The Greatness of Ellites

 Introduction  By Alexander Jacob

Maurice Muret (1870–1954) was a Swiss journalist and author who studied in Lausanne, Leipzig, Paris and Munich. He became editor of the Journal des débats in 1895 and contributed to the Foreign Affairs section of the Gazette de Lausanne from 1909. Muret was an anti-Dreyfusard and follower of Charles Maurras and the Action française. He published a book on L’esprit juif (The Jewish mind) in 1901 and disseminated German and Italian literature in France. During the First World War, Muret was decidedly Francophile and wrote two works condemning Germany’s role in starting the war, L’orgueil allemand (German arrogance) (1915) and L’évolution belliqueuse de Guillaume II (The belligerent development of Wilhelm II) (1917). He published a work entitled Le crépuscule des nations blanches in 1925, which was translated into English by his American wife, Charlotte Touzalin, as The Twilight of the White Races (1926). His next works included L’Archiduc François-Ferdinand (1932) and Guillaume II (1940). His defence of aristocratic and heroic cultures was crystallised in two further works, Grandeur des élites (Paris, Albin Michel, 1939) and France héroïque (1943), whose heroes range from Vercingétorix to Maréchal Pétain.

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Muret’s book on the elites is a social history in the form of a shimmering tapestry of characters, both historical and fictional, who exemplify the elites of the cultured societies of Western Europe from ancient Greece to early twentieth-century Britain. Thomas Carlyle had maintained that great historic periods are propelled by heroic individuals, who give their life to the realisation of an ideal while Marx put forward the contrary theory that it was not individuals who led the masses but the masses that led the individuals. Rejecting both these notions, Muret insists that it is elites that constitute the essence of a great period of history. He gainsays Carlyle by pointing out that ‘[t]he great man has something immoderate and excessive whereas the Western genius, considered in its most noble creations, always contains something measured, tempered, balanced’. In other words, it is not sufficient to have enlightened personages to direct the affairs of an entire nation in a particular direction but there must be an elite class, or caste, that is capable of moulding society in its image. The essential basis of the elites of Europe is identified by Muret as the humanist ideal, and it is this that constitutes the strongest bulwark against the rising tide of the mass mentality emerging from Bolshevist Russia. 

Muret notes that, even though the decline of the European aristocracy began with the French Revolution, the individual was still glorified in Western Europe and the concept of mass rule did not fully arise until the advent of Marxism. The Russian Revolution thus was a more alarming manifestation of the rise of the masses and the proletariat and this, Muret surmises, is partly because the aristocracy in Russia was not a very enlightened one and its loss was not felt by the Russian people as a very deleterious event. However, in its glorification of the proletarian, Bolshevism remains an extreme danger to the traditionally elitist societies of Western Europe since, according to Muret, hierarchical societies cannot be abruptly dismantled in order to make way for the rule of the lowest elements of the population. Rather, such societies should be preserved in an organic manner by a social mobility that allows upward movement only in carefully graded stages. Now that the mass ethos of Bolshevism was threatening the Western countries as well, Muret believes that only the Western ideal of humanism could offer an effective resistance to the Asiatic invasion from Russia. 

Humanism is essentially a Graeco-Roman phenomenon that was revived in Italy during the Renaissance and further developed in the court of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century. Although it underwent a relative decay in the eighteenth century under the pressure of the Englightenment’s adoration of reason and empiricism, it was restored in a striking manner in the English ideal of the gentleman that rose to prominence in the Victorian Age. In the aftermath of the devastating First World War, both Italy and Germany turned to statism as a political bulwark against Bolshevism. But Muret considers statism as not sufficiently related to society to be able to create the elites necessary to counter the Bolshevist rulers of the future society. Germany’s racialism too is opposed to humanism and to Christianity, which Muret sees as the indispensable foundation of European morality and culture. He therefore hopes that France and England will be able, through their existing elites, to continue the humanistic social paradigm that alone can resist the Bolshevist propaganda of the dictatorship of the proletariat. While the British are not naturally part of the Graeco-Latin humanist culture — even though they still study it carefully in their schools — the French indeed have a longer traditional affiliation with it. As he says, ‘Hellenism and Latinism have entered the blood of France to such an extent, the prestige of Classicism and the elites that it engendered remains so strong in this country that they try more to hoard its advantages for the benefit of the masses than to suppress them radically.’

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Muret believed that elites are formed initially under enlightened autocrats such as Pericles in fifth century B.C. Greece and Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France. The original formation of an elite in the classical world is identified by Muret in the aristocratic democracy of Periclean Greece. Here the Greek adoration of beauty combined with virtue resulted in the cultivation of what was called kalokagathia, or the combined beauty of mind and body in the well-formed Greek aristocrat. The Greek civilisation was essentially an urban one, even though it benefited from maritime trade as well. Athenian culture was centred around the polis, or city, with the agora,1  or public square, serving as the open-air meeting place for talented young men and their philosophical masters. Its generous humanism was devoted to the cultivation of literary eloquence and artistic excellence and, like its leader Pericles himself, it was opposed to both Spartan chauvinism and militarism. 

The democracy of Athens was an aristocratic one insofar as its government was constituted of eupatrides, or men of good Greek ancestry, and only Athenian citizens voted in the assemblies to the exclusion of slaves and immigrants. Pericles embodied all the virtues of an aristocratic Greek, having first served in the army and then devoted his life to the public service of Athens, which he fulfilled with astonishing taste and judgement as patron of the imposing public works and arts that fill even modern minds with awe. His demagogic opponent, Cleon, on the other hand, was a symptom of the decay that Greece was soon to suffer with the decline of the aristocratic democratic government of Athens. Cleon was opposed to the Athenian aristocracy and when he took over the leadership on Pericles’ death in 429 B.C., his reign was marked by bad government as well as bad manners. This decay was accelerated by the Hellenic expansion of Greece under the Macedonians and the substitution of Eastern luxury for the older kalokagathia civic virtues of Athens.

