Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  Since capitalism is evil and socialism is too good for man, the party held, a compromise is necessary. “On the one hand,” said a prominent German Catholic leader in 1848, “we see a rigid clinging to the right of property and on the other hand an equally determined denial of all property rights and we desperately seek some mediation between these two extremes.”14 The “mediation” he (and the Center party) reached was the idea that man does have a right to property, but that this right is not unlimited: it is conditioned by man’s overriding moral obligation to use his property in such a way as to serve the general welfare.

  Since every German group repudiated individualism, “centrism” in the Weimar Republic meant a middle ground, not between socialism and capitalism, but between statism of the Marxist variety (to benefit the lower classes) and statism of the conservative variety (to benefit the upper classes).

  In the early postwar years the conservative Centrists, like monarchists throughout the nation, were relatively subdued, and the party’s left wing was in the ascendancy. It was a wing eager to form a working coalition with the Social Democratic Reformists.

  The final member of the “Weimar coalition” was the Democratic party, a middle-class liberal group organized in 1918, which included among its supporters a roster of famous names from the academic and business worlds unmatched by any of the other groups. This party, in Pinson’s words, was the one “most committed to the ideals of a democratic republic, and it made its appeal largely to those in Germany who were truly democratic and socially minded but who rejected all notions of a class [or religious] party....”15 In the January 1919 elections, there was an impressive show of support for such an approach (over five million votes, about 19 percent of the total).

  At the Weimar Convention, Friedrich Naumann, the party’s first elected leader, stated the Democratic viewpoint in politics. The new Republic, he told the delegates, should represent a “sort of compromise peace between capitalism and socialism.”16 Such a compromise, the Democrats said, means the acceptance of individual rights—and of a powerful state, one strong enough to ensure that citizens exercise their rights in the service of the community. It means the sanctity of private property, and the socialization of monopolies. It means the rejection of egalitarianism, and a large-scale redistribution of income to benefit the poor.

  In the mid-twenties, one of the party’s election posters eloquently depicted its animating viewpoint. The poster, which would have been suitable for all the republican groups, featured a beefy Olympic runner symbolizing determination, along with a banner reading: “NOTHING WILL SWAY US FROM THE MIDDLE ROAD.”

  On the whole, the Democrats did not feel the need to defend their politics by reference to any abstract theory, such as dialectic materialism or the dogmas of faith. If, as has often been said, the essence of modern liberalism is “social conscience unencumbered by ideology,” then the Democratic party was the purest representative of liberalism in Weimar Germany.

  Even this approach, however, rests on an implied philosophic base, which was voiced occasionally by certain party members. Thanks to these men, Germany’s “secular, bourgeois liberals” can be said to have stood for something intellectually distinctive. What they stood for was eloquently expressed a year before his death by the sociologist Max Weber, a major influence on the social sciences in Germany and one of the Democratic party’s most illustrious founders.

  In 1919, a group of students at the University of Munich, agitated by the Weimar Assembly debates and shaken by the violence in the country, invited Weber to address them. The students wanted guidance; they wanted this famous scholar-scientist to tell them what political system to endorse, how to judge values, what role science plays in the quest for truth. “Weber knew what was on their minds,” writes Frederic Lilge. “He also knew that a distrust of rational thought was already abroad, a feeling which at any time might assume alarming proportions.... He therefore decided to impress upon his young audience from the outset the need for sanity and soberness of mind....”17

  They must not, Weber told the students, be taken in by religious dogmatists, or by irrationalist charlatans, left or right, who pretend to offer solutions to the world’s problems. The fact is, he explained, there are no solutions. Certainty is unattainable by man, knowledge is provisional, values are relative, scholars are merely specialists doing technical jobs detached from life, science has nothing to say about morality or politics—and (in Lilge’s synopsis)

  [it] was therefore an error on the part of students to demand from their academic teachers positive moral guidance and decisions, such as would be involved in answering the question as to what is the meaning of life. To attempt such an answer would transcend not only their work as scientists; it would also be a violation of the liberalism which Weber did his best to defend.

  Liberalism, according to Weber, means an end to illusions, including the “illusion” of human progress—along with an attitude of endurance, “endurance [in Lilge’s words] to bear the destruction of all absolutes, with no sentimental turning back or rash embrace of new faiths, only the strength to hold out in the radical though bleak veracity of a cleansed mind.” As to selecting the proper course of action, Weber told the gathering, each individual has to decide the ideals that are right “for him.” Since only questions of means, not of ends, fall within the province of science, he said, ends must be chosen subjectively, by reference to feelings.18

  The liberals of Weber’s kind, equating absolutism with fanaticism, believed that the precondition of freedom is skepticism. To restrain mob violence and induce respect for reason, they believed, one should tell the mob that reason is helpless and that man must act on feeling. To slow the march of the all-powerful state, they believed, it was proper to endorse it in principle, so long as one added that Germans should not act on principle, i.e., go to extremes. To discredit the totalitarians, to silence the noisy cry that they had the answer to Germany’s crisis—these men believed—one should tell a desperate country, in weary, muted tones, that sane men have no idea what to do and never will.

