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  Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Ideal of World Citizenship (2013) is the latest attempt in this endeavor; in fact, she not only frames Kant as an advocate of a world federation of nations coexisting peacefully, but, amazingly, as someone who voiced the idea that it was “Nature’s design” to bring about the “fusion” of the races through interaction, migration, and breeding!47 But how can anyone reach this conclusion in light of Robert Bernasconi’s exposition of Kant as someone who specifically “[opposed] race mixing on the grounds that it would diminish the White race”?48

  In an article, “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” Kleingeld tackles this difficulty directly in a rather clever way by insisting that Kant “radically changed his mind” on race during the 1790s and thereby endorsed a fully consistent cosmopolitan philosophy.49 She grants to leftist critics of Kant that it is not possible to treat Kant’s racial views as if they were marginally related to his philosophy. While she does not think that Kant’s earlier racial views contradicted his core philosophical principles, the Categorical Imperative and the ideas contained in the Critique of Pure Reason, insofar as these ideas were formulated for “humankind” in a “race-neutral” way, she adds that his racial views did affect many of his “intermediate ideas” such as his approval of European colonial rule over non-whites and disapproval of race mixing. These ideas limited the universal applicability of his otherwise “race-neutral” philosophy. I have argued here that Kant’s universalism was meant only for whites. Kleingeld argues that during the 1790s Kant rejected his racial theory and thereby developed a fully consistent universalism.

  I will state her claims about Kant’s alleged rejection of his early racial views and then offer quick rebuttals. She says that Kant’s later opposition to slavery and colonialism demonstrate his realization that non-whites could govern themselves as rational human beings. But this is an erroneous conclusion based on the supposition that Kant drew a sharp, either-or, contrast between rational whites and irrational non-whites. One can agree with Kant’s racial hierarchy and be opposed to colonialism and the enslavement of other races. The view that whites are superior to non-whites may be used as a justification for colonial rule, but it may also be used as a strong argument in favor of the separation of the races and the preservation of whiteness. One may also believe in Kant’s race arguments while insisting that all races and nationalities should enjoy self-determination.

  For all her talk about Kant’s later views, Kleingeld admits that in his Dohna Lectures on Physical Anthropology from 1792 Kant argued that “the end of Nature would be lost if half-breeds became common,” in that all humans would become similar physically and psychologically. She tries to counter this by drawing attention to the fact that Kant offered only a one-page section on the topic of race in his text, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, published in 1798, and that in this section he reached the conclusion that Nature aimed at the fusion of different races. To support her claim, she cites this passage:

  Instead of assimilation, which Nature aimed at in the fusion of different races, here Nature has made exactly the opposite into a law for itself; namely, in a people of one race (e.g., the white race) instead of letting the characteristics, in their formation, constantly and progressively approach one another [this law involves] multiplying endlessly the bodily and mental characteristics in the same tribe and even in the same family.

  A careful examination of the textual evidence shows that Kleingeld is manipulating Kant’s writings to justify her deep-seated hatred for German ethnic identity and her slavish support for “race-neutral” institutions and policies aiming to destroy the unusual ethnic variety of the white race, which is what Kant is celebrating in this passage.

  For starters, in the opening sentence of this section, Kant explicitly says that, rather than going over his ideas on race again, readers should consult a book by Christoph Girtanner, published in 1796, “presented so beautifully and thoroughly in explanation.” Kleingeld tries to minimize the importance of this reference by stating that Girtanner’s “extensive discussion of race on the basis of Kant’s conception of it . . . focuses purely on issues of anatomy and physiology and does not provide any ‘moral characterization’ or racial hierarchy of intellectual talents and psychological strengths.” But in a footnote she acknowledges Girtanner’s use of the phrases “slow Negro,” “even slower American,” and “lazy native savages.” More importantly, this book by Girtanner, On the Kantian Principle of Natural History, “draws together selections,” as Jon Mikkelsen tells us, “often cited verbatim . . . from all of Kant’s writings from the period of 1775 to 1790 on the subjects of natural history, race, purposiveness . . .”50 Why would Kant endorse a book that draws on all his ideas about race if he had “radically changed his mind” after 1792?

