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National Socialism 
 
The ideology of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), better known as the Nazi party, which was formed in 1919 and under Hitler ruled Germany between 1933 and 1945. National socialism essentially combined two doctrines: the fascist belief that national unity could best be secured by an all-encompassing state directed by a party with one supreme leader embodying the national will, and the racist belief in the superiority of the Aryan peoples, implying that other races might justifiably be subjugated or eliminated entirely. Although national socialism was the most spectacular, and in some respects the most successful, of all forms of fascism, it was intellectually less sophisticated and less interesting than French or Italian fascism. 

Its political success lay in its ability to synthesize often contradictory elements into a doctrine with universal appeal—'socialism' for the working class, anti-bolshevism for the employers, nationalism for traditional conservatives, and anti-semitism for all who looked for a scapegoat on whom to pin the blame for the loss of world war one and the economic disasters of the 1920s. Domestically, this recipe was a great success; internationally, it weakened the so-called Axis, or wartime alliance between Italy, Germany and Japan. Italy had every reason to fear German nationalism, which could only revive separatist aspirations in the former South Tyrol and boded ill for Italian ambitions in Africa; Japan could hardly be unaware that Hitler's ambitions for the Aryan race left little room for its own, and that the 'Yellow Peril' had frequently featured in the rhetoric of his pre-war speeches. 

Nazism had intellectual pretentions, but they came a poor second to an enthusiasm for brute force and the cult of the leader. Liberals have often accused Hegel of laying the foundations of Nazism (see Popper, vol. II); the Nazis themselves frequently claimed an intellectual kinship with Nietzsche. In fact, Hegel's conservative liberalism was at worst intermittently authoritarian, and his insistence on the rule of law and constitutional safeguards for private rights was utterly uncongenial to Nazism, while Nietzsche's contempt for the pretensions of the German Empire is an indication of how removed his ideals were from anything in national socialism. Where Italian fascism could boast of Gentile, and French fascism of BARRÈS and MAURRAS, Nazism was intellectually barren. Alfred Rosenberg (born 1893, hanged as a war criminal October 1946) was its only 'philosopher', and his best-known work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) is a discordant jumble of racist and volkisch ideas loosely attached to a history of European culture which bizarrely attempts to prove that everything worth having in European history is of Nordic origin. 
 
National socialism is of sociological rather than intellectual interest. It has been handled best by writers who have understood it as an intellectual pathology, whether that has been interpreted as an episode in the history of mass society (see Arendt) or as a response to the desire for the transcendental (see Nolte). Its 'socialism' meant little more than that the state's rights transcended those of private owners; its appeal to the Volk was hardly more than an excuse to destroy the secondary organizations of liberal society, trade unions in particular, and to arouse the population for war. The most interesting feature of Nazi ideology was its ambivalence about revolution; although Barrès and Maurras were articulate enemies of the French Revolution and subsequent liberalism, Mussolini was always as much attracted by Marxism as repelled by it. Nazism was the apotheosis of this ambivalence, simultaneously presenting itself as counter-revolutionary and yet revolutionary. Its psychological appeal was evidently very similar to the appeal of revolutionary utopianism of all kinds (cf. Cohn) and while lip-service was paid to the static ideal of the corporate state, the more characteristic aspect of national socialism, rhetorically and in practice, was something akin to permanent revolution. All institutions were valuable only in so far as they expressed the spirit of the Volk and advanced the triumph of the Aryan race, and all might therefore be swept away at any moment if necessary. This is but one of many ways in which national socialism defies assimilation to previous forms of conservatism or authoritarianism, and in which the Nazi version of fascism is much more than an assemblage of responses to the problems of economic dislocation which affected almost all countries in the inter-war years. 
 
Its embodiment in the febrile genius of Hitler is, in this sense, more than an accident. For it was his political opportunism and his galvanizing energy which allowed the Nazis to gain support by promising both nationalization and the protection of private ownership, by stressing both industrial might and the unique virtues of the peasant, and by emphasizing the necessity of both radical and conservative measures. The only constant was an emphasis on national expansion, racial purity and the 'leadership principle'. War was the inevitable outcome of combining these aspirations with the explicit claim that in international politics might is right; total defeat in 1945 was a verdict with which no national socialist could quarrel. See FASCISM, NATIONALISM, RACISM.
 
Reading 
 
Arendt, H.: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951. 
Bullock, A.: Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. 
Cohn, N.: The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Paladin, 1970. 
Mosse, G.L.: The Crisis of German Ideology. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966. 
Neumann, F.: Behemoth. New York, 1966. 
Nolte, E.: Three Faces of Fascism. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965. 
 
Popper, K.R.: The Open Society and its Enemies. London: Routledge, 1945; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. 
 
Rosenberg, A.: Race and Race History, ed. R. Pois. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970. [Includes excerpts from The Myth of the Twentieth Century.] 
 
Stern, F.: The Politics of Cultural Despair. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
source: Encyclopedia of Political Thought by Blackwell Publications

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