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possessed an independent force of its own, which could be combined
with other forces, most effectively with the power of a state bent on
modernisation, as a defence against other powers conceived of as alien
or hostile, or with particular groups and classes and movements within
the state, religious, political and economic, with which the bulk of the
society did not instinctively identify itself. It developed, and could be
used, in many different directions, as a weapon of secularism, industri–
alisation, modernisation, the rational use of resources, or in an appeal
to a real or imaginary past, some lost, pagan or neomedieval paradise, a
vision of a braver, simpler, purer life, or as the call of the blood or of
some ancient faith, against foreigners or cosmopolitans, or "sophisters,
economists and calculators, " who did not understand the true soul of
the people or the roots from which it sprang, and robbed it of its
heritage.
It
seems to me that those who, however perceptive in other
respects, ignored the explosive power generated by the combination of
unhealed mental wounds, however caused, with the image of the
nation as a society of the living, the dead and those yet unborn (sinister
as this could prove to be when driven to a point of pathological
exacerbation), displayed insufficient grasp of social reality. This seems
to me to be as true of the present as of the last two hundred years.
Modern nationalism was indeed born on German soil, but it developed
wherever conditions sufficiently resembled the impact of modernisa–
tion on traditional German society. I do not wish to say that this
ideology was inevitable: it might, perhaps, not have been born at all.
No one has yet convincingly demonstrated that the human imagina–
tion obeys discoverable laws, or is able to predict the movement of
ideas.
If
this cluster of ideas had not been born, history might have
taken another turn. The wounds inflicted on the Germans would have
been there, but the balm which they generated, what Raymond Aron
(who applied it to Marxism) has called the opium of the intellectuals,
might have been a different one-and if this had happened, things
might have fallen out otherwise. But the idea was born: and the
consequences were what they were; and it seems
to
me to show a certain
ideological obstinacy not
to
recognise their nature and importance.
Why was this, in general, not seen? Partly, perhaps, because of the
"Whig interpretation" so widely disseminated by enlightened liberal
(and socialist) historians; the picture is familiar: on the one side, the
powers of darkness: church, capitalism, tradition, authority, hierarchy,
exploitation, privilege; on the other, the
lumieres,
the struggle for
reason, for knowledge and the destruction of barriers between men, for
