The Destruction of Reason

By Georg Lukács

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Luk cs's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally published in 1952, the book is a sustained and detailed polemic against post-Hegelian German philosophy and sociology from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. The Destruction of Reason is unsparing in its contention that with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground fascist thought. In this, the main culprits are Friedrich Nietzsche and Mart n Heidegger who are accused, in turn, of introducing irrationalism into social and philosophical thought, pronounced antagonism to the idea of progress in history, an aristocratic view of the "masses," and, consequently, hostility to socialism, which in its classic expressions are movements for popular democracy-especially, but not exclusively, the expropriation of most private property in terms of material production.

The Destruction of Reason remains one of Luk cs's most controversial, albeit little read, books. This new edition, featuring an historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, will finally see this classic come back in to print.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839761850

Georg Lukács

Georg Luk�cs (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Book preview

The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason

GEORG LUKÁCS

Introduced by Enzo Traverso

Translated by Peter Palmer

This edition first published by Verso 2021

First published in English by The Merlin Press 1980

Originally published in German by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag GmbH 1962

© Verso 2021

Introduction © Enzo Traverso 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-184-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-185-0 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-186-7 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

Dialectic of Irrationalism: Historicizing Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason, by Enzo Traverso

Translator’s Preface

Preface. On irrationalism as an international phenomenon in the imperialist period

Chapter I. On some characteristics of Germany’s historical development

Chapter II. The founding of irrationalism in the period between two revolutions (1789-1848)

1. Basic Preliminary Remarks on the History of Modern Irrationalism

2. Schelling’s ‘Intellectual Intuition’ as the First Manifestation of Irrationalism

3. Schelling’s Later Philosophy

4. Schopenhauer

5. Kierkegaard

Chapter III. Nietzsche as founder of irrationalism in the imperialist period

Chapter IV. Vitalism (Lebensphilosophie) in imperialist Germany

1. Essence and Function of Vitalism

2. Dilthey as Founder of Imperialistic Vitalism

3. Vitalism in the Pre-War Period (Simmel)

4. War and Post-War Period (Spengler)

5. The Vitalistic Philosophy of ‘Relative Stabilization’ (Scheier)

6. The Ash Wednesday of Parasitical Subjectivism (Heidegger, Jaspers)

7. Pre-Fascist and Fascist Vitalism (Klages, Jünger, Baeumler, Boehm, Krieck, Rosenberg)

Chapter V. Neo-Hegelianism

Chapter VI. German sociology of the imperialist period

1. The Origins of Sociology

2. The Beginnings of German Sociology (Schmoller, Wagner and Others)

3. Ferdinand Toennies and the Founding of the New School of German Sociology

4. German Sociology in the Wilhelmine Age (Max Weber)

5. The Defencelessness of Liberal Sociology (Alfred Weber, Mannheim)

6. Pre-Fascist and Fascist Sociology (Spann, Freyer, Carl Schmitt)

Chapter VII. Social Darwinism, racial theory and fascism

1. Beginnings of Racial Theory in the Eighteenth Century

2. Gobineau’s Racial Theory Argument

3. Social Darwinism (Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, Woltmann)

4. H.S. Chamberlain as the Founder of Modern Racialism

5. The ‘National-Socialist Philosophy’ as the Demagogic Synthesis of German Imperialist Philosophy

Epilogue. On post-war irrationalism

Notes

Index of Persons

DIALECTIC OF IRRATIONALISM

HISTORICIZING LUKÁCS’S THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON

Enzo Traverso

The time has come to rediscover The Destruction of Reason, undoubtedly one of Georg Lukács’s most controversial books. It deserves to be reappraised beyond its demoniac and dark aura, and to be given its proper place in the history of twentieth-century critical thought. In 1954, the year of its publication in Germany, the Cold War was raging and the controversies on the origins of National Socialism had lost their previous intensity. In the West, this book was considered a piece of Stalinist propaganda not deserving more than superficial scrutiny, whereas the orthodox communist intelligentsia looked suspiciously at the work of a heretic Marxist whose reputation remained stained by the official Soviet condemnation of History and Class Consciousness (1923).

Scholars are accustomed to distinguishing at least four steps in Lukács’s intellectual trajectory. There was first a youthful, pre-Marxist, romantic, messianic and idealist moment, shaped by acclaimed works such as Soul and Form (1912) and Theory of the Novel (1916). Then a second, ‘extremist’ moment, when Lukács became a communist and participated in the Hungarian Revolution of Bela Kun, in which he produced what is usually considered his most creative Marxist work: History and Class Consciousness. The third moment was that of Lukács’s Stalinism, between the 1930s (preceded in 1928 by his ‘Theses on Blum’) and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in which the old philosopher was, once again, deeply involved. This was simultaneously the longest, darkest and most productive phase, almost entirely lived in the USSR and postwar Hungary, in which Lukács produced his major works of philosophy and literary criticism, from The Historical Novel (1936) to The Young Hegel (1948, but completed in 1938), and his multiple studies on literary realism. And then there was a last step, from 1956 to his death in 1971, in which he abandoned Stalinism and created the ‘Budapest School’, where a new generation of critical thinkers gathered around him. In this period, Lukács wrote his last masterpiece, The Ontology of Social Being (1972). The Destruction of Reason belongs to the third step – Stalinism – of which it is an eloquent mirror. Written substantially during the Second World War and completed in the early 1950s – the introduction is dated November 1952 – it summarizes a study he had developed since the rise to power of Hitler.¹

Lukács’s Stalinist period has fallen into a sort of limbo, much less investigated than his youthful romantic creations or his dialectical adventures at the time of revolutionary Bolshevism. This is a regrettable oblivion, because the Stalinist Lukács was an impressive thinker nonetheless, whose works cast an interesting light on Stalinism itself, its meaning as well as its ‘greatness’, however demoniac and sinister it was. I do not suggest ‘rehabili-tating’ Lukács or trivializing his responsibilities, even less dimin-ishing the crimes of Stalinism. Stalinism – most historians agree on this – was neither a pathology nor a simple ‘regression’; it was a gigantic attempt at creating a ‘new civilization’ with authori-tarian means. According to Stephen Kotkin, ‘Stalinism was not just a political system, let alone the rule of an individual. It was a set of values, a social identity, a way of life.’² As for Stalinist art, socialist realism – an integral cultural component of this civilization – was more than a pure sacralization of power. It was not exclusively the aesthetic celebration of a despotic political regime; for Boris Groys, it also was a ‘dialectical radicalization of the avant-garde’ that canonized revolution and produced an art oriented towards the future.³ Similarly, Stalinism was also a philosophy of history and Lukács provided one of its highest expressions. Thus, rereading The Destruction of Reason participates in this necessary work of historicizing Stalinism. This exegesis, however, is quite different from reinterpreting Nietzsche, Jünger, Heidegger or Schmitt. With Lukács, the problem lies neither in making a fruitful use of reactionary theories, nor in recognizing that a fascist philosopher can be a sharp thinker that deserves to be studied. ‘Using’ these authors does not mean legitimizing their ideas or political choices. The case of Lukács is different because his Stalinist works express the logic of an enemy within the Left. One can criticize Stalinism and denounce its horrible crimes, but during the Second World War – a titanic clash between the alliance of the inheritors of the Enlightenment and the forces of the most radical form of counter-Enlightenment – virtually all defenders of freedom and democracy were on the same side as Stalinism. This dialectic of history is at the core of The Destruction of Reason. The antitotalitarian wisdom of Friedrich Hayek and François Furet, for whom Hitler and Stalin were interchangeable enemies of liberalism and market society, became a commonplace at the end of the twentieth century; between 1941 and 1945, though, it simply meant political impotence and isolation. Confronting Stalinism instead of simply rejecting it with ethical and political arguments; reassessing its historical reasons without forgetting or forgiving its crimes: this is the task to which, three decades after the end of the USSR, the rereading of Lukács’s book invites us.