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With the rise of Rome, a new variant of aristocracy emerged in the West that was to have a lasting impact on the whole of Western European culture. Roman aristocracy was in its origins a rustic and military one. The original patricians were, rather like the later English squires, raised on estates in the country and served in the army, as the legendary figure of Cincinnatus, for example, did in the fifth century B.C. Although Rome began as a monarchy, it was, in 510 B.C., replaced by an aristocratic Republic ruled by patricians. The patricians were at first clearly distinguished from the commoners, or plebeians. However, gradually the two were increasingly intermixed. The aristocratic ethos was a rather austere one and practical. The hatred that Cato the Elder manifested for Carthage in the second century B.C. (‘Carthago delenda est’) was the hatred of a Roman peasant-soldier for the mercantile luxury of the Carthaginians. It was also the hatred of a land-based civilisation for the maritime one of the Phoenician. The Romans were also not a particularly scientific people and their devotion to the arts was not so original as that of the Greeks. However, the discipline that marked the Roman aristocracy was extremely impressive and constituted the foundation of the laws that were formulated in the Twelve Tables of the fifth century B.C. and later extended over the empire as Roman Law. Muret points out that the Romans were preoccupied with laws because they loved justice for its own sake and not, like the Hebrews, in order to foster petty tribalistic chauvinism.

Rome was distinguished in its developed phase by imperialism and the imposition of systematic laws both in Italy and in the expanding colonies of the Roman Empire. The Roman conquests were, to be sure, marked by cruelty and celebrated in triumphs that were humiliating for the conquered princes and armies. But the subsequent rule of the Romans in the colonies did not disturb the local traditions of the colonised but instead incorporated these nations systematically, under the Roman Law, into the famous pax romana. In fact, some defeated princes even voluntarily gave up their kingdoms to Rome and its superior legal and adminstrative organisation. 

The rule of the colonies by the governors was generally honest but, with the increasing wealth acquired through Rome’s colonial possessions, the gap between the rich and the poor increased and the latter had to be pacified through the organisation of proletarian games, such as gladiatorial fights, which betrayed a vulgarity and brutality of taste that still shock modern historians. Finally, with the advent of Christianity and its personal as opposed to state religion, Rome was undermined in its very foundations, which were the Roman ‘polis’ and the extended state. The Roman Empire was soon turned into a Christian one and the new religious empire was marked by Christian morality and its doctrine of Love. However, the Roman aristocratic imperium continued, in the subsequent centuries, to exercise a radiant influence over the whole of Europe through its stunning civilisatory achievements aptly crystallised in Pliny the Elder’s words: ‘May this divine benefit last forever which seems to have given to the world the Romans, like a second sun, in order to enlighten it!’

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The revival of classical Graeco-Roman learning in the Renaissance was accompanied by a focus on individualism that acquires a bravado almost anticipatory of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. However, unlike Nietzsche’s ideal, the Renaissance man remains mostly Christian in his faith and achieves in the ideal of humanism a perfect blend of the classical sources of European culture with the Christian moral doctrines that had penetrated Europe since the early Middle Ages. There is no doubt that the Christian religion had assumed the mantle of the pagan Roman Empire with considerable ease and dignity and unified even greater expanses of Western Europe than the Roman Empire had done. It also exalted religion to the same level as politics in forming a dual reign of Emperor and Pope. And, just as it had absorbed several elements of the Graeco-Roman cults into its ritual and theological framework, it also accepted and codified the Germanic feudal system into an impressive hierarchical social institution. It thus succeeded in refining the Germanic knights through the chivalric institutions that came into the fore in the Middle Ages. 

The earliest Renaissance poets, like Dante and Petrarch, are marked by their admiration of classical learning and focus on the Italian language and identity. In France too, ever since the High Middle Ages, there are signs of an impending change of worldview. The discovery of ancient Greek literature served to increase the scientific spirit just as the voyages of exploration expanded the horizons of the southern European princes. While it is true that mediaeval scholasticism too displayed elements of classical learning and even certain scientific formulations, it was confined mainly to the monasteries, and the antique ideas did not penetrate secular society until the Renaissance. The establishment of the Platonic Academy of Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century is a significant landmark in Western European history in that it successfully combined classical learning with the Christian faith. Muret points particularly to Pico della Mirandola as a proponent of Renaissance individualism and humanism since his view of man was not confined to the traditional Christian one with its stress on the original sin of the first man. Rather, Pico focused on the free will innate in man, which allows him to choose between a debased earthly life and a spiritual godlike one. Apart from Pico, Muret adduces the example of Leon Battista Alberti, who was a typical Renaissance man talented in several disciplines, being ‘a mathematician who was also a jurist, this moralist who was also a painter, a sculptor, an orator and a physician’. Alberti’s most remarkable achievements were in architecture but he was, no less than Leonardo da Vinci, a polymath typical of his astonishingly creative age. Leonardo himself combined scientific curiosity with aesthetic feeling and it must be remembered that, in spite of his intensive scientific experimentations, he too died a Christian. 

