The Fascifist Archive

Spengler's criticisms of liberalism and his idea of Prussian Socialism were the most welcomed concepts adopted to Nazi ideology

Spengler, in 1919 the same year in which Anton Drexler founded what was to become the NSDAP, published his small book on “Prussianism and Socialism,” he was not offering anything new. Nevertheless, it had its importance, for the time was propitious, and the author was not only a scholar with a reputation which was shortly to become worldwide, but he possessed an audacity rare in academic circles. Spengler sponsored, in “Prussianism and Socialism,” a brand of socialism that was anti-Marxian, anti-republican, anti-capitalist, nationalistic, bellicose, and aristocratic. Spengler warned the workers that for them it was Prussian Socialism or nothing; for the conservatives, socialism or annihilation. Oswald Spengler explains this view in his essay Prussianism and Socialism:

“In order to overcome man’s inborn lethargy, the Prussian socialist ethic maintains that the chief aim of life is not happiness. "Do your duty," it says, "by doing your English capitalist ethic says, "Get rich, and then you won’t have to work any more." There is doubtless something provocative about this latter motto. It is tempting, it appeals to very basic human instincts. The working masses of ambitious nations have understood it well. As late as the nineteenth century it produced the Yankee type with his irresistible practical optimism. The other motto is forbidding. It is for the few who wish to inject it into the community and thus force it upon the masses. The first maxim is for a stateless country, for egoists and Viking types with the urge for constant personal combat, such as we find in English sportsmanship. It implies extreme independence of mind, the right to gain happiness at the expense of all others, as long as one’s strength holds out—in other sewords, scientific Darwinism. The other, however, is an expression of the socialist idea in all its profundity: the will to power, the struggle for happiness, but for the happiness of the totality, not of the individual. In this sense Frederick William I, and not Marx, was the first conscious socialist.”

— Oswald Spengler

What Spengler describes to be German Socialism differ very much from what the Left knows socialism to be:

"Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The path to power has already been mapped: the valuable elements of German labor in union with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea both groups determined to build a strictly socialist state to democratize our nation in the Prussian manner both forged into a unit by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation by the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win by the strength to make immense sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for what we are what could not be without us."

— Oswald Spengler

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