Reception

In the 1950s, The Destruction of Reason was received with scepticism. In Adenauer’s Germany, this history of the rise of irrationalism from the early nineteenth century to Hitler was stigmatized by Kurt Sontheimer as a bad analysis of Nazi irrationalism and as eloquent proof of the author’s own irrationalism.⁴ Theodor W. Adorno accused Lukács of humiliating himself through such an exercise of accommodation ‘to the dismal level of Soviet pseudo-intellectual production’. In this way, he concluded, Lukács degraded philosophy to ‘a mere means to the ends of domination’.⁵ In 1963, George Lichtheim depicted The Destruction of Reason as ‘an intellectual crime’ and, fifteen years later, the former Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski pronounced his own verdict: more than a history of German irrationalism, this work was a ‘striking example’ of Lukács’s own ‘philosophy of blind faith’, a philosophy in which nothing was ‘proved but everything asserted ex cathedra‘, with the result that whatever did not fit his Marxist assumptions was ‘dismissed as reactionary rubbish’.⁶ The Destruction of Reason was therefore not translated into English until 1980, when the Lukácsian wave of the two previous decades was almost exhausted, and it remained engulfed in the dark waters of the ‘crisis of Marxism’. This was certainly the worst moment to discuss it, and it was mostly ignored. The book’s polemical epilogue on postwar irrationalism, which referred to the ideological and political conflicts of the 1950s, appeared irremediably dated and some peremptory judgments – especially on Wittgenstein – so dogmatic that most critics simply preferred to ignore the book. Thus, its reception could be summarized by a few death sentences.

In France, the country that dominated Western cultural debate in the postwar years, the missing reception of The Destruction of Reason, published in translation in 1959, had different causes. At that time, Lukács’s only book available in French was Existentialism or Marxism (1948), which severely criticized as idealistic and individualistic Sartre’s attempt to find a synthesis between Marxism as a philosophy of history and existentialism as a phenomenological approach to concrete reality. Except for his critique of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, Lukács was essentially known through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), in which History and Class Consciousness was depicted as a foundational text of Western Marxism.⁷ As for the orthodox French Communist Party (PCF), it decided to silence an author whose past did not appear completely reliable. In 1955, the PCF censured the publication of a lecture on Lukács delivered by Henri Lefebvre at the Paris Hungarian Institute, which contained a very appreciative exposition of The Destruction of Reason,⁸ and, one year later, it definitively banished an author who had participated in the Nagy government and had been deported to Romania after the Soviet occupation of Hungary. In 1960, however, The Destruction of Reason was eclipsed by the rediscovery of History and Class Consciousness, translated by Kostas Axelos and Jacqueline Bois and published by Éditions de Minuit. In the thrilling years of the Algerian War and the beginning of the Fifth Republic, when the French Left was exiting the stifling 1950s and looking for an alternative to Stalinism, the vibrant essays of the young Lukács allowed the rebirth of dialectics as a revolutionary method of interpreting history and society far beyond Alexandre Kojève’s canonized reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit..⁹ Differently from Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, which resulted in a philosophical apologia for Stalinism, History and Class Consciousness reframed the concepts of totality, reification, fetishism and the dialectic subject-object by giving the proletariat (rather than a party or a political leadership) the role of both interpreting and transforming the world. This work opened the way for the New Left, in France and elsewhere, by rediscovering a pioneering piece of Western Marxism.¹⁰

It is worth observing that, even in the countries of ‘real socialism’, The Destruction of Reason was substantially ignored. Lukács published his book in the poisonous atmosphere of the Rajk Trial, when he faced the real prospect of becoming a second high-level scapegoat after the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of communist Hungary. Mátyás Rakosi had advised him to retire from the public stage and for a while he kept silent. As he would later guess, what saved him from the Stalinist purges was a lucky combination of circumstances. During his first visit to Moscow in 1930 for research at the Marx-Engels Institute, he had conveniently refused to meet Bukharin and Radek, thus avoiding, a few years later, of being suspected of complicity with two of the main targets of Vyshinski’s witch-hunts. At the time of his exile in the USSR, he had been arrested by the NKVD in 1941 on allegations of Trotskyism, but he was quickly released thanks to Georg Dimitrov, who liked him and intervened in his favour.¹¹ This confluence of circumstances spared him a trial for treason in Hungary in 1950, but he remained a suspicious thinker nonetheless.¹² More specifically, Lukács’s reconstitution of the path of German irrationalism could not be accepted by the adherents of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, who interpreted the history of philosophy as a clash between materialism and idealism.¹³ This explains the silence that surrounded The Destruction of Reason. Instead of welcoming a work that depicted the USSR and the countries of real socialism as the final outcome of the Enlightenment, in 1960 the apparatchiks of the GDR published a collected book devoted to Lukács and revisionism, in which Bela Fogarasi, a former member of the Budapest Sonntagkreis, argued this ignominious charge.¹⁴ After 1956, most of Lukács’s books were withdrawn from the shelves of the GDR libraries.¹⁵

One of the few countries in which The Destruction of Reason was the object of a critical but generally positive reception was Italy, where it was published in 1959 by the prestigious Einaudi Editions, almost simultaneously with The Young Hegel. Three years after Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin, the Soviet occupation of Hungary, and Lukács’s exile in Romania, his apologetic assessments of Stalinism no longer appeared as the core of his book and his defence of rationalism merged with the PCI’s antifascism and its strategy of the ‘Italian road to socialism’. Some admirers depicted Lukács’s philosophical and literary works as ‘front notebooks’ parallel and complementary to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Lukács became a significant reference in an intellectual debate that involved the most important Italian Marxist philosophers (Lucio Colletti, Galvano Della Volpe, Cesare Luporini) and literary critics (Alberto Asor Rosa, Franco Fortini, Carlo Salinari).¹⁶ Thus, Lukács found his home in the land of the most powerful Western Communist party, whose intellectuals were at the same time too sophisticated to endorse the mediocrity of the official Soviet ideology and too moderate to accept the revolutionary sparks of History and Class Consciousness. Therefore, The Destruction of Reason reinforced Lukács’s status as an iconic figure for the Italian linientreuer Dissidenten, the adherents of a critical thought that did not break the boundaries of the party line. The old Hungarian philosopher did not hide his criticism of Stalin and real socialism, but he strongly believed in his own version of the British motto: ‘right or wrong, my party’.¹⁷

