Part 1: The German Socialism of Eugen Dühring

Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) was born in Berlin the son of a Prussian bureaucrat. He studied law, philosophy and political econ­omy at the University of Berlin. Although he began his career by practicing law (1856–59), he was forced to give up this profession at the age of twenty eight when he was blinded through a congenital defect.

However, Dühring accepted his fate heroically declaring that “[this catastrophe] did not dampen but increased the enthusiasm with which I had sketched out for myself even previously a human vocation of intellectual scope—my goal was my consolation—of all the thoughts that remained remote from me. In my later life it has been up to now the remotest to complain about my blindness.”

Dühring took his doctorate in 1861 at the University of Berlin with a dissertation entitled De Tempore, Spatio, Causalitate atque de Analysis Infinitesimalis Logica (On Time, Space, Causality and on Infinitesimal Logical Analysis). In 1863 he became university lec­turer in philosophy and national economy. His earliest published works were national economic ones influenced by his reading of the German-American economist Friedrich List (1789–1846) and the American Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879) who were both in fa­vour of organic economics with a strong emphasis on protectionism and national interest.

Dühring’s economic doctrines are detailed in Kapital und Ar­beit (Capital and Labor) (Berlin, 1865), Careys Umwälzung der Volkswirtschaftshehre (München, 1865), Kritische Grundlegung der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Berlin, 1866), and Die Verkleinerer Careys (Breslau, 1867). Already the ethical orientation of his economic studies was revealed in his early publication of a work entitled Der Wert des Lebens (Breslau, 1865). Two further philosophical publications (Natürliche Dialektik, Berlin, 1865, and Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1869) were followed by yet other works on national economy, the Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus (Berlin, 1871), and the Cursus der National- und Sozialökonomie (Berlin, 1873). A fuller elaboration of his philosophical system was presented in the Cursus der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1875).

While Dühring’s lectures were very successful, he adopted from the start a critical attitude to the university and its institutions, and the improbability of his acquiring a professorship as a result of this conflict only sharpened his attacks. Finally, in 1877, under the pres­sure created by his attacks on German universities and their pro­fessors as well as those on Helmholtz in his Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik, (Berlin, 1873), Dühring was removed from the university.

This dismissal was later attributed by him to the machination of the Jewish elements in the university and of their influential agents in the press. His later publications as a private scholar — including two works on literature, Die Überschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden (Karlsruhe, 1881) and Die Grössen der modernen Literatur (Leipzig, 1893), as well as Die Judenfrage (Karls­ruhe, 1881), an intellectual autobiography, Sache, Leben und Feinde (Karlsruhe, 1882), and a work on religion, Der Ersatz der Religion durch Volkommeneres (Karlsruhe, 1883) — represent his comprehen­sive treatment of the problem of Jewish involvement in European society. His major interest in social and political economy however is reinforced in his last works, a second edition of Capital und Arbeit entitled Waffen, Capital, Arbeit (Leipzig, 1906) and Soziale Rettung (Leipzig, 1907), which are consolidations of his economic and phil­osophic positions.

Dühring battled for reform in all fields of life, being exceptionally qualified to comment in an expert way on most of them. And it must be noted that, while the Jewish mentality is emphatically located as the root of the evil of society in his later works, his anti-Judaism was evident long before his dismissal from the university, in his earliest economic and philosophical works. His social ideal was based on a moral cultivation of the individual spirit which would liberate the personality from all external and internal hindrances and permit it to form a vital culture. To this end Dühring founded a journal called Der Personalist und Emanzipator in 1899, designed to strengthen the human-individual spirit in its opposition to the external powers of nature as well as to those of exploitative social groups, especially the Jews.

Unlike most of the other philosophical anti-Semites, such as Fichte and Schopenhauer and Chamberlain, Dühring was not an idealist but a realist. He dismissed metaphysics as being one of the sources of the superstitious errors of mankind and his mathemati­cal denial of infinity was reflected in his stern view of human life as being empirically and socially determined. However, even in this realism, Dühring retained a vestige of metaphysics since he posited behind all temporality a “primordial being” from which the universe evolves. Only, for human beings in their terrestrial condition, the actually present is far more valuable than speculations regarding the ulti­mate source of reality.

What takes the place of metaphysical ques­tions in Dühring’s work is the Socratean imperative of morality. For, all life, while materially manifested, is informed with vitality and activity, categories which cannot be reduced to matter. Man-made institutions like religion are to be removed only because they are invariably encrusted with superstitions and act as a stumbling block to the full realization of the human personality.

In economics, the Marxist view of class-warfare is to be similarly considered as a dangerous superstition which obscures in convolut­ed dialectic the real sympathy that should and could exist between employers and workers and which alone forms the basis of a healthy social ethos. In this, Dühring was one with the other ‘German socialists’, in­cluding Oswald Spengler (Preuβentum und Sozialismus) and Wer­ner Sombart (Deutscher Sozialismus) who paved the way for Na­tional Socialist economic theory.

