Dewey, John. German Philosophy and Politics. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942.

The distinctive feature of the ideal Folk-society is that its unity springs ultimately from blood or race. One may read everything Hitler has said and be none the wiser as to what he understands by race…Hitler once retorted impatiently to a critic that he knew the scientific facts about the composite racial structure of Germany as well as anyone. Certain it is that he employs “blood, race, and soil” in a mystical sense, if one defines “mystical” to mean the complete submergence of fact and idea in an overpowering emotion supposed to reveal higher truth than cold intelligence can compass. (34-35)

Scientific facts about race were as nothing in comparison with a simple, easily grasped, symbol which could be used as a weapon in an emotional appeal to fanatical action. Hitler’s contempt for intellectual measures and for science, except when used as an effective technical instrument in propaganda, are the obverse side of this belief in the power of emotion to reach the masses, and of his conviction that when “intellectuals” are emotionally stirred they fade into the masses. For it is characteristic of intense emotion to rule out discrimination; emotion is an all or none state. We fear and hate all over; the emotions are inherently totalitarian. When they are once kept excited they control belief and every semblance of intellectual operation. Indifference, apathy, Hitler called his chief foe; excitement, is the consistent quality in his inconsistent policies. Since emotion I total, it knows only black and white, not intermediate shades. Hence the ideal value of Germanic blood needed for effective presentation an extreme and wholly dark opposite. (35-36)

Blood, race, instinct, passion, in the vocabulary of Hitler, are names for life, for the vital; and they are a name for what move men to act en masse; leaders above meanwhile exercising with consummate skill the most approved methods of organization and control. The mass is not a new phenomenon. Neither is the authoritarian leader. What is new is a mass which is not a mere amorphous crowd but in which the most extraordinarily effective skill in every kind of organized effort is combined with the psychology of the crowd. (37)

That the content which fills and gives toughness to the idealism has moved from the intellectual (or quasi-intellectual) to the emotional and passionately impetuous, without losing its combination with technical efficiency and organization, is indeed new. It is the difference which has given victory in Germany to the ideology of Hitler. (37)

I conclude, then, with expression of the belief that it is this method, the method of achieving community by processes of free and open communication, which is the heart and the strength of the American democratic way of living and that the weaknesses of our democracy all represent expressions of failure to live up to the demands imposed by this method. Prejudices of economic status, of race, of religion, imperil democracy because they set up barriers to communication, or deflect and distort its operation. This is not the place to go into the relation of socialization of industrial production and distribution to attainment of a genuinely democratic way of life. But we can at least be sure that so far as the methods of management of a shop, a factory, a railway, or a bank are autocratic and hence harmful to democracy, it is because these methods prevent or impede the processes of effective give-and-take communication, of conference, of consultation, of exchange and pooling of experiences – of free conversation if you will. (46)

The democratic principle of communication as the means of establishing unity applies to relations between nations as well as domestically. (48)

War with a totalitarian power is war against an aggressive way of life that can maintain itself in existence only by constant extension of its sphere of aggression. (49)

We are committed by the challenge addressed to every element of a democratic way of life to use knowledge, technology, and every form of human relationship in order to promote social unity by means of free companionship and free communication. It is immensely clearer than it has ever been before that the democratic way of life commits us to unceasing effort to break down the walls of class, of unequal opportunity, of color, race, sect, and nationality, which estranges human beings from one another. (49)

When the philosopher Eucken (who received a Nobel prize for contributing to the idealistic literature of the world) justifies the part taken by Germany in a world war because the Germans alone do not represent a particularistic and nationalistic spirit, but embody the “universalism” of humanity itself, he utters a conviction bred in German thought by ruling interpretation of German philosophic idealism. By the side of this motif the glorification of war as a biologic necessity, forced by increase of population, is a secondary detail, giving a totally false impression when isolated from its context. The main thing is that Germany, more than any other nation, in a sense alone of all nations, in a sense alone of all nations, embodies the essential principle of humanity: freedom of spirit, combined with thorough and detailed work in the outer sphere where reigns causal law, where obedience, discipline and subordination are necessities of successful organization. (75)

The morals of bargaining, exchange, the mutual satisfaction of wants may be outlived in some remote future, but up to the present they play an important part in life. To me there is something uncanny in the scorn which German ethics, in behalf of an unsullied moral idealism, pours upon a theory which takes cognizance of practical motives. In a highly esthetic people one might understand the display of contempt. But when an aggressive and commercial nation carries on commerce and war simply from the motive of obedience to duty, there is awakened an unpleasant suspicion of a suppressed “psychic complex.” When Nietzsche says, “Man does not desire happiness; only the Englishman does that,” we laugh at the fair hit. But persons who profess no regard for happiness as a test of action have an unfortunate way of living up to their principle by making others unhappy. I should entertain some suspicion of the complete sincerity of those who profess disregard for their own happiness, but I should be quite certain of their sincerity when it comes to a question of my happiness. (91)

Patriotism, national feeling, national consciousness are common enough facts. But nowhere save Germany, in the earlier nineteenth century, have sentiments and impulses been transformed by deliberate nurture into a mystic cult. (108)

Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the Germans are the only truly religious people, they alone are truly capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes; they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which as become the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit. Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans have kept their native speech in its purity. (121-122)

In like vein, Hegel attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. (122)

A purely artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social movements – like anti-Semitism – and some of Germany’s political ambitions cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race, Culture, and the State. In the light of actual science, this is so mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact compared with it. (122)

No philosopher has ever thought so consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and overcoming as Hegel. When he says the “world history is the world judgment” he means judgment in the sense of assize, and judgment as victory of one and defeat of another – victory being the final proof that the world spirit has now passed from one nation to take up its residence in another. To be defeated in a way which causes the nation to take a secondary position among nations is a sign that divine judgment has been passed upon it. When a recent German writer argues that for Germany to surrender any territory would be sacrilegious, since it would be to refuse to acknowledge the workings of God in human history, he speaks quite in the Hegelian vein. (132)

Although the phenomenon of nationalism was very recent when Hegel wrote, indeed practically contemporary with his own day, he writes in nationalistic terms the entire history of humanity. The State is the Individual of history; it is to history what a given man is to biography. History gives us the progressive realization or evolution of the Absolute, moving from one National Individual to another. It is law, the universal which makes the State a State, for law is reason, not as mere subjective reflection, but in its manifestation as supreme over and in particulars. On this account, Hegel’s statement that the fundamental principle of history is the progressive realization of freedom does not mean what an uninstructed English reader would naturally take it to mean. Freedom is always understood in terms of Reason. Its expression in history means that Thought has progressively become conscious of itself; that is, has made itself its own subject. Freedom is the consciousness of freedom. Liberty of action has little to do with it. Obviously it is only in the German idealistic system – particularly in the system of Hegel himself – that this has fully taken place. Meantime, when citizens of a state (especially of the state in which this philosophic insight has been achieved) take the laws of their sate as their own ends and motives of action, they attain the best possible substitute for a reason which is its own object. They appropriate as their own personal reason the objective and absolute Reason embodied perforce in law and custom. (132-133)

As his [Hegel’s] philosophy of history ignores the past in seizing upon the national state as the unit and focus of history, so it ignores all future possibility of a genuinely international federation to which isolated nationalism shall be subordinated. (134-135)

Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the march of God on earth through time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in history is thus particularly manifest in those changes in which unique place passes from one nation to another. War is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement. The idea that friendly intercourse among all the peoples of the earth is a legitimate aim of human effort is in basic contradiction of such a philosophy. War is explicit realization of “dialectic.” Of the negation by which a higher synthesis of reason is assured. It effectively displays the “irony of the divine Idea.” It is to national life what the winds are to the sea, “preserving mankind from the corruption engendered by immobility. War is the most effective preacher of the vanity of all merely finite interests; it puts an end to that selfish egoism of the individual by which he would claim his life and his property as his own or as his family’s. International law is not properly law; it expresses simply certain usages which are accepted so long as they do not come into conflict with the purpose of a state – a purpose which always gives the supreme law of national life. (135)

Since his [Hegel’s] day, histories of philosophy, or religion, or institutions have all been treated as developments through necessary stages of an inner implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling law. And the idea of a peculiar mission and destiny of German history has lost nothing in the operation. Expressions which a bewildered world has sought since the beginning of the war to explain through the influence of a Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, or through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy of power, have their roots in the classic idealistic philosophy culminating in Hegel. (136-137)

The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial, and cultural. It is by the accident of position rather than any virtue of our own that we are not sharers in the present demonstration of failure. We have borrowed the older philosophy of isolated national sovereignty and have lived upon it in a more or less half-hearted way. In our internal constitution we are actually interracial and international. It remains to see whether we have the courage to face this fact and the wisdom to think out the plan of action which it indicates. Arbitration treaties, international judicial councils, schemes of international disarmament, peace funds and peace movements, are all well in their way. But the situation calls for more radical thinking that that which terminates in such proposals. We have to recognize that furtherance of the depth and width of human intercourse is the measure of civilization; and we have to apply this fact without as well as within our national life. We must make the accident of our internal composition into an idea, an idea upon which we may conduct our foreign as well as our domestic policy. And international juridical tribunal will break in the end upon the principle of national sovereignty. (144)

We have no right to cast stones at any warring nation till we have asked ourselves whether we are willing to forego this principle and to submit affairs which limited imagination and sense have led us to consider strictly national to an international legislature. In and of itself, the idea of peace is a negative idea; it is a police idea. There are things more important than keeping one’s body whole and one’s property intact. Disturbing the peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but because the fruitful processes of coöperation in the great experiment of living together are disturbed. It is futile to work for the negative end of peace unless we are committed to the positive idea which it cloaks: Promoting the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of any class, racial, geographical and national limits. Any philosophy which should penetrate and particulate our present social practice would find at work the forces which unify human intercourse. An intelligent and courageous philosophy of practice would devise means by which the operation of these forces would be extended and assured in the future. An American philosophy of history must perforce by a philosophy for its future, a future in which freedom and fullness of human companionship is the aim, and intelligent coöperative experimentation the method. (144-145)