First Reflections on Reactionary Modernism

Weberian left wing critique of irrational right wing techno-optimism in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. This Tuesday’s post is a new experiment for this project: sharing informal and discussion-oriented first impressions of a book, in this case Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism. The US has bombed Iran and that puts many of us on edge, but as my recent essay turned the spur of Sabrina Carpenter towards oil history, here I’ve sent my worries about the current hostilities to fascist history. This is one of the purposes of this project as a hedge – for those who want it, it’s a brake and shade. It’s not meant to discourage any short-term movements, but just to ensure that there’s also a long term and a solid “home front.”

The following is informal and not meant to be a persuasive document – some of the things below are just unsupported personal prejudices that I don’t expect too many readers to share. Nonetheless, I hope it’s interesting food for thought and that it inspires questions and responses. I’ll judge success of the experiment by comments and DMs.

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0. What is reactionary modernism? What were my first impressions?

Reactionary modernism is ideology that unifies reactionary romanticism to the embrace of technology. This can seem paradoxical prima facie, since it joins technical rationality to romantic irrationality, but it’s possible and the book clearly establishes that it was actual in pre-Nazi Germany and the Nazi Party.

The ideology is analyzed as a Weberian ideal typical construction, much like “the Protestant ethic” of Weber’s most famous work; more on the Weberianism in the next section (section 1). My reason for reading this is to evaluate

John Ganz

’s writing on contemporary fascism, for instance in this piece; this is discussed in section 2. I think there is less of a rational vs. irrational paradox here than Herf does due to insights into industrial capitalism from the New Deal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, but I’ll leave that for section 3. Finally, there’s a tension between some of Herf’s comments about antisemitism and the Holocaust that I’ve found myself thinking about a lot since reading, discussed in section 4.

Reactionary modernists on the move, via Wikimedia Commons

1. The traditions at work

This section may be too inside-baseball for some readers, but my first impressions of a book always contextualize it in time and social space in terms of major intellectual traditions. If you’re not the kind of reader who does the same, please feel free to skip or skim this and jump to the next sections as you like.

Reactionary Modernism is a Weberian book critical of the Frankfurt School Marxist tradition. It was published in 1984 and is typical of its time: overt Marxism was going out of style, perhaps due to Rawls or to backlash from the Days of Rage or other factors, and even core Frankfurt School figures like Habermas were turning to Weber (in his The Theory of Communicative Action). Weber and the Frankfurt school are brought up repeatedly and contrasted against one another, with Weber consistently preferred.

While Weberian terms dominate the outer form of the book, a single citation to Clifford Geertz also caught my eye and stayed with me:

In tracing this tradition [of reactionary modernism] I will be paying close attention to what Clifford Geertz has called the ‘autonomous process of symbol formation,’ that is, how ‘ideologies transform sentiment into significance and make it socially available.’ (Herf, p. 16)

The quotes are attributed to Geertz’s canonical The Interpretation of Cultures, which is a moeitic tradition marker for important American phyletic traditions of anthropology and sociology. Geertz is not mentioned again, but it is striking how much Herf’s “Weber” serves as a terminological shell to cover Geertz-style intuitive meat. I see this is a typical minor esotericism of the phyletic traditions of this era of American sociology, caused by the combined normative power and emotive weakness of prior generations’ Weberians, particularly the school of Talcott Parsons.

The book does not demonstrate mastery of the romantic and technical traditions that it describes on their own terms: it describes them from features imputed from its own traditions. As a result, it often seems to miss details about the reactionary modernists that would be important to a reader who is themselves a romantic, a technologist, or a reactionary modernist. Nevertheless, the way it misses these details does not seem to compromise its own conclusions for its own purposes, so I think it succeeds on the terms of its own traditions.