Like the anti-democratic thinkers of the Weimar Republic, both Conservative and Socialist, Dühring considered parliamentarism as an outmoded and dangerous system. The Eng­lish Parliament he characterised as a “Repräsentation des Raub- und Raffsystems” (representation of the system of robbery and money-grubbing), since the Tory and Whig parties were nothing but the representatives of belligerent and colonial robbery and capitalis­tic-commercial rapacity. The French parliament was even more basely bourgeois in its representation of financial and stock-ex­change interests. In Germany, parliamentarism receives its hateful stamp from the swaggering Junker and Hebrew bourgeois elements of the so-called Social Democracy in which “one cannot speak of a real rejection of slavery, but which on the contrary uses the traditional familiarity of the masses to slavery to subject them to a party despotism and an exploitation by the parties.” Parliamentary legislation too must be effectively curtailed in its attacks on the workers and their living conditions. Rather, he pro­posed free associations between the concerned parties that resemble economic communes and corporations.

Unlike Marx, Dühring did not consider the reformation of social relations as something that will arise through dialectical necessity from the increasing weakness of the working classes in an industrial society, for this is tantamount to expecting a miracle from the ex­ploitative tendencies of the capitalists. On the other hand, the workers themselves must strive to strengthen themselves through coalitions so as to achieve self-suffi­ciency. The coalitions or communes formed by workers will guaran­tee access of all to property and means of production. The focus is shifted away from the concept of personal property altogether to relations of the right of use of property according to personal capac­ity. The focus is thus shifted away from the concept of personal property altogether to the personal use of this property. Thus owners of property can only own their property according to their individual capacity to do so and if they avoid all tendency to exploitation.

The precondition for the success of such workers’ coalitions, however, is the direction of all their efforts on behalf of the interests of the whole, of the public as a totality, and this can be effected perfectly only when the state enters in their support. The state must act as the mediator between the several socio-economic interests of the pop­ulation, especially since the latter cannot be adequately represented by political parties, which are not truly democratic at all but oli­garchic groupings in which “a considerable part of the people has a place only as a ruled and mostly anonymous mass.” The leadership of the state can be accomplished only by the prevalence of another sense than that of profit-making such as is directive in the British political economy and in that of its followers on the continent.

The prime consideration of the state must be the totality of the as­pirations of the people. Dühring’s Socialitarian economics therefore is nation-bound and not an international economic one. Dühring commends the protective tariff economics of List and Carey, which, as opposed to free-trade economics, is an organic one and

more compatible with the logical consequences of the so­cialist instinct. The tariff party is conscious everywhere of a national interest; it is conscious of a genuine po­litical economy; it does not break up into atomism and individualism that benefit only exploiting individuals.

The Socialitarian principle is thus essentially the replacement of the egoistic individualism of force with the harmonious operation of the sovereignty of the individual. The remedy of the present deplorable situation can be accom­plished therefore only when society is first revolutionized on an an­ti-egoistic basis.

In his discussion of the Jewish question, Dühring makes clear that this revolution may be identified with a revolution against the Jews, as the racial embodiment of self-interest, and points out that “In the country of origin of the French Revolution, in Judaized France, one hears the declaration that the next Revolution will be one against the Jews.”

The fact that parliamentarism has increasingly been dominated by the influence of the Jews and the socialistic proletariat, that is, of those racial and social elements which are the most egoistic, leads Dühring to call for the overcoming of the “Jewish progress and Jun­ker reaction” represents the system of avarice and rapacity. This can be accomplished only by a transitional dictatorship which gives political expression to the anger of the people. Dühring con­ceives of the bearer of such a dictatorship as an intellectually and morally outstanding person whose power is consolidated by armed force and by an elite of like-minded persons filled with the same sense of social justice. The task of this regime would be to create a fertile ground for true justice so that, even after its passing, the society may continue to develop itself in future through its purified spirit and will.

Thus, although Dühring began as a student of socialist doc­trines, he later rejected all forms of collectivism and maintained that true progress proceeds only from individual powerful personalities. Even where groups seem to be the bearers of creative activities, in the final analysis it is individuals at the head of those organisations in whom the entire association achieves its characteristic effect.

The state as an association itself is to be valued only as a check on the various economic associations active in society so that none exploits or damages the other. Dühring’s increasing reliance on the individual personality caused him in his later years to identify the classification of society according to property and interest as a result of the differences of opportunities for development of personal ca­pacity and character which are propagated through the generations by tradition and inheritance.

