A Völkisch Enlightenment ?

Neo-hegelian jurists from Weimar to the Third Reich

A very common cliché about the Third Reich is that of its “irrationalism”, of its anti-philosophical stance in the name of Blood, Soil and Race, of ideology, of the desire to develop above all a Weltanschauung, rather than a philosophy. One of its variation, quite common among both marxists and a certain kind of liberals, who jealously guard the rational heritage of Hegel, is to make it (and broadly speaking, National Socialism and even völkisch currents) a mortal enemy of Hegelianism. A quote massively used¹ in order to underline such an aspect of nazi ideology is that of the famous jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who in his State, Movement, People², claims that “[on the day of Hitler's ascent to power] Hegel, so to speak, died.”

It is with this quote that Olivier Jouanjan, a recognized French jurist and scholar, begins his preface to Sylvie Hürstel's book In the name of Hegel: neo-hegelian jurists and the philosophy of Right from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich³.

However, as Emmanuel Faye, scholar of German philosophy, reminds us in his great work on Heidegger – The introduction of nazism in philosophy⁴,

the rest of Schmitt's text corrects and sensibly nuances such a claim. He in fact adds this, which is generally omitted from quotes

But that does not mean that the great work of the philosopher of the German State has become meaningless, and that the idea of a political leadership standing above the selfishness of societal interests has been abandoned. That which in Hegel's massive mental constructs is timelessly great and German, remains effective in the new form.

We see that in the end, beyond his taste for striking formulas, Schmitt maintains the idea of a strong continuity between Hegel and the Führerstaat that was established in 1933, beyond the historical mutation of the forms of the German State. He goes on to further clarify :

Only the forms of the Hegelian State of civil servants, that corresponded to the internal situation of the State in the nineteenth century, are eliminated, and are replaced by other formations corresponding to our reality of today.⁵

This quote taken out of its context⁶ is even more surprising when one sees that Mrs Hürel’s book does in fact very clearly show, based on a corpus of texts often ignored and unexploited by historians of the regime’s intellectual history, that there was, under the Third Reich, a Hegelian juridical current (and even a philosophical one : the author mentions the names of Hermann Glockner – and the success of his Vom Wesen der deutschen Philosophie (1941), Theodor Haering, Werner Schmidt and Bernhard Knoop⁷), willing to be explicitly National Socialist and völkisch (racist). It is true that these neo-hegelian tendencies were not in a ruling position, yet there still was a true "idological competition at work after 1933"⁸, which gave room for a certain diversity of approaches within the National Socialist framework, a framework often limited to certain high-ranked figures by historians, even if some of their ideological positions were not shared at all by Hitler or by the greater part of the nazi structures, or by the German population.⁹

The author herself gives testimony to this aspect, noting that in the field of Right, the redesigns of the juridical field and Hans Frank's loss of influence in years 1938-1939 had an effect : “the jurists from Kiel seem to gain back terrain”.

This short note has only the ambition to shed light on an unknown völkisch (and then nazi) school of thought that was philosophically idealist, usually deeply Christian, profoundly attached to Germandom, that produced quality scholarly works that would be interesting to study, especially since they (as many other works produced before and under the regime) contradict the claim of nazism philosophical and scholarly irrelevance. Its “founder”, Julius Binder, also shows through his path a profound intellectual exigency, and the richness of now-forgotten debates that existed in interwar Germany : coming from neokantianism, Binder ended his intellectual journey with Hegel and wished for a reconsideration of German idealism by the Right.

A thorough English presentation of such debates and their broad context can be read in a three-part article reviewing that book on a blog¹⁰. Wikipedia contains the basic biographical informations that this article lacks. French-speaking readers¹¹ will be pleased to learn that this book contains a lot of quotes from these authors, which are of great interest. However, English-speakers not being able to read them, I chose to gather a couple of interesting quotes concerning methodology, Germandom and the definition of some key concepts by these thinkers.¹²

They will be displayed by author, in a chronological order, and translated from the French. Many of these texts are articles from magazines, mainly Richard Kroner’s important Logos – Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur. (I chose to add a quote by Glockner, even if he was a philosopher and not a jurist.)

