Luther and the modern state in Germany Book

This is quite a (too) lengthy book, with a lot of lengthy footnotes and it generated a lengthy review. I started reading it at the beginning of Nov 2019. Back then I wasn’t yet taking notes and wasn’t planning to write a review but since I’ve read it on my books app on my iPad, I was using the highlighting function regularly, which helps me now in finding the parts of the book that were important to me.
I’ve started reading it because its author, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (K-L) was an acquaintance of Ludwig von Mises. All the persons in Mises’ orbit become interesting to me. And it has to be said that K-L is an interesting figure in his own right. He speaks or understands about a dozen languages and has read a lot of books and articles. But on the other hand, he doesn’t seem to be a constantly deep thinker. At times he had problems understanding economic theory, maybe he should have read more books by Mises.

In the Libertarian Forum, Ralph Raico (of whom I recently reviewed three books and one essay) wrote a devastating review about Leftism called Conservative Myths in History and writes about K-L: ”But the quality of K-L’s thought is so low, his power of reasoning so dim, that the rest [him reading lots of languages and visiting interesting places in the world] just does not matter very much.” And further: ”All in all, I cannot recall ever coming across a case such as K-L’s, where a scholarly apparatus of similar magnitude was put to the service of such a low-grade intellectual effort.” or: “K-L’s languages and life of reading allow him to make disdainful comments (justifiable, I suppose) about all kinds of ignorant, man-in-the-street Americans (it’s part of his indictment of democracy, you see); but, judged by the standards of the better sort of academic thinking prevalent here, he doesn’t begin to qualify as a serious intellectual.” The review isn’t always completely fair, take for example this excerpt: “How, the reader might wonder, does Hitler wind up on the left? The answer is simple: everything evil is identified with the left in K-L’s mind, just as everything good is identified with the right.” K-L actually puts forward more argumentation than this. First, he notes that Hitler was a national socialist, favouring collectivism over individual freedom. He also shows how national socialists are racial equalitarians or identitarians. And observes, as Mises did, that rather than dividing by social class (like Marxists do), they divide by race. This distinction between the two socialisms is hardly enough to put them on politically opponent poles. The question therefore has to be put back to Raico: ”How does Hitler not end up on the left?” or “Why would it surprise the informed reader to see Hitler on the left?” I find the implication of Raico’s statement, that Hitler is obviously on the right, rather childish and silly. It’s certainly fair or even sometimes helpful to label Hitler as a rightist, depending on the context of the discussion and/or situation, but to deny the similarity of Hitler’s position with those of default socialism is simply barroom talk. Be it as it may, Raico caricatures K-L’s reasoning here.
I also have to disagree with Raico on the question whether Marx’s poetical phase as a teenager has any relevance or is mere “personal nonsense”. I definitely side here with K-L, Wurmbrand and Rothbard, though I’m siding with Raico when it comes to how specifically K-L dealt with the issue. I also think it’s fair to discuss Marx’s personal and moral life, the more considering that he is venerated as a quasi-saint even by moderate, non-marxian leftists. He ends his review with: “If the reader thinks I have been too harsh on K-L, let him or her recall his slanders, explicit and implied, on hundreds of thousands of socialist men and women, the class of people for whose intelligence and good intentions Hayek had enough respect to dedicate to them his Road to Serfdom.” Of course I personally can know only very few of these socialist men and women. But those who I met were hardly intelligent or had good intentions. Most of them were unbearable hypocrites, egomaniacs and spoiled brats. Maybe Raico has met different persons than I did. However, on a theoretical level, it seems impossible as a socialist, to be both intelligent and have good intentions. How would that even work out in real life? You’re an intelligent person and one of your genuine goals in life is to make life better for the poor, yet you never stumble over the most basic economic laws? You somehow always end up with exactly those schemes that hurt the poor? Common, get real. That’s as stupid as anything K-L has written.

