Walter Struve

Elites against democracy : leadership ideals in bourgeois political thought in Germany, 1890-1933

Since the beginning of the current era of imperialism in the late nineteenth century, there has been a striking contrast between bourgeois political thought in Germany and the West. Walter Struve demonstrates how German political culture went through a phase in which great emphasis was placed on the establishment of a new political elite recruited on the basis of merit and skill, but ruling in an authoritarian way, and not controlled by the populace. He suggests that this type of elitism, many aspects of which were vital to the political culture of Nazi Germany, seems today to be widespread in the West. The development of this concept of an open-yet-authoritarian elite is approached through the analysis of the political ideas and activities of nine elitists, among them Max Weber, Walther Rathenau, and Oswald Spengler. The author relates biography to intellectual, political, social, and economic history, so that his work becomes a study in the political and social context of intellectual history. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Hans Zehrer as a Neoconservative Elite Theorist

SHORTLY before the collapse of the New York stock market in I929, a young German journalist published an article that would, he hoped, become the manifesto of the German intelligentsia. In a procedure unusual for a man who rejected Marxism, Hans Zehrer cited a passage from the Communist Manifesto to support his position. After quoting the assertion that all previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interests of minorities, he suggested a more meaningful formulation of it: . . . All movements began as intellectual [geistige] movements of intelligent, well-qualified minorities which, because of the discrepancy between that which is and that which should be, seized the initiative.1 Zehrer expected intellectuals to play the predominant role in creating and ruling a new Germany. During the final years of the Weimar Republic he and several of his friends used the pages of a monthly magazine, Die Tat, to stake out the future path of this minority. They participated prominently in the last, most turbulent phases of a widespread controversy about the type of leadership best suited to Germany since its defeat in World War I. Their efforts helped to make the Tat into one of the largest and most influential journals of German neoconservatism. Right Wingers who hesitated or refused to identify themselves with any political party and who dissociated themselves from the yearning of the more traditional Right to restore the Second Reich have come to be known as neoconservatives. Their ideas and activities have attracted much attention recently from students of the Weimar Republic,2 but their elite theories have not been studied systematically. Zehrers ideas provide an especially revealing example of a neoconservative elite theory. Although he and the other members of the Tat circle were almost alone on the Right of the