---

Julius Binder (1870-1939)

We live in the era of a new Aufklärung or, as Fichte would say, of a state of accomplished sin; at a time when the thought of the understanding (Verstand) reigns, which took up the ideas of the eighteenth century and forgot the achievements of idealism. The essential characteristic of our time seems to me to lie in the fact that it has turned away from the Subject and lost itself in contact with objects. (...) This spirit (of sin) was the cause of our defeat. Because what the enemy could not obtain on the battlefield, his ideas obtained. It was not his armies and his cannons, but rather his ideas of freedom, equality, self-determination and parliamentarism that crossed the Rhine, to a point where his troops would never have reached during the war, and which overcame the resistance force of the German nation because it was no longer conscious of itself. (Fichtes Bedeutung für die Gegenwart, 1923-4.)

[Fichte] was never able to get rid of the idea that the State can ultimately only be a contingent thing, which could be both be added to the existence of man and human society or disappear equally. The consequences of his organic and transindividualist conception of the State are to be sought in another direction, in that taken later by Hegel and Julius Stahl, who conceived the organic State as the necessary and indispensable form of the community of a people. (Ibid.)

Germany collapsed because it had abandoned its spirit and surrendered itself to the loss of the Idea and to the naturalistic positivism of a new Auklärung with a foreign spirit; Germany will only be able to rise again if the spirit of Kant comes back to life within it, if it remembers its categorical duty and overcomes the countless resistances of enemy powers and foreign minds thanks to the spirit of freedom. (Kants Bedeutung für das deutsche Geistesleben, 1924.)

And this is how we can formulate the following result: we must necessarily be Hegelians, if we want to be Kantians; or again: we cannot approve of Kant without going as far as Hegel. (Kantianismus und Hegelianismus in der Rechtsphilosophie, 1926-7.)

If the people (Volk) can be considered as the genealogical community [of descent], the State as the community of law, then the nation appears as the cultural community. (Fichte und die Nation, 1929.)

It results [...] for today's idealism the task of taking its Idea seriously, which means above all regaining awareness of the dialectic of the Spirit, and creating a theory of knowledge at the height of that which Hegel gave us in his Phenomenology. (Zur Lehre vom Rechtsbegriff, 1929.)

Our mission must be – and in this, the State philosopher walks hand in hand with the historian and the politician – to keep the Idea alive, the only one to promise us the possibility of a rebirth of our people in the Spirit, a rebirth to interior and exterior freedom. (Staatsraison und Sittlichkeit, 1929.)

The Führer cannot be made, and in this sense he cannot be selected either: the Führer makes himself, insofar as he understands the history of his people and knows himself and himself wants to be the Führer. (...) And this unity [of the ruled people] necessarily implies the Führer as the organ through which the will and self-consciousness of the people attain reality as persons, so that leader (Führer) and ruled (Geführte) are complementary notions and that the people is none other than the natural unity of these two things, the synthesis in which these moments of its existence arose. (Führerauslese in der Demokratie, 1929.)

The spirit of German idealism must be reawakened in the entire German people, after having been destroyed in the age of materialism and even more completely in the post-war period. [...] When the German youth, when the German nation understands again that there is a death which does not mean death, but life, then a new day and a new life will begin for our poor country ! (Der 28. Juni und die Kriegsschuldfrage, 1929.)

The best State is the one which corresponds to the stage of consciousness that a people has of its freedom and the one which is born from the development of the consciousness of freedom within this people itself. (Die Freiheit als Recht, 1930.)

Because it is the realization and fulfillment of this life, there is no freedom outside the State and without the State; there is no less individual life outside the community. (Das System der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels, 1931.)