On the other hand, Raico manages to show how K-L applied dishonest juxtaposition of statements in his books and writes:” K-L is obviously making a desperate gamble on the ignorance of his readers” and I have to admit that in my case K-L would have gotten away with it. I find it hard to understand why K-L would do such a thing. It puts his whole lifework into serious question. Interestingly, K-L writes: “Modern man is unhistorical and therefore he can be told every imaginable nonsense which he readily will believe.”
Anyway, it showed me how little besides economic theory I still know. Ironically, this is also why I finished the book, after getting demotivated by Raico’s review, to which I mostly and whole-heartedly concur. But I said to myself, since I know much less about history than Raico, that I might profit somewhat more from the book than he did (He had some positive things to say about the book as well). Since I just learned that K-L was untrustworthy, this was maybe a bit stupid. But then again, as I said in the beginning, everything in the orbit of Mises has my interest.

So what is the book about? K-L puts forward the theory that everything was great until the 18th century. In that time, elites like Voltaire started to mock religion which led to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which was the first left revolution and the root of all current evils. He makes Marquis de Sade responsible for it. Because of some obscenities on his part, de Sade ended up in the Bastille from where he shouted down from a window that he was one of many political prisoners in that building. According to K-L, this started the myth that later led to the Storming of the Bastille. This is at least a huge exaggeration. I once read half of the Schwarzbuch des Kapitalismus (Blackbook of capitalism) in which the author, a German left-wing journalist argued that de Sade was a liberal (in the classic sense) because he favoured institutions where women and girls are held captive so that men can rape them for free. He must have somehow associated the *freedom to rape* with liberalism. K-L on the other hand puts him in the leftist camp, which I guess is more to the point. Still, what K-L should have done was analyse de Sade’s political writings and present its findings to the reader, rather than pick here and there a sentence and then use non-sequiturs as a support for his theory. Marquis de Sade was surely an interesting person (Personally, I’ve only read a German translation of 120 days of Sodom and saw Passolini’s masterpiece adaption to celluloid, which managed to still become a police scandal when it should have been aptly shown in a church in the 00s in “progressive” Zurich city) and maybe his influence on the French Revolution is underestimated (though I doubt it), but then K-L should have worked harder to make this point clear. If he would have been really serious about his position on de Sade it would have made sense to dedicate the whole book on this worthy subject and toss everything else out.

L-K’s story goes on like this: Anyway, after the French revolution, socialism and liberalism are on the rise and religion on the decline. Socialism is evil and liberalism is good but in the end unable to save the world from the destruction of the left and the rise of totalitarianism (only good old religion, preferably Catholicism, can furnish that job). We are still under the spell of the French Revolution.
I think K-L is absolutely right here concerning the French Revolution, I think many people underestimate the influence that this event had on the posterity and on us. I haven’t yet read de Tocqueville’s work on the French Revolution where he argues that the impact was smaller than believed (I only listened to Raico’s audiobook Democracy in America where he, besides talking about de Tocqueville’s most famous work, he briefly discusses the work on the French Revolution. I will write a review about this nice and short audiobook soon).
According to de Tocqueville, and Raico seems to concur, it was a process of centralization of power that was going on for several hundreds of years. To me this seems counter-intuitive as there were so many advances made in France during the 18th century, especially in economics. In my experience, countries with big centralization of power are generally not famous for advancing the social sciences. But I have to defer my judgement at least until I have read this famous work. But I think it hardly can be denied that the French Revolution marks a new something, maybe a new era. According to F.J.P. Veale (In his Advance to Barbarism), the wars that followed between 1792 and 1815 were the first People’s wars, so called because people in arms were fighting rather than mercenaries. They were the beginning of the end of civilized warfare in Europe. K-L rightly called conscription an evil gift of the French Revolution. I think K-L is very in the right to put the French Revolution up there on the map as the starting point of leftism or modern leftism (a lot of leftism’s prejudices are older than the invention of writing). Of course, this insight is in itself not worthy of a whole book, much less a long book.
In leftism, L-K discusses some forerunners, leftists that theorized centuries before the French Revolution, so he obviously is aware that Leftism existed beforehand. It’s not like the French Revolution came from outer space and invaded earthlings and mocked their traditions. It’s even a truism to say that like any other historical event, it had its root in the past. It did not come out of nowhere. Nevertheless it constituted a break and catharsis (though these are now my own views and not necessarily those of K-L).