  But to get to the passage: while it is not clear what he meant in this context by “fusion of races,” it should be noted that Enlightenment thinkers generally believed that in the course of time some races had mixed, creating new races such as the inhabitants they had observed or heard about in India and Indonesia. Regardless, the key statement in this passage is that it is among whites that one finds the greatest variety of “bodily and mental characteristics,” which can only be categorized as a “white supremacist” view by Kleingeld’s own criteria. Her final argument that Kant’s development of the idea of perpetual peace in the 1790s precludes any notion of a racial hierarchy in conceiving the possibility that all nationalities can coexist and interact with each other in harmony supposes that non-whites, according to Kant, are sub-humanly incapable of reasoning about their basic interests for survival and peaceful trade.

  We live in a time of major deceptions at the highest levels of Western intellectual culture. We are continually reminded that the central idea in Kant’s conception of enlightenment is that of “submitting all claims to authority to the free examination of reason.”51 Yet the very ideals of the Enlightenment have been misused to preclude anyone from examining freely and rationally the question of race differences even to the point that admirers of the Enlightenment have been engaged in a ubiquitous campaign to hide, twist beyond clarity, and confound what Enlightenment thinkers themselves said about such differences. White nationalists should no longer accept the standard interpretation of the Enlightenment. They should embrace the Enlightenment and Kant as their own.

  A shorter version of this essay first appeared at

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right,

  May 13, 2013

  LEO STRAUSS, THE

  CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION, &

  NATIONAL SOCIALISM

  GREG JOHNSON

  “What [Walter Moses] calls ‘political’ is the political in the ancient sense of the word, rather than in the modern sense that is relevant for us. What is hidden behind this absolute negation of the sphere of the ‘private’ is not a modern Leviathan, but rather its pagan-fascist counterpart . . .”

  —Leo Strauss, 192352

  “. . . the fact that the new Right-wing Germany does not tolerate us [Jews] says nothing against the principles of the Right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the Right, that is from fascist, authoritarian, and imperial principles, is it possible with decency, that is, without the laughable and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme [inalienable rights of man], to protest against the shabby abomination.”

  —Leo Strauss to Karl Löwith, May 19, 193353

  “My head spins with a hundred plans, none of which is likely to be realized: England, U.S., Palestine. France is out of the question—in part because of the circumstance that they consider me a ‘Nazi’ here.”

  —Leo Strauss to Gerhard Krüger, December 3, 193354

  “If I were a German, if I had ever been a German, I might be prepared, or in duty bound, to have that hope.”

  —Leo Strauss, 194355

  LEO STRAUSS: A “NAZI” JEW?

  Leo Strauss has long been dogged with the accusat
ion of being a “Nazi” Jew. For instance, in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, we read, “Strauss was haunted by the rather cruel way in which Hannah Arendt had judged his assessment of National Socialism: she had pointed out the irony of the fact that a political party advocating views that Strauss appreciated could have no place for a Jew like him.”56 (Arendt and Strauss had met in the Prussian State Library in Berlin in the early 1930s, sometime before Strauss left Germany in the summer of 1932.)

  I had always dismissed such claims as cheap Leftist canards. But with the publication of the first volumes of Strauss’s Gesammelte Schriften, including his correspondence and early Zionist writings, as well as lectures from the 1940s,57 the question of Strauss’s relationship to National Socialism (and Italian Fascism) has resurfaced, and given the ample textual foundations, there is no mistaking it for mere cheap political polemics. Let us review the case.