The power of the state over citizens is unconditional and categorical. It is an original power which is not granted to it by its citizens, it does not exist in view of their particular interests and is not responsible towards them for its actions and their consequences. (...) The State as a unity of particular and universal will, the State of the universalist theory of the State is the State which realizes its concept, and it is the only true State. Thus, philosophy can assist politics in helping this true State, the State of the concept, to come into being. (Der autoritäre Staat, 1933.)

With elementary violence, Adolf Hitler's Reich fell on Germany born from the November revolution [...] and when this catastrophe, the most violent that German political life had ever known, became reality, they (those who had seen it coming) once again behaved in various ways towards it: with a fatalistic submission to their destiny, with the feeling of their own annihilation, or with the noisy or secret joy of a deliverance. (...) We must show that this State, which we owe to the political genius of Adolf Hitler, is not only the realization of the State understood in its truth – the State of the Idea – but also that, as long as it is understood in its truth, it corresponds to the essence of the people of which it claims to be the form of existence, and that it is in this sense the true State of the people (Volksstaat), and the State of the German people. (Der deutsche Volksstaat, 1934.)

But the nation or the people, understood thus as this unity of life, is not a simply natural relationship; (...) just as man through his history passes from the natural being to the spiritual being, as nature passes to the spirit, so does the nation, relationship of blood and birth: it becomes a spiritual community, the unity of moral and spiritual life in the infinite variety of individual figures. (...) As the will of the community, of which the individual is only a simple member, [the State] is necessarily also the will of the individual, and the latter has no other right with regard to the State than its right to participate. (...) This means that a certain danger is actually attached to the idea of ​​the Führer: that of seeing this idea misunderstood, either by the Führers, that is to say by the ruling class, or by those led, and of thus degenerating into a simple bureaucracy, the State thereby degenerating into a simple authoritarian regime. This is why it appears to me to be that the most urgent task of this new State is to implant this vital idea on which the entire existence of Hitler's Volkstaat depends, in the consciousness of the entire nation, of those led and leaders alike. (...) The task for the future therefore consists in understanding people and State in their unity and in their totality. (...) Without the mind, everything is just simple organization, dead mechanism. Only the spirit is life and can breathe life; only the mind can change the organization into a living organism. (Ibid.)

Through these developments, I have pursued no other goal than to help people understand this State that we call the “Third Reich”, to show them that it is not this monster representing to a unlimited power over a horde of servile men, but that, despite the authority with which it claims to govern the entire life of its citizens, it is faithful to the concept of the State and that just like the State in general, it does not mean servitude and constraint, but realized freedom. I never had the intention, and I would like to avoid this confusion, of wanting to present this State as the only possible State, as the only form by which the concept of the State can be realized; this could not have been my intention, and the proof is in the simple fact that I conceive the State as the form of existence of the nation and the nation as an individuality which is formed through history, so that each people must have the form of State which corresponds to this individuality, as the result of its history. All I wanted was to make the reader understand that the State which is today the form of existence of the German nation is the true State, that is to say the German manifestation of the State and of the consciousness of freedom, and to show him why we Germans see in this State our salvation and our future. (Der Idealismus als Grundlage der Staatsphilosophie, 1935.)

The man who leads an ethical existence [...] is immediately certain of his belonging to his people, he understands it as necessary, subscribes to it and determines his individual existence freely according to the necessities of life and his nation. This is how the opposition between law and morality that individualism believes to be necessary is here overcome. (Ibid.)

Of course, I am not only thinking of the unfavorable material conditions from which German legal science still has to suffer quite severely, but I am thinking here of the current way of thinking, of this anti-philosophical spirit which reigns more than ever over minds, and which prevents the true philosophical spirit from asserting itself more than ever. (...) This is why I do not see my duty in any way as keeping alive or even reviving the spiritual contents of a bygone era in the face of the surge of new ideas. But I affirm here the right of science and therefore of the self-conscious mind to their vital necessity; for without them, the “new spirit” will inevitably become contrary to the spirit, and instead of living and giving life, it will wither and die. (Grundlegung zur Rechtsphilosophie, 1935.)

