Ominous Parallels
Authors: Leonard Peikoff
Tags: #Europe, #Modern, #International Relations, #German, #Philosophy, #Political, #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), #Modern fiction, #United States, #History & Surveys - Modern, #American, #Germany, #National socialism, #General & Literary Fiction, #Politics, #History & Surveys, #History
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The Cause of Nazism
Chapter 2 - The Totalitarian Universe
Chapter 3 - Hitler’s War Against Reason
Chapter 4 - The Ethics of Evil
Chapter 5 - The Nation of the Enlightenment
Chapter 6 - Kant Versus America
Chapter 8 - The Emotionalist Republic
Chapter 9 - The Nazi Synthesis
Chapter 10 - The Culture of Hatred
Chapter 11 - The Killers Take Over
Chapter 13 - The Concentration Camps
Chapter 14 - America Reverses Direction
Chapter 15 - Convulsion and Paralysis
“
The Ominous Parallels
offers a truly revolutionary idea.... The book is clear, tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly reasoned. Its style is clear and hard as crystal—and as sparkling.... As to my personal reaction, I can express it best by paraphrasing a line from Atlas Shrugged: ‘It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine!’ ”
—Ayn Rand
“Extraordinarily perceptive ... frightening insights.... Everyone concerned with the collectivist trend in today’s world should read this book.”
—Alan Greenspan
“A fascinating weave of German history, philosophic determinism, and Objectivist polemic.”
—Chicago Tribune
THE
OMINOUS PARALLELS
LEONARD PEIKOFF is universally recognized as the pre-eminent Rand scholar writing today. He worked closely with Ayn Rand for thirty years and was designated by her as her intellectual heir and heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College, Long Island University, and New York University and is now host of the national radio talk show
Philosophy: Who Needs It
.
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Copyright © Leonard Peikoff, 1982 All rights reserved
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Introduction
It gives me great pleasure to introduce the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself.
Perhaps the best recommendation I can give this book—and its author, Dr. Leonard Peikoff—is to say that it and he are not of today’s cultural mainstream. They will be part of tomorrow’s.
It is not necessary for me to prove that something is wrong with today’s world. Everybody—of any creed, color, or intellectual persuasion, old and young, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, foreign and domestic—senses that something monstrous is destroying the world. But no one knows what it is, and people keep blaming one another—with some justice.
As a symptom of today’s cultural anxiety, observe the unusual interest in and the deluge of books dealing with Nazi Germany. Every sort of semi-plausible and wholly impossible theory has been offered in futile attempts to find the cause and explain the rise of Nazism. The failure of those explanations intensifies the quest: men seem to sense that the collapse of what had been a civilized country into such monstrous evil must be understood if we are to make certain that it will not be repeated. “We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism,” states Dr. Peikoff. If we do not know its causes, how can we be sure that our own country is not traveling the same road?
Dr. Peikoff answers these questions. He identifies the cause of Nazism—and the ominous parallels between the intellectual history of Germany and of the United States. He demonstrates that there is a science which has been all but obliterated in the modern world. “Yet this science determines the destiny of nations and the course of history ... ,” he writes. “It is the science which had to be destroyed, if the catastrophes of our time were to become possible. The science is
philosophy.”
The non-modern (and non-old-fashioned) aspect of Leonard Peikoff’s book is the breadth of his vision and the stunning scale of his philosophic integration. He does not share the concrete-bound, college-induced myopia of those alleged philosophers who study the various meanings of the word “but” (the contemporary empiricists)—nor does he share the foggy stumbling and the floating abstractions of their predecessors (the rationalists). He presents the history of Germany’s philosophy, in telling essentials—then the history of America’s philosophy and what destroyed it. (The chapter “The Nation of the Enlightenment” is the most inspired and inspiring tribute to the Founding Fathers that I have ever read.) Then he presents the practical results—the way in which philosophic ideas direct the course and shape the particular events of the history of both countries, as reflected in politics, economics, art, literature, education, etc.
This last is the cardinal achievement of Dr. Peikoff’s book. While today’s philosophy departments make it a loud point to proclaim that philosophy has nothing to do with practical life or with reality (which, they add, does not exist)—Dr. Peikoff shows to their mangled victims what philosophy is, what it does, and how to recognize its influence all around us. He gives a virtuoso performance of shuttling effortlessly between abstractions and concretes—keeping the first tied firmly to reality and thus illuminating the second. He shows that a nation brought up to regard the principles of duty and self-sacrifice as cardinal virtues will be helpless when confronted by a gang of thugs who demand obedience and self-sacrifice.
It is a tragic irony of our time that the two worst, bloodiest tribes in history, the Nazis of Germany and the Communists of Soviet Russia, both of whom are motivated by brute power-lust and a crudely materialistic greed for the unearned, show respect for the power of philosophy (they call it “ideology”) and spend billions of their looted wealth on propaganda and indoctrination, realizing that man’s mind is their most dangerous enemy and it is man’s mind that they have to destroy—while the United States and the other countries of the West, who claim to believe in the superiority of the human spirit over matter, neglect philosophy, despise ideas, starve the best minds of the young, offer nothing but the stalest slogans of a materialistic altruism in the form of global giveaways, and wonder why they are losing the world to the thugs.
As an example of why the cause of Nazism should be understood (but is not), I would like to mention a recent television interview with Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany. Asked to name his favorite philosopher, he answered —in a changed tone of voice, a stiff, solemn, deaf-and-blind, heel-clicking tone—“Marcus Aurelius. He taught that we must do our duty above all.” If he is typical of his country (and I believe he is), Germany has learned nothing.
The ineffable monster destroying the world is not an entity but a vacuum, an absence, the emptiness left by the collapse of philosophy. In that lightless emptiness, mindless men rattle frantically, bumping into one another, seeking desperately some way to exist on earth—which they cannot find without the tool they have discarded. This leads to phenomena such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, as Dr. Peikoff demonstrates.
If you do not wish to be a victim of today’s philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous
Parallels
as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly, the ideas that are destroying you and the world. It will bring order into the chaos of today’s events—and show you simultaneously the enormity of the battle and the contemptible smallness of the enemy.
The
Ominous Parallels
offers a truly revolutionary idea in the field of the philosophy of history. The book is clear, tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly reasoned. Its style is clear and hard as crystal—and as sparkling. If you like my works, you will like this book.
As to my personal reaction, I can express it best by paraphrasing a line from
Atlas Shrugged:
“It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine!”
AYN RAND
New York
November 1980