The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century PDF
Preview The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century
THE AGE OF IDEOLOGIES THE AGE OF IDEOLOGIES A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century KARL DIETRICH BRACHER Translated from the German by Ewald Osers St. Martin’s Press New York © 1982 by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH, Stuttgart English translation © 1984 by Ewald Osers All rights reserved. For information, write: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Printed in Great Britain First published in the United States of America in 1984 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 1922- The age of ideologies. Translation of: Zeit Der Ideologien. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Political science—History—20th century. I. Title. [JA83 B68513 1984b] 320.5 84-15104 ISBN 0-312-01229-2 For Dorothee CONTENTS Preface ix Preface to the English Edition x Introduction: Ideology and Progress i Part I THE TURN OF THE CENTURY Signposts to the Modern Age 1. The Ideological Legacy 9 2. Progress and Irrationalism 17 3. Political Religions and the Belief in Race 26 4. Harbingers of the Great Crisis 39 5. Theories of Alienation, Theories of Élites 50 6. Changes in Liberalism 62 7. Social Democratic Reformism 69 Part II THE INTER-WAR YEARS Intellectuals and Dictatorships 1. Authoritarian and Totalitarian Thought 81 2. The Ideological Post-war Period, Intellectual Seductions 87 3. Dictatorship as a Concept: Fascism, National Socialism and Communism Compared 101 4. Totalitarian Progressivism on the Right and the Left 116 5. Forms of Crisis Thought 130 6. The Struggle for Values and Orientations 147 7. Problems of the Democratic Idea 166 8. Authoritarianism and Dictatorship: from the First to the Second Post-war Period 176 Part III THE PRESENT De-ideologization and Re-ideologization 1. Post-war Experience: Re-evaluation and Reconstruction 189 2. New Orientations towards the World: Ideological Departures of the Sixties 203 3. Changing Opinions and Political ' Culture in the Seventies 219 ' 4. Contested Principles of Democratic Theory 231 5. Between Communism and Democracy: Transitional Variants of Thought 245 6. Ideologies from the First to the Third World 260 Index of Names 279 General Index 293 PREFACE Our century opened with the fateful transformation of political ideas into ideologies. This process has been repeated ever since: not least as the intellectual misinterpretation of developmental crises and as a susceptibility to totalitarian ways of thinking. In consequence, reliance cannot be placed on premature predictions of an end to ideologies; on the contrary, new challenges in the name of ideological claims to totality must be expected. There is, therefore, a greater need than ever for remembering and recalling those experiences which are capable of conveying political understanding and providing support against the confusion of concepts and values. This book is dedicated to my wife. She has not only accompanied it, as she has all my work on politics and the history of ideas, for over three decades with indefatigable engagement but also promoted its realization by ideas which stood the test of time, during the most difficult period of our century, in the Bonhoeffer-Schleicher family from which she comes. My thanks go also to James Billington and to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington dc, where I was able to draft part of this book from December 1980 to February 1981. Some ideas and preliminary studies, of course, go back much further, indeed to my wartime and post-war experiences and to my doctoral thesis (1948) on ideas of decline and progress in classical antiquity. I hope to be able to supplement it with a further volume on the origins of modern political thought. Karl Dietrich Bracher Bonn, May 1982 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION The subject of this book has constantly engaged the author’s interest over the past four decades while he was working on his studies of the Weimar Republic and national socialism, the history of European problems in the twentieth century, and the confrontation of democracy and dictatorship both in the past and at present. Invariably, these topics involved the question of the intellectual and ideological background of the great crises of the modern world - crises which are very largely those of thought as well as of political ideas. The actual writing of the present book, however, was carried out in the face of the topical discussion about the profound change of social and political values in the seventies. It was carried out, moreover, amidst a German experience which, disturbingly and alarmingly, revealed the extent to which the special burdens of German history and German thought invariably affect questions of attitude and orientation, especially among the younger generation of Germans. The generation rift of the sixties was followed not by a generally predicted de-ideologization but by new waves of an ideological renaissance. When the realization of high-pitched political expectations was found to come up against certain limits, there was a revival of the confrontation of power and spirit, politics and ideal - a confrontation especially painful in Germany and one that was generally believed to have been overcome. There were new signs of that disruption of a normal relation with political reality which had caused the shipwreck of the first German democracy in 1933. A significant role was played in this connection by the challenge to and the questioning of institutional forms of education and upbringing, of family and school, under the impact of an unexpectedly rapid and radical upheaval of values. Belief in social progress and social emancipation had exerted a powerful reformist pressure on the era of the social-liberal coalition since 1969. Consequently, the crisis of growth after the mid-seventies was interpreted by an increasing number of contempor aries - either indignant or resigned - as a crisis of western civilization generally. In this excited and exciting debate, which at times has the semblance of a
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