Traders and Heroes by Werner Sombart

Author:Werner Sombart [Sombart, Werner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: germanics, volksgeist, germanic, anglos
ISBN: 9781914208348
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd
Published: 2021-06-08T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

German Militarism

He values battle, our enemies have declared, as we have seen. And we said they were right. But what is this militarism? On this Germans and foreigners will be of very different opinion. The announcements that the latter have issued in the last months against militarism do not really attest to a deep understanding of its nature. If I disregard what Prof. Larsen in Denmark or Dr. Gino Bertolini in Italy have said about German militarism (one or two more may be added to them, whose statements escape me), one can characterise everything that foreigners placed in high positions and low have said about that recently as nonsense, without being unfair. Another proof of the fact that a foreigner cannot understand us, apart from a very few prominent personalities whom a happy fate has raised to the heights of the German mind.

How fully the thought of non-German men, especially those with a trader’s mentality, fails in the case of a problem like that of militarism — for that, once again, Herbert Spencer is an eloquent example.

Spencer posits, as we have already seen, the two social types, the militant and the industrial, against each other, naturally esteeming the former as the lower and the latter as the higher. But how he describes the militant social type shows that he too has not the least idea of its character (whereas he analyses the ‘industrial type’ with a fine trader’s instinct). What he says about it are nothing but superficialities; thus he is able to characterise the ‘fundamental principle’ of the militant type as nothing but ‘compulsory cooperation’ (Principles of Sociology, Art. 554).

The fundamental fault of his conception, as well as of that of all foreigners (which is always in these matters one ‘dedicated to death’, as Fichte put it), is that they consider a certain institution as the primary cause from which a certain spirit is supposed to emanate, that they thus invert cause and effect, since there is indeed only a certain spirit whose external phenomenal form is the social or political institution. All well-meaning foreigners always want to liberate us from some ‘institution’; the president of Harvard University, Eliot,106 would like to draw up a better constitution for us so that we may slowly work our way up with diligence and perseverance to the cultural level of the USA. Others would like to free us from our Kaiser, who is supposed to weigh upon us like a burden. The aim of most, however, is to ‘liberate’ us from militarism. The same false basic view returns repeatedly: as if all these institutions that are found among the Germans, like a burden that weighs upon a donkey, were something external. Whereas it is important to understand that all external manifestations of social and political life are the necessary radiations of the spirit that informs a people.

Thus militarism too is at first, naturally, something external because it is institutional. It is represented in the universal compulsory military service; is represented in the powerful

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