The German Genius

and political corruption sounds so pertinent after 150 years, but that we take so much of Marx for granted now, without most of us even knowing it. We accept, implicitly, that economics is the driving force of human development; we accept, implicitly, that the social being determines consciousness; we accept, implicitly, that nations are interdependent; we accept, implicitly, especially in the realm of the environment, that capitalism destroys as it creates. After the credit crunch and stock market collapse of 2008, the sales of Das Kapital rose markedly, especially in Germany.
    Wheen’s point, and the argument of the people he quotes, is that these matters have become ever more visible since the Berlin Wall came down, and the socialist “alternative” to capitalism collapsed. Did the existence of two Germanies, and the rivalry they stimulated, keep capitalism seemingly more healthy than the alternative, than would otherwise have been the case? Either way, Germans and Germany are at the center of the argument.
    T HE M OST C ONSEQUENTIAL C ONTEMPORARIES OF THE M ODERN W ORLD
     
    Sigmund Freud’s influence was less catastrophic than Marx’s, but no less consequential. There are two ways of looking at Freud’s legacy. One is to consider him on his own, to outline the specific ways in which psychoanalysis has affected all our lives; the other is to consider him together with his contemporaries, Nietzsche and Max Weber. Both approaches will be attempted here since this is the only way that the full impact of this cohort of German thinkers can be appreciated.
    Alfred Kazin, the American critic, maintained in an essay he published in 1956 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Freud’s birth that “Freud has influenced even people who have never heard of him.” 3 Kazin thought that, at mid-century in America, “to those who have no belief, Freudianism sometimes serves as a philosophy of life.” 4 He thought that at “every hour of every day now,” people could not forget a name, feel depressed, or end a marriage without wondering what the “Freudian” reason might be. He thought that the novel and painting (Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction) had been reinvigorated by the Freudian knowledge that “personal passion is a stronger force in people’s lives than socially accepted morality” and that the “most beautiful effect” of Freudianism was the increasing awareness of childhood “as the most important single influence on personal development.” 5 He thought the insistence on personal happiness—the goal of psychoanalytic therapy—was the most revolutionary force in modern times, a modern form of self-realization.
    Another aspect of Freud’s legacy is that we are now, to use Frank Furedi’s phrase, taken from Philip Rieff’s book The Triumph of the Therapeutic , living in a “therapeutic society.” In the therapeutic society, as Furedi puts it, “there is an inward turn…The quest for personal self-understanding through the act of self-reflection is one of the legacies of modernity…the self acquires meaning through the experience of the inner, emotional life…” 6 Especially among those who are no longer religious, there is a widespread belief in an alternative self, somewhere within, and with it goes the essentially therapeutic belief that, if we can only “get in touch” with this inner, alternative (better and “higher”) self, we can find happiness, contentment, fulfillment. The “soul” has been secularized.
    Not everyone has been so sanguine about Freud. Richard Lapierre thought that “the Freudian ethic,” as he called it, was responsible for many of the discontents and false pathways of modern society. “In the Freudian concept, man is not born free with the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness; he is shackled by biological urges that can never be freely expressed and that set him in constant and grievous conflict with his society.” 7 Lapierre thought Freudianism had been responsible for “the permissive home,” “the progressive school,” “the condoning of crime,” and “the maternalization of politics” (now called single-issue or identity politics), none of which he cared for.
    Christopher Lasch, himself a psychoanalyst, was still more caustic. He said frankly that we now have what he called a culture of narcissism, economic man (Marxist man) having given