The Renaissance doubtless also suffered a weakening of the Christian spirit that had predominated in the Middle Ages. Thus Boccaccio reveals considerable impiety in his compositions and Machiavelli’s pragmatic cunning can clearly not be considered a model of Christian morality. Further, the unrestrained personality in the Italian Renaissance was often a surprising combination of aesthetic taste and judgement with amoral and even criminal social behaviour. Muret gives two brilliant examples of this apparent contradiction — that of Sigismondo Malatesta, who was at once utterly amoral in his personal life and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the period, and of Benvenuto Cellini, who was not only a superlative sculptor and goldsmith but also a customary assassin. 

The reactions against the untrammelled individualism of the Renaissance geniuses were not absent but unfortunately they were directed in a quasi-Protestant manner that did not make a serious effort to unify the classical outbursts of the Renaissance with Christian faith. Thus we have the example of Girolamo Savonarola, the proto-Protestant reformer who rebelled against the Medici rule in Florence but was not supported by Pope Alexander VI, who excommunicated and had him executed. Similarly, when the Italian Renaissance moved north through Johannes Reuchlin, who was deeply influenced by humanist learning, it did not succeed in establishing a unity of classical artistic exuberance with the Roman Catholic doctrines. Rather, the Germans who followed Luther tended to separate the classical world from their more Puritanical, iconoclastic view of Christianity. Thus the unity of Europe itself, which might have been achieved through a unity of the Renaissance ideals with a reformed Church, remained unaccomplished.

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Muret’s next exemplars of European elites are those of the high society of the time of Louis XIV, which, in the view of the Comte de Saint-Simon, was ‘a long reign of the vile bourgeoisie’. Indeed, Louis XIV, in his opposition to the nobility (the ‘gentilhommes’), favoured members of the bourgeoisie who formed now a new class of gentlemen (‘honnêtes hommes’) and who sought to enter either the court or the high society of the reputable literary salons hosted by aristocrats like the marquise de Rambouillet. The world created by such hostesses was one of extreme refinement, where women were always present and it was the constant endeavour of the male guests to please them with their wit and gallantry. Pleasing thus became more important than edifying or moralising, even though the guests included great literary figures like Corneille and Boileau. What was cultivated in these salons was decorum, graciousness, gentility and a general light touch that abjured pedantry and scholarly erudition in favour of a more generous and liberal attitude to life and letters. The Chevalier de Méré thus declared that ‘[i]t is to be hoped, in order to be pleasant always, that one would excel in everything that suits gentlemen without however being too interested in anything, I mean, without doing anything that does not present itself of its own accord and without saying anything that might prove that one wants to assert oneself.’ And La Rochefoucauld too advocates restraint in the expression of one’s feelings so as to avoid confrontation with one’s interlocutors. As Joseph Joubert put it, France in this century produced ‘an uninterrupted succession of generations not scholarly but friends of knowledge and accustomed to the pleasures of the mind who multiplied in France, that country in the world where this education was best offered and perhaps best received.’ 

Though the Grand Siècle produced some of the finest literary products of France, the universal man of the French seventeenth century was gradually turning away from the asceticism and mysticism of the Middle Ages to a more reasonable, and sentimental, view of the world. However, the seventeenth century bourgeois was still ruled not by Reason itself but by Right Reason, which did not go beyond the limits of Christian morality. As Racine remarked to his son, ‘one cannot be a gentleman without paying all one’s debts first to God and then to men, and there is only religion that teaches us the methods and helps us to satisfy both men and God.’ And in Madame de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves, one gets a moving example of the force of the right reason governing human relationships in this society in Monsieur de Clèves’ words to the unfaithful princess: ‘In the mood in which you are, by allowing you your liberty I set stricter restrictions than I could have imposed on you.’

The delicate balance between society manners and morality in the seventeenth century, however, was too fragile to be universally sustainable. Bossuet for one criticised the high society values of his time forcefully: ‘The society people’, he would say of the Chevalier de Méré and those who resemble him, ‘lie to God and lie to themselves in claiming to conduct side by side a life of pleasure and true piety. These two things exclude each other absolutely.’ The fascinating equilibrium represented by the high society of the seventeenth century could not be sustained with the growing rationalism and empiricism of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, right reason was replaced by reason itself in the works of Voltaire and the Encylopedists, who rejected Christian morality, and of Rousseau, whose sentimentality even condoned the Terror of the French Revolution. As for the older aristocratic notion of honour, it was replaced by the more bourgeois one of ‘conscience’, which, being too personal and not associated with a whole class of people, could no longer serve as a foundation of social morality. Honour does reappear intermittently in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century but only in a military context, when Napoleon reorganised French society in an imperialistic fashion.

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The ideal of refinement evident in the French bourgeois high society of the seventeenth century is evident also in England in the eighteenth century. But the British gentleman has a different origin than the French honnête homme. Derived from the warrior nobility, the British gentleman is less sociable than the French gentleman and more snobbish. Indeed, the upper class character of the gentleman was an accepted part of the traditionally hierarchical society of Britain that dates back to the Plantagenets — who were indeed, as Augustin Filon suggested,2   the original founders of the British aristocratic culture. The social strata below the nobles and the gentlemen — that is, the middle class not elevated through knighthoods, and the working class — aspired to the status of a gentleman and there was little criticism of his social eminence. However, the British nobles and gentlemen gradually lost their warrior affiliations with the entry into the peerage of wealthy members of the middle class. Unlike the Prussian nobility who retained their military character during most of their existence, the British gentleman turned, like his French counterpart, into a high society figure. 