Zeitgeist

The Destruction of Reason is not only a particular moment in Lukács’s intellectual and political trajectory; it is also highly significant to the culture of postwar Germany and Central Europe. It participated in a wide-ranging debate on the origins of National Socialism and the causes of its catastrophic outcome that raged for more than a decade in the German-speaking world, mostly in the nascent Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and among Jewish exiles in the United States. Lukács’s book was the last intervention in this debate and probably the only outstanding contribution coming from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. It concluded a period of philosophical and political reflection that had begun during the Second World War and produced an impressive constellation of works. In February 1941, such a representative of conservative liberalism as Leo Strauss delivered a lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York, in which he defined German nihilism as ‘the rejection of the principles of civilization as such’, with civilization defined as ‘the conscious culture of reason’.¹⁸ In the same year, Herbert Marcuse and Karl Löwith, respectively, published Reason and Revolution and From Hegel to Nietzsche, two works that proposed different – in many respects antipodal – readings of Hegel’s legacy, but which converged in defining National Socialism as a new form of anti-Hegelian irrationalism. One year later, Franz Neumann published Behemoth: Structure and Practice of National Socialism, which depicted Hitler’s system of power as ‘a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy’, a totalitarian power that had ‘swallowed the rights and dignity of man’ and had tried to ‘transform the world into a chaos’.¹⁹ In short, the realm of irrationalism. In 1945, Karl Popper, then exiled in New Zealand, published The Open Society and its Enemies, in which he sketched his own genealogy of modern totalitarianism as a long road going from Plato to Hitler, passing through Hegel and Marx. The following year, in a country still in ruins, the aged historian Friedrich Meinecke published The German Catastrophe, which put into question the entire history of modern Germany going back to the Reformation, and Karl Jaspers summarized his tormented reflections on The Question of German Guilt. Both Meinecke and Jaspers had lived in Germany during the age of Hitlerism and war, the first as a respected and loyal scholar, the second as a representative of the so-called ‘inner emigration’. Both of them expressed the troubled conscience of a defeated nation in whose name the most horrible crimes had been perpetrated. Their works provide a snapshot of the state of mind of a country that had suddenly achieved the status of a pariah in the eyes of international public opinion.²⁰ Outside Germany, other major works appeared in 1946, from Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler to Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State. Kracauer scrutinized the expressionist movies of the Weimar age as mirrors to a psychological transformation of German society that prepared the advent of an authoritarian power. Cassirer, the old neo-Kantian philosopher who had published a history of Enlightenment at the end of the Weimar Republic, reconstructed the twisted road of its destruction through a rebirth of myth (notably the myths of hero, race and state). In 1947, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, still in exile in California, published their most ambitious book written during the war, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which turned Hegel’s philosophy of history upside down by depicting the long trajectory of Western civilization from Antiquity to Auschwitz: the accomplishment of the Absolute Spirit was replaced by the inexhaustible process of the ‘self-destruction of Western Reason’.²¹ In the same year, Thomas Mann gave literary form to the idea of Germany’s demoniac destiny in his novel Doktor Faustus. In 1951, in the climate of McCarthyism, Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, a masterpiece of political theory that unconvincingly merged the genealogies of National Socialism and Stalinism as the two Janus faces of the same realm of ideology and terror.²²

All the pieces of this heterogeneous constellation shared a common question: why Hitler? Why the collapse of the German mind? Why did the country of the Aufklärung turn into the realm of a modern Apocalypse, the locus of the conception and implementation of the worst crimes of human history? In different ways, adopting divergent approaches and analytical categories, all these works tried to apprehend and explain the advent of irrationalism in twentieth-century Germany. The Destruction of Reason does not mention these books – and its author probably did not know some of them – but it undoubtedly belongs to the same constellation, shares the same Zeitgeist, and tries to answer the same questions. Myth, irrationalism and nihilism are the most shared concepts of this large literature of Germany’s Stunde Null, the ‘zero hour’ which signaled a radical break with Nazism in the postwar period. The discrepancies between Lukács and Adorno, Arendt and Strauss were certainly more than significant, but they stood in the same camp during the historical divide of the Second World War, an ideological conflict that, far beyond two military and political alliances, opposed two worldviews: the forces of Enlightenment against those of irrationalism, the provisional alliance between communism and liberal democracy against fascism. Despite its highly polemical style, The Destruction of Reason was entirely grounded in this basic assumption.

Stressing that the development of irrationalism did not possess an ‘immanent’ character ‘driven by the inner dialectic of philosophical thought’, but was rather intimately related to the dynamic of class relations and conflicts, Lukács pointed out the structural foundations of German irrationalism.²³ Far from being a historical accident, the Nazi regime embodied the most aggressive and expansionist tendencies of imperialism. The first chapter, devoted to ‘some characteristics of Germany’s historical development’, presented the Marxist version of an interpretation that many scholars would subsequently summarize through the concept of the German Sonderweg, the ‘separate path’ of modernization that distinguished Germany from Western Europe. The premises of this approach appeared in Meinecke’s The German Catastrophe, where the Prussian Empire was already depicted as the realm of a ‘wrong track’ (Irrweg) that abandoned the path of Western civilization.²⁴ During the First World War, many German scholars had fiercely claimed the historical peculiarities of the land of Luther, Frederick the Great and Bismarck, which Werner Sombart depicted as the land of ‘heroes’ (Helden) opposed to an alliance of ‘merchant’ nations (Händler). Meinecke himself had claimed the defence of Kultur against the corruptive forces of Zivilisation and ‘the ideas of 1914’ against the values of 1789.²⁵ At the end of the Second World War, however, this widespread assumption of a Sonderweg suddenly saw a kind of negative reversal that stigmatized Germany’s entire history as a sequence of defeats and tragic mistakes.²⁶ Lukács adopted this critical gaze by reformulating it in Marxist terms. Quoting a famous Engels essay on the sixteenth-century peasant war in Germany and a lesser-known book by Lenin denouncing the ‘economic romanticism’ of the Russian populists, he emphasized the consequences of a succession of historical defeats. First, the Reformation durably divided the country without creating a modern bourgeois spirit. Germany did not know Calvinism but rather Lutheranism, a political authoritarianism and a gloomy propension to obedience that supplied ‘a spiritual background’ and ‘a moral foundation’ for its ‘economic, social, and cultural backwardness’.²⁷ Differently from France and Great Britain, which had accomplished their ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Germany missed its democratic transformation in 1848. This failure reinforced the Prussian absolutism that completed the national unification of the country under the reactionary leadership of Bismarck. Finally, the defeat of 1918 produced the collapse of the Kaiserreich but, instead of allowing a true democratization of the country, it simply radicalized its nationalist tendencies.

