After Rousseau, collectivist political thought was divided into left-wing and right-wing versions, both of which were inspired by Rousseau. The history of the Left version is the subject of Chapter Five, so my purpose in this chapter is to highlight the development of right-wing collectivist thinking and to show that in its essence the collectivist right was pursuing the same general anti-liberal and anti-capitalist goals that the left pursued. collectivist.
What links the right and the left is a nuclear set of underlying postures: anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view of religion as a matter of state (either to promote it or to suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialization, an ambivalence on science and technology, and strong positions of inter-group conflict, violence, and war. Lefts and Right have often bitterly dissent about which issues are priority and how they should be implemented. Despite all their differences, the collectivist left and the collectivist right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its limited government, its separation from Church and State, its fairly uniform position that education is not primarily a question of political socialization, and his persistent optimism Whig for a perspective of peaceful cooperation and trade among the members of all nations and groups.
Rousseau, for example, is often seen as a left-wing man, and has influenced generations of leftist thinkers. But it was also inspiring for Kant, Fichte, and Hegel — all right men. Fichte in turn was regularly taken as a model for right-wing thinkers — but it was also an inspiration for leftist socialists like Friedrich Ebert, President of the Weimar Republic after World War I. Hegel's legacy took, as is well known, both a right-wing and a left-wing form.
Although the details are confusing, the general point is clear: the collectivist right and the collectivist left are united in their main goals and in identifying their main opponent. None of these thinkers, for example, ever had a kind word for John Locke's political stance. In the twentieth century, the same trend continued. Academics debated whether George Sorel is left or right; which makes sense since he inspired and admired both Lenin and Mussolini. And just to give one more example, Heidegger and the Frankfurt School thinkers have in political terms much more in common than what either of us have with, say, John Stuart Mill. This in turn explains why thinkers like Herbert Marcuse to Alexandre Kojève and Maurice Merleau Ponty argued that Marx and Heidegger are compatible, but none ever dreamed of even connecting them to Locke or John Stuart Mill.
The point is that liberalism did not penetrate deeply into the main lines of political thought in Germany. As in the case of metaphysics and epistemology, the most vigorous developments in social and political philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth century took place in Germany, and German socio-political philosophy was dominated by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism , Chapter 4, translation Walter Jerusalem