In a spate of recent books, neoconservatives have rehearsed the drama of their radicalization and subsequent deradicalization. Typically the curtain rises on their active participation in, or engaged sympathy for, leftist movements of the 1960’s, and falls after they have regained their equilibrium and embraced liberal democracy. One thinks, for example, of former Ramparts editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz, with whom the author of this exhaustively researched volume clearly identifies. Indeed, so fixated is he on the American neoconservative experience that he has read it back into the history of 20th-century German conservatism. The totalitarian temptation, he insists, has been a phenomenon of the political right as well as of the left. Communism, the paradigmatic left-wing tyranny, was not the only “god that failed,” as Arthur Koestler and others famously titled it. “Fascism,” and especially National Socialism, was the “other god that failed.”

The pattern of disillusionment that Muller claims to discern in Germany is an all too familiar one. German “radical conservatives,” most of whom cut their political teeth in the Jugendbewegung (youth movement), subjected liberal democracy to corrosive criticism. So alienated were they from Weimar society that, wittingly or unwittingly, they gave aid and comfort to National Socialism. In due course, however, they saw the error of their ways and began to distance themselves from the Führer and his party. Though never able to muster any genuine enthusiasm for liberal democracy, they came by war’s end to accept it as the best of the viable alternatives. They transformed themselves, in short, from “radical” into “liberal” or “neo” conservatives. To their amazement, they soon found themselves in the same camp with liberals such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Kurt Sontheimer, who, traumatized by the German New Left, made themselves over into conservative liberals. All honorable roads, Muller suggests, lead to neoconservatism.

It all seems plausible enough because there is some truth in it. Some German conservatives did view Hitler as a vulgar but useful ally, and only later recognized the enormity of their misjudgment. But the parallel with communism and 1960’s radicalism is not as exact as Muller wants us to believe. There is, to begin with, the matter of Hans Freyer, the sociologist whose career Muller chooses to examine because he was “representative” of radical conservatives in the same way that Georg Lukacs typified radical leftists. Yet Lukacs was a Communist Party loyalist and Leninist until the day he died, while Freyer never joined the Nazi Party, was not an anti-Semite, and, on Muller’s own showing, always maintained a distance from the Bewegung. Indeed, our author has to go to extraordinary lengths in an unsuccessful attempt to explain why Freyer never mentioned Hitler or National Socialism in Revolution von rechts, purportedly his most blameworthy publication.

The worst that one can say of Freyer, I believe, is that he adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the Nazi regime during the first year of its existence. True, he praised Hitler publicly in 1933, but only in a speech applauding the decision to withdraw from the League of Nations as “the first and perhaps decisive step toward a true liquidation of the Versailles system.” Even with the advantage of hindsight, this is not very incriminating. In fact, if one looks closely at Muller’s honest account of Freyer’s conduct during the period 1933 to 1935, one is unlikely to judge him harshly. To be sure, he was wrong to have placed any confidence in Hitler and the Nazis, but like Hermann Rauschning, author of the anti-Hitler classic The Revolution of Nihilism, he quickly lost it.

Muller fairly describes Freyer’s anti-Nazi, if Aesopian, writings of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, but he paints his years as a visiting professor in Budapest (1938-44) in darker hues than they warrant. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that the man actively served the regime in Horthy’s Hungary. Instead, he seems to have viewed the assignment as an opportunity to escape the suffocating, and threatening, political atmosphere in his native land. At this point, then, one begins to suspect that, for Muller, Freye’s real sin, and that of greater and more compromised thinkers such as Cari Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, was their rejection of liberal democracy, which neoconservatives advance as yet another stand-in deity. In religious accents, for example, they proclaim the message of “global democracy,” much as Christians call for the evangelization of the world. “The ideology of Democratism,” Russell Kirk has observed, “is a pseudo-religion, immanentizing the symbols of transcendence.” Those who doubt this should note that Norman Podhoretz, Commentary‘s editor and a leading neoconservative spokesman, has referred to himself as “a virtual idolator of democracy.”

There can be no doubt that the German conservatives took a jaundiced view of democracy, but then so have most great thinkers, from Plato to Tocqueville to Solzhenitsyn. And living in Weimar Germany Freyer observed many of the pathologies to which Americans now seem resigned. I doubt that he would be surprised that we live in a land laid waste by drugs, savage crime, uncontrolled appetites (“human rights”), and a dehumanizing welfare state, the ideal of which, George F. Kennan fears, “is not that more people should live really well, but that no one should.”

But whether one allies oneself with conservatives (Muller’s “radical conservatives”) or neoconservatives will, finally, depend upon the attitude one adopts toward the Enlightenment. According to Muller, “Freyer continued to adhere to the historicist critique of the Enlightenment that lay behind the works of his radical conservative phase.” For neoconservatives such a critique must be fatal, for they despise the Counter-Enlightenment and the historical thinking that questions the universality of reason’s dictates and insists upon the relativity of political and social arrangements. Totalitarianism of the right and left, they believe, is rooted in romanticism, while democracy and liberty proceed from the Enlightenment.

The issue is by no means so simple. For example, it is true, as I have elsewhere attempted to show, that the structure of Lukacs’s Marxism was Hegelian and in that sense romantic. Yet as Karl Mannheim wisely observed, Marxism emerged during the bourgeois epoch, and even as it accepted certain strands of irrationalism, it remained firmly within the rationalist world. That was clear, Mannheim argued, not only when one examined the “automatic” Marxism of the Second International, but when one looked closely at Lukacs’s version. Hegel’s dialectical reason was not that of the positivists, but it possessed a powerful logic of its own. It did not so much destroy the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, as it modified it. The trouble with Hegel, Kern, and Lukacs, in Mannheim’s view, was that their thinking was not historical and irrational enough.

At the same time, as Martin Jay has pointed out, the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno maintained that “totalitarianism was less the repudiation of . . . the values of the Enlightenment than the working out of their inherent dynamic.” One need not, of course, accept the entire argument those men presented in order to agree with their conclusion. Perhaps one should put it this way. It was the Enlightenment that replaced God with Man, Christian prescription with rational morality. Since that time, men have found it necessary to make and worship other gods. Nazism and communism failed, therefore, not because they opposed democracy, but because they substituted themselves for the historic Faith.

 

[The Other God That Smiled: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton: Princeton University Press) $49.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper)]