Unlike the socialists, Dühring considered all property related to personal accomplishment as vigorously to be defended against the acquisitive grasp of socialistic measures. All Marxist denials of social classifications are thus utopian, since a conflict of interests is indivisibly linked to the natural differences between man and man. Only one sort of differenti­ation is to be rejected, that based on violence. The Jewish socialist propaganda of class-warfare is only a result of the introduction of injustice into these natural differences. This injustice is concocted, in the final analysis, not from economic sen­timents but from the original opposition between a powerful warri­or nobility and a powerless slave group such as the Jews themselves have always been. It is not surprising that the Jewish economy transvalues econom­ics through the subordination of the higher to the lower aspirations of the people.

The vital importance of the self-emancipation of the individual is reinforced in Dühring’s doctrine of morality freed from all superstitious religion. Considering the Judaic concept of Yahweh as that of a God of “transcendental terrorism,” Dühring sought to replace the Judeo-Christian ethos by a new social and economic feeling for justice. This entails the rejection first of all of all sorts of exploitation whereby the individual is exposed to harm from the robber-types of the society. The latter are directed by the desire for increasing indi­vidual profit, that is, by the cultivation of a ruthless egoism.

The true concept of justice therefore depends on the substitution of egoism by a radical antiegoism. Only on the ground of this sort of justice can a healthy society and culture develop, a social order in which “entire members would be bound by legal interests and would not aim at basing their own existence and power on the re­duction and destruction of other lives.”

The reform of social justice, however, does not mean the simplis­tic socialist demand of equality for all, since rewards are always directly related to performance; what is to be avoided at all cost, however, are unjust encroachments on personal freedom and in­tegrity which represent the mastery of the exploitative members of the present society. The reform of the “intellectually motivated will” to a better and nobler personal disposition will, in its anti-egoism, be naturally restrained in its inter-personal dealings and its partici­pation in the nexus of economic interests.

That the major representatives of the exploitative economy are Jews Dühring never once doubted. In the Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus, he comments on the commer­cial ethos of the present:

It denies in no way its Semitic relationship and, even though the discernment that we have to bring to the settling of the question of egoism is clear, we cannot attribute an understanding of this to those who, by virtue of their unchangeable egoism, seem to have no organ for scientific reason and for nobler motives in this direction.

This “theoretical obtuseness” of the Jews is an intellectual fortifi­cation “behind which has been entrenched up to now the apotheosis of egoism, the glorification of the art of cheating, and, in general, the entire celebration of the celebration of the fine strategy of cunning exploita­tion.”

In his Cursus der Philosophie, he reiterates the commercial and financial role appropriated everywhere by the Jews after the fall of their own state and their parasitical infiltration into other nations. The historically attested “cruelty and crass egoism” of the Jews has thus seeped into the public through the press and even into legis­lation, which have been increasingly dominated by them. Indeed, “even parts of science which are especially ventured into by the Jews on account of their exclusion from others already reveal in many ways the stamp of the new form of business directed to profit.” At first agreeing to a subordinate position in exchange for the privilege of making money through underhanded means, and then gradually currying favour with the power-holders through their increasing fi­nancial advantages, the Jews have inexorably developed a mastery in their host societies. “To be a slave or to make slaves—that is the alternative of the peoples disposed to lack of freedom.” The “slave-form of religion” is thus the characteristic and influential contribu­tion of the Jews to intellectual history.

At the time of writing this work on philosophy, Dühring still be­lieved that socialism itself would be sufficient to counter the egoistic system of the Jews since it is based on the organic sensibility of the people which itself is radically opposed to the alien character of ex­ploitative Jewry. In fact, Dühring still hoped that, when society removed the sup­ports for the material egoism and exploitative activity of the Jews, the latter would be forced to live on their own work and not para­sitically on that of others. Moreover, he thought that, since his form of socialism, or Socialitarianism, would guarantee the economic in­dependence of women as well as men, the former would not enter into marriages of economic convenience with Jewish men any longer since, according to Dühring’s belief, there could be no “personal in­clination” thereto. This would preclude ‘’the danger that the Jewish elements may exert some hateful influence on the physiology of the national character.” The removal of opportunities for the exploitative activity of the Jews would at the same time make possible in the long run “a grad­ual improvement of the ways of thought and feeling” of the Jews and equip them for “functions freed of egoism.”

This generous optimism of 1875 was, however, soon replaced by a more realistic understanding of the impossibility of the ethical im­provement of the Jews. Dühring’s, increasing concentration on the Jewish problem since the first publication of the Judenfrage in 1881 led to an increasing annoyance with the destructive alien element in European society until, in the final editions of the Judenfrage, he clearly maintained that, since the Jewish character was an un­changeable one, the only means that would be effective against them would have to be of a violent nature.

