Will Morrisey Reviews

Book reviews and articles on political philosophy and literature.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

    Archives

    Categories

    Meta

    Sociology, That Societal Problem

    by

    Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss: Primitive Classification. Rodney Needham translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. French original published in 1903.

     

    Denying that logic is natural, by which they mean innate to human beings, the authors claim that their “methods of scientific thought [are] veritable social institutions whose origin sociology alone can retrace and explain.” How, then, does sociology explain itself? And how does it know that its self-explanation, if it has one, is accurate, and how does it know that its explanation of other phenomena, including the methods of scientific thought, are accurate?

    The authors are historicists, offering an explanation of scientific method, and especially of scientific classification as “a history,” one moreover with “a considerable prehistory.” According to them, scientific classification is only as old as Aristotle, but before him there existed “primitive classification.” “It would be impossible to exaggerate, in fact, the state of indistinction from which the human mind developed,” and substantial elements of this fuzzy thinking persist, as seen “even today” in “a considerable portion of our popular literature, our myths, and our religions,” founded as they are “in a fundamental confusion of all images and ideas,” as seen in notions of metamorphosis and “the materialization of spirits and the spiritualization of material objects.” “The Christian dogma of transubstantiation is a consequence of this state of mind and may serve to prove its generality.” Other “cultures” still claim that transformation of one thing to another occurs; “the Bororo [for example] sincerely images himself to be a parrot.” In this, “culture” mirrors the development of the individual human mind, which begins with “only a continuous flow of representations which are lost one in another,” and even such distinctions as mature human beings make would remain “quite fragmentary” “if education did not inculcate ways of thinking which it could never have established by its own efforts and which are the result of an entire historical development,” since “every classification implies a hierarchical order for which neither the tangible world nor our mind gives us the model.” If so, if all is ‘social history, how does sociology help? How does it begin? And if classification systems are historically and socially determined, then why is ‘sociology’ not merely another game of thrones? If it is, why should it replace the existing ‘principalities and powers’? Why would that replacement do any good?

    Durkheim and Mauss first consider the “primitive” classification systems seen among native Australian peoples. Each tribe has two sections, what the ancient Greeks called phratries and what the authors call “moieties.” Each moiety has clans within in it, and each also has two marriage classes within it. Crucially, “the classification of things reproduces this classification of men,” although it is assumed rather than argued that it isn’t the other way around. For example, alligators constitute one moiety, kangaroos another, although some moieties and some clans may encompass a variety of what we would call animal species. Human and animal moieties intersect, as the totems of a clan within a moiety often corresponds to the animal represented on a totem. “Things attributed to one moiety are clearly separated from those which are attributed to the other; those attributed to different clans of one and the same moiety are no less distinct. But all those which are included in one and the same clan are, in large measure, undifferentiated. They are of the same nature”—the latter being a term brought in from the Greeks, inasmuch as the Australian peoples do not take reality to be stable, predictable; an event such as death, for example, is always attributed to sorcery. Within the tribes, “the social divisions applied to the primitive mass of representations have indeed cut them into a certain number of delimited divisions, but the interior of these divisions has remained in a relatively amorphous state which testifies to the slowness and the difficulty with which the classificatory function has been established.” This leaves one to wonder how the moieties themselves were distinguished, if not by means of some natural human capacity. Indeed, the authors observe that when a group becomes too large it is divided, whether it is a moiety divided into clans and sub-clans or a non-human group. The authors describe this as “a completely logical process,” suggesting an underlying human nature beneath primitive classification. This notwithstanding, while for Western men “the essence of man is his humanity,” “the essence of the Australian is in his totem.” 

    The totems are closely associated with sorcery, magic. Each totem “confers upon the individuals who belong to it various powers over different kinds of things.” Some of these powers correlate the totem with an animal species, but not necessarily. For example, the people whose totem is a drum may have powers associated with tortoises, but they also have “the right to conduct a ceremony which consists in imitating dogs.” 

    The same kind of classification prevails in North America, where the Zuñi tribe of the Pueblo people classify tribes by regions but also by the system “we have seen already in Australia.” The phenomenon also may be seen among the Omaha tribe of the Sioux, hundreds of miles further to the north of the Pueblo. Space and totem are related. Two moieties will be seen to “have distinct personalities,” and “because each has a different role in the life of the tribe, they are spatially opposed; one is established on the one side, the other on the other side; one is oriented in one direction, the other in the opposite.” And this prevails not only among the Zuñi and the Omaha but throughout the continent, “among the Iroquois, the Wyandot, the disintegrated Seminole tribe of Florida, the Tlingit, and the Loucheux or Déné Dindjé, the most northern, the most bastardized, but also the most primitive of Indians.” (André Malraux recounts a story told by Carl Jung, who visited one of the North American Indian tribes. When the chief politely inquired what Jung’s totem was, the great social scientist answered that his people, the Swiss, had no totems. When they descended from the pole-supported room they had been meeting in, the chief descended the ladder as Westerners descend a staircase—facing out, while Jung descended as Westerners descend a ladder, facing the ladder. When Jung stood on the ground, the chief silently pointed to the Bear of Berne, embroidered on the back of Jung’s jacket. “The bear is the only animal that descends with its face to a tree trunk—or a ladder.”) What we would call nature is both fluid—susceptible to the manipulations of sorcery—and rigid—classified in accordance with “fixed relationships to equally fixed regions in space.” Moreover, the camp, the region the tribe inhabits, “is the center of the universe, and the whole universe is concentrated within it.” “Cosmic space and tribal space are thus only very imperfectly distinguished, and the mind passes from one to the other without difficulty, almost without being aware of doings so.”

    And there is Asia. In China, too, the “classification of regions, seasons, things, and animal species dominates the whole of life.” “It is the very principle of the famous doctrine of gung-shui, and through this it determines the orientation of buildings, the foundation of towns and houses, the siting of toms and cemeteries; if certain tasks are undertaken here and others there, if certain affairs are conducted at such and such a time, this is due to reasons based on this traditional systematization.” “All these infinitely numerous elements are combined to determine the genus and the species of things in nature, the direction of movement of forces, and acts which must be performed, thus giving the impression of a philosophy which is at once subtle and naive, rudimentary and refined.” As for their own ‘philosophy,’ it has a subtlety and a naivete of its own, as the authors find “traces” of social origins of the Chinese classification system but nothing very impressive. They tend to ‘sociologize’ human life, including the life of human minds, without considering the infinite regress this entails, if one contemplates their own enterprise.

    The authors do not exclude ancient Western societies from their inquiry. “One cannot but remark that the two principles of Heraclitean Ionism, viz. war and peace, and those of Empedocles, viz. love and strife, divide things between them in the same way as do yang and yin in the Chinese classification,” or that “the relationships established by the Pythagoreans between numbers, elements, sexes, and a certain number of other things are reminiscent of the correspondences of magico-religious origin which we have had occasion to discuss.” The notion of the world “as a vast system of classified and hierarchized sympathies” may be discerned among some characters in the Platonic dialogues. 