I am of the opinion that we must destroy the legend that the new Aufklärung and the intellectualism of the nineteenth century have woven around this eminent spirit [ie Hegel] and redraw his true face, as it presented itself to us through all these years of efforts to rediscover it. Only then we will be able to place the “new spirit” before the question of knowing what it has to say against this true Hegel, in the face of which all the attacks in question find themselves destroyed. Because finally, what is Hegel for us, what is he in himself ? (Hegel und der neue Geist, 1937.)

Thus Hitler, by fighting the individualism which had asserted itself in the liberalism, democratism and socialism of yesteryear, returned to the universalism which had already asserted itself in German romanticism and especially in Hegel, and which found its full conceptual elaboration in the Hegelian philosophy of history and law. (Ibid.)

Personality is spirit, and spirit is only real in the nation, which necessarily contains within itself all its members. (...) And so, we must be universalists, to be able to be personalists. (...) This is why we cannot be mistaken in seeing in the State of National Socialism the realization of universalism, the theory of which all our considerations aim to found, and we will thus be able to approve this State with good conscience. (System des Rechtsphilosophie, 1937.)

Walther Schönfeld (1888-1958)

Expecting us to be and remain “Hegelians” in the strict sense of this term is nothing less than expecting us to recognize having waged war for nothing, because we could have also become without it what we have become through it, if we had studied Hegel better. [...] We have “experienced” something other than Hegel, and through this we also know other things than him. The world war made us discover reality to such depths, in the good and in the bad sense of the term, that no era before us had been able to glimpse them, not even that of German idealism, with which we we still feel in community, both from a historical and systematic point of view. (Puchta und Hegel, 1930.)

Without Christianity, German idealism is impossible, just as it is impossible without the Greco-Germanic spirit. It is their intimate, even too intimate, fusion which not only makes it great, but also makes its German character. (Ibid.)

Preserving and protecting [the legal person] from degeneration has thus become the decisive question of our law, our State, our life and our culture, within the framework of an authentic socialism, which is just as far from “individualism” than “communism” because it overcame them both. (Zur Ehrenrettung der juristischen Person, 1932.)

For the reconciliation (of natural law and the science of law) is the German legal science, [...] the idea ​​which emerged when the times were fulfilled, that is to say around 1800, on the one hand in the philosophy of German idealism, and in particular that of Hegel, and on the other hand in the romanticism of the Historical School of Savigny and Eichhorn – two modes of thought certainly enemies, but all the same brothers, enemy brothers whose odious quarrel is now forgotten for us. (Die juristische Fakultät, 1933.)

There is no right that is capable of renouncing the people (Volk), the State or the individual, even if it sometimes favors one, sometimes the other, or even, when it degenerates, only the third element. (...) The people, the community of the people, is the environment, the native soil of the State and of the individual, from which both move away, and even must move away in order to find their way back to him and thus form a superior unit. (Das Rechtsbewusstein der Langobarden auf Grund und Rechtswissenschaft, 1934.)

The opposition between “individual and community” is a useless invention of liberalism, which National Socialism could never endorse. It is not the fact that he recognized the individual which constitutes the fundamental error of liberalism, but rather the fact that he did not recognize him as an individual, that is to say as a community. The individual has a natural disposition towards community, and this is where his essence lies. (Der Kampf wider das subjektive Recht, 1937.)

Marxism is nothing other than the attempt to kill Christ in Hegel's thought, which, from Christian and Germanic philosophy, thus becomes a caricature of philosophy, a Jewish and Satanic one. (...) It is therefore absolutely necessary to be Christian to be Hegelian, because Hegelianism is united with Christianity. Hegelianism is certainly not the only one, but rather a philosophy of Christianity, and in so that remains fundamentally incomprehensible to both Greeks and Jews. (Der absolute Idealismus Julius Binders im Lichte Hegels, 1938.)