  This was the contest in the Weimar Assembly: the romanticist-nationalist groups (along with a transitional party of Independent Socialists, who sought a proletarian dictatorship) against the groups widely identified as the exponents of reason. These exponents were a coalition of halfhearted Marxists, dogmatic Catholics, and quaking skeptics.

  The debate on the Constitution began on February 24, 1919. The final draft was approved by a vote of 262 to 75 on July 31 and took effect as the country’s fundamental law on August 14. The conservative parties (and the Independent Socialists) voted against the draft on the grounds that it offered the country too much freedom. The members of the Weimar coalition voted yes unanimously. They recognized in the document not a partisan viewpoint, but the common base on which Germany’s republicans were prepared to stand in their battle to win the allegiance of the country.

  The Weimar Constitution is not a traditional Western charter of liberty. It is a distinctively twentieth-century document.

  Article 7 alone, for instance, confers on the Federal government unlimited power to legislate on twenty subjects, including : “The press ... Public health ... Labour laws ... Expropriation ... banking and exchanges ... Traffic in foodstuffs and articles of general consumption or satisfying daily wants ... Industry and mining ... Insurance ... Railways ... Theatres and cinemas.” In subsequent articles, the state is assigned further powers. Some of these are: the power to lay down “general principles” concerning “The rights and duties of religious bodies ... Public education, including the universities ... housing and the distribution of the population ...”; the power to preserve “the purity and health and the social furtherance of the family ...”; and the task of supervising “the whole of the educational system.”19

  Having established its basic approach to government, the Constitution, striking a more traditional note, goes on to guarantee the protection of man’s “fundamental rights.” It pr
omises to protect the freedoms of expression, association, movement, emigration, the ownership of property, the inviolability of a man’s home, and several other rights. In every essential case, however, the document makes its priorities clear: it reserves to the government unlimited power, at its discretion, to attach conditions to the exercise of these rights. The promise of freedom of movement, for instance, concludes with the words: “Restrictions can be imposed by federal law only.” The promise of the secrecy of correspondence concludes: “Exceptions may be admitted by federal law only.” There is to be “no censorship”—except in the case of movies or “for the purpose of combating base and pornographic publications....” The education of their children is “the natural right of the parents”—but “the state has to watch over their activities in this direction.” “Personal freedom is inviolable,” sums up Article 114, which continues directly: “No restraint or deprivation of personal liberty by the public power is admissible, unless authorised by law.”20

  The most famous statement of this kind is Article 48, which was invoked by the German government in 1930 to justify the establishment of a Presidential dictatorship. “If public order and security are seriously disturbed or endangered... ,” the article says, without further definition, the President “may take all necessary steps ... he may suspend for the time being, either wholly or in part, the fundamental rights” recognized elsewhere.21

  The Founding Fathers of the United States accepted the concept of inalienable rights. The public power, they said in essence, shall make no law abridging the freedom of the individual. The Founding Fathers of the Weimar Republic rejected this approach as rigid and antisocial. The public power, their document says, shall make no law abridging the freedom of the individual—except when it judges this to be in the public interest.

  As a rule, the German moderates held, political freedom works to benefit the public and therefore it should not often be abridged. Besides, they felt, such freedom pertains primarily to man’s inner life or spiritual concerns, which can safely be left to the decisions of the individual.

  Neither of these points, they held, applies in any comparable degree to economic freedom. A businessman, they said, works for his own welfare, not the public’s. Besides, he is up to his neck in “materialistic concerns.” This, the more religious republicans felt, is a realm that involves the lowest side of man, which must be firmly controlled by the authorities. This, the skeptics felt, is a realm vital to human survival, in which there can be no excuse—not even skepticism—for government inaction. This, the Marxists said, is the realm which counts in history and, therefore, which belongs to the people.

  In the Weimar Assembly debates, the delegates never considered the possibility of extending freedom to the realm of production and trade. The moderates demanded that the government give up (much of) the Kaiser’s control over the minds of the citizens; but they took it for granted that the government must never relinquish its grip over the citizens’ productive actions.

  Imperial Germany had not been a purely statist economy, but a mixture of controls and an element of economic liberty, with the emphasis on the controls. The Social Democrats in 1919 wanted just such a compromise as a transition measure. The liberals in the various groups wanted it as an end in itself. The conservatives wanted it in the name of tradition. Whatever their differences, the moderate consensus was: We do not want socialism (at least not now); we do not want capitalism (ever); we want a mixed economy. They got it, along with everything to which it leads.

  The essence of Weimar economics is stated in Article 151 of the Constitution. “The organisation of economic life,” it says,

  must accord with the principles of justice and aim at securing for all conditions of existence worthy of human beings. Within these limits the individual is to be secured the enjoyment of economic freedom.