    The authors conclude by noticing a certain continuity between “primitive classifications” and those classifications “employed by more civilized peoples.” The early classifications feature “all the essential characteristics” of those we now have: they are hierarchical, with groups “stand[ing] in fixed relationships to each other,” forming “a single whole”; they have “a purely speculative purpose,” namely “to advance understanding,” not (or at least not only) to “facilitate action.” “Such classifications are thus intended, above all, to connect ideas, to unify knowledge; as such, they may be said without inexactitude to be scientific, and to constitute a first philosophy of nature.” As sociologists, Durkheim and Mauss insist that primitive men were not “divided into clans by a pre-existing classification of things but, on the contrary, they classified things because they were divided by clans.” That is, they are social determinists, albeit social determinists who never explain how they were able to climb from the cave of convention to the bright sunlight of social science.

    As proof, they observe that “the first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of things were classes of men, into which the things were integrated.” Really? What about the distinctions between the edible and the inedible, light and dark, hot and cold? “Moieties were the first genera; clans, the first species.” Male and female? They claim that it was “states of the collective soul which gave birth to these groupings,” but this sociocentric explanation of human cognition cannot be the whole account even of “primitive classification.” While it is often true that “the pressure exerted by the group on each of its members does not permit individuals to judge freely the notions which society itself has elaborated,” this would make sociology itself a dubious enterprise. An enterprise, moreover, that inclines to replace moral reasoning with scientific accounts of morality, thereby undermining the societies in which sociologists practice their craft, and indeed possibility of sociology’s intellectual self-immolation.

    Sorel’s Valorization of Violence

    by

    Georges Sorel: Reflections on Violence. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth translation. New York: Collier Books, 1967. (Originally published in 1908.)

     

    Born in 1840s France, trained as a civil engineer, at first politically liberal, Georges Sorel came to Marxism in the 1890s. Initially, ‘scientific socialism’ appealed to him, but he soon began to question Marx’s historical determinism. He preferred to think of himself as “a self-taught man” who, for two decades, “worked to deliver myself from what I retained of my education,” reading books “not so much to learn as to efface from my memory the ideas which had been thrust upon it.” Accordingly, he found philosophic systems distasteful. “Every time that I have approached a question, I have found that my inquiries ended by giving rise to new problems, and the farther I pushed my investigations the more disquieting these new problems became. But philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists.” “Abysses” suggests Nietzsche, or perhaps Schopenhauer, and sure enough: “Greek philosophy did not produce any great result because it was, as a rule, very optimistic. Socrates was at times optimistic to an almost unbearable degree.” In politics, optimism becomes dangerous, yielding either petty reformism or (as in France) the Terror. (He “does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists.”) In their greater sobriety, pessimists recognize that “the march towards deliverance” is “conditioned” by “experimental knowledge,” knowledge acquired by encountering obstacles and accompanied by “a profound conviction of our natural weakness.” 

    The emphasis on knowledge acquired by experience and on the natural weakness of human beings (human minds not excluded), brings Sorel close to historical relativism. “It may be laid down as a general rule, that in order to understand a doctrine it is not sufficient to study it in an abstract manner, nor even as it occurs in isolated people: it is necessary to find out how it has been manifested in historical groups.” And these groups are perpetually on the move: “the Wandering Jew may be taken as a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, condemned as it is to march forever without knowing rest.” There will be no ‘end of history,’ as predicted by the great modern teleologists, Hegel and Marx. The “Wandering Jew” and the rejection of teleology suggests Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution had made its sensational appearance the year before. 

    At the same time, Sorel denies that natural right exists, as it is, he charged, tautological, amounting to little more than the assertions that what’s just is good, what’s unjust is bad—a more or less Nietzschean critique. Moreover, it is not universal (hence not natural); the same practices may be praised or condemned at different times and in different places. That is, Sorel assumes that the diversity of human conventions disproves the existence of natural right, a characteristic argument of many kinds of relativists. At the same time, he complains, natural right is much too universal, too capacious, as “there is hardly anything, not excepting even war that people have not tried to bring inside the scope of natural right: they compare war to a process by which one nation reclaims a right which a malevolent neighbor refuses to recognize.” Given his esteem for violence, it may seem odd that Sorel finds war repulsive, but he condemns war not for its violence but for its inclination toward statism. The revolutionary movements of the past century, too, have only “ended in reinforcing the power of the state.” Sorel detests the state, along with its contemporary ruling class, the bourgeoisie, because it impedes the freedom of the proletariat. He leaves the moral content of “freedom” unexamined, decrying both “intellectualism” and “moralism.” [1] He is thus a moralist, too, in his own way, ‘relativizing’ only the principles of his opponents—admittedly, a very large group.

    He instead endorses a form of irrationalism, borrowed from Henri Bergson, who derived it from Nietzsche. [2] Transferring Bergsonian intuitionism to politics, he celebrates not reasons but “myth,” the belief of the participants in “a great social movement” that “their cause is certain to triumph.” Examples include Christianity, including Catholicism (the Church against Satan), Marxism, and Syndicalism’s “General Strike.” While “the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth ordering of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean,” Sorel rejects such compromise and does not consider the smooth ordering of public affairs to have any ethical weight, since his moral principle is freedom. Myth is indispensable to free action because “to say that we are acting, implies that we are creating an imaginary world placed ahead of the present world and composed of movements which depend entirely upon us.” “In this way our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible.” But so long “as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without every provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution”—socialists like Jean Jaurès, who comes in for repeated bruisings throughout the book. Jaurès headed the reformist, democratic socialist French Section of the Workers’ International, which rejected the Marxist-Leninist regime of proletarian dictatorship. 

    Sorel distinguishes a myth from a utopia. A utopia (as seen in Thomas More and Plato) is an intellectual product; it is analyzable, refutable if it can be shown to contradict realizable existing conditions—today, “the necessary conditions of modern production.” A myth, however, “cannot be refuted” because it is “at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement.” The role of the intellect, and of intellectuals, on the contemporary Left should be confined to polemical critique of the enemies of socialism, “attacking middle-class thought in such a way as to put the proletariat on its guard against an invasion of ideas and customs from the hostile class,” as for example the pacifism and parliamentarism espoused by democratic socialists. For his part, Sorel aims to “help ruin the prestige of middle-class culture.” 