The book’s relationship to The Dialectic of Enlightenment is particularly interesting and telling. There are two primary places this occurs: p. 9–11 and p. 233–234. The latter are the last pages of the book but one – the final conclusion. The contrasts are unequivocally critical of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and I found this a good representative of the whole:

Because they [Horkheimer and Adorno] viewed modernity through the prism of Auschwitz, and because they were accustomed to laying bare the antinomies and inner tensions within bourgeois thought and society, Horkheimer and Adorno saw paradoxes the Marxists and modernization theorists missed. But they mistakenly attributed to the Enlightenment what was in fact the product of Germany’s particular misery. Germany did not suffer from too much reason, too much liberalism, too much Enlightenment, but rather from not enough of any of them. (Herf, p. 234)

I did not find this case persuasive because I thought it mischaracterized The Dialectic of Enlightenment. I believed that book described how Germany’s culture was made to be a locus of greater mythic irrationality in dialectical opposition to the rationalization of other loci by Enlightenment, not “Germany was too liberal” but more like “excessive English and French liberalism came at a cost of excessive German illiberality.” Still, I didn’t really care much if it had mischaracterized it or not and I didn’t go back and check. It’s a difficult book and I think it has been misinterpreted productively by many excellent readers. Possibly I’m one of them and Herf got it right! This dispute isn’t where I would want to allocate much of my own time and energy.

Any thoughts about these traditions? If so, please feel free to engage without reading the rest yet.

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2. Does this support Ganz’s fascism models?

Simple answer: yes. It doesn’t seem like Ganz has had to twist the source at all in his particular uses of it, as here or here. I’m impressed with how clean the citation is.

The book doesn’t make a direct case that reactionary modernism was itself necessarily fascism, but it makes strong cases both that (1) Nazi fascism incorporated reactionary modernism and (2) reactionary modernist politics in interwar Germany could not support parties that were not fascist. If I add a general premise that (a) “a politics that cannot support a party that is not X implicitly is itself X,” then I can see good arguments that German reactionary modernism was itself fascist.

I do not personally grant premise (a) but I also do not think others would necessarily be wrong to. It’s a matter of coalitional political strategy: “cannot not support X implies supports X” would be valid, and for political reasons it may be expedient to elide the possibility that a person would not support any party at all, because so often this claim “not to support anyone” is made in bad faith. The book itself is full of examples where those who “said they did not support the Nazis” did ideologically and materially aid them against their adversaries in fact. “What counts as support” is crucial and contested, making disagreement about (a) entirely fair on my view.

The reason I do not grant it myself is that I believe that fascism is fundamentally a politics of despair of alternatives, and so one of the most important means for fighting fascism is to help people see that they do not have to turn to fascism even if they cannot support what they see as the other alternatives. I also believe in being direct with people that their non-identification with fascism does not protect them from retroactively finding themselves supporters of fascism, however, so I’m not simply advocating lenience. More like “letting people know the nature of the waterfall they’re being sucked towards so they have some chance to get out of the river.”

It’s something that has happened to me personally. I’ve naively been used to support unambiguous contemporary fascism (Evolan Ultraism, Savitri Devi’s esoteric Hitlerism, genocidal vitalism) in my own past. I felt betrayed when I discovered this, but it wouldn’t be unfair for others to say I should have known. Others did warn me, but out of despair I pushed past the line of caution. That despair was in part driven by people accusing me of being a fascist very early and thus inuring me to the accusation. That personal experience (and subsequent study of history) causes me to believe that eager identification of others as fascists tends to empower fascism. This causes me to reject (a).

The book itself is filled with sharp stories of reactionary modernists being betrayed or disillusioned by the Nazis. It’s one of its great strengths, and a reason I might recommend it widely to the contemporary non-fascist and/or anti-fascist right. The collection of stories will need to be rewritten by someone with a better emotional sense of right wing traditions to become widely digestible in those circles, but I think that this is entirely feasible and would probably be personally rewarding for a writer who did it.

I do not grant (a) and I think it would be better not to give the fascists exclusive claim to reactionary modernism, but rather to show how to represent and/or recuperate reactionary modernism fairly under the leadership of other politics. I think democracies are robust enough to incorporate minority parties of nonviolent and noncriminal reactionary modernists, for instance.

However, to discuss my belief there any deeper I’ll want to begin getting into how Herf’s discussion of reactionary modernism made me think of Galbraith’s insights into industrial capitalism, since Galbraith’s insights seem fundamental for me (and also for my own phyletic traditions shared with close colleagues) for (a) understanding why German despair post-WWI drove engineers to ideologies of reactionary modernism in the first place and (b) for determining how to better help romantically-disposed engineers feel represented in a constitutional democracy.