While the British gentleman was originally not particularly religious and even somewhat brutal in his manners, the eighteenth century infused a religious element into social life that is exemplified in Joseph Addison’s fictional character Sir Roger de Coverley. Religion gained a greater foothold in gentlemanly society in the nineteenth century under the reign of Queen Victoria, who was essentially a ‘bourgeois’ sovereign. The Bible regained its importance after having lain dormant from the time of the Puritans, and sartorial style and church-going respectability were combined in the typical Victorian model of a gentleman. Muret gives as a prime example of the British gentleman of the Victorian age the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who was considered the most elegant gentleman of his time.

Unlike the French gentleman, however, the British was not a particularly literary-minded one and showed less appreciation for the fine arts. He retained from his original warrior background the impassibility that marked the mediaeval knights and the traditionalism that became characteristic of the country squires. He also inherited from his warlike origins a taste for brutal team sports, like cricket and football, and willingly subjected himself to the harsh discipline of corporal punishment in the elite public schools of England. Yet, all this discipline was enforced on lives geared to monetary success in the Industrial Age, since Puritanical Christianity advocated not only hard work but also its material rewards. The original cast of the British gentleman, however, continued to survive in the soldierly gentleman of the British Empire, as evidenced, for example, in the characters depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his short story ‘His Private Honour’.

After the Great War, the gentlemanly ideal suffered increasing attacks from socialistic fronts and authors like Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. While Wells criticised ‘the aristocratic prejudice’ of the English and hoped for a regeneration of English society through science and socialism, Bennett hoped for the destruction of the bourgeois order through ‘the alliance of ‘the intellectual and the proletarian’. Muret, however, brushes aside such socialistic criticisms and insists that the British gentleman still represents a valuable ideal of individual liberty since ‘[p]olitics, in his view, must not suffocate the human being for the benefit of a God or a king but make him serve both to the degree to which it is just while retaining his independence.’ Muret is, in general, rather partial to the bourgeois, whom he considers to have been, at least in the nineteenth century, the successor of the aristocrat and propagator of traditional culture. But he does acknowledge the weakness of the ability of the bourgeoisie to withstand the assaults of the masses below it once the latter become aware of the exploitation to which they are subjected by the bourgeois: 

… demos is in the process of making these classes, whose mastery they no longer wish to suffer, pay dearly for their faults. One could console oneself of this if all sorts of rules valid for all well-ordered societies were not in the process of perishing along with the bourgeoisie: the respect for tradition, the cult of the family, the spirit of order, prudence and economy. This entire bourgeois morality, a tested mixture of principles that were already dear to antiquity and of doctrines spread by the Gospel, is an execration to the masses because it imposes a brake on the naturally perverse instincts of man while the masses tend to shake off all manner of constraint.

He does not, however, like Willliam Lecky and Anthony Ludovici, denounce the bourgeois themselves for their plutocratic ambitions.3  And the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon gentleman, British and American, in the Atlanticist empire of today, into a mercantile individualist hardly distinguishable in his taste and judgement from a proletarian is a prospect that Muret in 1939 obviously did not envision.

In his concluding chapter, Muret reiterates the importance of the gentlemanly ideal as exemplified in the French Grand Siècle and in the British Victorian Age as modern representatives of the ancient Greek notions of kalokagathia and of the Roman pride in Roman citizenship. However, the special merit of Muret’s study of elites is indeed the stress he places in it on humanism as the essence of the high culture that they represent. He points out that, right from Graeco-Roman antiquity and through the Renaissance to the First World War, the greatest value of the elites has been their general devotion to humanism, for it is this that most fully embodies the glory of Western European civilisation. As Muret puts it: 

Humanism is the continuous and constant awareness of humanity. It invites us to know ourselves better, it invites us to love our neighbour better. It is at once the child of Plato and of Jesus Christ. It re-establishes man in his dignity, it gives him the knowledge of his duties. Between the past and the present it constructs a solid and safe bridge.

Maurice Muret 

The Greatness of Elites 

Gottfried Feder on a German state built on national and socialist foundations

Gottfried Feder on a German state built on national and socialist foundations[1]

The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation
Gottfried Feder

Translated and with a Preface by Alexander Jacob

Sanctuary Press, 2019

Gottfried Feder was  born in 1883 in Würzburg and studied engineering at the Technical Universities in Munich, Berlin and Zurich. After the completion of his studies, he set up a construction company in 1908 under the aegis of Ackermann and Co. and undertook several projects in Bulgaria. From 1917 onwards he taught himself economics and political economy, and in late 1918, not long after the proclamation of the Weimar Republic by Philipp Scheidemann in November of that year, Feder wrote a manifesto on usury[2] and sent it to the Kurt Eisner government, though he obtained no response. The Treaty of Versailles signed in June 1919 which determined Germany as solely responsible for the war and liable to reparations caused Feder to fear that Germany was now firmly in the hands of the international financiers. In September of that year, Feder established a militant league (Kampfbund) with a program of ending interest slavery and nationalising the state bank. His anti-capitalism was bound also to racialism insofar as the international financiers were considered to be mostly Jews.

Feder’s nationalist efforts drew him into a close alliance with the anti-Communist activist Anton Drexler (1884-1942) and Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923), the editor of the anti-Semitic journal Auf gut deutsch and later, of the National Socialist organ, Völkischer Beobachter. The three together formed, in January 1919, the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP).[3] Adolf Hitler joined the DAP in late September 1919 and soon emerged as the leader of the party, which he renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Hitler had, even before his joining the party, attended Feder’s lectures on economic subjects and wrote later in his Mein Kampf (1925/6):

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities. …The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence. I clearly saw what was developing in Germany and I realized then that the stiffest fight we would have to wage would not be against the enemy nations but against international capital.[4]

In the Foreword to the original 1923 edition of Feder’s work, Der deutsche Staat, Hitler wrote that in this work the National Socialist movement had indeed acquired its “catechism”.