    For the purpose of advancing freedom, Sorel lauds Syndicalism, the movement of trade unions which set self-organization and self-help against the rule of the modern state, which Syndicalists intended to replace with a civil society organized along federal and entirely economic lines, institutionalized as a set of workers’ cooperatives. The revolutionary means of resisting the state was the general strike. “Revolutionary syndicalism keeps alive in the minds of the masses the desire to strike, and only prospers when important strikes, accompanied by violence, take place.” That is, revolutionary Syndicalism reinforces the myth with action even as the myth inspires the action. It is “a philosophy of modern history,” the “history of contemporary institutions.” Because philosophic rationalism, particularly in the form of grand systematizing as seen in Hegel and Marx, impedes freedom and indeed denies it in the name of historical determinism, the Syndicalist “philosophy” is unsystematic, irrational, particularist. It lauds myth, invulnerable to rational criticism, a myth of violent action, in the name not of reason but of freedom defined implicitly in the democratic impulse to do as one likes or, at very least, to refuse to do as one doesn’t like. 

    Sorel therefore does endorse Marxian class warfare, along with Marx’s claim that a man’s morality is largely determined by his socioeconomic position in civil society. “Duty has some meaning in a society in which all the parts are intimately connected and responsible to one another, but if capitalism is inexhaustible”—Marx assumed that production under the capitalist system was limitless, given the technological and organizational power of the modern project to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate—then “joint responsibility is no longer founded on economic realities, and the workers think they would be dupes if they did not demand all they can obtain; they look upon the employer as an adversary with whom one comes to terms after a war.” Thus, “social duty” under modern conditions “no more exists than does international duty” among states, which are in a perpetual condition of real or potential war with one another. How, then, to resist the bourgeoisie and the modern state it controls if not by violence? “The workers have no money,” like the bourgeoisie, “but they have at their disposal a much more efficacious means of action; they can inspire fear.” Indeed, “the most decisive factor in social politics is the cowardice of the Government,” whose members must eventually buckle under the pressure of revolutionary violence by proletarians. Syndicalist leaders “must profit by middle-class cowardice to impose the will of the proletariat.” “A social policy founded on middle-class cowardice, which consists in always surrendering before the threat of violence, cannot fail to engender the idea that the middle class is condemned to death, and that its disappearance is only a matter of time. Thus, every conflict which gives rise to violence becomes a vanguard fight”—vanguard in the Marxist-Leninist sense, the leading edge of historical progress toward freedom. The democratic socialists, “theorists of social peace,” find “these embarrassing facts” too grim to look at; “they are doubtless ashamed to admit their cowardice,” being socialists infected with bourgeois fear of violent death, socialists with the soul of Hobbes, of Locke, of Englishmen, so despised by Nietzsche. “Many Englishmen believe that by humiliating their country they will rouse more sympathy toward themselves; but this supposition is not borne out the facts,” as “these worthy progressives prefer to pay, or even to compromise the future of their country, rather than face the horrors of war.” Indeed, “we might very well wonder whether all the high morality of our great contemporary thinkers,” whether English or Jaurès, “is not founded on degradation of the sentiment of honor.” In this way, Sorel appropriates Nietzsche’s aristocratic principle for democratic egalitarianism—a move that has become characteristic of the Left of our own time. Throughout, Sorel’s rhetorical strategy is to equate domestic class conflict with international conflict and then to appeal to both hard-nosed realism and to realists’ contempt for cowardice in the face of reality to valorize violence deployed in class conflict. 

    The “moral theology” of those whom Sorel derides as the “responsible Socialists” is “not one of the least of the buffooneries of our time.” Although Jaurès displays a certain praiseworthy “peasant duplicity” with his insight into the stupidity of the bourgeoisie, “the ideology of a timorous humanitarian middle class professing to have freed its thought from the conditions of existence” has been “grafted on the degeneration of the capitalist system,” whose rulers have shifted from being “bold captains who made the greatness of modern industry” (a nod to Thomas Carlyle) “to make way for an ultra-civilized aristocracy which asks to be allowed to live in peace”—no real aristocracy at all, but a class that “has become almost as stupid as the nobility of the eighteenth century,” the rotten fruit supplanted by the Jacobin Tree of Liberty. Only two things might interfere with such rulers, including such Socialists: “a great foreign war, which might renew lost energies, and which in any case would doubtless bring into power men with the will to govern”; “a great extension of proletarian violence, which would make the revolutionary reality evident to the middle class, and which would disgust them with the humanitarian platitudes with which Jaurès lulls them to sleep.” Worse, these faux-democratic Socialists “stupefy the worker,” too, making him lose his “revolutionary energy.” As long as the bourgeoisie is really capitalistic (bold, energetic, calculating), Marxian predictions of proletarian revolts will be true, but “if, on the contrary, the middle class, led astray by the chatter of the preachers of ethics and sociology, return to an ideal of conservative mediocrity, seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element  is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.” To succeed, Socialists must sharpen class conflict, not ameliorate the class oppression that sparks it.

    The great meliorist Jaurès contradicts himself, “found[ing] his own hopes on the simultaneous ruin of the capitalist and revolutionary spirit.” [3] Even Marx did not foresee “a middle class which seeks to weaken its own strength,” but he was nonetheless correct in understanding that “proletarian violence comes upon the scene just at the moment when the conception of social peace is being held up as a means of moderating disputes; proletarian violence confines employers to their role of producers and tends to restore the separation of the classes, just when they seemed on the point of intermingling in the democratic marsh.” Such violence will not only ensure “the future revolution” but, in so doing, will prove “the only means by which the European nations—at present stupefied by humanitarianism—can recover their former energy.” In this, Sorel regards himself as a writer in the Marxist line, emphasizing what Marx and Lenin would call the synthesis of capitalist practices with socialism—the use of (for example) the capitalist practice of accounting within the future socialist milieu. To overthrow a strong capitalism would be “a very fine and heroic thing”—again, the rhetoric of Nietzsche, with his “planetary aristocracy,” turned to the purposes of egalitarian freedom.

    The political caution Sorel despises arose in the aftermath of France’s disastrous war against Prussia in 1870-71. Since then, socialists have attempted to ground reform on rationalism, particularly on ‘scientific’ social experimentation or on Jaurèsian attempts to revive “the most melodramatic images of the old rhetoric” of republicanism, à la Victor Hugo, now laced with reassurances of peaceableness. “In the eyes of the contemporary middle class, everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle-class desire to die in peace—after them, the deluge.” If, regrettably, war should break out, it should be “carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge,” they hope. But in real war, Sorel insists, “force is displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow anything from the judicial proceedings which society sets up against criminals.” He predicts that Syndicalism will abandon these “old superstitions,” making social conflict more like war, while at the same time “refin[ing] the conception of violence,” making it less vengeful and bloody. “We have the right to hope that a Socialist revolution carried out by pure Syndicalists would not be defiled by the abominations which sullied the middle-class revolutions.” 