Before I do however, please feel free to leave a comment on any of the prior without going further. No need to read all of this to engage with any of it.

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3. Romantic irrationality or identificatory rationality?

My impression from reading Herf’s book was reactionary modernists achieve the union of reactionary romanticism and embrace of technology by romanticizing the technology itself. In an inversion of Carl Schmitt’s

Everything romantic stands in service of other, unromantic energies. The lofty talk about ‘definition’ and ‘decision’ evolves into a serviceable accompaniment of alien powers and alien decisions. (Quoted in Herf, p. 118)

the reactionary modernists romanticized the alien powers, particularly technology’s own powers, and the alien decisions, for instance outcomes of war. In other words, not Herf’s but my own, the reactionary modernist comes to identify the powers of technology with their own romantic powers and the decisions of war with their own romantic decisions.

Whether or not this identification is a wise or rational thing to do, this personal reformulation of Herf’s use of Schmitt in terms of identification immediately reminded me of the heart of New-Deal-establishment Democrat economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State. This book describes how large industrial organizations accomplished organization and planning in mid-20th-century monopoly capitalism, and it does it in terms of a fairly unusual economic analysis that I rarely see cited elsewhere.

Specifically, the book makes a case (a convincing one in my own opinion) that the incentives for the work of monopoly-employed technical classes in mid-20th-C industrial capitalism (which he calls “members of the technostructure”) were not primarily monetary incentives or profit-maximizing incentives. Money is important, Galbraith acknowledges, but it arrives through steady salary, and contemporary managers did not believe raises and bonuses were the most immediate or effective means for incentivizing individual performance. Instead, individuals doing this technical work, the “members of the technostructure,” were more immediately motivated by ego identifications with their roles. The engineer is not so much motivated by the salary itself as the class position identity afforded by the salary, for instance. Status matters more immediately than money, and status can change quickly in an engineering organization.

Here is one quote from Galbraith I found especially striking and apt:

The members of the technostructure do not get the profits that they maximize. They must eschew personal profit-making. Accordingly, if the traditional [economist’s] commitment to profit maximization is to be upheld, they must be willing to do for others, specifically the stockholders, what they are forbidden to do for themselves. It is on such grounds that the doctrine of the maximization in the mature corporation now rests. It holds that the will to make profits is, like that to sexual intercourse, a fundamental urge. But it holds that this urge works not in the first person but the third. It is detached from self and manifested on behalf of unknown, anonymous and powerless persons who do not have the slightest notion of whether their profits are, in fact, being maximized. In further sexist analogy, one must imagine that a man of vigorous, lusty and reassuringly heterosexual inclination eschews the lovely and available women by whom he is intimately surrounded in order to maximize the opportunities of other men whose existence he knows of only by hearsay. Such are the foundations of the maximization doctrine when there is full separation of power from reward. (Galbraith, The Affluent Society and Other Writings (Library of America), The New Industrial State Chapter 10 Section 3, p. 740)

This uncanny mismatch of first person and third person profit maximization is resolved in the next chapters via the model that members of the technostructure are motivated more by identificatory rewards rather than by pecuniary rewards.

And insofar as this is the case, I thought immediately that where Herf’s Weberian analysis classifies the romantic identification of the reactionary modernist with his technology as an irrationality, Galbraith’s theory makes room for a type of rationality that I have never seen used in Weberian analyses, one that might be called “identificatory rationality” or “role rationality” (or “status rationality”?) in contrast to Weberians’ usual duality of “instrumental rationality” vs “values rationality” (also called “means rationality” and “ends rationality”).

Roles combine both means, for instance skills and privileges, together with values, for instance particular social and aesthetic value commitments. Weberian analyses, lacking “role rationality,” call such behavior an irrational confusion of means and ends. However, Galbraith’s book develops the ideas I’m now calling “role rationality” into a category that I think is worthy of more respect. I’ll just state this as my own opinion for now since it’s a long, ambitious book (576 pages in Princeton’s James Madison Library edition), and I can’t do justice to the full development in this “first reflections” piece.