Therefore, we must have respect for a mind such as Hegel's, as he is and as he will remain as long as there is spirit on this earth ; because Hegel was, even where he made a mistake, great and much greater than many are where they think they are giving him a piece of their mind. (...) This is why we thank [the Hegel-Forschung] as it deserves, even if we must concede that in the person of some “late offspring of Hegel” it has from time to time sinned by excess of zeal, to the extent that they were not always able to resist the temptation to make Hegel a sort of National Socialist avant la lettre, in which they could not do justice either to Hegel or to National Socialism. (Zur geschichtlichen Persönlichkeit in der Lebensordnung des deutschen Volkes, 1939.)

Our difference and our community with German idealism, and above all with Hegel, lies in the fact that we are experiencing what he saw in spirit, and this is why we should not presumptuously reproach him his “spiritualism” but recognize it and respectfully consider it as our past. (Ibid.)

Metaphysics is in fact nothing other than the mirror in which history is reflected, in order to learn what is true and what is false in it. Without the mirror that metaphysics holds up to it, history is blind, it is ignorant on its own account, because it is only in the mirror that it can see and recognize itself. (Die Geschichte der Rechtwissenschaft im Spiegel der Metaphysik, 1943.)

Hermann Glockner (1896-1979)

Two souls alas! live within us: a peasant's soul and a soldier's soul. (...) This is how the German philosopher is naturally faithful, sedentary and anxious to preserve things: he scrupulously manages his heritage. Like the peasant, he ruminates and dreams behind his stove. (...) The German philosopher is pious as is the German peasant when he goes through the fields and feels the presence of underground forces. (...) [The soldier's soul] rises from his side like a flame, it despises life. (...) The bold, idealistic, but also abstract ambition to reach what is behind things drives the German philosopher. (...) This is where the characteristic tension comes from, that none of our great philosophers has denied. Sometimes it is quiet and prosaic joy that predominates, the presentiment of the Eternal in earthly things; sometimes, it is an impulse towards the ideal which is lost with intoxication in the transcendent. (...) Weren't socialism and nationalism considered until now to be mutually exclusive opposites, between which we had to make a choice? (...) And were the German people not guided by a brilliant German to bring about a synthesis, which is certainly not to be confused with a narrow compromise or a middle path, but which represents a total and energetically new project ? (Vom Wesen der deutschen Philosophie, 1941.)

Karl Larenz (1903-1993)

This is how we can see in [Hegel] a guide (Führer), not only in view of a conceptuality which is founded and systematically applied, but also in view to an in-depth conception of law which highlights the ethical and social character of law, its conditioning by the Idea both in the general arrangement of its system and in the apparently very distant details. [...] It is on the position that it will take or refuse to take in relation to Hegel that the future of the philosophy of law in Germany will be decided. (Hegels Zurechnungslehre und der Begriff der objektiven Zurechnung, 1927.)

Thus, the current revival of Hegel's philosophy, modern Hegelianism, can only have for us the meaning of a return to Hegel which is just as much his overcoming, the meaning of an intellectual movement which seeks to confirm Hegel in not simply repeating his thought, but making it fruitful for a new intellectual situation and bringing it to its truth. (Hegels Dialektik des Willens und das Problem der juristichen Persönlichkeit, 1931.)

The ultimate meaning of law and the State and therefore the ultimate foundation of any philosophy of law and the State is not the responsibility of the latter, but of metaphysics or religion. Idealism and Christianity are the deepest answers that the German Spirit has found for the question of final ends. (Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie der Gegenwart, 1931.)

The first act of neo-Hegelianism must necessarily be to free Hegel from all the prejudices and all the misunderstandings with which the late nineteenth century had covered his image. This is the task of what we call the Hegel-Renaissance. (Die Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie des deutschen Idealismus und ihre Gegenwartsbedeutung, 1933.)

