Word: german
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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More important, Lichtheim is a master of that peculiarly German form, the Ideengeschichte. His integration of Marx and the Enlightenment is masterful. Finally, Lichtheim takes his Marxism seriously. Whatever defects there may be in his method, however bitter his denunciations of Communism as it is practiced, he never ceases to treat his subjects as reasonable men whose criticisms of society have likewise to be met in a reasonable fashion. Lichtheim remains a philosopher (indeed that is his chief shortcoming) and he has thus been proof to the current fashion which spares itself the difficulty of replying to Marx by dismissing...
Lichtheim's comments on German history, then, will serve as a nice demonstration of his fundamental idealism. "The basic fact about German history since the eighteenth century," we are told, "has been the failure of the Enlightenment to take root." Why did it fail to thrive? In an essay entitled "The European Civil War," we learn that "national attitudes in the three countries [France, Germany and Italy] were different, and that the difference went back to the impact of the French Revolution." This is some help, but not much, for we now want to know what factors determined the reception...
...influence is to be set down to the fact that he "had the advantage of addressing himself to readers already predisposed by a century of literary romanticism to come down on the irrationalist side." What predisposed the reading public to romanticism is never disclosed. At any rate, this German, with his "course mind," had broken the rules of the game by shouting that it all might not be comprehensible after...
...leaders of the Third Reich (notably the SS, the core of the whole movement) really had taken Nietzsche seriously. So had large strata of the German educated class in general...How could a movement of this sort have gained power in a major European country? Dreadful though it is, the answer must be: largely by accident. For there can be little doubt that an early successful attempt on Hitler's person would have caused his party to collapse ... The Third Reich was a oneman show...
Without some history and sociology, then, Lichtheim's notion of a "dialectic between the French Revolution and German Counter-Revolution" is not overly helpful. Nor do his unfortunately diffuse comments on ideology represent a theoretical advance: in the 20's Mannheim was rejoicing at the possibilities for intellectual advance provided by the collision of cultures and the dissolution of old systems. Still, look the book over. Even when Lichtheim loses his battles, which is far from always, he does it with panache...