  1. NIETZSCHE

  First, Strauss was deeply influenced by Nietzsche, who was the single greatest influence on the Conservative Revolutionary milieu from which National Socialism emerged. Strauss began reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer “furtively” as a teenager.58 In a letter to Karl Löwith, Strauss claimed that, “Nietzsche so dominated and charmed me between my 22nd and 30th years [1920–1928] that I literally believed everything I understood of him.”59 (This is an exaggeration, as we shall see, for Strauss never accepted Nietzsche’s assimilationist views on the Jewish Question.)

  Four Nietzschean teachings that Strauss accepted are particularly relevant to this topic: (1) atheism, specifically the rejection of the Biblical god; (2) the rejection of Biblical “slave morality” and bourgeois mercantile values in favor of a pagan, warlike, aristocratic “master morality”; (3) the rejection of universalism, i.e., the idea of a global moral and political order, on the grounds that the moral life requires a multiplicity of “closed horizons,” i.e., different cultures and political orders that are, at least in principle if not in practice, always in conflict with one another, whereas universalism leads to the emergence of the “Last Man,” a bestialized or subhuman entity concerned only with bourgeois comfort, security, and equality; and (4) the rejection of liberal democracy, which is founded upon political universalism and Biblical and bourgeois moral principles. Al-though this is not the place, I would argue that Strauss never saw fit to abandon or modify these Nietzschean principles.

  2. ZIONISM

  Nietzsche’s principal difference from National Socialism concerned the Jewish Question. Nietzsche saw Jews as a European people. He hoped that Jews, like other European peoples, would set aside their petty nationalism and assimilate to become “good Europeans” who would be equal to the global political struggles of the coming century. In Beyond Good and Evil, section 251, Nietzsche claims that Jews wanted assimilation and denied that they wished to remain a separate and hostile people who sought dominion over Europeans. (If they wanted that, he claimed, it already would have happened. Indeed, to a great extent, it already had.) Furthermore, the idea of Zionism never occurred to Nietzsche. Indeed, when Beyond Good and Evil was published in 1886, Zionism had not occurred to Theodor Herzl either.

  Strauss, like the National Socialists, rejected Nietzsche’s assimilationist view of the Jewish Question. It is important to recognize, however, that Nietzsche’s assimilationism was based on an error of fact whereas Zionism is quite consistent with Nietzsche’s deeper philosophical principles, e.g., the rejection of universalism and liberal democracy. At the age of 17, Strauss—while reading Nietzsche but before he was totally under his sway—“was converted to Zionism—to a simple, straightforward political Zionism.”60

  Strauss was a Zionist because he believed that Jews were a distinct people who required their own homeland. He was a political rather than a religious Zionist because he was a Nietzschean who rejected Biblical religion, Biblical morals, bourgeois values (Jews almost exclusively occupied the bourgeois economic niche), moral universalism, and liberal democracy.

  The Zionist group that Strauss joined at age 17 was the Jüdischer Wanderbund Blau-Weiss (Jewish Hiking Club Blue White—as in the colors of the Israeli flag), founded in 1907 as a Jewish equivalent of the German Wandervogel movement. Members wore uniforms of khaki shorts, blue shirts, and low- cut boots. Blau-Weiss advocated a secular, power-political form of Zionism. In 1922, Blau-Weiss was reorganized under the leadership of Walter Moses. Instead of looking to the Bible or modern liberalism for political models, Moses looked back to the Greek and Roman pagans and across the Alps to Mussolini’s Fascism, hence Strauss’s characterization of Moses’ tendency as “pagan-fascist” in his very first Zionist essay.61 The group developed in an increasingly paramilitary and hierarchical direction, with levels of membership, oaths of lifetime fealty to the group’s Führer, and the rejection of private life in favor of total political commitment. Blau-Weiss actually managed to create a German-speaking settlement in Palestine, but when the settlement collapsed in 1926, the group dissolved.