    Why so? Sorel wants Bergsonism to be applied to the theory of the general strike. Although “there is no process by which the future can be predicted scientifically,” as Marx and his demi-bourgeois epigone have imagined, the myth of the general strike, consisting of “a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society,” can carry the proletariat to victory. That myth also can temper the necessary violence of working men as they struggle against the bourgeoisie. “Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all in a coordinated picture, and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colors with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. we thus obtain that intuition of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clarity—and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously,” an example of Bergson’s intuitive “global knowledge.” That is, the general strike, with its clear-cut oppositions, with no compromises, no muddle, and no utopian “programme for the future,” educates workers as it proceeds. Bergson “has claimed for the philosopher the right to proceed in a manner quite opposed to that employed by the scientist” in society, equipped with his “little science” of rationalism and description. Real science “know[s] what forces exist in the world, and then take[s] measures whereby we may utilize them, by reasoning form experience.” The myth of the general strike (and even Marx, insofar as he is a sound guide, has limned a myth, not a scientific prediction) resembles the concept of “a modern physicist [who] has complete confidence in his science, although he knows that the future will look upon it as antiquated.” In this way, Syndicalists possess “the scientific spirit.” That is, Sorel’s “myth” is the rhetorical equivalent of a scientific hypothesis, refutable not by ratiocination but by experience. And the experience of one generation will differ from that of another, as circumstances change. [4]

    Syndicalists must take care to engage in the “proletarian general strike,” based on the conflict of socioeconomic classes, not the “general political strike,” a heterogeneous affair in which economic elements are combined with other kinds of factions. The general political strike leads to unrealism, utopianism, as “there are plenty of young barristers, briefless and likely to remain so, who have filled enormous notebooks with their detailed projects for the social organization of the future.” Avoid alliances with such people, demagogues who “believe that the best way is to utilize the power of the State to pester the rich.” The true, proletarian general strike, by contrast, “awakens in the depths of the soul a sentiment of the sublime proportionate to the conditions of a gigantic struggle; it forces the desire to satisfy jealousy by malice into the background; it brings to the fore the pride of free men and thus protects the worker from the quackery of ambitious leaders, hungering for the fleshpots.” Or so Sorel supposes. The proletarian general strike resembles the heroic ancient Greek and French Republican spirit of war, whereas the political general strike resembles the cynical view of war taken by pacifists, which claims that soldiers are mere instruments of ambitious rulers, who use war to increase state power. That is in fact how many wars are conducted, but the proletarians will be exempt from such venality.

    Why so? Proletarians use violence; statists use force. Violence is a term “that should be employed only for acts of revolt,” acts aimed at destroying an existing, oppressive order. Force is used by those in power; its object is to impose order, as seen in parliamentary legislation enforced by the gendarmerie. Sorel criticizes Marx for failing to make this distinction. Syndicalism “cannot accept the idea that the historical mission of the proletariat is to imitate the middle class; it cannot conceive that a revolution as vast as that which would abolish capitalism could be attempted for a trifling and doubtful result, for a change of masters.” Syndicalism “endeavors to separate what disfigures the work of Marx”—particularly the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ of ‘state socialism’—from “what will immortalize his name.” Sorel effectively claims that Syndicalism can obviate the need, claimed by Marx and Lenin, for an intermediate stage of ‘History’ between capitalism and communism; Syndicalists can bring society straight to communalism without statist coercion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a preliminary.

    How will this measured, consciousness-raising violence be achieved? “It may be questioned whether there is not a little stupidity in the admiration of our contemporaries for gentle methods.” Sorel quotes the French social economist Paul de Rousiers who, in his 1890 book, La Vie américaine, describing the actions of vigilantes in the American West, wrote that “the American who happens to be honest has one excellent habit—he does not allow himself to be crushed on the pretext that he is virtuous.” That is what proletarian general strikers will be: vigilantes claiming freedom from injustice. “There is no danger of civilization succumbing under the consequences of a development of brutality, since the idea of the general strike may foster the notion of the class war by means of incidents which would appear to middle-class historians as of small importance,” even as the small number of Christian martyrs inspired a vast change in the spirit of mankind. The myth will moderate the psyches, and therefore the actions, of the strikers. At the same time, Sorel makes the Machiavellian argument against Christianity itself; its morality is too lofty. A lofty morality can be realized in a state of real, not spiritual, war, a war limited not by respect for ‘international law,’ which is ineffective, but by the nobility-engendering myth. “The proletariat has none of the servile instincts of democracy,” with its compromises and “scandalous corruption.” The best proletarians are “Homeric,” embodiments of myth as much as Achilles and Hector. (In this, Sorel follows Nietzsche’s invocations of Homer against such rationalists as Plato and Aristotle.) Like the heroes of the Bronze Age, the workers embody their own standards. “The free producer in a progressive and inventive workshop must never evaluate his own efforts by any external standard; he ought to consider the models given him as inferior, and desire to surpass everything that has been done before.” Being democrats rather than aristocrats, these paragons will have no concern for fame, however.

    Democratic nobility is as democratic nobility does: “It is to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.” For “it was war that provided the republics of antiquity with the ideas which form the ornaments of our modern culture,” and “war, carried on in broad daylight, without hypocritical attenuation, for the purpose of ruining an irreconcilable enemy, excludes all the abominations which dishonored the middle-class revolution of the eighteenth century.” And the “social war” of the general strike, “by making an appeal to honor which develops so naturally in all organized armies, can eliminate” the “evil feelings” of jealousy and envy “against which morality would remain powerless,” inasmuch as “in undertaking a serious formidable, and sublime work, Socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world.” Eventually, this generation of Socialists will pass away, but “what will remain of the present Socialist movement will be the epic of the strikes.” [5]

    One might suggest, then, that Sorel begins his book as a pessimist but ends it with eyes glistening with optimism. The 1919 edition confirms the suggestion, with Sorel appending a paean “In Defense of Lenin,” whom he describes as “the greatest theoretician that Socialism has had since Marx and the head of state whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great,” the most prominent of the czars who propounded Enlightenment principles. “The ideology of the new form of the proletarian state will never perish,” Sorel predicts. “If we are grateful to the Roman soldiers for having replaced abortive, strayed, or impotent civilizations by a civilization whose pupils we are still in law, literature, and monuments, how grateful will not the future have to be to the Russian soldiers of socialism!”

    Well, not much. But the optimist presses on: “How lightly for the historians will weigh the criticisms of the rhetoricians charged by democracy with denouncing the excesses of the Bolsheviks.” Less lightly than you suppose, Monsieur Sorel. “New Carthages must not triumph over what is now the Rome of the proletariat.” But they did, anyway. “Cursed be the plutocratic democracies which are starving Russia!” Still more cursed, then, the Russian tyrants who murdered tens of millions of Russians?