In short, National Socialism was not an accident of history: it was the inevitable outcome of a national path that combined a belated, extremely intense and lacerating capitalist development with the persistence of an archaic, premodern and authoritarian state, a state that conserved all the stigmas of absolutism. Starting from such premises, exacerbated nationalism, racism and irrationalism resulted in a peculiar form of reactionary modernism. In the interwar decades, this contradictory synthesis of cultural backwardness, economic power, technological development and political authoritarianism became literally explosive. Hitler’s fascism was the outcome of this historical trajectory. The Nazi worldview was ‘only the ultimate culmination of a long process’, which Lukács summarized in a striking phrase: ‘the destruction of reason’.²⁸ Of course, imperialism was an ‘international tendency’ and many ideological currents of this German course towards irrationalism had illustrious representatives in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and other European countries. In fact, the Prussian ‘revolution from above’ was not exceptional at all. It had several equivalents in Europe – Gramsci defined the Italian Risorgimento as ‘passive revolution’ – and elsewhere, from Turkey (Kemalism) to Japan (the Meiji Revolution of the 1860s). Moreover, the idea of a German Sonderweg implicitly supposed a normative European path to political modernity – which Marxist historiography summarized through the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ – whose empirical existence could not be proven.²⁹ In most European countries, Jacobinism failed and the overthrow of absolutism was the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars and Bonapartist transformations rather than the consequence of autochthonous bourgeois-democratic revolutions. In the early 1950s, this historical debate had not yet started, but Lukács wished to distinguish his interpretive model from the widespread idea of an ontological – sometimes formulated in almost racist terms — ‘German guilt’. He thus tried to nuance his arguments: irrationalism was an international tendency and aggressive imperialism was far from being a German peculiarity, but in his eyes ‘the role played by German irrationalism remained undiminished’.³⁰ Despite a constellation of British, French, Italian and Spanish conservative thinkers opposed to the Enlightenment, Lukács concluded, Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the ‘classic’ land of irrationalism.

Domenico Losurdo, who shared Lukács’s interpretation of Nietzsche as the apogee of nineteenth-century European reaction in philosophy, expressed his scepticism towards this Marxist version of the Sonderweg theory. Lukács had magisterially understood the European roots of Hegel’s dialectical thought (the French Revolution, Enlightenment and classical liberalism), but he remained almost indifferent to the French and British intellectual origins of German irrationalism. Except for Arthur Gobineau, he did not pay attention to such French authors as Joseph de Maistre, Maurice Barrès, Gustave Le Bon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge; such Italians as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giovanni Gentile and Julius Evola; Spaniards like José Ortega y Gasset; and such British thinkers of racialism as Francis Galton and Benjamin Disraeli.³¹

In short, Lukács’s definition of Hitler’s irrationalism was the philosophic equivalent of the canonical definition of fascism formulated by George Dimitrov in 1935: ‘the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital’.³² As I emphasized above, The Destruction of Reason was the only significant contribution to the postwar German debate on Nazism coming from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Far from being anecdotal, this fact has many implications. The actors in this transatlantic debate were antifascist intellectuals, victims of National Socialism, Jews and/or exiles. They expressed, like Thomas Mann or Karl Jaspers, the abysmal tragedy of German conscience; they interrogated, like Hannah Arendt, the end of a Jewish cycle of German history; or they meditated, like the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, on the antinomies of Western civilization. Their gaze was German or, for some of them, more broadly Western. Lukács participated in this debate from outside this transatlantic exchange. He wrote from Budapest and his epistemic status was very different. He reconstructed from within the process of the disintegration of German philosophy but did not write as a defeated German who contemplated a historical nemesis; he wrote as neither victim nor vanquished, but as a thinker defending the reasoning of the victors. He did not write, like Thomas Mann, as a German who observed the awful spectacle of his country completely destroyed and accepted its punishment as an ineluctable destiny. He wrote as a thinker who perceived the breath of historical Reason in the Soviet flag hoisted atop the ruined Reichstag by a soldier of the Red Army. As Reinhart Koselleck explains, the gaze of the victors is generally apologetic, not very critical.³³ Lukács’s gaze was apologetic, but he defended the motives of a victor who had fought a just war. We can critically analyse the Nuremberg Trial as a classical example of Victor’s Justice. In 1946, however, its verdicts were universally received as a just act, tout court. The Manichaeism of The Destruction of Reason mirrored that of the victors of the Second Thirty Years’ War.

From Hitler to Schelling

The Destruction of Reason is built as the indictment of a pitiless prosecutor who calls to the stand the actors of two centuries of German philosophical thought. He carefully scrutinizes the evidence – disparate but deeply interrelated – of a single process that ultimately unveils the magnitude of the crime. The charges depict a colourful and impressive landscape. In many respects, Lukács’s indictment evokes the hermeneutic procedure of the detective novel, analysed by Siegfried Kracauer in the early 1920s. The hotel lobby, where, at the end of the novel, the detective gathers all characters to designate the murderer and explain his misdeeds and motives, is a kind of ‘inverted image of the house of God’.³⁴ God has been replaced by Reason – Kracauer says Ratio – and the detective plays the role of a secular priest who celebrates the liturgy of triumphal Reason. Reason defeats madness and his explanation is irrefutable, because of the multiple pieces of evidence that corroborate his charges. Kracauer himself adopted this inquisitorial method in From Caligari to Hitler (1946), a book with many hidden affinities with The Destruction of Reason. The crime has already been perpetrated, we know the murderer, and the detective rigorously reconstitutes the genealogy of his horrific misdeeds, mentioning his accomplices, the dynamic of his acts, the circumstances that surrounded every step of his crime and which were ‘objectively’ – either consciously or unconsciously – favoured by many bystanders. According to Kracauer, the Weimar movies undoubtedly revealed ‘the preponderance of authoritarian leanings’ that became ‘a decisive factor’ in the advent of National Socialism. ‘Irretrievably sunk into regression’, he concluded, ‘the bulk of the German people could not help submitting to Hitler’.³⁵ Both From Caligari to Hitler and The Destruction of Reason were conceived of as a filmography and a philosophy of collective guilt. Both of them rewound the film reel of the German path to Nazism: the former from Hitler to Caligari, the latter from Hitler to Schelling.

Let us look at Lukács’s demonstration. His starting point is the culture of the Age of Restoration, between 1814 and 1848, which he depicts as the cradle of irrationalism. Its major actors are Schelling, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. Schelling’s ‘intuition’ and philosophy of nature developed a form of ‘epistemological aristocratism’³⁶ – knowledge as a privilege for God-elected people – that departed from Hegel’s dialectics and introduced a ‘mystical’ tendency halfway between Goethe’s naturalism and Novalis’s magical idealism. Schopenhauer’s pessimism was burdened with a ‘mystic-metaphysical irrationalism’³⁷ that mirrored the ideology of Restoration. A stronger mystical inclination shaped Kierkegaard’s religious irrationalism, which rejected the idea of progress and announced twentieth-century existentialism.

