Readings on Fascism and National Socialism: Selected by members of the department of philosophy, University of ColoradoVarious
Philosophy
Readings on Fascism and National Socialism: Selected by members of the department of philosophy, University of Colorado
Various
Fascism; National socialism
Every identification of the state with the people is false
from a legal and untenable from a political standpoint ...
The state is the law-forming organization and the law serves
the inner order of the community; the people is the
politically active organism and politics serve the outward
maintenance of the community ... But law receives its
character from the people and politics must reckon with the
state as the first and most important factor.[22]
The "nation" is the product of this interplay and balance between the
state and the people. The original and vital force of the people,
through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the
unified communal life of the nation:
The nation is the complete agreement between organism and
organization, the perfect formation of a naturally grown
being. ... _Nationalism_ is nothing more than the outwardly
directed striving to maintain this inner unity of people and
state, and _socialism_ is the inwardly directed striving for
the same end.[23]
Dr. Herbert Scurla, Government Councilor and Reich's Minister for
Science, Education, and Folk Culture, in a pamphlet entitled _Die
Grundgedanken des Nationalsozialismus und das Ausland (Basic
Principles of National Socialism With Special Reference to Foreign
Countries_), also emphasizes the importance of the _Volk_ in the
National Socialist state. Dr. Scurla points out that National
Socialism does not view the nation in the domocratic sense of a
community to which the individual may voluntarily adhere.
The central field of force of the National Socialist
consciousness is rather the folk, and this folk is in no
case mere individual aggregation, i.e., collectivity as sum
of the individuals, but as a unity with a peculiar
two-sidedness, at the same time "essential totality" (M.H.
Boehm). The folk is both a living creature and a spiritual
configuration, in which the individuals are included through
common racial conditioning, in blood and spirit. It is that
force which works on the individual directly "from within or
from the side like a common degree of temperature" (Kjellén)
and which collects into the folk whatever according to
blood and spirit belongs to it. This folk, point of
departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National
Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for
political order, but as well the central factor of the
entire world-picture. Neither individuals, as the epoch of
enlightenment envisaged, nor states, as in the system of the
dynastic and national state absolutism, nor classes, as
conceived by Marxism, are the ultimate realities of the
political order, but the peoples, who stand over against one
another with the unqualifiable right to a separate existence
as natural entities, each with its own essential nature and
form. [24]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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