Insofar as I am convinced by Galbraith’s motivational picture for “members of the technostructure”, “role rational behavior” does then seem crucial for understanding engineering performance in industrial production in general. Weberian analyses, lacking “role rationality,” should almost always classify engineers and scientists in any industrial economy as ideologically irrational! I do think I see Weberians take this approach to engineers, scientists, and other professionals motivated by identificatory rewards, for instance Weber himself in the famous “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” lectures.

However, if this is not actually irrationality but rather a new Galbraith-Weber hybrid tradition’s “identificatory rationality,”¹ then it has very different political implications. The relevant identifications could be with progressive roles rather than reactionary roles, for instance, and on initial reflection I think such motivational structures are in fact important for progressive modernism. On further reflection, it seems clear that there are romantic progressive modernists as well, who have become romantically irrational but remain committed to progress and to technology.

In traditions of theory of deliberative democracy downstream of Habermas’s Weber-Frankfurt-School hybrid phyletic tradition in political philosophy, splits of means-rational deliberation in bureaucracies and markets from ends-rational deliberation in parliaments and public spheres play an important role in political analyses. Fascism is generally considered to arise out of a breakdown of democratic deliberation in these traditions. Weber-Galbraith role rationality could be added: what institutions are responsible for deliberation about role rationality? Did they break down uniquely in the Weimar period in order to drive German engineers to reactionary modernism? Does this match up with Dylan Riley’s observations in Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe?

With these concepts I find myself asking many new questions that all feel rewarding, so I’ll leave it there and invite comments – if you’ve followed this, do you feel drawn to explore something more with it?

Members of the technostructure at work at Bell Labs, via Wikimedia Commons

4. The criticisms of Behemoth on antisemitism versus Werner Sombart

This final one will be short, but it has really stuck with me.

From the concluding pages,

Franz Neumann’s Behemoth was embarrassingly wrong about the Holocaust because he could not believe the Nazis would do something so irrational as to kill the scapegoats that allegedly held their rule together. (Herf, p. 233)

or, from the introduction,

at their [Marxist analyses] best, such as Franz Neumann’s classic Behemoth, they employ a utilitarian concept of class and ideology that rules out the possibility that the Hitler regime could act against the interests of German capital – as indeed it did when it pursued racial utopia and genocide above all else.

I haven’t read Behemoth, but this is chilling: it reminds me perfectly of my days adjacent to Effective Altruist utilitarians in 2018, watching them reason about how Sam Bankman-Fried couldn’t really be as much of a fraud as early whistleblowers were starting to say, since that would simply be too irrational. I saw some of these people discuss the morality of genocide of people with insufficiently altruistic genes in those days, as well. Maybe seeing these brutal coincidences of reason and unreason is why I was more sympathetic to The Dialectic of Enlightenment than Herf is.² This isn’t what really stuck with me, however.

What struck me was a contrast with another quote in Herf’s chapter on Werner Sombart:

Germany’s liberation from the Jewish Geist was the primary task facing the German people and German socialism. This task could not be attained through exclusion of Jews from Germany. Rather, it was necessary “to transform the institutional culture so that it no longer serves as a bulwark of Jewish Geist.” (Herf, p. 149)

The quote continues into further “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” material. When I had this in my recent memory while reading the quote from p. 233 about Behemoth just above, it struck me as obvious that the Nazis would never have run out of scapegoats if they killed every ethnic Jew. They would have been able to continue with scapegoating “spiritual Jews” to the very end.

In other reading I’ve done about the Third Reich, I’ve seen or guessed that even Goebbels could be teased about his spiritual Jewishness at times. And I certainly remember that among leaders of the Dissident Right, from times I’ve hung around a few. Plenty of banter then about who was more spiritually Jewish at parties, even by the ethnic Jews in the movement, and it could also come out as a weapon in their frequent mutually-destructive coups.

This catty purge politics is self-defeating, but as the Nazis’ example showed, it can still bring down an entire industrial country with it. Herf’s book proved valuable to me for understanding why so many Germans (especially engineers) went along with the Nazis even despite their insane values and insane decisions, and I hope understanding can help dissuade Americans (and again: especially engineers) from going along with something similar in this country today.

1. Here you can easily hear the echoes of MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? but I won’t go further into that here.

2. I’m referring back to section 1, here, in case you skipped that.