The second step is embodied by Nietzsche, whose open irrationalism, pessimism and aristocratic nihilism corresponded with the ideological reaction after the Paris Commune. His radical rejection of the idea of equality in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) was the premise for a ‘pseudo-revolution’ that expressed the romantic anticapitalism of a rebellious aristocratic elite. Therefore, Lukács stigmatizes Nietzsche’s ‘fascination for the parasitic intelligentsia of the imperialist period’ and interprets his thought as the philosophical expression of ‘imperialism’s most repugnant forms and mortal fear of the proletarian revolution’.³⁸ Even if the author of Zarathustra (1883) and Anti-Christ (1895) probably did not read a single line of Marx, his ‘whole life’s work’ represented ‘a continuous polemic against Marxism and socialism’. Nietzsche’s nihilism, Lukács concludes, was a ‘fascinating and colourful symbol-realm of imperialist myth’.³⁹

Then comes vitalism (Lebensphilosophie), a very large category in which Lukács includes a constellation of authors as diverse as the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey, the poets Stefan George and Friedrich Gundolf and such a thinker of the Conservative Revolution as Oswald Spengler. Simmel, the author of The Philosophy of Money (1900), was a ‘religious atheist’ who despised the plebs with a Nietzschean propensity for aristocratism. His work revealed the ‘intellectual tendencies of prewar imperialism’.⁴⁰ Dilthey’s thought, grounded in the distinction between natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), simply expressed the exhaustion of Hegelianism and theorized the cultural backwardness of Germany, a country which, unlike France and the United Kingdom, was unable to produce accomplished bourgeois ideologies like positivism or evolutionism. Like Nietzsche, neither Simmel nor Dilthey could be considered as ‘conscious forerunners of fascism’, but they certainly had been its objective ‘ancestors’ (Ahnen).⁴¹ As for Spengler, the bard of the decline of the West, he resolved the conflict between Kultur and Zivilisation with a nihilist revolution that was a direct appeal for fascism.

The march towards the Nazi culmination of irrationalism makes a significant step forward with the transition from vitalism to existentialism, from a philosophy grounded in life (Leben) to a new conception rooted in Being and existence (Sein). In a chapter with a literary title – ‘The Ash Wednesday of Parasitical Subjectivism’ – Lukács does not hesitate to put together Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, i.e. the author of the infamous inaugural address on ‘the self-assertion of the German University’ (1933) and the author of The Question of German Guilt. Whereas Heidegger pursued a Nazi realization of the concepts of Being and Time (1927) by indicating an alternative to the ‘inauthenticity’ of existence in the ‘authenticity’ (Eigentlichkeit) of Hitler’s ‘blood and soil’, Jaspers pushed to extreme limits the ideas of subjectivism, relativism and individualistic irrationalism. Suggesting that, differently from Heidegger, Jaspers did not join the Nazi movement exclusively ‘for purely private reasons’ (the Jewishness of his wife), Lukács emphasizes that, considering ‘the substance of their philosophy’, both of them ‘paved the way for fascist irrationalism’.⁴² Beside and beyond Heidegger and Jaspers, Lukács situates the ‘militant younger generation of vitalists’ – Alfred Baeumler, Franz Boehm, Ludwig Klages, Ernst Krieck and Ernst Jünger – whose aggressive nationalism remained ‘only a few steps away from National Socialist philosophy’.⁴³ This allows Lukács to include in the same chapter, beside Klages and Jünger, the official thinker of Nazi racialism Alfred Rosenberg.

Moving a step backward, Lukács devotes an entire chapter to the history of German sociology, whose most significant figures are indicted for irrationalism. Ferdinand Tönnies posited a dichotomy between ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) that reformulated the vitalist conflict between Kultur and Zivilisation. Max Weber’s criticism of Western rationality – the inhuman ‘iron cage’ of industrial civilization – resulted in a dangerous form of epistemological relativism, very close to the most reactionary irrational mysticism. Karl Mannheim, the author of Ideology and Utopia (1929), showed irrational tendencies with his theory of the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ and joined the ranks of ‘antidemocratic’ liberalism. Finally, Carl Schmitt’s concepts of dictatorship and the ‘political’ – the irreducible friend-enemy conflict – revealed the stigma of political existentialism.

In the last chapter of The Destruction of Reason, Lukács sketches a genealogy of German racism. A large number of social Darwinist scholars, from Ludwig Gumplowicz and Ludwig Woltmann to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, abandoned Gobineau’s pessimist and resigned attitude towards the ineluctable degeneration of civilization: far from being the destiny of humankind, miscegenation could be replaced by a new racial order. It is Chamberlain, a British Germanophile, who definitively repudiated the concept of humanity itself. In short, irrationalism was the red thread that linked the cultural pessimism of conservative romanticism and political existentialism with the reactionary modernism of fascism.

As we saw above, genealogical investigations of modern totalitarianism were not unusual at the end of the Second World War. Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, whose indictment came back to Plato, Hegel and Marx, or Jacob Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), with its charges against Rousseau and a large section of the French Enlightenment, were not less controversial than Lukács’s book.⁴⁴ What is amazing in The Destruction of Reason is the magnitude of the intellectual landscape it depicts, which almost encompasses the culture of modern Germany as a whole. The only exception it admits, presenting it as an alternative to this triumphal march of irrationalism, is the lineage of dialectical thought going from Hegel to Marxism, whereas a second exception – the tradition of neo-Kantianism embodied by major figures such as Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer – is simply ignored. The indictment is so extensive and all-embracing that, according to several critics, Lukács’s book provided Hitler and Rosenberg with philosophical credentials they certainly did not deserve. It risked, as Ernst Bloch wrote in a letter to his old Budapest friend, unduly dignifying ‘Hitler’s latrines’.⁴⁵

Lukács’s charges are not only extended and all-encompassing; they are often excessive, approximative and sometimes unjust. He mentions Jaspers’s conservative statements under the Weimar Republic and his initial ambiguities towards the Nazi regime, but keeps silent about his banishment from the German university after 1938 and his isolation in Heidelberg during the war years, while paying no attention to his essay on German guilt. Putting the entire tradition of phenomenology in the realm of irrationalism and pre-fascism, Lukács emphasizes the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger, but he carefully avoids any reference to Husserl’s statements against irrationalism in his famous lecture ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology’ (1936).⁴⁶ Quite problematic are also some excursions beyond the German boundaries, notably the inclusion of Benedetto Croce in the field of prefascist irrationalism. Whereas it can be legitimate to depict Croce’s thought as a form of ‘abundantly reactionary […] imperialist liberalism’, it is equally well-known that the Italian philosopher embodied the intellectual opposition to Mussolini’s regime for two decades.⁴⁷ The list of approximations, misunderstandings and omissions could be extended.

