Ideas Have Consequences

Toward A Non-Hesiodic View of History

γένοι' οἷος ἐσσὶ

- Pindar

There’s a view implicit in much modern thought that we could call the Hesiodic view of history—that ideas start out pure and only later become corrupted. Often this view is applied to things that are quasi-religious. The Enlightenment, in the eyes of a Steven Pinker, was a miraculous, sui generis event that issued from we know not where,¹ but because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance or something, we just kind of forgot how to be liberal and now the horizon is darkened by the looming spectres of communism and fascism. Apart from the fact that any idea whose price is eternal vigilance is weak and unnatural, this view is contradicted at every step by the actual history of ideas.

The blogger N. T. Carlsbad has been on an anti-Nietzschean crusade for some time now, and while Nietzsche is valuable, one can sympathize given how he is misused. Carlsbad engineered his own Sokal Affair against the BAP-sphere, which was actually pretty damning. But a couple of months ago he posted a thread on Twitter attempting to decouple Nietzsche from National Socialism, and implicit in this thread is the Hesiodic view that National Socialist doctrine was full-born from the brow of Zeus and only later became contaminated by political exigencies. He says:

Nigel Carlsbad @pompilivs

We must also draw a clear distinction between NS-Bewegung (the movement) and NS-Staat (the regime, i.e. after 1933). The presence of Nietzschean tropes greatly increased after the seizure of power (but still highly contested); they were not that common in the movement phase.

He never says why this distinction matters, but to be fair this is a Twitter thread and not a dissertation. However, the implication seems to be that the earlier movement phase embodied the more authentic spirit of National Socialism than the later statehood phase, which was presumably corrupted by the struggle to consolidate power²—indeed, the whole argument depends on this value judgement. As we understand it, like a great punk band, National Socialism began as a gang of hungry upstarts whose early and purist work is to be contrasted with their later sell-out albums and subsequent reunion tours. I don’t mean to pick on Carlsbad, who has done valuable work some years ago on French and German Counter-Enlightenment figures,³ but the dichotomy here does illustrate this Hesiodic view nicely. The problem is that it is wrong.