In 1920, Hitler, along with Feder and Drexler, composed the ’25-point Programme’ of the NSDAP. This programme rejected the Treaty of Versailles and called for a reunification of German peoples along with an exclusion of aliens, especially Jews, from national life. In February 1920, Hitler held a rally in which he presented the programme to the German people. Later, in 1927, Feder published a comprehensive version of the programme entitled Das Programm der NSDAP and seine weltanschaulichen Grundlagen.[5] In 1923, Feder offered a further elaboration of his national economic views in the present work, Der deutsche Staat auf nationaler und sozialer Grundlage, which was re-issued in 1932 in the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” series[6]

Feder took part in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch against the Bavarian government in 1923 but was only fined 50 marks for unlawful assumption of authority since he had acted, for a day, as the new “finance minister”. In 1924, he was elected a representative to the parliament. In parliament, he demanded the confiscation of Jewish property and the freezing of interest-rates. which were key elements of the anti-capitalist programme of the party. In 1926 Hitler entrusted Feder with the editorial direction of a series of books on National Socialist ideology under the title “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” (National Socialist Library). In 1931, Feder was appointed chairman of the economic council of the NSDAP. But gradually, under pressure from big industrialists like Gustav Krupp, Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf, Hitler decided to distance himself from Feder’s socialist ideas.[7] With Hitler’s strategic alliance with big industrialists and capital, even foreign capital, for his intended war on Bolshevism, Feder lost most of his influence on the party, since foreign banks especially would not have supported Feder’s plans for a nationalised interest-free banking system. The loss of interest in Feder’s economic policies among the party members is evidenced in Hans Reupke’s book Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft (!931), where the author stated that it was no longer necessary to deal with the “breaking of interest slavery” in “the extreme form in which it first emerged”.[8]

Thus, when Hitler assumed power in 1933, Feder was not named Economics Minister but rather only State Secretary in the Economics Ministry. However, in 1933 Feder published a collection of his essays entitled Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz as well as a book on the Jews called Die Juden. In 1934, the influential banker Hjalmar Schact was made Economics Minister since his contacts with the big industrialists made him more useful to Hitler in his rearmament aims than Feder with his stark anti-capitalist doctrines. Feder’s subordination to Hjalmar Schacht was indeed a concrete sign of his fall from grace.  After the Knight of the Long Knives in 1934, when left-wing nationalists like Gregor Strasser were assassinated, Feder withdrew from the government. In 1936, he was given a new job as professor at the Technical University in Berlin which he maintained until his death in 1941.

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Feder’s Deutsche Staat is indeed one of the most important treatises on National Socialist economics.[9] However, it has a precedent in the Austro-Hungarian Bohemian German, Rudolf Jung’s work, Der Nationale Sozialismus (1919). Rudolf Jung (1882-1945) was a civil engineer from Jihlava (in the current Czech Republic and former Austro-Hungarian Empire) who joined the Bohemian Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP) in 1909. The DAP was founded in 1903 in Aussig (now Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic) by Germans threatened by the increasing Jewish and Czech influence in the empire. It was renamed Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiter Partei (DNSAP) in 1918. Jung’s work Der Nationale Sozialismus: seine Grundlagen, sein Werdegang und seine Ziele (1919) was intended as a German nationalist answer to Marx’s Das Kapital.[10] The work is divided into two parts, the first dealing with ‘The Foundations of National Socialism’ and the second with ‘The Development and Goals of National Socialism’. Jung’s nationalism focusses on social and economic questions and, exactly like Feder, Jung stresses the difference between income derived from real work and that arising from interest.[11] His strong socialist and anti-Jewish viewpoint is  evident throughout this work:

All non-socialist parties are based in the main on “individualism”, i.e. the demand for the greatest possible freedom and lack of constraint of the individual. Economically it is expressed in Manchester liberalism and, further, in Mammonism. The ruthless ruler who is tormented by no pang of conscience is the goal, the weaker man falls thereby under the wheels. Now, since the Jew is the most ruthless, he can fare best thereby. Thus all non-socialist anti-Jewish orientations unwillingly support the rise of Jewry to world-rulership.[12]

Further, democracy itself is the vehicle of Jewish international capitalism:

If we were to sum up, we might say that the entire international democracy whose alleged ideals the major press and parties represent and on whose flag they swear, is nothing but the political crystallisation of the Jewish spirit and, in the final analysis, serves no other goal but the establishment of the world-rule of Jewry.[13]

Another writer who contributed to the exact identification of the Jewish constitution of international high finance was Heinrich Pudor (1865-1943), who also wrote under the pseudonym Heinrich Scham (the German translation of the Latin “pudor”). Pudor was a vegetarian and naturist who, from 1912, published several anti-Semitic pamphlets and books including an extensive series on the international connections between the various Jewish high financiers.[14] Feder refers sympathetically to Pudor in the present work. However, Pudor’s magazine Swastika was banned in 1933 by the National Socialists for its criticisms of the National Socialist leadership and the regime’s surprising toleration of Jews. Further, five issues of the series on Jewish high finance were banned including no.13, Neues über Br. Roosevelt und seine jüdischen und Kommunistischen Verbindungen (News about Brother Roosevelt and His Communist Connections) and no. 49, Judendãmmerung. “Juden unerwünscht” Keine jüdischen Rechtsanwälte mehr. Ende der Judenfinanz in Deutschland ((Judendãmmerung. “Jews Unwanted.” No more Jewish lawyers. End of Jewish finance in Germany). The pamphlets were banned on account of what a state official, Raymund Schmidt, described as Pudor’s “no longer opportune polemical methods” which were indeed exploited by the English for the purpose of counter-propaganda.[15]

