Dichotomous Political Thought in Germany before 1933

In speaking about influential paradigms in Germany before 1933, I will focus on the extreme poles of a tradition of thinking which I cannot address in all its specificity. I would like to make clear that neither the political left nor the political right in toto thought in these extremes. But what is important in the following context is the fact that the tradition of thinking in dichotomies became dominant in the period leading up to 1933. The era of antifascism is the era of dichotomous thought. But dichotomous thinking is not rooted only in the history of the left. It is part of a tradition which stretches back to the nineteenth century and is much older than the gulf between leftist and rightist thinking which we have come to take for granted. Since 1945, the left-liberal discourse in Germany has considered leftist and rightist thinking mostly as two separate currents in German history of thought. In the so-called conservative sectors of public discourse, the notion of totalitarianism which was introduced by Hannah Arendt and by Carl J. Friedrich as well as by Zbigniew Brzezinski was used to point out common elements of leftist and rightist thought and practice. But within this concept, most political orders and their ideologies were compared without referring them to the broader history of thinking in ideals and in myths. On the other hand, the historical context was used to reduce the role of rightist and leftist thinking to its supposed contributions to National Socialism or Stalinism respectively. It has been a common practice from the forties onwards to consider the composer Richard

Political science · Politics · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · German History and Society · German legal, social, and political studies · History · Law · Philosophy