    A generation later, a young American writer, Janet Flanner, began her expatriate life in Paris. Decades after that, looking back on her life there in the 1920s, she recalled, “Up until the 1930s I mostly lunched in my rue Jacob restaurant in the company of some minor Surrealists, Surrealism having become the lates Paris intellectual revolutionary aesthetic movement such as Paris always foments when the cerebral sap of the Gallic mind runs in two opposite directions at once, at the destruction of a present society and the other at setting up a utopian on which no one can agree.” [6]

     

    Notes

    1. For a discussion of the “philosophy of freedom” see “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.’ (Although hardly a philosopher, as an ideologist Sorel borrows heavily from philosophers, and so I have placed this review, also under that category.) Here, again, Sorel borrows from Bergson, this time from his critique of mechanistic causation and his notion of la durée. Bergson argues against mechanistic theories of causation in favor of free will. As stated in his first important book, Time and Free Will, intensity should not be confused with extensity. Feeling some things intensely, the human mind overlooks the gradual accumulation of forces, the duration, that predates (for example) the pain we are feeling. This leads us to mechanistic theories of causation, the substitution of spatial concepts (mechanisms, things that take up space) for the Heraclitean flow of events in time. (In his later essay on laughter, Bergson explains comedy as the intrusion of mechanical behavior upon free-flowing life, with its élan vital. His young contemporary, Charlie Chaplin, would come to exemplify this understanding of comedy. But there isn’t much laughter in Sorel.)
    2. “Life transcends intellect,” Bergson writes in Creative Evolution because life consists of la durée and intellect can only limp after duration with its need for the fixed ideas that make the principle of non-contradiction possible. If all is flux, as in Heraclitus-Nietzsche-Bergson, then life cannot be captured by logical analysis, a practice that follows from our having put “artificial abstractions” into our heads instead of “concrete phenomena.” This does not commit Bergson to mere capriciousness, however, as “to behave according to caprice” entails “no real maturing of an internal state, no real evolution,” whereas genuine evolution, true freedom, sees a life that “ripens gradually.” Even biological evolution sees “species pass[ing] through alternate periods of stability and transformation.” Duration, “the living mobility of things” (An Introduction to Metaphysics [1903]), is thus “constitutive” or creative as well as noetic.
    3. Jaurès (1859-1914) rejected Marxian internationalism for a (decidedly non-Hitlerite) national socialism; “Socialism implies France; it implies the Republic” (Louis Lévy, ed.: Anthologie de Jean Jaurès. London: Éditions Penguin, 1947, p. 39.) More offensive to Sorel is his refusal to partake in hatred of the bourgeoisie, remarking that the bourgeoisie “is not an impenetrable bloc” (p. 110); he connects Socialism with the tradition of the French Revolution (pp. 117-119), an extension of the Rights of Man to all classes, in practice. (Ironically, Jaurès uses quotes from The Communist Manifesto to fortify his position.) He does show some affinities to Sorel and to notions fashionable in Europe at the time: vitalism (Socialism “is a great force of life” (p. 125); and a decided optimism respecting the character of the workers (“this egoism of the proletariat”—i.e., their ardent pursuit of self-interest—is “an impersonal egoism” (p. 180). But in all he is much too ‘bourgeois’ for either Marx or Sorel.
    4. As Bergson contends in his 1896 book, Matter and Memory, both objectivism/realism and subjectivism/modern idealism assume that “to perceive is above all to know,” but the human body, including its brain, orient themselves toward action, not knowledge; while “the past is essentially that which acts no longer,” the present is “that which is acting,” a “system of nascent acts which plunges roots deep into the real.” Reality is neither constructed, as in subjectivism, nor reconstructed, as in realism, but “touched, penetrated, lived” a matter of intuition which dissolves the dichotomy of subjectivism and objectivism. “None of our mathematical symbols can express the fact that it is the moving body which is in motion rather than the axes or the points to which it is referred.” That is, the geometry of the calculus can deceive us; “geometry and logic are strictly applicable to matter; in it they are at home, and in it they can proceed quite lone,” but outside this domain, pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing.” It is realism (seen in the systems of Hegel and Marx) which claims that matter “evolves in such a manner that we can pass from one moment to the next by a mathematical [logical, scientific] induction.” Not so for Bergson, and more or less not so for Sorel. For Bergson, intuition is “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible” (An Introduction to Metaphysics); for tough-minded Sorel, revolutionary experience takes the places of that. Both reject historical determinism. Both contend that theoretical reasoning cannot, as Bergson puts it, “comprehend life,” of which reasoning is merely a part, and both contend that intuition (Bergson) or experience (Sorel) is “disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its subject and of enlarging it indefinitely” (Creative Evolution).
    5. There is a suggestion of something along these lines in Creative Evolution: “In a general way, in the evolution of life, just as in the evolution of human societies and of individual destinies, the greatest successes have been for those who have accepted the heaviest risks.” He tempers this, however, insisting that “the duty of the statesman is to follow [the evolution of society] and to modify the institutions while there is still time: out of ten political errors, nine consist simply in believing that what has ceased to be true is still true,” but he tenth, which might be the most serious, will be no longer to believe true what nevertheless is still true.” Sorel prefers to miss that last point.
    6. Janet Flanner: Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939. Irving Drutman, editor. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

     

    Hindenburg

    by

    William J. Astore and Dennis E. Showalter: Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism. Washington: Potomac Books, 2005.

     

    Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was a German aristocrat, it is safe to say. And a Prussian among Germans—a nontrivial distinction, among Germans: the immigrant grandmother of an acquaintance of mine, who spoke almost no English, once perceived that she was being described as a German; “Nein! Nein! Ich bin ein Prusse!” she replied, with due emphasis. Hindenburg, her older contemporary shared the sentiment, saying “I have always felt myself an ‘Old Prussian.‘”

    Born into the Junker class in East Prussia in 1847, Hindenburg reached maturity in a Prussia that not only had recovered from its mauling by Napoleon in 1806 but had undertaken the unification of the 37 sovereign German states into one powerful nation-state, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm I, Otto von Bismarck, and Helmuth von Moltke. His father was a reserve infantry officer, his mother a Lutheran. Accordingly, “discipline, duty, and obedience to higher authority prevailed in the household, as “even the young Hindenburg’s nurse was known to bark ‘Silence in the ranks!’ to squelch childish complaints.” Already a member of the Prussian Cadet Corps by the age of twelve, he “demonstrated moral uprightness and physical hardiness without showing any particular intellectual qualities.” He rose to the Senior Cadet School in 1863, selected as a page to Queen Elizabeth of Prussia in 1864, and received his first commission in 1865 as a second lieutenant of the Foot Guards, only a year before the Austro-Prussian War. Hindenburg fought bravely at Königgratz in the war’s decisive battle, which left Prussia in the position of fulfilling its ambition to unite the Germanies and to face off against the French, four years later. In the Franco-Prussian War, Hindenburg survived the attack on St. Privat, near Metz, a battle in which his battalion “took heavy casualties.” No chauvinist, he later admired French conduct during the prolonged siege of Paris, also praising the “ruthless postwar suppression of the Paris Commune” after the war was over and the Third Republic had been established. 

