1016 Book Reviews

between Spinoza’s concept of the remedium affectuum and freudean psychotherapy)-are little more than notes. Others-most notably the lengthy study of Negri-point the way to a deeper understanding both of Spinoza’s political theory and of the promise which it holds in resolving contemporary problems of politics and society.

Macherey has provided a wealth of reflexion and suggestions for future historical and philosophical research in Spinoza, particularly in social and political theory. His arguments that Spinoza has much to offer the contemporary social theorist are well constructed, and the articles which constitute this fine anthology provide eloquent testimony to the truth of the very arguments which it offers.

Marquette University Lee C. Rice

Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkisch Utopias and National Socialism, Jost Hermand, trans. Paul Levesque in collaboration with Stefan Soldovieri (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), xvi + 332 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Jost Hermand’s Old Dreams of a New Reich is a study of an (allegedly) good idea gone bad. It chronicles the evolution of German nationalist utopias from the classical period of the eighteenth century through the Third Reich. Its central premise is that early nationalist-utopian aspirations with positive egalitarian and fraternal elements became ‘distorted’ into the narrowly chauvinistic program of the Wilhelmian imperialists, and then into the genocidal volkisch fantasies of the Nazis. The chiefcorruptingagencies were the ‘Wilhelmian and National Socialist ruling classes’, who ‘shamelessly distorted and misused’ the utopian ideals ‘for their own purposes’. They succeeded in their nefarious project because ‘a broad section of the German population proved to be so committed to the notion of a Voiksgemeinschaft, a true community of the people, that they were willing to take such distortions at face value’. This was ‘a decision that, tragically enough, contributed greatly to that chauvinistic wave of enthusiasm on the part of the German people which first made the sordid and murderous acts of their rulers at all possible’[xiii].

In our understandable haste to condemn the imperialists and the Nazis, argues Hermand, we must try to understand the ‘lingering appeal’ of the egalitarian-utopian dream. If we do so, we might even be able to reverse the process of corruption and ‘return to a meaningful notion of the state founded on a truly social understanding of a sense of community’. This might yet save us from that devastating paradigm of the late twentieth century-namely, ‘profit-hungry and therefore consumer-oriented market liberalism’ with all the ‘accompanying problems of systemic unemployment, ruthless exploitation, and the ongoing ecological destruction of the planet .’ [xii; xvi]. In short, let us not throw out the collectivist baby with the fascist bathwater.

Before taking issue with what strikes this reviewer as an amazingly half-baked conceptualisation, let it be said that Hermand performs a useful service by dredging up and synopsising dozens of obscure books, pamphlets, manifestoes and tracts that have rarely if ever been analysed before. These works do indeed provide a fascinating glimpse into a murky netherworld of racist nostrums, Teutonic science fiction, astrological

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visions, glacial cosmogony, revenge fantasies, Wunderwuffeen, and miracle cures. Clearly

the land of Dichter und Denker was capable of producing an extraordinary mass of dreck. Given the fact that many of these estimable works survive only in a few copies scattered among far-flung libraries, most of us would not be able to locate and read them, even if we were inclined to do so. We can thank Professor Hermand for sparing us the trouble of trying.

Too bad he did not also spare us the peculiarly dated and tendentious analytical structure in which he frames his diligent research. He argues-to get to the specifics-that the above-mentioned ‘democratic form’ of national community became replaced by a ‘manipulative form’ when, starting with the ‘economic boom of the early 1890s’ (the boom actually started in the early 1870s not 189Os), many of Germany’s writers and social thinkers began ‘twisting’ good ideas into bad in order to support the exploitative interests of the ruling classes. Leaving aside the highly dubious dichotomy between good and bad forms of utopian nationalism, we must wonder how this corrupting process actually

worked. Lamentably, Hermand does not explain whether the writers acted on their own or were in some sense commissioned by the greedy rulers. His implication, however, is that there was some conscious effort to distort a healthy heritage into one that would be servicable to the ruling classes. Writers (shame on them!) ‘invoked utopian visions purely for the sake of propaganda rather than as a means of fulfilling political change’ [xv]. To cite one example, the artists who presented the First World War as a ‘bath of steel’, a ‘purification’, or a ‘divine struggle*, knew full well that the conflict they glorified was nothing but ‘a predatory war that the German ruling elite had deliberately loosed on the world in order to achieve the world power they had long yearned for’ [69-701. Hermand’s portrait of Germany’s imperialist and (later) volkisch artists as duplicitous servants of the nation’s political and economic rulers sounds like something out of the GDR ca. 1955; at the very least it is breathtakingly simplistic.

The same can be said for his portrait of the poor German masses, the ‘victims’ of this deception. Never mind the naive and crude distinction between rulers and ruled at work here. What seems extraordinary is the description of the German people as at bottom well- intentioned, but too politically moronic to see what was happening to their healthy utopian instincts. As an explanation for the evolution of volkisch politics, and above all for the probiematique behind National Socialism, this beggers the imagination.

Finally, we have the assertion that the now-obscure tomes that Hermand has dredged up were once so popular and widely read as to have decisively, and fatefully, altered the political consciousness of the German people. The only evidence offered for this is the observation that some of the works in question went through many editions, though exactly which ones and in what numbers he does not specify. At any rate, one cannot legitimately claim that the extra printings of some of the books in question ‘document a widespread acceptance of the prophetic speculations they were propagating’ [41]. Even less can one be confident that these works indeed ‘played a major role in the genesis and development of a nationalist consciousness that managed to stir the broad masses of the German people.. .’ [xv]. As any reasonably sophisticated student ofRezeptionsgeschichte knows, print-runs themselves tell us little about the actual acceptance and degree of influence a given work might have had. In the end, it is very difficult to know just how politically significant the stuff Professor Hermand as set forth really was. Certainly it would have been more prudent not to make such extravagant claims for the effects that these strange utopian fantasies supposedly had on the course of modern German history.

Montana State University, MI David Clay Large

Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994