A big flaw of the book is that he deals with outrageous crimes of violence only when it fits his narrative. He overlooks the torture and other harm done by Catholic Rome or Monarchies. How he can ignore those glaring omissions is beyond me. Of course it demolishes his central theme that everything evil started with the leftism of the French Revolution, so it’s only natural that he would want to shed no light on it. Yet it is so big a hole in his theory that a child will be able to see through it. What was he trying to achieve? He must have been aware that such a perforated plot would never stand the test of time. Was he talking about eternal truths and honours seeking momentary fame? K-L was a rather big name in conservative circles back in his days in North America, so people seemed to have bought it after all. But the weakness of his position seemed to have correlated with the decline of his popularity in the decades afterward.

After de Sade and the French Revolution, K-L deals with Marx. For me, the only interesting point was that Marx was inspired by the bloodlust of the French Revolution and wanted to imitate it. Does he belong to the intelligent socialists with good intentions? I fear not. I also learned that Heinrich Heine knew him personally and labelled him a “godless self-god”. Apart from that there was nothing noteworthy that was new to me about Marx. It is telling that K-L completely shunned away from dealing with Marx’s economics. If I remember correctly, he even gives us some reason for it, but the truth is that he a) simply does not understand Marx’s economic theory and b) does not understand enough about real economics to corroborate or dismantle Marx’s (or Rodbertus’) theory.

What I found most interesting was K-L’s partition of liberalism into four schools (I’m not fully sure whether K-L invented it, but I haven’t seen it used elsewhere):

Pre-Liberalism: Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Shouldn’t the French economists like Turgot who preceded Smith or ideologists like Destutt de Tracy not also be in this phase?

Early Liberals: de Tocqueville, Acton and Jacob Burckhardt. This phase had primarily a cultural and political, not an economic character. I wonder whether Alexander von Humboldt shouldn’t also belong here.

Old Liberals: Mises and Bismarck. They were anticlerical and convinced that dogmatic beliefs automatically led to intolerance. Which of course, as Raico pointed out in his review, does in no way fit Mises, who was very, and rightly so, dogmatical (used here in its original, positive meaning).

Neo-Liberals: Wilhelm Röpke (Never heard). They were inspired by the Early Liberalists and differed from the Old Liberals by their greater sympathy for Christian values and their greater toleration for intervention and their leanings toward conservatism.

Maybe this classification could be extended to protoliberals (liberal writers of the first part of the 18th century or earlier) and postliberals (ancap’s).

K-L’s economic illiteracy however is shown in sentences like: “True, the evils engendered by a private monopoly are sometimes as great as those due to the state monopoly of socialism.” or “because if the rich man pays 50 cents and his less affluent fellow-citizen only 25 cents of his dollar in taxes, equality before the law becomes a sham”. Or by the fact that he calls Galbraith an economist of note (in the sense that his “economic” work was worthy of attention).

He claims that the empiricist Napoleon has invented the term ideologist. This is not true. The term has been coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy after landing on death row during the French Revolution. He tried to come up with a science that in future could prevent such atrocities as had happened to him and others.

My original review was longer but they sadly have a limit here, so ended:
Another reason why I stayed with the book till the end was that it was easily readable. It was far less demanding than some other books I’m reading. This was perfect for times when I didn’t feel my best because of my illness.
In the end K-L is an entertaining, arrogant, and as Raico probably rightly claimed, writer with a “lack of intelligence” and without analytical skills, but having some intuitive insights here and there. He’s somewhat of an imposter who tries desperately to be someone he’s not: an intellectual heavheavyweight like Mises. I wonder what their relation was. Maybe their relation was just another of K-L’s exaggerations.