But it would be to completely misunderstand the meaning of the new research on Hegel to believe that the aim of the "neo-Hegelians" is to make the new German philosophy of law as closely dependent on Hegel as neo-Kantianism was on Kant. If we refer to Hegel, what interests us is not so much the correctness of some of his theories, but a concrete thought and a substantial dialectic. (Ibid.)

The path that German idealism followed from Kant to Hegel is not only a historical evolution taken once and for all, but corresponds to an immanent necessity and must be repeated each time thought extracts itself from naturalism and materialism. Today's neo-Hegelianism is proof of this internal necessity which is repeated in philosophical evolution. (Ibid.)

The Idea of ​​law in its concrete character and in its reality as a spiritual force is determined by the people and by blood; it is the Idea of ​​right of a certain people. (...) National Socialism puts forward in Germany a new, specifically German Idea of ​​law. This is at its core, its most essential meaning. We believe that the German Idea of ​​Law is destined for the next historical era to replace that resulting from the French Revolution. (Deutsche Rechtsterneuerung und Rechtsphilosophie, 1934.)

The highest legal value is not freedom or even the well-being of the individual, but the people (Volk) and the State as the unified will of the national community, shaped by blood and soil, by culture and by history. (Ibid.)

Blood and spirit are the two poles of human existence. (...) Blood must become spirit and spirit must become blood, if we want to reach the creative impulse. From blood relationship the first manifestation of all spiritual life is formed, which is language; it is on its basis that all culture is built. (...) Existence means for us, as it should be remembered here, tthe unity of the individual with the substance of the life of the people. Because the internal form of the community is inscribed in the blood of its members, the vital law of the community does not appear to them as a “you need to” but as a “you must”. (Volksgeist und Recht, 1935.)

Because the structure of German law is once and for all different from that of Roman law; it requires concrete individual concepts in place of abstract universal concepts, and requires dialectical and totality-oriented thinking. (Ibid.)

He who is part of the people (Volksgenosse), is not, like the “private person” of the traditional law, an isolated individual who is his own end, nor is he a simple means in the eyes of of a power which presents itself to him as a foreign power, but he carries within him the life of the community of the people in which he was born, which flows in his blood and in which only his own being can flourish. (Gemeinschaft und Rechtstellung, 1936.)

What Hegel saw achieved at the end of Classical Antiquity was repeated in the nineteenth century. The community dissolved, and thus the law was transformed into an external and binding norm. But today, National Socialism has brought us true community by returning to the original sources of people's lives. (Ibid.)

Can there be a philosophical knowledge which would avoid the abstraction of a universally identical reason or even of a “human nature” without falling back into simple historicism or positivism ? If we seek an answer to this question, it is certainly in Hegel, more than in any other philosopher, that we can find it. (Die Aufgabe der Rechtsphilosophie, 1938.)

Our times are the first to correctly understand and honor Hegel's authentic, deepest project, namely: the truly totalizing community of a people, the “ethical totality”, while all of the nineteenth century was unable to do so, but allowed itself to be misled by a false image. (Hegelianismus und preussische Staatsidee, 1940.)

No other philosopher has grasped as deeply the essence of a living community as Hegel, none has recognized so lucidly the preponderant role of peoples in world history, nor shown so clearly the importance of great men in history. [...] This is why the author did very well to place the notion of people at the head of the title. People, State and History in fact form for Hegel a unity in the Trinity. (Review of F. Bülow, Hegel, Volk-Staat-Geschichte (1939), 1940.)

Gerhard Dulckeit (1904-1954)

The question of what Hegel can still mean or still means for us, that is to say the ethical shaping of the present by the National Socialist Weltanschauung, brings us again to this other question of knowing what Hegel himself was. Because it is only in this way that we can measure what he would have become and what he would have accomplished for our time, in other words: if the starting point of his theory, once developed, allows us also to grasp present reality philosophically. (...) It is a question of destroying the traditional liberal image of Hegel which still parasitizes philosophy and science. It is only too understandable, and even necessary today, that “Hegel” encounters so many rejections, including in the new legal science: because this so-called Hegel remains essentially the diverted, misinterpreted and popularized Hegel of the liberal individualism. (Hegel und der preussische Staat, 1936.)