  Legal compulsion is admissible only as far as necessary for the realisation of threatened rights or to serve overriding claims of the common weal.22

  “Property is guaranteed,” says Article 153, but “Property entails responsibilities. It should be put to such uses as to promote at the same time the common good.” Property, therefore, may be expropriated “in the public interest.” For the same reason, “the distribution and the use of land are under state supervision....” In addition, the government may “convert into social property such private economic undertakings as are suitable for socialisation,” or it may demand the merger of such undertakings “in the interests of collectivism.”

  The Weimar Constitution concludes by mandating the programs of the welfare state, and by promising that the government will take special steps to protect the interests of “the independent middle class” and of “the labouring classes ev erywhere.”23

  The German Republic has been called “the freest republic in history.” It is often described as an experiment in freedom which tragically failed. If so, it was a special kind of experiment, one that proved to be a pacesetter for the rest of the world.

  The German Republic was an experiment in political freedom combined with economic authoritarianism and defended by reference to the ethics of altruism.

  The country’s republicans did not wish to choose between freedom and altruism. They thought that they could have both. “Every German,” says Article 163, “is under a moral obligation, without prejudice to his personal liberty, to exercise his mental and physical powers in such a way as the welfare of the community requires.”24 In fact, however, it is either-or, and the moderates did have to choose; and they wrote their priorities all over their founding document.

  The transition from document to reality did not take long.

  While the contest between socialists and nationalists was taking place in the form of solemn debates at Weimar, a different version of the same contest was taking place in the streets of Berlin, Munich, and other German cities. In this arena, the contending forces were the Communists and the Free Corps.

  During the war, a faction of young Marxists had broken away from the Social Democrats, denouncing the party’s pro-war policy as a betrayal of the class struggle. These youths soon formed themselves into the Spartacus League (named after the rebellious Roman slave), then, after the war, reorganized the group as the Communist party of Germany. The party’s support came from two sources: a militant minority of workers, and an influential elite of middle-class intellectuals centered in Berlin.

  In contrast to the Social Democrats, whom they despised as “social Fascists,” the Communists experienced no ideological conflicts; they were not tempted to dilute their fundamental approach by mixing into it remnants of an opposite viewpoint. They did not vacillate over the issue of individual rights; they dismissed the concept as a rationalization designed to justify “bourgeois privilege.” They did not try simultaneously to uphold liberty and economic equality; they rejected the idea of liberty. Until we reach the classless society, they held, there can be no such thing as a society without rulers; until the state withers away, the absolute state is an absolute—and now it is the turn of the workers. The workers, they said, echoing the words of Lassalle, will offer the nation a “social dictatorship, in contrast to the egotism of the bourgeois society.”25

  Unlike their former colleagues among the Social Democrats, the Communists were not willing to postpone the socialist revolution; they were impatient to have their ideal now. It is pointless, said party leaders, to spend time trying to persuade or educate the “class enemy”; since men’s thought is a mere by-product of economic factors, they claimed, and since proletarian logic is beyond the grasp of the bourgeoisie, enemy ideas cannot be dealt with by argument or discussion; they can be answered effectively only by the forcible overthrow of the existing social system. For the same reason, the leaders said, the party refuses, even as a transition measure, to participate in any parliamentary form of government. The alleged political equality of men under such a government, declared Rosa Luxemburg, the top Spartacist theoretician, “is nothing but lies an
d falsehoods so long as the economic power of capital still exists.” “[T]he idea that you can introduce socialism without class struggle and by parliamentary majority decisions is a ludicrous petty-bourgeois illusion.”

  “Socialism,” said Rosa Luxemburg, “does not mean getting together in a parliament and deciding on laws. For us socialism means the smashing of the ruling classes with all the brutality that the proletariat is able to develop in its struggle. ”26

  The Russian Bolshevists, who were turning Moscow at the time into the world center of Marxist ideology, were eager to support those who shared their viewpoint. They supplied their German counterparts unstintingly with every necessity, including trained organizers, strategic guidance, literature, funds, and weapons.

  The German Communists’ first demand after the war was “All power to the Soviets,” i.e., not to a representative national assembly, but to the (unelected) councils of workers and soldiers that had sprung up across Germany in the wake of the Kaiser’s collapse. The radicals

  come in from the street [said one Social Democrat at the time] and hold placards under our noses saying: All Power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils! At the same time, however, they let you understand: If you do not do what we want, we will kick you out.... They can only represent a force as long as they are in possession of the majority of machine guns.27

  In December 1918, a general congress of such councils convened in Berlin. By a large majority, the delegates backed the movement for a parliamentary republic and rejected the idea of a workers’ dictatorship. The will of “the people,” it seemed, was unmistakable. The Spartacists, however, had grasped the lesson of Hegel and were undeterred: they understood that the people does not know what it wills.