THE WORLD HISTORIANS
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mense service to the Nazi movement by his destructive criticism of
all ideas that might have strengthened the tender growth of a
genuine democratic and pacifist spirit in republican Germany
after 1918, must rather be classified with Hugenberg, Thyssen and
Rauschning as the herald of a "conservative revolution." It is
certain that he did not hail Hitler as the leader and savior of the
German empire-or was not given a chance to do so-after the
victory of Nazism in 1933.
Nevertheless both Toynbee and Spengler have contributed
more than anybody else to the theoretical foundations of that truly
"new history" which had its first practical application in the rise
of totalitarianism in Europe and in the outbreak of the present
'world war. This is confirmed by Toynbee himself. When he pub–
lished his first three volumes in 1934, he still believed, to a certain
extent, in a new age (assmnedly inaugurated by the First World
War, the League of Nations, and the Kellogg Pact) in which the
corporate consciousness of communities would no longer aspire
at being "universes in themselves" but rather ·at being "parts of
some larger universe." But he had abandoned all such hopes
when he published the second three volumes in 1939. His asser–
tion this time was that "the common goal towards which our post·
war Capitalist and Communist states are headed is a totalitarian
regime in a parochial socialist national state which commands the
religious as well as the political allegiance of its subjects and
imposes itself upon their souls as their supreme and indeed ex–
clusive object of worship." It is to be hoped that this assertion of
Toynbee will not be confirmed so fully and so quickly as his other
amazing prediction made before the outbreak of the present war
concerning the fate of the Maginot Line under the assault of the
"militarized mechanics" of the German Reichswehr.
7.
What are the practical consequences of a condition in which
the
existing powers will have abandoned every aspiration to be
"parts of some larger universe" rather than "universes in them–
selves"? A one-sided and partial answer-but an answer backed
by
a tremendously successful action-is given by the new theories
of Nazism.
The Geopolitics of totalitarianism have finally repudiated