In the last edition of Judenfrage (1901), Dühring even suggested that all the specific social and political remedies proposed by him against the Jewish evil in the earlier editions were bound to be inadequate in the long run and must necessarily be reinforced by stronger means which do not permit the possibility of Jewish existence within European communities any longer. As he explained in Sache, Leben and Feinde, the Jewish mentality is a criminal one and its effect on the rest of society is that “the corruption of the senses and the spirit comes first and the lowering of the feeling for justice paves the way for the material ravaging and devouring. For this reason the answer to the Jewish question belongs not merely to economics but in general to life and to existence, in all contexts.”

He now considered the Jewish question not merely in racial terms but in terms of the question of estates, especially those bearing arms and those those that are derived of them. This included the Junkers as a target of Dühring’s criticism, since they represented a segment of the exploitative population that would naturally have to be overcome: “Junker and priest, Jew and bourgeois, were to be analysed from different viewpoints but still in a similar way. . . . Crime has no right to existence and must be destroyed in its embodiments—that is the axiom from which I start everywhere, thus even in the questions of race and estate.”

His animus against the Junker ruling class is due to his convic­tion that militarism and exploitation are the characteristics of an exploitative stratum that harms the peaceful occupation of the peas­ant: “the real peasant is directed to peace from his occupation it­self and . . . the unjustified belligerent disturbances throughout the world are based primarily on a weapon-bearing estate which has lived throughout history only by the sword, thus on the robbed or forced work of others.”

He naturally concedes that even the working class could become degenerate and unworthy of consideration: “Even a working class that has degenerated in its estate can have forms which forfeit the right to existence as much as any other section.” Dühring’s final effort was to raise his reformatory idea to the status of a world-historical principle. The case of the Jews, however, was the “most serious” since it revolved on “original natural defects and criminal natural creatures.” The Jewish eman­cipation is meaningless since the Jews will never be free, for a

true emancipation worthy of the name is accomplished only where the personal freedom and integrity is established and secured fundamentally and in all contexts, but especially in the individual. Therefore, the emancipation of the Hebrews is the real and decisive one for man­kind; for, to remain exposed to the powers of lies and exploitation, of intellectual and material deception, indeed to fall victim to them to a certain degree through the laws themselves and for the sake of justice, so to speak, means to be not free. . . . To be free or not to be is our solution in all things and for all.

Part 2: The Jewish Question

One of the most important contributions of Dühring’s work to the history of anthropology and culture is the distinction he makes between the Jews and the other Semites so that all the features of the so-called “anti-Semitism” are in fact directed only to the Jews as a specific branch of the Semitic race, “the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race,” and not to all the members of that race in general.

The Jewish question too is not a religious one but of the inherent and unchangeable character of the Jewish people. Thus, as Dühring puts it,

it lies in the interest of a noble mankind, thus of a true humanity and culture, that this obscurantism of religion which has up to now covered and protected the worst characteristics of the Jews with its darkness be fully re­moved so that the Jew may be revealed to us in his natu­ral and inalienable constitution.

In general, Dühring believes that all official religions are en­crusted with superstition and it would be best to substitute religious dogma with something more genuinely spiritual in social institutions. The point of departure for Dühring’s critique of Jewry is thus an entirely moral one. The chief accusation against the Jews is that they are morally corrupt and therefore thrive most in a society where moral corruption has already set in or has begun to set in.

This is the justification of the appellation of the Jewish race as a parasitical one since it feeds on the moral corruption of the host so­ciety, a corruption either created by it or, if already present to some degree, fostered by it. The dangers of moral corruption through the admixture of Jews into European society have increased particularly after the emancipation of Jewry in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century. The source of the Jewish corrupt nature is located by Dühring in their basic lack of conscience and cruelty vis-à-vis the other nations. Exploitation of other nations is their major aim and a genuine sense of human rights is utterly lacking in their commercial, essen­tially usurious, dealings. This lack of a moral sense makes true pol­itics impossible among them and their involvement in all sorts of so-called Socialist movements is only conditioned by their desire to extract advantages for themselves from disturbed social and eco­nomic conditions.

The religious constitution of the Jews is evidenced most clearly in their overarching theocratic ideas of society wherein the Jewish people are enslaved to their Lord God but, in turn, must enslave the rest of mankind to please this sole, jealous monarch of the world. Yahweh is indeed nothing but an embodiment of the Jewish self-inter­est and represents the very opposite of the Indo-European natural pantheon.

Germanic mythology is ruled by concepts of fidelity and na­ture-based spirituality which have unfortunately been obscured by the overlaying of the original German moral character by Christian­ity, a religion which is very closely related to the Jewish racial culture in which it arose as a reaction to the evils of the Jewish nature. The Jewish religion has no truly religious character but, instead, a markedly economic-political one. Given their natural proclivity to prof­it-making, it is not surprising that the Jews have, in their extensive wanderings away from their homeland, curried favor with pow­er-holders in all ages through their financial loans. The Alliance Israelite Universelle based in Paris is in fact a modern confirmation of the operation of the political influence of Jews on an international scope under the cover of an apparently religious organization.

