Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
I have a pet theory by the way that fundamentalism can only take root in a society where the prevailing philosophical culture is empiricist/liberal (Hume, Mill) but not in which it is rationalist/communitarian (Kant, Hegel).

So, does that mean that fascism and radical racism can only take root in a society which is 'rationalist/communitarian (Kant/Hegel' :)

by MarekNYC on Mon Jan 22nd, 2007 at 04:59:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]
And let's not forget some of the currents in German twentieth century Protestantism:

Twisted Cross

Or if we prefer Catholicism, how about the twentieth century Spanish incarnation of the Church Militant eagerly supporting the crusade against modernity.

by MarekNYC on Mon Jan 22nd, 2007 at 05:18:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Interesting book. I guess Protestantism is one of those common antecedents of Nazism and German idealism that I spoke of. In this sense: Luther held that you can only know God through faith, I believe. That is anti-rationalist. And anti-rationalism was constitutive of Nazism, in my opinion.

As for Catholicism, I don't think that anyone has ever argued that Catholicism has an easy relationship with modernity. (I was raised Russian Orthodox, and I think that Orthodoxy has an even less easy relationship with modernity.) In Hegel's view, the impetus that produced modernity was Protestant. Catholicism accommodated itself to the new conditions (not entirely successfully, some would say), but did not play a role in producing them.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns

by Alexander on Mon Jan 22nd, 2007 at 06:06:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Haha. I think that is still an open question. For about two years after 9/11, I thought the Bush regime might morph into full-fledged fascism, but I don't find that likely any more. (It must be said, however, that some people, like Chalmers Johnson, think that America still might turn fascist in the next 10 or 20 years or so, as a result of strains caused by its militarism.)

I suppose it is fair to say that there is a correlation between rationalism/communitarianism and fascism (the Nazis), but I would claim that anything in Kant or Hegel only condemns fascism, rather than supporting it. The way I would look at it is that German idealism and Nazism have some common antecedents, the way  that liberalism and fundamentalism do. (By the way, after Hegel's death, there was a gradual decline in German philosophical culture (and the effort to regain that culture is being carried out mainly in the US, not in Germany) which I still don't understand. Thus, at the time when Germany started taking its wrong turn (after Bismarck's death), the German idealist tradition was not very influential any more.)

I would consider American slavery to be a form of radical racism, wouldn't you? And then there is the genocide of the native Americans... Thus I don't think rationalist/communitarian societies have a monopoly on that.

As a final note, one might speculate that fundamentalism might be the anglophone equivalent of fascism, as you were getting at. Certainly, when I look for something comparable to fundamentalism's anti-rationalism in modern Europe, the first thing I think about is the Nazis.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns

by Alexander on Mon Jan 22nd, 2007 at 05:31:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series