Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [44]
The problem is not why the Germans as such are vicious, which congenitally they are probably no more than other peoples, but to determine the circumstances which during the last seventy years have made possible the progressive growth and the ultimate victory of a particular set of ideas, and why in the end this victory has brought the most vicious elements among them to the top. Mere hatred of everything German instead of the particular ideas which now dominate the Germans is, moreover, very dangerous, because it blinds those who indulge in it against a real threat. It is to be feared that this attitude is frequently merely a kind of escapism, caused by an unwillingness to recognize tendencies which are not confined to Germany and by a reluctance to re-examine, and if necessary to discard, beliefs which we have taken over from the Germans and by which we are still as much deluded as the Germans were. It is doubly dangerous because the contention that only the peculiar wickedness of the Germans has produced the Nazi system is likely to become the excuse for forcing on us the very institutions which have produced that wickedness.
The interpretation of the developments in Germany and Italy about to be proffered in this book is very different from that given by most foreign observers and by the majority of exiles from those countries. But if this interpretation is correct, it will also explain why it is almost impossible for a person who, like most of the exiles and the foreign correspondents of English and American newspapers, holds the now prevalent socialist views to see those events in the proper perspective. The superficial and misleading view which sees in National Socialism merely a reaction fomented by those whose privileges or interests were threatened by the advance of socialism was naturally supported by all those who, although they were at one time active in the movement of ideas that has led to National Socialism, have stopped at some point of that development and, by the conflict into which this brought them with the Nazis, were forced to leave their country. But the fact that they were numerically the only significant opposition to the Nazis means no more than that in the wider sense practically all Germans had become socialists and that liberalism in the old sense had been driven out by socialism. As we hope to show, the conflict in existence between the National Socialist “Right” and the “Left” in Germany is the kind of conflict that will always arise between rival socialist factions. If this interpretation is correct, it means, however, that many of those socialist refugees, in clinging to their beliefs, are now, though with the best will in the world, helping to lead their adopted country the way which Germany has gone.
I know that many of my Anglo-Saxon friends have sometimes been shocked by the semi-Fascist views they would occasionally hear expressed by German refugees, whose genuinely socialist convictions could not be doubted. But while these observers put this down to the others’ being Germans, the true explanation is that they were socialists whose experience had carried them several stages beyond that yet reached by socialists in England and America. It is true, of course, that German socialists have found much support in their country from certain features of the Prussian tradition; and this kinship between Prussianism and socialism, in which in Germany both sides gloried, gives additional support to our main contention.5 But it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism. It was the prevalence of socialist views and not Prussianism that Germany had in common with Italy and Russia—and it was from the masses and not from the classes steeped in the Prussian tradition, and favored by it,