The influence of the Jews on society is more evident in the up­per and middle classes than in the lower, since the former are more exposed to the thoroughly Judaized press and literature of modern times.

The Jews themselves lack all creative power in science as well as in art and merely trade in the ideas of others. The Jewish economist, David Ricardo, for example, derived his famous ground-rent theo­ry from the Scot James Anderson, and the Jewish mathematician, Carl Gustav Jacobi, derived his ideas from the Norwegian Niels Abel. Even the sole distinguished philosopher of the Jewish race, Spinoza, has produced a system which is singularly lacking in all ideals above rational calculation. The neglect of compassion in his Ethics as a feeling-based category to be overcome by rational understanding points to the real cult of intellectual power which lies at the base of his system.

The Jewish talent in literature is always of a hybrid sort displaying even amidst occasional attempts at Germanic sublimity an irresisti­ble proclivity to buffoonery, as in the case of Heine, and to polemics, as in the case of Börne. The Jews have also turned Lessing’s sympa­thetic attitude to the Jews (perhaps, as Dühring maintains, because Lessing was himself originally of Jewish descent) into an exaggerat­ed cult of Lessing as the glory of the German Enlightenment when ­ in fact his works are entirely artificial and lacking in genuine emo­tional power.

The Jews lack all heroism of character required to produce epic or dramat­ic literature and can, at best, attain some weak lyricism as revealed in their ancient Psalms. Like Richard Wagner, Dühring also criticiz­es the unpleasant manner of Jewish chanting in the synagogues and goes even farther than Wagner in his anti-Judaism in maintaining that Wagner himself compromised in the end with the Jews in ac­cepting generous donations from the Jews at Bayreuth and in pur­porting to save those Jews who supported his “music of the future,” rather like a dispenser of indulgences. The general unsuitability of the Jews for artistic enterprise is, in fact, located by Dühring in their lack of “that free and unselfish activity of the mind which alone ad­vances to uninterested truth and beauty”.

The Judaized press, however, constantly ridicules the German as having the nature a simpleton, of the “deutschen Michael.” The Jews have, through their involvement with the political parties of the present, corrupted the concepts of socialism and social democracy. Their aim in the realm of economics has been always, whether it be through Marx or through Lassalle, to foster economic dissatis­faction through terms such as “class-warfare” in order ultimately to achieve a “merging of all nations into a Jewish kingdom.”

The German state was in fact founded originally on the moral quality of loyalty, which was the basis of the feudal system which developed therefrom in the Middle Ages. Loyalty should thus be the source of future German politics as well. Jewish politics, on the other hand, is based on betrayal—of Europeans as well as, occa­sionally, of Jews too by other Jews. The intolerant Jewish ethos can operate only in an exploitative manner and under the enforcement of a terrorism learnt from their fear-inspiring Lord God.

True piety is lacking in their politics as much as in their religion. The Jewish infiltration into the legislative activities of the German state after their emancipation has enabled them to herd the Ger­man people under the thrall of individualistic “freedom” into the ex­ploitative hands of the Jews. In this they have been abetted by the university professors and intelligentsia, since the latter depend for the most part on the Jewish press for their reputation. The advance­ment of Jews from an original pariah status to the leading political positions in the European nations is evidenced by the rise of Gam­betta in France and of Disraeli in England. Gambetta rose to power on the basis of a French political fiasco for which his own people were responsible. Disraeli’s opportunism is manifest in his use of the stock-exchange business to acquire foreign lands. But the true manipulative schemes of the Jew are revealed by Disraeli himself in his fictional writings such as Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. The very appoint­ment of a Jew like Disraeli as the head of the English aristocracy is a sad sign of the degeneration of the English in recent times.

The solution of the Jewish problem must be an international one if it is to have any lasting effect. One of the major preparatory steps is the elimination of the false idea of tolerance. Tolerance of baseness is a contradiction of the principle of human tolerance itself: “Humane reciprocity will consist in living in peace insofar as the nobler humanity comes together in the good. For the rest, however, precisely battle and destruction will emerge so much more energetically against the inhuman.” Similarly, the principle of equality cannot mean the consideration of that which is unequal as equal. The economic communes and corporations which Dühring suggests in his Socialitarian system thus must reserve the right to exclude harmful economic elements like the Jews.