There is no doubt that, considering the main features of irrationalism analysed in his book – existentialism, pessimism, intuitionism, subjectivism, a religious form of scepticism towards intellect, and notably romanticism – Lukács could have easily given himself a place of honour in his rogues’ gallery of reason destroyers. As we mentioned above, the first step of his intellectual itinerary was deeply shaped by Dilthey’s and Simmel’s vitalism, Kierkegaard’s and Novalis’s religious spirit and tragic worldview, George’s and Gundolf’s aestheticism, Bergson’s intuitionism, Weber’s critique of modern rationality, and romantic anticapitalism, which found a powerful expression in his youthful books. Between 1902 and 1920, Lukács engaged a rich correspondence with many writers and thinkers such as Martin Buber, Paul Ernst, Karl Jaspers, Karl Mannheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber, whom he would criticize in The Destruction of Reason.⁴⁸ A single quotation from Soul and Form eloquently shows that its author belonged to the intellectual atmosphere of Lebensphilosophie he posteriorly would go on to depict as prefascist irrationalism:

Life is an anarchy of light and dark; nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends; new, confusing voices always mingle with the chorus of those that have been heard before. Everything flows, everything merges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure; everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers into real life. To live is to live something through to its end; but life means that nothing is ever fully and completely lived through to the end.⁴⁹

According to Lucien Goldmann, Soul and Form was a landmark in the rise of the intellectual current that, after the Great War, would become existentialism.⁵⁰ Marianne Weber, the wife of the German sociologist, was deeply struck by the messianic spirit that animated Lukács at the edge of the Great War, when she and her husband regularly met him in their home at Heidelberg. In her biography of Max Weber, she describes Lukács and Ernst Bloch as ‘messianic young men […] moved by eschatological hopes of a new emissary of the transcendent God’.⁵¹ Lukács, however, looked at his youthful books with a certain complacency. In 1962, he wrote a preface to the re-edition of his Theory of the Novel in which he stressed that, grounded in Hegel’s dialectics and Goethe’s Romanticism, his book expressed a clear ‘opposition to the barbarity of capitalism’ – an age of ‘complete sinfulness’ – and therefore was ‘not conservative but subversive in nature, even if based on a highly naïve and totally unfounded utopianism’.⁵² In short, even if epistemologically debatable, his book defended a ‘left-wing ethics’ that could not be ascribed to the tradition of conservative irrationalism. This is certainly true, but it is also obvious that this retrospective recognition of the antifascist and revolutionary potentialities of anti-capitalist romanticism puts into question the general indictment of existentialism, romanticism and vitalism developed in The Destruction of Reason. As Michael Löwy has cogently argued, Lukács’s transition from aesthetics to politics and from romanticism to socialism emblematically summarized the evolution of an entire generation of Jewish-German intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, from Gustav Landauer to Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.⁵³

Dangerous Liaisons

These considerations on Lukács’s youthful existentialism could be extended to many other currents of thought scrutinized in The Destruction of Reason. This holds true for Weber’s criticism of Western rationality, which Lukács himself incorporated into his own concept of reification in History and Class Consciousness.⁵⁴ This holds true for Nietzsche, whose appropriation by the official Nazi ideology did not prevent several Marxist scholars from considering him a stimulating and inspiring thinker. Both Bloch and Marcuse welcomed the emancipatory potentialities of a Dionysian revolt against repressive civilization. Nietzsche’s thought, Marcuse pointed out, contained more than an aristocratic rejection of modernity and an ominous apology for slavery; it also brought the ‘liberating air’ of a philosophy that fruitfully proceeded ‘cutting into Law and Order’.⁵⁵ Adorno and Horkheimer did not ignore the ambiguities of Nietzsche’s nihilism, which already contained some seeds of a ‘prefascist’ ideology, but viewed him as ‘one of the few after Hegel who recognized the dialectic of enlightenment’.⁵⁶ And this holds true for Heidegger too, whose committed support for the Nazi regime did not invalidate the multiple directions of his ontological thought, in which Marxist thinkers such as Marcuse and Günther Anders found valuable ammunitions for their radical critiques of technology and capitalist alienation. Adorno, who did not express any complacency towards Heidegger in his Jargon of Authenticity (1964), could not accept Lukács’s tendency to assimilate to fascism all forms of irrationalism detectable in German philosophy. The guardian of Hegelian dialectics, he wrote, looked very ‘un-dialectically’ at several philosophical tendencies which, despite their irrationalism, were ‘combating the very same reification of existence and thinking that Lukács [himself] was in the business of criticizing’.⁵⁷ And, ultimately, very undialectical also was Lukács’s contempt for any religious belief, which he regarded as a dangerous and potentially reactionary form of irrationalism. A few years after The Destruction of Reason, Lucien Goldmann published The Hidden God (1958), a study on the tragic vision of Pascal and Racine that finished with a Marxist reformulation of Pascal’s ‘wager’ (part) about the existence of God.⁵⁸ Rather than a ‘science’ grounded in a deterministic and positivistic form of rationalism, Goldmann argued, socialism was a wager based on a secular belief in the liberating potentialities of human beings.

The case of Heidegger is interesting insofar as it illustrates the shifts and bridges that existed between revolutionary Marxism and ideological reaction under the Weimar Republic. If we enlarge the horizon and cross the boundaries of a purely textual interpretation – which is the method of The Destruction of Reason – by approaching all these debates from the perspective of intellectual history, the trajectory of German ‘irrationalism’ appears much more complex. In fact, many authors walking what Lukács defined as ‘Germany’s path to Hitler’⁵⁹ crossed the paths of critical, revolutionary and antifascist thinkers. We already mentioned the participation of Bloch and Lukács himself, between 1912 and 1914, in the Heidelberg circle of such a conservative and nationalist thinker as Max Weber. In 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote a letter to Carl Schmitt to express his admiration for his Political Theology (1922). According to Scholem, Benjamin was attracted by the ‘strange interplay between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice’, and knew how to perceive ‘the subterranean rumbling of revolution’ in the most reactionary authors.⁶⁰ As for Adorno, in 1938 he devoted an insightful essay to Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) that pointed out the pertinence of this thinker of irrationalism with respect to the commonplaces of many apologists of Progress. ‘Spengler is one of the theoreticians of extreme reaction’, he concluded, ‘whose critique of liberalism proved to be superior in many respects to the progressive one’. Defending science and reason against barbarism was harmless if one did not understand ‘the barbaric element in culture itself.⁶¹ And C.L.R. James admitted he had become a revolutionary Marxist after reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.⁶²

In this context of ‘dangerous liaisons’, many studies focus on Heidegger. In 1929, the famous Davos disputation between Cassirer and the author of Being and Time played a significant role in the intellectual formation of Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer.⁶³ Marcuse was a disciple and assistant of Heidegger at the University of Freiburg between 1928 and 1930. He found in Being and Time the ontological element lacking in classical Marxism, but finally rejected its existentialism, which did not cross the limits of metaphysics and thus resulted in an ontology conceived of as an abstract and timeless condition of ‘mortality’ (Sein-zum-Tod) rather than a historically concrete form of alienation under modern capitalism. Marcuse therefore tried to transcend Heidegger’s ontology by inscribing it into a Hegelian-Marxist theory of history and a historical-materialist critique of capitalism. As for Adorno, he did not identify Heidegger with a reactionary form of irrationalism but considered that, starting from a legitimate critique of Cartesianism, the Freiburg philosopher had come to an unacceptable rejection of the Enlightenment that continued Kierkegaard’s existentialism. Horkheimer found in Being and Time a healthy counterbalance to Max Weber’s gloomy vision of modernity as a rational ‘iron cage’, but he was not satisfied with Heidegger’s ontology, a form of ‘solipsistic existentialism’ that ignored both history and capitalism. As Mikko Immanen suggests, the founders of the Frankfurt School used Heidegger’s philosophy by putting its conservative criticism into the service of ‘progressive ends’.⁶⁴ A convergence was impossible because of Heidegger’s metaphysical assumptions, anti-Marxism and anti-Semitism, but their discrepancies did not appear so clearly in the Weimar years.

