348
PARTISAN REVIEW
destructive, "atomising" individualism, soulless mechanism, alien
influences, shallow empiricism, rootless cosmopolitanism, abstract
notions of nature, man, rights, which ignore differences of cultures and
traditions. This is, in short, the typology and catalogue of the enemy,
which begins in the pages of Hamann and Burke, reaches a climax in
Fichte and his romantic followers, is systematised by de Maistre and
Bonald, and reaches a new height in our own century in the propagan–
dist writings of the First and Second World Wars, and the anathemas of
irrationalist and fascist writers, directed at the Enlightenment and all
its works.
The language and the thought behind them, charged with emo–
tion as they tend to be, are seldom wholly clear or consistent. The
prophets of nationalism sometimes speak as if the superior, indeed, the
supreme claims of his nation upon the individual, are based on the fact
that its life and ends and history alone give life and meaning to all that
he is and does. But this seems to entail that other men stand in a similar
relation to their own nations, with claims upon them equally valid and
no less absolute, and that these may conflict with full realisation of the
ends or "mission" of another, for example, a given individual's own
nation, and this in its turn appears to lead to cultural relativism which
ill accords with the absolutism of the premise, even if it does not
formally contradict it; as well as opening the door to war of all against
all.
There are nationalists who seek to escape this conclusion by efforts
to demonstrate that a given nation or race-say, the German-is
intrinsically superior to other peoples, that its goals transcend theirs,
or that its particular culture breeds beings in whom the true ends of
men as such come closer to full realisation than in men outside its
culture, as measured by some timeless objective, transnational stand–
ard. This is how Fichte speaks in his later writings (and the same thesis
is to be found in Arndt and other German nationalists of this period).
This, too, is entailed by the idea of the role played by the historic
nations alone, each in its appointed time and place, to be found in the
thought of Hegel. One can never feel completely certain whether these
nationalist writers acclaim their own nation because it is what it is, or
because its values alone approximate
to
some obj ective ideal or
standard which,
ex hypothesi,
only those fortunate enough to be
guided by them can even so much as understand, while other societies
remain blind to them, and may always remain so, and are therefore
objectively inferior. The line between the two conceptions is often
blurred; but either leads to a collective self-worship, of which Eu-