The political solution of the Jewish problem lies first in the spiritual emancipation of the people from the Jewish mentality and ethos. But individual natures are too weak to carry out this process of reformation of society by themselves and so must be helped by state legislation and administration. The disenfranchisement of the Jews is a sine qua non of all remedial action with regard to the Jewish problem. Their exclusion, internment, and deportation must be encouraged wherever possible.

However, Dühring is too realistic to think that the creation of an independent Israeli state in Palestine and the deportation of the Jews to it would suffice to solve the Jewish problem. For, the Jewish race is an essentially nomadic one and will soon disperse again throughout the world even if it did manage to concentrate itself in Palestine for a while. The nomadic nature of the Jews itself is ex­plained by Dühring as being due to the basically unpleasant nature of the Jews, so that they are repulsive even to themselves when they are alone with themselves and not in the midst of European socie­ty—to whom they are, naturally, far more repugnant.

The specific means to be adopted against the Jews must be un­dertaken in three fields, the political, the economic, and the social. Political representation and occupation of official positions by Jews is to be curtailed immediately in such a way that no Jew can be elect­ed to Parliament any more than any Jew can exercise a right to vote in European elections.

The excess number of Jewish judges must be reduced through forced retirement; the cost of retirement payments incurred hereby would be much less than the damages that are to be anticipated if the Jews continue to distort legislation and justice in the country over a long period of time. The financial measures to be adopted against the Jews should be directed by the knowledge that all Jewish racial economics is based on avarice and the ambition to dominate others. The powerful Jewish financial houses must be nationalized forthwith and placed under official curatorships and state supervision.

This step must be carried out not only in Germany but in every country where the Jews exert such financial power. If we remem­ber Dühring’s identification of the main means by which most of the Jewish finance was acquired by cheating, then we will understand the indispensability of such steps against it. The social means should at first be focused on the chief Jewish agent of social influence, the press, wherewith the Jews turn public opinion into Jewish opinion. Jews must be removed from all ownership as well as editorial positions of newspapers; though, for the cultivation of a public opinion different from the present pre­dominantly Jewish liberal one, radical political changes are neces­sary as well.

Education too should be reoriented in a native Germanic way by the exclusion of Jews from school and university instructorships. If the Jews have succeeded so far in their social endeavours, it is pre­cisely because the university professors have, in their weakness and corruption, encouraged the parasitical activity of the Jews.

Other important social means against the Jews consist in the discouragement of intermarriages between Germans and Jews. He rightly points out that the case where a Jewish woman marries a German man is somewhat better than the reverse since the man is the bearer of the inherited spiritual qualities.

Dühring does not yet think that legislation is necessary for this purpose since the natural aversion that Germans, especially Ger­man women, have to Jews will act as a deterrent. Also, the reduc­tion of the financial power of the Jews and the increasing economic independence of women will make German women less tempted to marry rich Jews for economic reasons. In general, the danger of such mixtures can be successfully reduced only if there is strict legislation regarding the number of Jewish immigrants permitted into a particular territory.

The state’s role in anti-Jewish measures must be supplemented by agitations on the part of the people. The parties themselves are im­potent in their narrow programmes and have too much connection to Jewish agencies to be effective in any way. For example, the meas­ures taken by the German Conservative parties to reduce corrup­tion in society were not specifically limited to the Jews and affected even the better elements engaged in the occupations in question. The Jewish question is first and last a moral question and demands the reestablishment of German loyalty and trust against the frivolity of the Jewish mind and the corruption that creeps under cover of this frivolity.

What is at stake is the very existence, moral and material, of the European peoples, for “if things are not directed, the descendants of traders in old wardrobes, scraps and cattle bones must get to the very bones of the modern peoples after they have pocketed their wealth and lamed their mind through inoculation”. The solution to the Jewish problem must be an international and a continually last­ing one, and Dühring maintains that even the most powerful means cannot be shied away from in the effort to free the better peoples and nations from what he calls their “internal Carthage.”

* * *

The social effect of Dühring’s work can be estimated more gener­ally in the anti-Jewish Congresses organized first at Dresden in 1882, and then at Chemnitz in 1883. At the latter, a division occurred on account of the ideological differences between those who favored Dühring’s more uncompromising views and the Christian elements at the meeting. However, a loose confederation of ‘Reformvereine’ sprang up in the 1880s, and by 1890 there were 136 of them. As Pe­ter Pulzer reports, the extreme view, associated with Dühring, pre­dominated in Westphalia, under the leadership of Dr. König.

While the state social legislation of Bismarck served to allay the enthusiasm regarding the Jewish problem somewhat and to disin­tegrate these anti-Jewish organizations, the movement acquired a new impetus from the leadership of Theodor Fritsch in Leipzig who revitalized it according to the extremist point of view. It was Fritsch’s call for an anti-Jewish organization “above the parties” which cre­ated such seminal nationalist societies as the Thule Society and the Germanen Order. It is true that the latter were in fact not so directly influential on the NSDAP itself, which—though created initially by Karl Harrer (along with Anton Drexler) at the suggestion of the Germanen Or­der that several economic ‘Rings’ of the society should be set up all over the country—ultimately proscribed the Germanen Order for its overly Masonic qualities.