These critical remarks simply indicate that ‘Germany’s path to Hitler’ was probably less linear than depicted in The Destruction of Reason. Nazism was not the outcome of a teleological enchainment. Nonetheless, Lukács’s book possesses an incontestably fascinating power – something comparable to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler – and its arguments deserve to be considered. After all, what is at stake in his work, to reiterate, is genealogy as a method of historical analysis. The fascinating power of The Destruction of Reason deals with the magnitude of the cataclysm that came to an end in 1945 and which it mirrors as a kind of ultimate philosophical indictment. There is no doubt that the concept of irrationalism itself – both its definition and its representation in our historical consciousness – does not mean the same thing before and after the caesura of National Socialism. This holds true, of course, for other historical experiences. Roger Chartier is right in stressing that the French Revolution invented the Enlightenment.⁶⁵ This means that this epochal event put into a different perspective a whole set of ideas and concepts that previously did not appear so deeply correlated and interwoven. The history of anti-Semitism too took on a different significance after the Holocaust, a genocide that revealed the murderous potentialities of a movement and an ideology usually considered as an archaic prejudice. However, this does not mean that the eighteenth-century philosophes were consciously preparing the execution of Louis XVI, that their works logically tended to a revolutionary outcome, or that Wilhelm Marr, Adolf Stoecker and Edouard Drumont had prepared a plan for exterminating the Jews. And, similarly, a Marxist is not allowed to ignore Stalinism in the twenty-first century, but this does not mean that Marx’s thought was a step on the road to the Gulag. These elementary considerations come to mind when we read Lukács’s indictment of Schelling, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Scheler, Weber, Heidegger and many other German thinkers. Defining Nietzsche and Paul de Lagarde as ‘ancestors’ of Hitler arouses a certain scepticism. According to Lukács, it does not matter whether Dilthey and Simmel were ‘witting forerunners of fascism’ or not, simply because, regardless of their intentions, their works do not escape ‘the objective dialectics of the development itself.⁶⁶ But this means reducing dialectic to teleology and intellectual history to a form of deterministic causality.

Karl Löwith approached the controversial question of Nietzsche’s prefiguration of National Socialism in more nuanced terms. Despite his desire to make time eternal, the author of Genealogy of Morals belonged to his own time, which was the age of Bismarck, not of Hitler. This was an undeniable fact, alongside the fact that he became a ‘catalyst’ for the Third Reich. Thus, Löwith explained:

The attempt to ‘unburden’ Nietzsche of this intellectual ‘guilt’, or even to claim his support against what he brought about is just as unfounded as the reverse effort to make him the advocate of a matter over which he sits in judgment. Both crumble before the historical insight that ‘forerunners’ have ever prepared roads for others which they themselves did not travel.⁶⁷

One year after Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche, Marcuse published ‘The New German Mentality’ (1942), an essay in which he expressed his scepticism with respect to philosophical genealogies of Nazi ideology. ‘Numerous studies have been made which trace the roots of National Socialism in German philosophy and literature since Luther, Herder or Nietzsche’, he wrote, by observing that their purpose was to prove that ‘the roots of National Socialism are to be found everywhere in German history since the Reformation’. The problem was that ‘almost every German writer’ could be ‘picked out’ as a precursor and, at the same time, as a critic of some Nazi conceptions.⁶⁸ Precursors only appear retrospectively. Thomas Mann, who invented the character of Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus, wrote that Nietzsche did not create Hitler; it was Nazism that created its own Nietzsche.⁶⁹

It would be tempting – and in many respects inevitable – to regard Lukács’s book as the prefiguration of several future disputes on the relationship of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schmitt to National Socialism, considering him as the uncomfortable and embarrassing father of so many prosecutors, from Victor Farias to Richard Wolin, Emmanuel Faye, Domenico Losurdo and Yves-Charles Zarka.⁷⁰ Nietzsche’s appropriation by Nazi ideology or Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s adhesion to the Nazi regime are irrefutable facts and it does not make sense to diminish them, to explain them as misunderstandings or transitional mistakes, or even to distinguish what can be saved from what should be rejected in their controversial works. These quarrels are usually sterile. The problem is that, without ignoring or removing this unpleasant legacy, many critical thinkers – including Marxist ones – were able to think with and through the highly inflammable materials provided by Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s or Schmitt’s criticisms of modernity, universalism, humanism, democracy and rationality.⁷¹ It is with and against Heidegger that Anders and Marcuse interpreted the rule of late capitalism; and it is with and against Weber that Lukács shifted from romanticism to Marxism. Evoking an ‘impossible and necessary’ meeting between Marx and Schmitt, Mario Tronti observed the relationship of ‘historical complementarity’ that linked them: ‘In the twentieth century, we cannot read Marx politically without Schmitt. But conversely, reading Schmitt without Marx is historically impossible, because without Marx Schmitt would not exist’.⁷²

Dialectic of Irrationalism

What is missing, paradoxically, in The Destruction of Reason is Nazi irrationalism. After devoting hundreds of pages to explaining how most currents of German philosophy had so deeply departed from the legacy of Aufklärung, the book does not then try to study their incorporation into a new racist and imperialist form of irrationalism. It does not devote any chapter to the Nazi Weltanschauung, which is almost ignored except for a few quotations of Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930). Lukács insists from the beginning that, instead of following an inner and ‘immanent’ dynamic, the history of irrationalism should be related to some structural tendencies of German capitalism, but he does not seem very interested in analysing how nihilism, antihumanism, racism, nationalism and imperialism finally merged into a new, syncretic ideology. He follows the path of European racism from Gobineau to Rosenberg, passing through Gumplowicz, Woltmann and Chamberlain, that is from a contemplative to a ‘regenerative’ racism that incorporated the stances of social Darwinism. But he does not scrutinize the emergence of a new racial theory grounded in Nordicism, eugenics and a new geopolitical conception – both biologistic and vitalist – of the ‘vital space’ (Lebensraum). Thus, the names of Hans Günther, the official Nazi thinker of racialism (Rassenkunde), Karl Haushofer, the geographer who theorized German expansionism in Eastern Europe, and Friedrich Ratzel, the nineteenth-century geographer who forged the concept of ‘vital space’, never appear in Lukács’s book. In general, both anti-Semitism and colonialism play a very limited role in his demonstration.