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Feder’s treatise on national economy, like Rudolf Jung’s, is remarkable for its strong moral foundation and its formulation of National Socialism as a movement for social justice as well as for national regeneration. Unlike capitalism with its “soul-destroying materialistic spirit of egoism and avarice with all its concomitant corrupting manifestations in all fields of our public, economic and cultural life” (p.31)[16] and unlike Marxism, which insists that everything should belong to the One, which might be either the State or Mammon controlling it, National Socialism wishes to revert to the mediaeval and Prussian dictum of “suum cuique”, ‘to each his own’, whereby each person will earn as much as he deserves according to his performance of work, with the fullest possible responsibility, as a duty. Economically, this moral doctrine is translated into the doctrine of serving “the public interest” before self-interest. Not profitability but fulfilment of demand is the National Socialistic basis of the economy.

Unlike Marxism, National Socialism will not prohibit private property but respect it as the privilege of the creative and productive Aryan man. On the other hand, the mobile Jewish mind has no deep connection with the land but rather exploits the production and property of the natives financially through all sorts of legal claims, bonds and mortgages, whereby “property” is turned into a profitable “possession” (p.14). In order to counter these avaricious strategies of the Jews, the National Socialist state will enforce limitations on the right to property, personal or commercial, so that in all cases the welfare of the whole, the nation, rather than of individuals will be first served. In Feder’s discussion of the party’s programme in Part II, we note that, since the social policy is “the welfare of the whole”, the financial policy of the National Socialist state is accordingly directed against those financial powers who tend to develop “a state within the state” (p.29). As he puts it:

In the last and deepest analysis, it is a matter of the battle of two worldviews that are expressed through two fundamentally different intellectual structures — the productive and creative spirit and the mobile avaricious spirit. The creative spirit rooted in the soil and yet again overcoming the world in metaphysical experience finds its principal representatives in Aryan man — the avaricious, rootless commercial and materialistic spirit directed purely to the this-worldly finds its principal representative in the Jew (p. 31).

The strength of Germany before the war was due to its unity under Bismarck and its efficient industrial sector. This advantage was undermined by the dependence of the economy on the credit system of the banks and “the inventors and bearers of the modern credit system” are the Jews (p. 36). The mediaeval system of credit was based on the belief (“credo”) of the creditor that his money could be used to greater economic advantage by the debtor whereby the debtor, if successful in his enterprise, may return a share of his profits in gratitude to the creditor. Standardised interest, on the other hand, was forbidden by the Church as usury (p. 45). Feder advocates a return to the conception of money as a token of “performed work” or of a product so that money cannot, independently of any work, be hoarded for the purpose of being lent out later at interest.

Feder further points out that it is the stock-market that lies at the basis of the alienation of capital from work:

Anonymisation — the depersonalisation of our economy through the stock-marketable form of the public limited company — has to a certain degree separated capital from work, the shareholder knows in the rarest instances something of his factory, he has only the one-sided interest in the profitability of his money when he has invested it in the form of shares (p.36)

Apart from the indifference of the shareholder to the quality of the goods produced by the company in which he invests, the market in general has diverted production from its legitimate task of fulfilling real needs to that of stirring up — through the Jewish market-crier’s technique of advertising — artificial needs among the public that will bring in greater profits. This fundamental transformation of national economics has been supported in academic circles by Jewish scholars who restrict their economic analyses to descriptions of the current economic system rather than investigating its social and political legitimacy. This sort of intellectual subversion is further continued by the Jewish intelligentsia in the fields of art, entertainment and the press.

The major source of the current distress of Germany is indeed the interest owed to large loan capital. The burden of interest has indebted entire nations to international high finance and forced them to become interest-collectors for the latter which they do by taxing the working people ever harder. Feder calls this false economic process an “international fraud” (p. 53). The power of international finance has however grown so great that it was able to encircle Germany as soon as it perceived that its currency was rising in strength and independence. Once they succeeded in militarily defeating Germany, the international financial powers then enforced further enormous debt burdens on it through the Treaty of Versailles. Feder therefore proposes the cancellation of the payment of the interest on these debts to the Allies (p. 97). Indeed, the remedy to the interest burdens of all nations to international finance is the legal abolition of interest (p. 94). And this is simultaneously the solution to the Jewish question itself:

The solution of the interest problem is the solution of the Jewish question. The solution of the interest problem in the sense of our explanations is the breaking of the Jewish world-rule, because it smashes the power of world Jewry — its financial power.

The fullest representation of the socio-economic interests of a nation should be the state, and its industries should be models of efficiency and commercial success. One example of such an industry in Germany is indeed the transport industry and especially the German railways. Unlike Bolshevism, which seeks to control all production, the National Socialist state will, through the establishment of storage and distribution cooperatives under state supervision (p. 917), remove only the avaricious interference of private commerce between production and consumption. As the means of exchange necessary for the exchange of goods, money will be under the control of the state through a nationalised state bank.

