Who said it? A post-liberal, an anti-liberal, Carl Schmitt?
Blood rises up against formal understanding, race against the rational pursuit of ends, honor against profit, bonds against the caprice that is called 'freedom,' organic totality against individualistic dissolution, valor against bourgeois security, politics against the primacy of the economy, state against society, folk against the individual and the mass.
I cheated, Bill, so I won’t weigh in—except to thank you for occasioning the research that led to this https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300.2023.2201803#d1e83
Good job, Tony! You located the passage from Ernst Krieck in the article from which I lifted it, namely, Herbert Marcuse’s “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” in Marcuse’s Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Beacon Press, 1968). This, the lead essay, was originally published by Marcuse in 1934. Die Machtergeifung Hitlers, as you know, was in early 1933. Marcuse’s essay contains a brilliant critique of Carl Schmitt, which I will have to report on.
Ernst Krieck’s book, from which the passage I cited is taken, is Nationalpolitische Erziehung, [National-political Education] 1933, and that was the 16th impression! — which says something. I don’t imagine you have Krieck’s book in your library, but I will buy it from you if you do. NYC is now a shithole, thanks to the Dementocrats, but there must still be used book outlets where you can dig up this old Nazi stuff. There is a ton of it, and Marcuse seems to have read most of it.
Here is something that will get your anarchist-libertarian goat: Marcuse, pp. 9-10 takes aim at your man von Mises, and quotes him, but without a reference. (Marcuse is meticulous in his referencing except for this one instance.) See if you can find the source of this von Mises quotation:
>>The program of liberalism . . . summed up in a single word, should read “Property,”that is, private property in the means of production . . . All other demands of liberalism derive from this basic demand.<< Ellipsis in original, i.e., in Marcuse's quotation. Marcuse goes on to say that liberalism, on the other hand, acc. to von Mises maintains that >>fascism and all similar attempts at dictatorship . . . have momentarily saved European culture. The merit that fascism has thereby acquired will live on eternally in history.<< Ellipsis in original, i.e., in Marcuse's quotation.
Bill, I don’t have anything by Kriek.
Marcuse misled his readers regarding Mises, the Gestapo target. I no longer have my copy of Mises’s 1927 Liberalism, but ChatGPT gave me page 51 of the Liberty Fund edition, where we find: “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby acquired will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To consider it as something more would be a fatal error.” It is worth noting that Mises’s frame of reference is Mussolini’s fascism; in 1927, Hitler was holding Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. Mussolini, according to Mises, prevented an immediate socialist or communist revolution, which Mises deemed a greater threat to liberal civilization.
Tony,
“The primacy of the economy.” A drawback of libertarianism, I’d say.
Which libertarian affirmed the “primacy of the economy”? My sleuthing missed that.