West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 by S. Jonathan Wiesen

Author:S. Jonathan Wiesen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2001-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

In a 1954 publication called Unternehmer in der Politik, Gustav Stein and Herbert Gross elaborated on this elitist suspicion of democracy in a chapter titled “Task of the New Elite.”

We live in an age of the “overtaxed (überforderten) voter,” manifested in the continual emptying (Entleerung) of the economy and society by politics and the state. Democracy, in the conception of Rousseau[,]... certainly leads man away from absolutism but does not entirely free him. More often, it re-enslaves him through the new “peoples sovereignty,” or the voting masses. National Socialism and Bolshevism are the logical consequence of the democratic principle, namely the rule of the majority of the mass. In connection with the principle of equality, democracy leads to a total politicization of life. Democracy, in its Jacobin component, is the flag-bearer for collectivism, socialism, codetermination, or for whatever form enslavement under the state takes. Democracy of this type is essentially the archenemy of liberalism, which protects the unlimited freedom of humans but holds the power of the state in check.20

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