Omnipotent government : the rise of the total state and total war by Von Mises Ludwig 1881-1973

Author:Von Mises, Ludwig, 1881-1973
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Totalitarianism, National socialism, Economic policy, International relations
Publisher: New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House
Published: 1969-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

cal viewpoint would require. The principl e of polylogism would lead to the inference that Marxian teachings also are not object tively^true but are only "ideological" statem ents . But the Marxians "deny it. They claim for their own doctrines the character of absolute truth. Thus Dietzgen teaches that "the ideas of proletarian logic are not party ideas but the outcome of logic pure and simple." * The proletarian logic is not "ideology" but absolute logic. Present-day Marxians, who label their teachings the sociology of knowledge, give proof of the same inconsistency. One of their champions, Professor Mannheim, tries to demonstrate that there exists a group of men, the "unattached intellectuals," who are equipped with the gift of grasping truth without falling prey to ideological errors.f Of course, Professor Mannheim is convinced that he is the foremost of these "unattached intellectuals." You simply cannot refute him. If you disagree with him, you only prove thereby that you yourself are not one of this elite of "unattached intellectuals" and that your utterances are ideological nonsense.

The German na tionalists had to face precisely the same problem a s "the Marxians. They also could neither demonstrate the correc tness of their own statemen ts nor disprove the theori es of economics and praxeoloff y. Thus they took shelter under the roof of poly-logism, prepared for them by the Marxians. Of course, they concocted their own brand of polylogism. The logical structure of mind, they say, is different with different nations and races. Every race or nation has its own logic and therefore its own economics, mathematics, physics, and so on. But, no less inconsistently than Professor Mannheim, Professor Tirala, his counterpart as champion of Aryan epistemology, declares that the only true, correct, and perennial logic and science are those of the Aryans.]; In the eyes of the Marxians Ricardo, Freud, Bergson, and Einstein are wrong because they are bourgeois; in the eyes of the Nazis they are wrong because they are Jews. One of the foremost goals of the Nazis is to free the Aryan soul from the pollution of the Western philosophies of Descartes, Hume, and John Stuart Mill. They are in search of an arteigen § German science, that is, of a science adequate to the racial character of the Germans.

We may reasonably assume as a hypothesis that man's mental

* Dietzgen, Briefe uber Logik, speziell demokratisch-proletarische Logik (2d ed. Stuttgart, 1903), p. H2.

f Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London, 1936), pp. 137 ff.

X Tirala, Rasse, Geist und Seele (Munich, 1935), pp. 190 ff.

§ The word arteigen is one of the many German terms coined by the Nazis. It is a main concept of their polylogism. Its counterpart is artfremd, or alien to the racial character. The criterion of science and truth is no longer correct or incorrect, but arteigen or artfremd

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