    After those wars, Bismarck proceeded step-by-step, winning the Kulturkampf of the 1870s against the Roman Catholic Church, which he stripped of it control over education and authority to make ecclesiastical appointments, powers that had compromised his state-building efforts, especially in the Catholic south. He then made an alliance with Austria-Hungary, avoiding any troubles on his southern border, and attempted a rapprochement with the Russian czar, hoping to secure his eastern flank. For his part, by the end of the decade Hindenburg won appointment to the general staff, was promoted to the rank of captain, and married the daughter of a general. His subsequent elevations in rank in the peacetime army came slowly, but they came; he served under Count Alfred Graf von Schlieffen on the imperial general staff in the second half of the 1880s and was granted command of the Ninety-first Infantry Regiment at Oldenburg in 1893, vowing (as an aristocrat might) “to cultivate a sense of chivalry among my officers, and efficiency and firm discipline,” animated by “the love of work and independence side by side with a high ideal of service.” 

    Kaiser Wilhelm II acceded to the imperial throne in 1888, causing German foreign policy to enter “a more bellicose phase after the new kaiser dispensed with Bismarck in 1890.” Despite his extraordinary achievements, Bismarck had been too cautious for young Kaiser Willy’s taste. Still, for a time, perhaps somewhat to Hindenburg’s disappointment (war being the condition of rapid promotion in military organizations), peace continued. So did the slow but steady pace of promotions: chief of staff of the Eighth Army Corps in Goblenz, then brigadier general, the major general and commander of the Twenty-eight infantry Division of Karlsruhe in 1900. In 1905, “he reached the pinnacle of his peacetime military career” as lieutenant general and commander of the Fourth Army Corps at Magdeburg, making him “one of only twenty-four corps commanders in Germany.” Seeing no prospects for further promotion, he retired in 1911 at the age of sixty-four.

    By then, his political convictions were settled. “The subordination of the individual to the good of the community” was “not only a necessity,” in his eyes, “but a positive blessing,” one that “gripped the mind of the German army, and through it, that of the German nation.” That nation was surrounded by enemies, indeed oppressed by them, as he supposed. The Geist— the spirit, the mind—of that nation would animate its soldiers in the wars of the future, conducted by means of what the author calls “battles of annihilation.” As the historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, enthusiastically, war requires “the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the state.” There was a moral claim accompanying German ambition. A popular slogan at the time was “Germanness will cure the world”—cure it of bourgeois money-grubbing, base individualism, and all the other moral niaiseries of liberal democracy. “Anticipating der frishfröhliche Krieg, a short and joyful war, young patriotic Germans answered the call to arms in 1914 with pride and celerity.”

    The authors remark that Hindenburg and his colleagues were also Fachmenschen —literally ‘facts-men’ or specialists. Technically astute, loyal to a fault,” they “confined [themselves] to an operational and Eurocentric perspective that eschewed study and reflection about the wider socioeconomic and political aspects of war.” That is to say that they read Clausewitz, but without understanding, or perhaps without wanting to acknowledge, his core teaching, that war is a continuation of politics, rightly limited by political aims. Thus, “lacking firsthand knowledge of the world outside of Europe, or of the world of business and industry within and without Europe, Hindenburg also had little exposure to military grand strategy,” instead trying to solve “difficult operational problems by fostering tactical excellence and an aggressive spirit”—by treating means as ends. In the First World War, Hindenburg shared the prevailing preference for offensive operations. This worked on the Eastern Front, where he and Ludendorff ran things, while it failed on the Western Front, where the French and their British allies were able to arrest their advance with trench warfare.

    Hindenburg had anticipated a short war. Russia struck first, however, invading East Prussia in August 1914, driving the Eighth Army back. When the Army’s commander, Maximilian von Prittwitz recommended retreat into West Prussia, Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff called Hindenburg out of retirement to replace him, adding Erich Ludendorff as Hindenburg’s chief of staff. “Known to be a hothead” who “suffered from nerves when plans went awry,” Ludendorff needed “someone higher ranking…to take command and provide stability and aristocratic presence” to bring out the best in him—that being his “combination of tactical skill, operational insight, and boundless energy.” “In their postwar memoirs, both men celebrated the Hegelian synthesis they had forged during the war,” although as the war went on, Ludendorff became the more dominant partner, quite likely to Germany’s disadvantage. But by the end of August, the two men worked to regroup their forces and counterattack. Meanwhile, the Russians overreached and fell victim to the Eighth Army’s flanking maneuvers at the Battle of Tannenberg—so named by Hindenburg himself, as it was fought in the vicinity of a fifteenth-century Prussian defeat by Polish and Lithuanian forces (not Russians but nonetheless Slavs—close enough for government work). “It is a great joy to me that I was able to wipe out that disgrace,” Hindenburg intoned. “Tannenburg was Hindenburg’s victory,” “a stunning victory” which destroyed the Russian Second Army, induced its commander to commit suicide, and resulted in the capture of 92,000 Russian troops. While this only stiffened Russian determination to fight on, it also buoyed the German Geist and made Hindenburg the nation’s hero.

    Germany’s main problem, however, wasn’t its morale but its overall war strategy. In 1905, General Alfred von Schlieffen wrote a plan for a two-front war, calling for a short (six-week) war on France, which would be overwhelmed by superior German forces attacking through Belgium, followed by a war against Russia. Moltke had modified the Schlieffen Plan, reducing the number of troops in the West. When that offensive failed Wilhelm II sacked him and put Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn in his place. By now, Germany faced a war on two fronts and a naval war with Great Britain. No contingency plan had been written; “there was no consensus about what to do next,” and Falkenhayn persisted in prioritizing the Western Front, despite continued German successes against Russia. Even that effort was hampered by the failure of Germany and its ally, Austria-Hungary, to coordinate their forces. The Austro-Hungarians proceeded to lose catastrophically in Galicia, with 250,000 causalities and 100,000 captured. Ludendorff complained that Germany was “shackled to a corpse”; for their part, the Austro-Hungarian High Command chafed under German contempt. Such “recriminations notwithstanding,” Hindenburg and Ludendorff reinforced their ally’s position in Poland, and Hindenburg was named Field Marshal.

    They urged Falkenhayn to send them the troops they needed to finish the war in the East. “Much of the strategic plot of 1915 and 1916 on the German side revolved around the debate and infighting between ‘Westerners’ led by Falkenhayn and ‘Easterners’ led by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.” In this struggle, “Falkenhayn prevailed in part because he had the kaiser’s confidence.” Eventually, however, Hindenburg’s ascendency continued. “Whereas the kaiser was flighty, insecure, and vain (Viennese wags wrote that he ‘insisted on being the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at ever funeral’) Hindenburg exuded confidence and spoke with dignified modesty.” Wilhelm II was quietly and gradually cordoned off from military matters by the military officers themselves. “Hindenburg became ‘the savior of the fatherland,’ a man who had selflessly answered his country’s call to duty well after most men his age had retired,” a symbol of “mature masculinity to thousands of German men,” a “loyal husband and loving father,” combined, to German women, a courageous and just leader to the soldiers. “Larger than life, he nevertheless exhibited proper humility and modesty before God,” “character, rather than intellectual brilliance,” being his “core strength.” In a republican regime, he would have been a latter-day George Washington, but Germany was no republic. And it wouldn’t be long before the young, impetuous Ludendorff would come to dominate the older, more cautious Hindenburg, even as Hindenburg had sidelined the young, impetuous kaiser.

