After the Guns of August: Max Weber: Hoisted from Ten Years Ago
Hoisted from Ten Years Ago: After World War I: Weber: Marxism, liberalism, and what we will here call "nationalism"—just to be polite... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/lecture-notes-f.html
- We've talked about Marxism...
- We've talked about classical liberalism...
- We haven't talked about "nationalism"...
We read Norman Angell: We did not read Max Weber: nationalism as social-darwinist doctrine:
Max Weber, "The National State and Economic Policy": [W]e all consider the German character of the East as something that should be protected, and that the economic policy of the state should enter into the lists in its defense. Our state is a national state, and... we have a right to make this demand....
[T]he economic struggle between the nationalities follows its course even under the semblance of 'peace'. The German peasants and day-labourers of the East are not being pushed off the land in an open conflict by politically-superior opponents. Instead, they are getting the worst of it in the silent and dreary struggle of everyday economic existence, they are abandoning their homeland to a race which stands on a lower level, and moving towards a dark future in which they will sink without trace.
There can be no truce even in the economic struggle for existence; only if one takes the semblance of peace for its reality can one believe that peace and prosperity will emerge for our successors at some time in the distant future. Certainly the vulgar conception of political economy is that it consists in working out recipes for making the world happy; the improvement of the 'balance of pleasure' in human existence is the sole purpose of our work that the vulgar conception can comprehend. However... [reality] prevents us from imagining that peace and happiness lie hidden in the lap of the future, it prevents us from believing that elbow-room in this earthly existence can be won in any way than through the hard struggle of human beings with each other....
The overwhelming majority of the of the fruits of the economic, social, and political endeavours of the present are garnered not by the generation now alive but by the generations of the future.... [T]here can... be no real work in political economy on the basis of optimistic dreams of happiness.... The question... is not 'how will human beings feel in the future' but 'how will they be'.... We do not want to train up feelings of well-being in people, but rather those characteristics we think constitute the greatness and nobility of our human nature....
The economic policy of a German state, and that standard of value adopted by a German economic theorist, can therefore be nothing other than a German policy and a German standard.... Our successors will not hold us responsible before history for the kind of economic organization we hand over to them, but rather for the amount of elbow-room we conquer for them in the world.... Processes of economic development are in the final analysis also power struggles, and the ultimate and decisive interests at whose service economic policy must place itself are the interests of national power....
The science of political economy is a political science... a servant of politics... of the lasting political-power interests of the nation.... [F]or questions of German economic policy... the ultimate and decisive voice should be that of the economic and political interests of our nation's power, and the vehicle of that power, the German national state...
Note: This is a World War I-era German liberal...
And this is a German talking about Poles. Recall post-World War II Chancellor Konrad Adenauer: "A Prussian [an eastern German] is a Pole who has forgotten who his grandfather was..."
World War I did not change Weber's mind...
Yet more:
In the outstanding works of our historical colleagues we find that today instead of telling us about the warlike deeds of our ancestors they dilate at length about "matriarchy," that monstrous notion, and force into a subordinate clause the victory of [sic: mistranslation—should be "over"] the Huns on the Catalaunian Plain...
But in 451 the Huns lost the Battle of Chalons to the coalition led by Comes et Magister Utriusque Militum et Patricius Flavius Aetius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chalons as the Visigoths came to the aid of the Roman Empire to defend civilization against the Asiatic Horde. And yet this great victory did not matter: the Roman Empire in the West still fell...
A second view of nationalism. Nationalism as way to distract people from domestic political concerns:
Matthew Yglesias: The Search for an Enemy: "I've actually heard that Francis Fukuyama has said this before, but that information didn't come to me in reportable form...
...During a BloggingHeads.tv appearance with Robert Wright, Fukuyama says of Bill Kristol and his circle at The Weekly Standard that during the 1990s: "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" when foreign policy wasn't on the issue agenda. The obvious candidates were either China or something relating to Islamic fundamentalism and, as Fukuyama notes, what they came up with was China. Then 9/11 changed things around, at least for a few years.
I think this is very telling, and reveals a great deal about the mentality that's been guiding America's foreign policy during the Bush years... http://bloggingheads.tv/?id=81&cid=271&in=04:59
William Shakespeare:
Henry IV to Prince Harry: "All my friends, which thou must make thy friends...
...by whose fell working[s] I was first advanc'd, and by whose power I well might lodge a fear to be again displac'd.... [R]est and lying still might make them look too near unto my state.
Therefore, my Harry, be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days...
The point of all this: World War I makes it impossible to be a liberal believer in progress, peace, rationality, equilibrium, the benevolence of the market, the triumph of reasoned discussion, et cetera. So what do you do?