The World Spirit has indeed entered the Germanic world, but the Prussia of 1820 could not yet be its adequate form, for the simple reason that this Prussia suffered from a serious defect: it was not the State of the German people. [...] On the contrary, when Hegel opened his writing in 1802 on The German Constitution with the terms: “Germany is no longer a State” and called at the end of his treatise for a conqueror who would achieve by force the unification of the German people – in the service of the Idea –, the silence he subsequently kept in no way allows us to conclude that he abandoned the idea of ​​a German state. And if it is true that he saw Prussia as the precursor of the German Reich, subsequent history once again proved him right. (Ibid.)

National Socialism as a historical event is the struggle of the Spirit for the first pure figure of the concept of freedom in historical reality. It was in German thought that the spirit first manifested itself; it was among the German people that, after many detours, it had to emerge for the first time in all its force from the bosom of living political reality and enter world history. (...) Until our days, abstract law has asserted its formative power in the history of peoples, alongside morality; and the era in which ethical life arises as a pure figure of law, and then enters understood history, only begins to shine today and rests like a still unknown wealth in the bosom of Germany’s future. (Rechtsbegriff und Rechtsgestalt, 1936.)

At this point an astonishing perspective opens up on the incredible scope and present significance of Hegel's thought. We find ourselves today in the midst of a revolution, including in legal thinking. The opposition maintained for so long – and with great difficulty – between law and ethical life must now disappear. [...] Law must no longer be only the figure of a single abstract moment of law – “abstract law” – but the figure of the whole of law like ethical life itself [...] ; without however, and this must be underlined, abandoning the moment of abstract law as a moment: the latter subsists insofar as it is suppressed (aufgehoben). (Ibid.)

The history of the Western world repeats as a whole and in a broader framework – despite the fact that each people is independent – ​​its inner struggle for life, in such a way that we can understand the historical development precisely as the breakthrough and as the affirmation of the higher principle of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the face of abstract law and morality. (...) I have tried to characterize and understand the mission of our time and of National Socialism in these terms: our law must become the immediate figure of ethical life itself. (...) In this way the system [as a whole] rejoins history, providing it with the principles which integrate as formative forces into the totality of life (...). Expounding this idea in a philosophy of the history of law and peoples remains today a mission for the future. (...) This is how the dialectical movement returns to its starting point, which has thereby become a truly concrete result. (...) In the person of the Führer as the sole reality of the personality of the State, the abstract concept of the free person in himself and for himself finds its culmination and its concrete completion. (System und Geschichte in Hegels Philosophie, 1938.)

This is how the dialectical movement returns to its starting point, which has thereby become a truly concrete result. (...) In the person of the Führer as the sole reality of the personality of the State, the abstract concept of the free person in himself and for himself finds its culmination and its concrete completion. (Ibid.)

1. For example, this quote is the last sentence of the nonetheless very interesting Reason and Revolution (1941), by Frankfurt School marxist Herbert Marcuse, who seems to have been central in its diffusion in the intellectual historiography of the Third Reich. His ambition to “demonstrate that Hegel's basic concepts are hostile to the tendencies that have led into Fascist theory and practice” is expressed in the first paragraph of the first page.

2. Staat, Bewegung, Volk, 1933.

3. Au nom de Hegel. Les juristes néo-hégéliens et la philosophie du droit de la République de Weimar au Troisième Reich, 2010.

4. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, 2011 [2005].