    “His directness and devotion to duty endeared him to his soldiers and to the German people.” The esteem was mutual, as he told an American interviewer, the former U.S. senator Albert J. Beveridge (famous for his 1900 speech, “The March of the Flag”): “Our knowledge that we are right; the faith of the nation that we shall win [NB: “shall”]; their willingness to die in order to win; the perfect discipline of our troops; their understanding of orders; their greatest intelligence, education and spirit; our organization and resources” guarantee German victory. It is, of course, not inconceivable that Hindenburg talked that way in the hope of persuading Americans not to intervene on the side of France and Great Britain, but there is no reason to doubt that he meant it, or most of it.

    In 1916, Falkenhayn doubled down on his bet that the French would fold. His new strategy, the Ermattungsstrategie, aimed at defeating France in a “war of wearing-down.” It didn’t work: Falkenhayn not only failed to coordinate strategy with the Austro-Hungarians, he failed to share it “with his own army commanders.” The result was the Battle of Verdun, where “Germans gave better than they got” but the French held them off. “Like Tannenberg,” the Battle of Verdun “spawned its own sustaining mythology,” as General Philippe Pétain’s resolute insistence, “They shall not pass!” became the watchword of the French for the remainder of the war. Now, Germany’s campaign on the Eastern Front also faltered, as Russia retook Galician and the Bukovina, capturing half a million Austro-Hungarians while doing so. Had Falkenhayn not gone into Verdun but instead had aided the Austro-Hungarian campaign against Italy, Italy might well have been knocked out of the war, Austria-Hungary could have brought his forces out of Italy in time to halt the Russian offensive in Galicia. These “uncoordinated actions wet the stage for Russia’s greatest victory of the war” and for the success of the British offensive at the Somme River.

    By September 1916, with war prospects looking increasingly desperate, Ludendorff’s energy had overcome Hindenburg’s moderation, as the younger man demanded equality in command. Recognizing that the war “had become a colossal Materialschlacht, or material struggle, waged by modern industrial juggernauts,” they conceived the “Hindenburg Program,” a “concerted attempt to mobilize fully, if somewhat belatedly, for total war.” Registering the ethos of the German regime, they supposed that “an economy could be commanded like an army.” It can, but with bad consequences. The long-range consequences should have been obvious: deficit spending leading to inflation, commercial sclerosis caused by the removal of voluntary incentives to work. The medium-range consequence affected the course of the war itself; “the sacrifices required and incurred by modern warfare’s destructive industrialism drove Germany, as well as the Entente powers, to inflate strategic goals to justify national sacrifice.” Even as the “war of wearing-out” slowly exhausted all sides, even as military production goals dislocated the elements of the German political economy, leading to food shortages, rulers needed to make ever more “grandiose political and territorial demands, ruling out opportunities for a compromise peace, which Hindenburg and Ludendorff rejected anyway.” Nor did their mass deportation of Belgian workers to Germany, where they were dragooned into working in factories in order to keep German men on the front lines, make the German regime seem an attractive partner in negotiations. Worse, the average German didn’t fare much better than the hapless Belgians, as his rulers “treat[ed] citizens as subjects who had to put up or shut up.” For example, women were told to pitch in to the war effort or “expect to go hungry”; “barking commands to grieving widows was not the way to win hearts and minds.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff assumed that German hearts and minds had already been won (true) and that they would remain won by dint of an unwavering sense of moral duty, however German persons were treated (false).

    Anticipating an Anglo-French offensive in 1917, Hindenburg and Ludendorff prudently put their forces in a defensive posture, withdrawing several miles, leaving booby traps in their wake, constructing a battle zone consisting of pillboxes, trenches, barbed wire, and tank traps, then positioning mobile troops behind all these structures, establishing an “elastic system of defense in depth.” Unfortunately for German fortunes, the wisdom of these military measures was not equaled by their political strategy in the east. Ludendorff pushed for the revival of the kingdom of Poland, expecting to constitute a powerful Polish army to invade Russia. Not only did Poles “not relish serving as cannon fodder for German ambitions,” the policy steeled the weakening czarist regime against any compromise peace. Russia soon “collapsed into Bolshevism,” whose leaders promised to sue for peace, and that “contagion…soon spread to the German army in 1918.” 

    Things looked no better at sea, where an effective Entente blockade “continued to bite into the German home front.” Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Admiral Henning von Holzendorff successfully urged “unrestricted” submarine warfare against the blockade and against American shipping to the Entente countries. No longer would German sailors board civilian ships to search for contraband; they would simply sink them. Hindenburg and Ludendorff understood that this could goad the Americans into declaring war, but they gambled that the navy could cripple the Entente “before U.S. soldiers reached France in significant numbers,” a decision that “cost Germany the war.” British exposure of the Zimmerman telegram, an appeal to the Mexican government for “alliance and financial support in return for a Mexican offensive to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona,” only further fueled American outrage and hardly persuaded Mexicans. “The Second Reich needed a second Bismarck to emerge, a master diplomat possessing the guile and force of will” to reign in the generals, but it was stuck with Wilhelm II, who averred, “The soldiers and the army, not parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded the German Empire together. I put my trust in the army.” Hindenburg “found himself becoming an erstatz kaiser.” He and Ludendorff put the blame for Germany’s declining prospects not on themselves but on the hapless Chancellor of the Empire, Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg, whom Ludendorff charged with abetting “German Radical Social Democracy,” with its pusillanimous “longing for peace.” They replaced him with a cipher. Wilhelm II had “essentially granted Hindenburg and Ludendorff the power to fire and hire chancellors at will.” The parliamentary parties fell into line and the military commanders stepped up their implausible propaganda, pretending that war casualties were low, and no shortages of food or other consumer goods existed. 

    All this notwithstanding, “with Russia’s collapse, prospects for victory brightened,” and on the occasion of a national celebration of his seventieth birthday Hindenburg “issue[d] a ringing manifesto,” telling Germans to give no thought to the aftermath of the war (“this only brings despondency into our ranks and strengthens the hopes of the enemy”) but to “trust that the German oak will be given air and light for its free growth,” and that “God will be with us to the end!” True enough, God being with all sincere Christians—but He is with us when we suffer and die as much as when we live and succeed. In all, for the political landscape of postwar Germany, with a citizenry accustomed to the regime of militarist monarchy, not commercial republicanism, “the barren soil they left behind was far more hospitable to the hardy weeds of fascism than to the fragile flowers of parliamentary democracy.”

