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MARSHALL BERMAN
through Marx and TocqueviIle up to Nietzsche and Sorel, ransacked past
and present in search of new models of universality and heroism to set
against the avarice and mediocrity of modern bourgeois life. Only after a
century of escalated defeat was pseudo-heroic
Machtpolitik
and "action
for action's sake" grasped at in a last attempt to leap beyond the
bourgeois world. Ironically, fascism could pose as the rightful heir to that
revolutionary
elan
which it would eventually destroy.
Loewith at his best succeeds, as all great tragedians do, in main–
taining a delicate balance between internal and external forces. But he
must always be careful not to lean too heavily on either side: in par–
ticular, not to let his great feeling for the structure of the German
Geist
carry him out of touch with its foundations in the German
W elt.
Yet he is curiously reluctant to involve himself in the forms of this
world, and this reluctance creates certain problems, which we can ob–
serve in his discussion of Germany's "Two Cultures."
For Hegel, Loewith argues, there was no conflict between "human–
istic" culture and "political" culture: he could feel that a humanistic
education prepared the individual for public life as the citizen of a mod–
ern state, because he took it for granted that the modern state realized
the classical ideal of political community. As the century wore on, how–
ever, a great gulf developed between the two: politically-minded men
turned aggresively philistine, while humanists came to see their field
as a lone oasis in the spiritual desert of politics. Loewith's scheme seems
to work well; yet there is a disturbing gap. His narrative skips abruptly
from the Left Hegelian and democrat Arnold Ruge in 1844, who exalted
politics as the fulfillment of humanism's highest spiritual aims, to
Nietzsche in 1873, who reviled politics as the death of everything
spiritual. This means leaping over the most decisive years in German
history: years that saw a democratic revolution collapse dismally and
an authoritarian empire rise without check or balance to dazzling suc–
cess. Within the span of these three decades the whole nature of politics
in Germany changed radically, as the country passed from an aggregate
of underdeveloped petty states to the greatest power in Europe. The
great turning point for Germany, both spiritually and politically, was
1848. And yet, in a comprehensive work on the nineteenth century, Loe–
with has not a word to say about 1848. It is as
if
the first German
Revolution had never really taken place--or as if he simply wasn't
watching when it happened.
This failure of insight is crucial because it marks a deeper failure
that pervades the book. Almost the only allusion
to
the crisis of 1848
From Hegel to Nietzsche
makes is in a cited letter of Burckhardt's, in
which he declares his disgust with the whole affair, and resolves to flee
