The German Genius

Lukács’s Die Zerstörung der Venunft (1962), and Ralf Dahrendorf’s Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland (1965) stand out, however.
    Lukács’s book, which has been translated as The Destruction of Reason , looked at “the path to Hitler in philosophy” and was among the first to tread what would become a well-known path, from Ludwig Gumplowicz and Houston Stewart Chamberlain to Wilhelm Dilthey, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber and Oswald Spengler to Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt. Lukács was among the first to remark on Germany’s “delayed” status in capitalist development, on the misère among German intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their cultural pessimism. He attributed this to, first, the Idealism of Kant, “which gave intuition a good name,” culminating, he said, in a form of vitalism that, among other things, prevented the far more rational and scientific Marxism from taking hold in Germany, where the “class struggle” was different from that elsewhere. Philosophically, Germany embraced the Goethe-Schopenhauer-Wagner-Nietzsche route (Lukács reserved special scorn for Nietzsche) rather than the more “enriching” path of Lessing, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach to Marx and Engels. Lukács claimed to see irrationalism taking hold in the United States after World War II and this, combined with his argument that Leninism-Marxism was a “higher intellectual stage,” at a time when Stalin’s Great Terror was becoming known, somewhat vitiated his arguments.
    Dahrendorf’s book, translated as Society and Democracy in Germany, on the other hand, was less polemical and had the merit of considering most of the arguments in the other titles and of using recent sociological and survey work to confirm or contradict their theses. 16
    Born in Hamburg in 1929, Dahrendorf was the son of a Social Democratic member of parliament in the Weimar Republic. His education at the University of Hamburg bridged the traditional and the modern—he read classical philology and sociology. He took his PhD in 1956 at the London School of Economics, and thereafter his career straddled the academic world and practical politics. In 1969–70 he became a member of the German parliament and was subsequently appointed a commissioner to the European Commission in Brussels. After that, he returned to the LSE as director and then became warden of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, taking British citizenship and being elevated to Britain’s House of Lords. He died in 2009.
    In his book, Dahrendorf set out to answer what he called “the German Question”: Why is it that so few in Germany embraced the principle of liberal democracy? He went on: “There is a conception of liberty that holds that man can be free only where an experimental attitude to knowledge, the competition of social forces, and liberal political institutions are combined. This conception has never really gained a hold in Germany. Why not? That is the German Question.”
    He began by highlighting some important differences between Germany’s industrialization and the parallel (or not so parallel) process in other countries. He noted, for instance, that German industrial enterprises tend to be much bigger than those in Britain (three times as big in terms of capitalization), and that one result of this was that, “instead of developing it, industrialisation in Germany swallowed the liberal principle.” This led him to conclude that, “Contrary to the beliefs of many, the industrial revolution is not the prime mover of the modern world at all.” 17 The industrial sector was so large in Germany that it formed an alliance with the state, and “there was no place in these structures for a sizeable, politically self-confident bourgeoisie.” 18
    He traced the origin of the idea, first popularized by Tönnies, that the original human Gemeinschaft is threatened by an artificial Gesellschaft , and found it unlikely that “a sweet community of minds” ever existed. 19 In a section headed “The nostalgia for synthesis,” he argued that the Germans harbored different attitudes toward conflict than did some other modern nations, and that “different attitudes to conflict imply different interpretations of the human condition.” 20
    In a section on universities, he drew parallels between science and politics—both were open-ended and their direction could (and should) not be forced along any