  Granted, in the essay in question, Strauss does not exactly endorse Moses’s “pagan-fascist” orientation. But it nonetheless maps out Strauss’s later intellectual journey: the critic of liberal democracy (here represented by Hobbes’s Leviathan state) who looked both to the Ancients (the pagans) and to the “fascists” (Heidegger, Schmitt, Nietzsche, the Conservative Revolution) for critical ammunition and alternative political models. In particular, Nietzsche—who loved pithy sayings—can be pithily summed up as offering a “pagan-fascist” synthesis, insofar as he was a critic of liberal modernity who looked to pagan antiquity for an alternative to Biblical religion and morality. And in 1923, Strauss was, first and foremost, a Nietzschean.

  Strauss was not a cultural Zionist, because he defined nationality in terms of blood, rather than in terms of culture and law. Legally, Strauss was a German citizen. Culturally, he was a German Jew, a self-consciously German Jew who throughout his life apparently disdained East European Jews, even among his own students. But in 1943, when Strauss was a US citizen, he claimed that he was not German and never had been.62 Meaning that he was by blood a Jew and not a German, regardless of culture and law. (By the same token, Strauss was legally a US citizen, but on his own premises, he was not and never had been an American, since he was and always remained a Jew.) Strauss’s blood-based distinction between Jews and Germans was, of course, shared by the National Socialists. Both Strauss’s Zionism and National Socialism are species of biological nationalism. Thus the main point on which Strauss departed from Nietzsche drew him closer to National Socialism.

  3. HEIDEGGER

  In 1922, after completing his Ph.D. in Hamburg, Strauss went to the University of Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement.63 Strauss did not get much from Husserl’s classes, but he made a major discovery in Husserl’s entourage: Martin Heidegger. Strauss attended Heidegger’s lectures from time to time, but understood little. He did, however, understand a lecture explicating the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which left him thunderstruck: “I had never heard nor seen such a thing—such a thorough and intensive interpretation of a philosophic text.”64 He told Franz Rosenzweig that “compared to Heidegger, Max Weber, till then regarded by me as the incarnation of the spirit of science and scholarship, was an orphan child.”65

  Strauss claimed that he took little interest in Heidegger for “about two decades” after Heidegger joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) on May 1, 1933. Strauss says next to nothing about his engagement with Heidegger from 1922 to 1933, but a number of Strauss’s posthumously published lectures contain masterful syntheses of Heidegger’s thought that could only result from careful reading and lengthy reflection.66 Even though Strauss seldom mentions Heidegger in his published works, he was a constant hidden presence. As a rule, when Strauss talks about philosophical or radical historicism, he is talking about Heidegger. And Strauss talks about historicism frequently.

&nb
sp; Strauss claims that, “There is a straight line which leads from Heidegger’s [concept of] resoluteness to his siding with the so-called Nazis in 1933.”67 But this does not mean that Strauss could not have shared Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness. Resoluteness is relative to one’s particular historical situation and historical tradition—to Nietzsche’s plurality of closed cultural horizons. Resoluteness means owning up to one’s indebtedness to one’s particular horizon and heritage, and taking responsibility for carrying it forward. Thus resoluteness could lead the German Heidegger straight to German National Socialism, whereas it could lead the Jew Strauss to its Zionist equivalent.

  Heidegger and Strauss differed, however, in their views of the particular identities to which their resoluteness was relative. Heidegger rejected the Nazis’ biological definition of nationhood, preferring a cultural-historical one.68 Strauss rejected a cultural-historical definition of nationhood for a biological one. Thus Strauss’s departure from Heidegger actually brings him closer to the National Socialist position. Despite the fact that he was a Jew, on this point, Strauss was closer to orthodox National Socialism than Heidegger.

  4. SCHMITT

  Strauss also had an intellectual relationship with another prominent German philosopher who joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933: the jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. In 1927, Schmitt published his most celebrated work, “The Concept of the Political,” as a long essay in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.69 An expanded second edition appeared as a small book in 1932.70