Instead of borrowing money from private banks, the state should, in the case of all large public works projects, finance the latter though the issuance of interest-free notes of its own. The Reichsbank’s sovereignty of issuing notes must be regained through nationalisation (p. 72). Freed of interest-burdens to banks, the state will ultimately be able to operate in a mostly tax-free manner (Ch. 22, ‘The state without taxes’). Taxes will be restricted to the coverage of non-productive tasks such as the administration of justice, the police system, medical and educational systems, if the commercial enterprises of the state such as the railways, post and telegraph, mining and forestry do not present surpluses wherewith to pay for these tasks (p. 92). International transactions should be conducted through a clearing system rather like that of the international postal union “without the international finance benefiting two or three times in all these simple mercantile operations and becoming big and fat at the cost of the productive nations” (p. 77).

But the state must be powerful if it is to effect any reforms. Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic has abjectly accepted the monstrous burden of guilt after the war with the result that “the members of the Chosen People can, on these reparations, forever lead a glamorous work-free life in all the countries of the world at the cost of German work.” (p. 19). The crisis faced by Germany after the war was facilitated by parliamentarianism and Mammonism. The “great democratic lie of the capacity of the people for self-government” is to be combated along with the real capitalistic rulers of democracies. Marxism likewise is a sham socialist system that employs the dissatisfaction of those exploited by Mammonism for the benefit of the “handlers for international capital” in order to “divert from themselves the hatred of the exploited” (p. 25).

The majority of the principal Marxists as well as Mammonists are Jews, and so “The Jewish question is becoming a world-question on whose solution the welfare and woe of the nations will be dependent” (p. 26). The solution of this question cannot be through violence since “indeed one cannot kill the plague bacillus individually, one can only eradicate it by cutting off its life necessities from it” (p. 26). A suggestion of what might be done to reduce their ill-earned gains is contained in point 17 of the party’s programme which envisages creation of legal possibilities of confiscating if necessary land that was acquired in an illegal way or not administered according to the viewpoint of the welfare of the people. This is directed thus mainly against the Jewish land speculation companies. (p. 47)

Further, removal of Jews from all public positions will cause no difficulty to the nation since “the real vitally important productive activity in industry and agriculture, in the professions and administration, is almost entirely free of Jews” (p. 38). Concomitant with the removal of Jews from the “national body” is the enforcement of new citizenship laws whereby the citizenship rights will be “acquired” by the citizens and not merely granted to them. Thus only those who pledge themselves to the German community and culture and do not continue an adherence to another nation can obtain these rights (p. 39).

The National Socialist state will be a strong state that includes all the German tribes, and its power will be concentrated in a strong leader, or autocrat, who embodies “the highest responsibility” (p. 22)[17] since the German people have traditionally wanted a strong leader, and monarchs are not always to be relied upon. The leader of the National Socialist state, on the other hand, is not envisaged as a permanent ruler but one chosen only for the re-establishment of order and the prosperity of a debilitated nation. After he has accomplished his goals, he may step aside to let other rulers take his place under the constitution. Indeed, the National Socialist state may be characterised as a constitutional autocracy (p. 31). The constitutional aspect of the state will be used especially to ensure an effective labour law and social insurance (p. 23). Obviously, in a German national state, no members of foreign races can assume the leadership of state affairs (p. 22).

Feder is aware of the adverse reaction of the international financiers to such autarkic measures, but he believes that a transformation of interest-bearing bonds into interest-free bank assets or postal cheque accounts (p. 96) whereby foreign creditors can be paid will avert the wrath of the latter. He also suggests that boycotts can be overcome through transactions with neutral countries. As for military action, he believes that it is not likely to be pursued by the foreign creditor nations since

if the German people saw the French or Jewish tax collector sitting in every tax- and pension office, and if the best cows were taken from the stalls of the farmers by these foreign oppressors — then the anger and indignation would perhaps become soon so strong that one night would sweep the foreign spectre away with a bloody broom and free Germany. (p. 97)

*   *   *

We see that, in spite of the lucidity of his economic doctrines, Feder rather underestimated the unforgiving nature of the Mammon that he was striving against. In keeping with Feder’s doctrines, the Nationalist Socialist state officially cancelled the war debt to the Allied nations and sought, from 1933 on, to combat the cumulative deflation by the creation of money and work.[18] Work was created by increasing public works activity, such as notably the building of superhighways, and other construction and agricultural projects. These projects were financed, as Feder had recommended, by the issuance of government bills.[19] The production of armaments especially was spurred by the use of the so-called ‘Mefo’ bills — named after Schacht’s Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft (Mefo), which served as a government holding company.[20] These bills were used by government contractors for payment of their needs and were valid as a form of currency. As Overy notes, as a result of these economic strategies, “the banks increasingly became mere intermediaries, holding government stock and helping in the job of keeping bills circulating in the way that the government wanted.”[21] Tax levels were simultaneously reduced for farmers, small businesses and heavy industry through the “remission of taxes already paid”.[22] However, Hitler was also dependent in his ambitious rearmament plans on foreign finance, which certainly would not have accepted Feder’s insistence on an abolition of interest.[23]

The National Socialist economy was an increasingly state-controlled one that sought to avoid inflation by controlling prices and wages and foreign trade. Autarkic restrictions on imports were offset by bilateral barter agreements. Whether the war that began two years after the 1937 edition of Feder’s work was, as Feder’s view of the role of international finance in the first World War would suggest, another effort to punish Germany’s financial independence under National Socialism or whether it was indeed secretly willed by the international financiers for their own geopolitical ends, the increasing losses suffered by Germany in the course of it certainly provoked Hitler into attempting to “sweep the foreign spectre away with a bloody broom”, as Feder had predicted.