However, Alfred Rosenberg, the National Socialist ideologue wrote a work on the Jewish question very similar to Dühring’s called Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Track of the Jew Through the Ages) (1920). In it he discusses first the his­torical circumstances of the Jews from their diaspora after the de­struction of Jerusalem to their various interventions in modern Eu­ropean politics. The second section deals with the Jewish mentality as revealed in its religious documents and cultural and economic works. The work ends with a discussion of the Jewish ambition for eco­nomic and political mastery of the world and suggests ways of curb­ing this tendency forthwith in Germany. The points contained in Rosenberg’s anti-Jewish program are in many ways similar to the points of the Nürnberg Laws of 1935.

Thus, even if it may not have had an immediate political con­nection with the programs of the National Socialist regime, the extraordinary value of Dühring’s work on the Jews consists in its prophetic accura­cy. Dühring’s systematic uncovering of the viciousness of the Jewish character and his suggestions for the removal of this evil bear the closest resemblance to the increasing anti-Semitic mood, ideologi­cal as well as popular, and the actual course of anti-Semitic events in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

Starting with the measures to exclude Jews from official positions and the prohibition of intermarriages between Jews and Germans promulgated in the Nürnberg Laws of 1935 and ending with in­creasing irritation with the very presence of Jews on German soil, the anti-Judaic programmes of the National Socialists were anticipated almost to the last detail by the blind philosopher of Berlin. Between the first appearance of Dühring’s work and the first major political measures taken against the Jews by the National Socialist re­gime there had elapsed a rather long period of about sixty years; neither Jews nor Jewish sympathisers can blame the Germans for having been too rash in their dealings with a racial group whose social and cultural influence had been philosophically identified as morally criminal. The claims of George Mosse and Donald Niewyk that the brutal­ization of German politics was spurred by the defeat of 1918 is only partially accurate, since the sharp turn of anti-Semitic trends in the Weimar Republic was actually propelled by the blatant arroga­tion of power by those very Jewish elements whom intellectual an­ti-Semites from the start had sought to exclude from German society through more rational social discrimination.

The moral corruption associated with Jewish finance and mores showed no signs of improving since the first publication of Dühring’s work but, rather, it achieved a giddy triumph at the end of World War I in the ill-fated Weimar Republic, which was initially es­tablished as a Socialist republic by Karl Liebknecht, the Jewish agita­tor, and conducted in a markedly Jewish social and political climate. It cannot be very surprising to one who is familiar with Dühring’s analysis of the Jewish ethos and its role in modern Germany that the Germans reacted to this ethos with a populist movement such as National Socialism. Those sections of the population which suffered most from the sense of exploitation at the hands of the Jewish economic and so­cial system naturally supported a German nationalist movement which sought in the end to destroy the Jewish evil at its very roots. As Dühring had foretold, “The German, to be sure, moves his limbs mostly only when the usurpation become too malicious; but if he does that once, then he does that which he undertakes, no matter what, also in a fundamental way.”

In retrospect, therefore, we may consider the National Socialist movement as being in no way an aberration but one which was clearly predicted in advance by philosophical under­standing. Historical discussions of Hitler’s regime which puzzle over the extreme measures taken by it against the Jews and Jewish Bolshe­vism and quickly dismiss them as the products of the monstrous psycho­logical complex of one individual are clearly handicapped by their unfamiliarity with the real philosophic impetuses of an ideological political movement such as National Socialism. Peter Pulzer’s suggestion that Hitler was merely relying on the political effectiveness of anti-Semitism, for instance, seems not to understand that anti-Semitism was in its origins, and throughout its career in the early years of the twentieth century, not a mere tool in German politics (except perhaps in the case of Bismarck) but the very aim of it.

The failure of the National Socialist regime was partly due to its rashness both in internal politics and foreign policy. The hasty foreign political moves made by Hitler at a time when neither the German people nor the remainder of the European nations had yet been forged into a political and cultural unity could not but fail. Be­sides, the powerful influence of the Jewish presence in America and Britain was not reckoned with adequately to forestall the defeat at the hands of the Allies.

The real tragedy of World War II, however, is that the failure of the Nazi movement and the discovery of the National Socialist attempts to eliminate Jewry in Germany have only succeeded in handing over the sympathy of the public to the very elements which formed the pivotal issue of the war. The corruption and degeneration that Dühring and the National Socialists at­tempted to check have proceeded with redoubled vigor after the war, and the enslavement of the European peoples to the Jewish baseness and vulgarity has become almost complete. Dühring’s prophetic philosophical work on the Jewish character thus clearly retains its cautionary significance.

