National Socialism Before Nazism:
Friedrich Naumann and Theodor Fritsch, 1890-1914
By
Asaf Kedar
https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Kedar_berkeley_0028E_10454.pdf
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Political Science
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley
Committee in charge:
Professor Mark Bevir, Chair
Professor Wendy Brown
Professor Martin Jay
Spring 2010
Abstract
National Socialism Before Nazism:
Friedrich Naumann and Theodor Fritsch, 1890-1914
by
Asaf Kedar
Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Mark Bevir, Chair
This dissertation is a rethinking and critique of the concept of “national socialism.” I
show that this concept not only emerged in Germany years before Nazism, but also arose within
the mainstream of German society, alongside and independently of parallel developments in the
radical right. Alarmed by the dramatic rise of an internationalist, Marxist socialism in the years
following German unification, a succession of prominent public figures gave voice to an
alternative, nationalist reading of the social problems accompanying capitalist industrialization.
This endeavor involved a wholesale reconceptualization of social life and social reform, and a
marginalization of the concern for social justice and emancipation in favor of a preoccupation
with national order, homogeneity, and power.
The dissertation focuses on two variants of national socialism developed in Germany
prior to the First World War, one by the left-leaning bourgeois reformist Friedrich Naumann and
the other by the right-wing völkisch antisemite Theodor Fritsch. Their differences
notwithstanding, both strands of national socialism shared two major ideational foundations.
First, both were underpinned by a national existentialism: the claim that the nation is facing a
“struggle for existence” which necessitates aggressive international expansion, colonization, and
ethnic purification. The social reforms demanded by national socialism were, accordingly,
geared at systematically harnessing all socio-economic forces in the service of these purportedly
“existential” struggles. Second, both variants of national socialism adhered to a national
productivism that, by stressing the need for cooperation among all the “productive” strata of the
nation, elided the class-based exploitation characteristic of industrial capitalism. On the basis of
their national productivism, both Naumann and Fritsch were opposed simultaneously to Marxism
with its class-conflict view of society on the one hand, and to liberalism with its individualistic
worldview on the other hand.
Given that Naumann and Fritsch were pivotal figures in their respective social, cultural,
and political milieux—Naumann in the reformist bourgeoisie, Fritsch in the radical right—their
articulation of a national-existential claim on the social is indicative of a profound generational
shift in the ideational climate of Imperial Germany. This generational shift did not consist in the
appearance of national socialism itself, which had already been articulated in the 1870s by
2
prominent figures such as political economist Gustav Schmoller and Christian socialist Adolf
Stoecker. Rather, the shift consisted in the shedding of the ethical-conservative sensibility of the
first generation of national socialism in favor of a sense of existential urgency grounded in a
biologistic imagination. The impact of national socialism on the generation of Naumann and
Fritsch reached its apex in the First World War, when an existential national socialism
constituted the ideological underpinning of Germany’s war economy, i.e. the systematic
regimentation and mobilization of the national economy in service of the war effort.
Beyond the fresh perspective it offers on the historical dynamics of Imperial Germany,
the dissertation also sheds new light on the intellectual-historical context in which national
socialism made its way into the name and program of the Nazi movement from 1920 onward.
The study suggests that the conceptual field of national socialism into which Nazism entered
after the First World War was more variegated, more sophisticated, and had deeper historical and
intellectual roots than previously believed.
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