But neither Feder nor Hitler may have foreseen the severity of the revenge — more cruel since more lasting than that after the First World War — that the international Jewish interests would take on Germany after its defeat in 1945. While Feder hoped that other nations of the world will also eventually follow the German example and  “mankind, freed of the Jewish oppression, will experience an age of unprecedented prosperity — and, above all, Germany — the heart of the world”, the opposite of that indeed has occurred, since most of Europe has been turned into “a slave, fellaheen, bondman and servant of the all-Jewish world-power” (p. 35). And the heart of Germany itself, drained by a tyrannical psychological control of its population, has virtually stopped beating.

[1] This article is taken from the Preface to my edition of Gottfried Feder, The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation, Sanctuary Press, 2019.

[2] Manifest zur Brechung des Zinsknechtschaft des Geldes, Diessen vor München: Joseph C. Huber, 1919; cf. The Manifesto for the Breaking of the Financial Slavery to Interest, tr. Alexander Jacob, History Review Press, 2012; Sanctuary Press, 2019.

[3] Another major early member was Karl Harrer (1890-1926), who joined the party in March of 1919. Harrer, like Drexler, was a member of the occultist Thule society in Munich, which was an off-shoot of the Germanen Order founded in 1912 by Theodor Fritsch. Eckart too was influenced by the doctrines of the Thule society.

[4] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. James Murphy, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939, pp.168,171.

[5] This work was translated by E.T.S. Dugdale as The Programme of the NSDAP and its general conceptions, Munich, 1932.

[6] I have for my translation used the 1932 edition, vol.35 of the “Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek” series.

[7] For the part played by big industries in Hitler’s rise to power see G. Hallgarten, “Adolf Hitler and German heavy industry 1931-1933”, Journal of Economic History, 12 (1952).

[8] H. Reupke, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wirtschaft, Berlin, 1931, pp.29ff.

[9] The closest to National Socialist economics is the Social Credit movement founded in Britain by C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), whose work Economic Democracy was published in 1920 (see F. Hutchison and B. Burkitt, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism, London: Routledge, 1997). Douglas influenced Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the thirties (see Kerry Bolton, “Breaking the bondage of interest, part 2”, Counter-Currents, August 11, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/breaking-the-bondage-of-interesta-right-answer-to-usury-part-2/

[10] It was on his suggestion that Hitler changed the name of the German branch of the DAP in 1920 to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).

[11] Feder’s manifesto on interest-slavery was interestingly published in the same year as Jung’s work on National Socialism.

[12] Rudolf Jung, Der Nationale Sozialismus, Munich, 1922, p.187f.

[13] Ibid., 53f.

[14] The pamphlets that he self-published (in Leipzig) in this series, “Die internationalen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen der jüdischen Hochfinanz” (The international kindred relationships of Jewish high finance’), between 1933 and 1940 present short historical accounts of the different branches of Jewry in various countries of Europe as well as in America. For instance, the first pamphlet is on Das Haus Rothschild, numbers two to four on Ginsberg und Günsberg und Asher Ginzberg, five to eight on Jakob Schiff und die Warburgs und das New Yorker Bankhaus Kuhn, Loeb & Co., nine to ten on Amsterdamer und Oppenheimer Juden, eleven on Französische Finanzjuden, twelve on Tschechoslowakische Finanzjuden, fourteen on Rumänische Finanzjuden, fifteen on Lessing und Moses Mendelssohn und das Bankhaus Mendelssohn & Co., seventeen on Polnische Finanzjuden, eighteen on Schwedische Finanzjuden, nineteen on Holländische und belgische Finanzjuden, twenty on Frankfurter Finanzjuden und die I.G. Farben, twenty-one to twenty-three on Englische Finanzjuden, thirty-four to thirty-eight and forty-three to forty-four on Tshechische Finanzjuden and thirty-nine to forty-two on Ungarische Finanzjuden. In addition, he published, in Halle, a similar work on Amerikanische Finanzjuden (1936).

[15] “nicht mehr zeitgemäßen Kampfmethoden, die sogar von den Engländern in jüngster Zeit zum Zwecke der Gegenpropaganda ausgeschlachtet wurden” (see Gerd Simon, “Chronologie, Pudor, Heinrich“, http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/gerd.simon/ChrPudor.pdf, p.19f.)

[16] All page-references are to my edition.

[17] The “Führer principle” was championed also by Rudolf Jung in his Nationale Sozialismus, p.177f.

[18] See G. Senft, “Anti-Kapitalismus von Rechts? – Eine Abrechnung mit Gottfried Feders ‘Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft’”, Zeitschrift für Sozialökonomie, 106 (1995), pp.18-32.

[19] According to Henry Liu: “through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began” (Henry C.K. Liu, “Nazism and the German economic miracle,” Asia Times Online, 24 May 2005, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GE24Dj01.html).

[20] Hitler’s eagerness to rearm Germany is not surprising in the light of the eastern expansionist and anti-Bolshevist foreign political aims outlined by him already in Mein Kampf, Vol.II, Ch.14.

[21] R.J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.43.

[22] Ibid., p.38.

[23]See the web-log by “Scanners”, “Gottfried Feder und das zinslose Geld”, http://www.utopia.de/blog/umweltpolitik/gottfried-feder-und-das-zinslose.The western financial powers may have partly supported Hitler’s effort to check the westward spread of Bolshevism. For American involvement in National Socialist finance, for example, see Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the rise of Hitler, Sudbury: Bloomfield Books, 1976.

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