Notes

This essay is taken from the Introduction to my edition of Eugen Dühring, The Jewish Question as a racial, moral and cultural question, with a world-historical answer, London: Ostara Publications, 2019.

Waffen, Capital, Arbeit, p. 73.

Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie and des Sozialismus, p.486.

Ibid. p.489.

Die Judenfrage, (posthumous edition, ed. H. Reinhardt), Leipzig: O.R. Reisland, 1930, p.134.

Soziale Rettung, p. 181.

Thus Dühring also occasionally called his Socialitarian system an ‘Antikratic’ one (as opposed to an ‘Anarchic’ system).

Ibid., p. 453.

Ibid., p. 391.

This was of course written a century ago, when the natural sense of the Europe­an peoples was still relatively uncorrupted by liberalistic indoctrination.

Sache, Leben and Feinde, p. 281.

p. 282.

p. 512.

p. 284.

p. 283.

p. 508f.

This is in fact borne out by the evidence of Josephus regarding the circumstanc­es of the expulsion of Abraham and his tribe from Chaldea, for he states that the Chaldeans drove him out because he forsook the lofty, astronomically oriented, natural philosophy of the Chaldeans for a more mundane ethics (Jewish Antiq­uities, I, 157; cf. Philo the Jew, De mutation nominum, 72–76, and De migratione Abrahami, 184). This first recorded expulsion of the Jewry from a host country is strengthened by the second, dating from Egyptian antiquity, when, according to Dühring himself, the Jews revealed their avaricious worldly nature in their at­tempt to take as much of the Egyptians’ gold and silver with them as possible when they left Egypt.

All quotations from the Judenfrage are from my translation of the sec­ond edition.

Compare Schopenhauer’s contempt for the Jews which was directed by his rec­ognition of their worldly nature and superficial theism, rationalism, and opti­mism. The references to these characteristics of the Jewish mentality are ubiqui­tous in his works. For instance, in his ‘Fragments for the History of Philosophy’ (Parerga and Paralipomena, I), he declares: “[the religion of the Jews] is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and re­volting theism—While all other religions endeavour to explain to the people by symbols and parables the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations”, (cf., Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Ill, Art.48, IV, Art.59; Parerga, I, ‘On Philosophy at the Universities’; and II, ‘On Religion’).

In Sache, Leben und Feinde, Dühring points out that “The belief which Christ demanded was the belief in his person, the blind subjection to the word of the master and prophet, but not that naturally grown fidelity such as it lies in the nature of the better peoples and characters” (p.288) and both in this work and in the Ersatz as well as in the later editions of the Judenfrage, Dühring maintains that the ascetic ordeal of self-crucifixion exemplified by Christ in his life is valid only for the inferior Jewish flesh, embodying the characteristic Jewish self-interest, and should not apply to the healthy peoples.

In his Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie, Dühring declares: “The concept of so-called virtue coincides with that of power. From the logical affirmation of in­dividual power the symbol of all ethical principles is supposed to be ultimately produced by means of the understanding and higher insight” (3rd. ed., Leipzig, -excha1878, p.306f.).

The 16 May 1877 Crisis that brought down the royalist president Patrice MacMahon.

The acquisition of the Suez Canal for Britain with funds derived from the Roth­schilds is a case in point.

That is, at the time of writing the second edition (1881).

Peter Pulzer, The rise of political anti-Semitism, London: Peter Halban, 1988, 99.

Hammer, XI (1912), 153–58, ‘Vom partei-politischen Antisemitismus’.

See Reginald H. Phelps, “’Before Hitler came’: Thule Society and Germanen order’, Journal of Modern History, 35 (1963), 245–61.

See my English edition of this work, The Track of the Jew through the Ages, London: Ostara Publications, 2016.

See George Mosse, “Der erste Weltkrieg und die Brutalisierung der Politik: Betrachtungen über die politische Rechte, den Rassismus, und den deutschen Sonderweg”, in Manfred Funke et al. (ed .), Demokratie und Diktatur: Geist und Gestalt in Deutschland und Europa, Düsseldorf, 1987, pp. 127–139 and Donald Niewyk, “Solving the ‘Jewish problem’: continuity and change in German anti­semitism, 1871–1945”, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), p.370.

Peter Pulzer, The rise of political anti-Semitism, London: Peter Halban, 1988, p.202.

Cf., in this context, Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London: Pinter Publishers, 1991, where he points out that German Fascism can be explained only in terms of a “palingenetic” effort on the part of the German nation to rid itself of all Jewish forms of social and political life.

See for example Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority, Cape Canaveral, FL: Howard Allen Press, 1976, Ch