5. Page 35 of Simona Draghici's translation, Plutarch Press, 2001.

6. Not to mention another quote attributed to Hitler with neither source nor context on page 11 (“[Hitler] said one day : In the days of old, the comedian was put in the pauper's grave. Today, it should be lawyers.”) in order to present Hitler as a man who abhorrs the Law. The remark of the Chancellor seems to come from the Table Talks gathered by Martin Bormann, where he talks a lot about such issues. However, two things can be said about that : 1) the source itself is not the most trustworthy of sources (see M. Nilsson, Hitler redux, 2020), 2) such words show no rejection of law but of a certain type of men, in the same way that expressions of anticlericalism are usually directed against men and their passions, flaws and intellectual manners rather than against religion or God.

7. Even if he was no hegelian, one could mention the name of the great philosopher and sociologist Arnold Gehlen, who was a strong Right-winged figure in postwar German debates, and who had an important influence on sociologist Niklas Luhmann, among others. Working for the Amt Rosenberg under the Third Reich, he gave a lecture on the 165th anniversary of Hegel’s death in 1935, criticizing the late Hegel as a partisan of the Restoration, but praising the “great and authentic political philosophy” of the young Hegel. Interestingly, this lecture led to a philosophical quarrel with another great philosopher, Alfred Bäumler, who questioned his methodology (see Klingemann’s article on Nazi sociologists and Max Weber, p. 63).

8. Au nom de Hegel, p. 23.

9. About the existence of ideological divergences, one should note that the figure of Charlemagne was publically reclaimed by Hitler, yet rejected by Himmler and Rosenberg who had to submit to the Führer instead of quarelling about the importance of the Saxon Widukind, as historian Alain Brose shows in his 2015 article on Charlemagne in the National Socialist ideology. Another example can be seen in Hitler's attitude towards Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century. In T. Ryback's Hitler's Private Library, the author notes that Hitler allegedly told cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte that he had nothing to do with Rosenberg's “Pagan things”, and that he supported “Herr Rosenberg, but not the author of the Myth”. In his Diary, J. Goebbels also reports and expresses himself a certain disdain for some ideas of Rosenberg (see Brose, notes 50 and 116).

10. Neo-hegelianism in Germany before 1945: Part One (containing Jouanjan’s preface and the Introduction), Part Two, Part Three.

11. Who can also read the Introduction to this book for free, and a scholarly review. On the case of Karl Larenz, see Jouanjan, “Communauté, race et « rénovation allemande du droit » : Karl Larenz, ou les errements de l’hégélianisme juridique sous le Troisième Reich”, in De la société à la sociologie, Kervégan-Colliot-Thélène ed., 2002.

12. The Chinese seem to have taken an interest in the postwar works of jurist Karl Larenz: a couple of his works (Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, 1960 [法学方法论, 2003], and Allgemeiner Teil des deutschen Bürgerlichen Rechts, 1960 [德国民法通论, 2013]) have been translated into Chinese in the last decades. An English essay on his Life, Works, and Ideological Context can also be found online, that seems to be translated from Zivilrechtslehrer des 20. Jahrhunderts in Berichten ihrer Schüler, Band 2, 2010.

The English reader can find informations about this current in the Volume 12 of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, 2016, especially chapters 5, 6 and 9 by Agostino Carrino.

Other than that, several works of these thinkers, mainly from their postwar career, have been translated into Italian (Binder has been studied in Palazzolo’s La filosofia del diritto di Julius Binder, 1947, and translated in La fondazione della filosofia del diritto, 1945 and Principi di filosofia del diritto, 2013; Karl Larenz has been studied in La Torre’s La lotta contro il diritto soggettivo. Karl Larenz e la dottrina giuridica nazionalsocialista, 1988, and translated in Storia del metodo nella scienza giuridica, 1966), Spanish (Binder’s Derecho de Sucesiones, 1953 [republished in 2019]; Larenz’s complete works are published by the Chilean Ediciones Jurídicas Olejnik and La Torre’s essay La lucha contra el derecho subjetivo has been translated in 2008; their works are studied in Fernández-Crehuet López’s Hegel bajo la esvástica : la filosofía del derecho de Karl Larenz y Julius Binder, 2017) and Portuguese (Larenz, Metodologia da Ciência do Direito, 2009).