    At the beginning of 1918, with victory on the Eastern Front secured and the French army weakening, Germany’s prospects on land looked fairly good. If they could secure the Slavic countries, bring them under German hegemony, they might rival or even surpass the United States as a continental power. But unrestricted submarine warfare hadn’t taken out the British navy, enabling Great Britain to continue to reinforce France. With no “grand strategy to win the war,” and no intention to negotiate a settlement, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, especially Ludendorff, determined to launch a mass offensive in the spring, hoping to win the war before the Americans could arrive, that summer. “They were infected by victory disease.” All of this only “confirmed in Western eyes the insatiable appetite of German militarism.” They had reversed the teachings of Bismarck and Clausewitz, prioritizing military over political aims. Whereas tactical and operational war policies “admitted rational solutions by diligent soldier-specialists” such as themselves, strategic and political policy “required collaboration with allies and statesmen, both of whom Hindenburg and Ludendorff held in contempt.”

    A major difficulty resulted from their victory in the East. Germany had taken half of Russia’s industrial base and almost 90 percent of its coal mines; the Bolsheviks plotted revenge. The continued threat from Russia, along with the treaty that made Rumania a vassal of Germany and Austro-Hungary, required Germany to maintain three dozen divisions in the regions, with no possibility of shifting them in time for the planned offensive in the West. “In coercing sweeping concessions from Russia and Rumania, Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s reach exceeded their grasp.” They “placed their trust in battle,” hoping for “a larger Tannenberg” to be obtained “through higher levels of frontline effectiveness.” But they simply lacked the means to win on the Western Front, where national armies backed by the resources of their empires opposed them. “This was not Prussia fighting Austria in 1866 or France in 1870.” Once the French and British commanders “accepted the wisdom of a unified Entente command” under General Ferdinand Foch, “total victory by feats of arms was unattainable” for the Germans. A series of “costly offensives” in spring-summer 1918 failed “to shatter the Entente’s will”; the German army was “conquering itself to death.” By now, the Americans had arrived, under the command of General John Pershing. Ludendorff’s lunges at Paris failed, thanks to continued French valor, American reinforcements and, during the final offensive, the Italians. Although the offensives gained substantial territories, they came at the expense of almost a million casualties, with no replacements, anymore.

    In addition, Hindenburg resisted the very concept of machine warfare; against the Entente’s 800 tanks the Germans fielded eighteen; they had one-third the number of trucks than the Entente forces. “It is always bad,” Hindenburg intoned, “when an army tries through technical innovation, to find a substitute for the spirit. That is irreplaceable.” The difficulty is that the human spirit is embodied, and the bodies of the German soldiers were being ground up. This fact never quite got through to Hindenburg or Ludendorff, isolated as they kept themselves from the conditions at the front and refusing to believe bad reports. Exhausted German troops faced an Entente counter-offensive along the Marne River, losing another 420,000 in battlefield deaths and 340,000 to injury and capture. That powerful Geist upon which Hindenburg depended evaporated, replaced by German Zerrisenheit, “profound disorientation, dissonance, and despair.” Scapegoats were needed, and they weren’t to include the German High Command, if the commanders could help it. “Far easier to believe a big lie—that radical socialists and war profiteers (especially of Jewish extraction) had betrayed Germany—rather than to accept the disturbing truth that Germany’s betrayers were its most renowned and respect leaders.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff didn’t scruple to encourage this misdirection, preferring to “shift blame from themselves to Germany’s new civilian leaders,” after the surrender and the collapse of the monarchic regime. (He shrewdly “left the armistice negotiations to the new government,” so that “the brush of total defeat…tarred Germany’s nascent parliamentary government instead of the army.”) And while after the war Ludendorff soon discredited himself by allying with Hitler, “Hindenburg’s reputation survived Germany’s collapse largely intact,” “a testament to Hindenburg’s gravitas, as well as the German people’s need for a noble figure who could uphold the nation’s dignity in defeat.” The authors praise Hindenburg for his “invaluable service” in overseeing the demobilization of what remained of the army, “prevent[ing] a military coup.” He also helped to defeat the Communist uprising in Berlin in January 1919, which would have destroyed the Weimar Republic at its outset.

    The harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty exacted punishment for the generals’ misjudgment, although most now would say that its punitive terms themselves constituted both an overreach and an underreach, setting up the next world war. Even at the time, General Pershing, “among others, had warned that leaving the German army intact without its experiencing the humiliation of a final defeat would delude Germany into thinking it had been perfidiously sold out rather than physically whipped”; that was the underreaching. Hindenburg himself propagated the stab-in-the-back lie, as it “freed him from blame” for his conduct of the war. The overreaching consisted of the punitive character of the peace, “highlighted and exploited” by the German Right, poorly complemented by the Entente’s complacent failure to enforce those terms. 

    The authors remark something now mostly forgotten: that the Weimar Republic was a success, initially. The regime consolidated after fending off the Hitler-Ludendorff ‘Beerhall Putsch’ in 1923, and “by early 1925, political stability and economic prosperity reduced radical parties such as Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) to nuisances,” with the Nazis winning a paltry “less than 3 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1924 and 1928.” In those years, it was rather from Left that the main threat to republicanism came, but in April 1925 Hindenburg’s election to the presidency (having by now dissociated himself from Ludendorff’s Jewish conspiracy claims) stabilized the political atmosphere mostly by simply occupying this largely symbolic office. “Craving stability and national unity, Germans rallied behind Hindenburg as an ersatz kaiser and father to a ‘fatherless generation.'” As president, he toured the country giving speeches in favor of “a policy of strict constitutionalism that did him credit.” He went on to defeat Hitler for the presidency in 1932. But parliamentary dithering and a nearly constant reshuffling of cabinets (twenty in the thirteen years of the regime’s existence), along with hyperinflation, followed by the worldwide financial collapse, ruined the regime and enabled the Nazis to win a plurality of Reichstag seats, voters being more alarmed by the Communists.

    Although French commander Ferdinand Foch and Charles de Gaulle (in his first book, La Discorde chez l’ennemi) praised Hindenburg as a patriot, distinguishing him from the younger, more militant Ludendorff, the authors here disagree, characterizing him instead as the embodiment of “militarism gone mad.” A Prussian patriot, yes, but one who refused “to work sincerely for a republican Germany” after the war, allowing himself “to be co-opted by rightist elements and, eventually, by Hitler, through bribes, flattery, and promises of a return to glory for the army.” (For example, Hitler added five thousand acres to Hindenburg’s family estate, after Hindenburg, as president of the Weimar Republic, chose him as chancellor in 1933.) In his partial defense, the authors grant that by the early Thirties Hindenburg was 85 years old, “worn down and fed up.” They guess that he expected his German conservative allies to contain Hitler, still another example of his wishful thinking. At this point, even Ludendorff had more sense, saying of Hindenburg’s handover of the chancellorship to Hitler, “Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”

    This and much that preceded it indicates that Hindenburg’s patriotism was not so much in question throughout his life. His judgment was the problem. Politics is a better school of prudence than the military, and Hindenburg was schooled in the army.