The extermination of the European Jews, which is currently considered the most tragic and persuasive evidence of Hitler’s irrationalism, is never mentioned in The Destruction of Reason. Quoting a doubtful source such as Hermann Rauschning’s conversations with Hitler — Gespräche mit Hitler, a book published in 1940 – Lukács emphasizes that Nazi anti-Semitism, as violent as it was, did not exceed the realm of propaganda: ‘Here it is clear that for Hitler, racial theory was only a pretext for making attractive and plausible to the masses a wholesale conquest and subjugation of Europe and the destruction of the European peoples as distinct nations.’⁷³ Lukács continues quoting Rauschning, according to whom Hitler denied his intention of annihilating the Jews, ‘otherwise [he] would have to invent them again’.⁷⁴ Nazism required the Jews alive because it needed to designate ‘a visible enemy, not just an abstract one’.⁷⁵ In other words, anti-Semitism was useful in opposing a ‘grasping’ (raffend) to a ‘creative’ (schaffend) mode of capital, but it could not go further. Franz Neumann had already exposed a similarly myopic interpretation of Hitler’s anti-Semitism in Behemoth (1942), but this view was no longer defensible after the Second World War.⁷⁶ A Marxist interpretation of Nazi anti-Semitism through a Lukácsian lens – the extermination of the Jews as a defence of capitalism by destroying its fetishized expression – would appear three decades later.⁷⁷

Neither does Lukács’s book pay attention to colonialism. In fact, both anti-Semitism and pan-Germanist colonialism were deeply intermingled in the Nazi ideology, where they found a synthesis in the concept of Jewish Bolshevism (Jüdischer Bolschewismus). As Arno J. Mayer magisterially argued, the Nazi Weltanschauung was eminently syncretic and combined three different elements: counter-Enlightenment, anti-Semitism and geopolitical expansionism.⁷⁸ In 1941, with Operation Barbarossa, these three objectives merged into a single war of conquest and extermination: the destruction of the values inherited from the French Revolution, the extermination of the Jews and the colonization of Eastern Europe became a single goal. Marxism and Bolshevism were the most radical outcome of the Enlightenment, and the Jews were the brain of the USSR, a state that gathered together the Slavonic ‘subhumanity’ (Untermenschentum). Thereafter, the conquest of the German ‘vital space’ meant the destruction of the USSR, the extermination of the Jews and the colonization of the Slavs. This was Nazi irrationalism: an ideological, racial and geopolitical project. Understanding its unity, its structure and purposes, is the condition for reconstituting – a posteriori – its genealogy. This makes it possible to retrace the process by which, after the Great War, several ideological and philosophical currents of thought experienced a deep transformation with tragic consequences: vitalism and existentialism became a radical form of nationalism; the Kulturkritik was replaced by the Conservative Revolution; a contemplative racialism turned into aggressive imperialism; and a social and religious prejudice became a form of ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’.⁷⁹ In other words, it is Nazi irrationalism that reveals its genealogy, which cannot be deduced from its ‘forerunners’.

From this point of view, Lukács’s approach is quite conventional and does not differ very much from the dominant vision of fascism in the postwar years. It reminds one of Gordon Craig, for whom the concept of ‘Nazi culture’ was an oxymoron,⁸⁰ or Norberto Bobbio, who distinguished the ‘Italian culture under fascism’ from fascist anti-culture, which he presented as a set of simple negations: anti-democracy, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, anti-humanism and anti-Enlightenment.⁸¹ In fact, fascism was a vision of man and history, a project of society and civilization, a cultural and political strategy.⁸² The idea of totali-tarianism, the plan for a racial order and the myth of a fascist ‘New Man’ were more than simple propaganda: they synthesized a project that fascism tried to realize.

After explaining that irrationalism did not follow an immanent movement but rather resulted from a historical process, Lukács did not pay attention to the dialectical process of reason, which is equally historical. Irrationalism is not a deviation from the linear path of Reason; instead, it possesses a specific relationship with modern rationality. The idea of a dialectic of reason (and irrationalism) runs through many works elaborated by the Frankfurt School during and after the Second World War. In ‘Eclipse of Reason’ (1941), Max Horkheimer highlighted the ‘rationalized irrationality’ of modern civilization that Nazi Germany pushed to its extreme limits. He described fascism as ‘a satanic synthesis of reason and nature, the very opposite of that reconciliation of the two poles that philosophy has always dreamed of’.⁸³ In 1942, Marcuse depicted Nazi ideology as a strange culture of irrationalism made by ‘predicates such as transcendental, romantic, dynamic, formless, dark, pagan, innerlich, primordial’. This ‘pattern of thought and feeling’ was supposed to transcend the empirical reality towards a realm which was ‘hard to grasp and define, a realm indicated by the specifically German concepts of nature, passion (Leidenschaft), Seele, Geist.’⁸⁴ This metaphysical construction, however, coexisted with the apparatuses of instrumental reason: National Socialism accomplished the fusion between ‘mythology and technology’, and the world of ‘blood and soil’ emerged ‘as a gigantic, totally mechanized and rationalized enterprise’.⁸⁵

The Destruction of Reason contains a glancing reference to Hitler’s combination of vitalism with ‘the technique derived from the American advertising world’.⁸⁶ But National Socialism was more than that; it was an attempt at finding a synthesis between anti-Enlightenment – a radicalized version of all values inherited from conservatism and legitimism – and modern science and technology. According to Goebbels, Nazism was a form of ‘steel romanticism’ that merged a complete rejection of the idea of humanity with a true cult of technological modernity, a fusion of irrational vitalism and industrial strength.⁸⁷ Thus, Nazi irrationalism was more than a philosophical construct: it was a synthesis of management and genocide, of productive rationality and socially irrational accomplishments, of rationality of means (scientific management) and irrationality of goals (race domination). Anti-Semitism was one of the most evident features of Nazi irrationalism, but the apparatus of deportation, concentration and industrial extermination of the Jews implied very rationalized procedures and technologies. It is precisely this quite peculiar osmosis of ideological irrationalism and modern rationality that Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno captured through the concept of ‘self-destruction of reason’. Nazism, Adorno argued, was the product of a ‘negative dialectic’ that, instead of finding a liberating outcome, resolved the conflict between productive forces and relations of production by a reinforcement and an extension of domination. This is why Nazi irrationalism was not a regression of civilization or a throwback to barbarism but rather an eminently modern form of barbarism. From this point of view, both Heidegger’s existential ontology and Weber’s theory of instrumental rationality could help to debunk Nazi irrationalism.

Dialectic of Stalinism

The only effective alternative to irrationalism, Lukács explains throughout his book, was Marxism – only in its Soviet version, however, since he does not mention a single ‘heretical’ Marxist. He does not pay attention either to Ernst Bloch or Karl Korsch, whereas Herbert Marcuse is quoted for his suspiciously Heideggerian dissertation Hegel’s Ontology and Theory of Historicity (1932). Reason and Revolution (1941), which Marcuse wrote as a defence of Hegel against fascism, is simply ignored. Similarly neglected is the tradition of neo-Kantian liberalism, notably Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical monument to reason The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932). Nonetheless, The Destruction of Reason finishes with an ardent praise of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, two ‘bourgeois’ writers who did not succumb to ‘their contemporaries’ pessimistic, nihilistic decadence’ and had been able to ‘clearly sketch the answer for Germany and its culture before the catastrophe of Hitler’.⁸⁸

This reference to Thomas Mann makes The Destruction of Reason the philosophical equivalent of Lukács’s works on aesthetics and literature like The Historical Novel (1937), in which the