Traders and Heroes

Patriotic Reflections

Werner Sombart

• Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781914208348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Werner Sombart's Traders and Heroes, published in 1915 during World War I, is an insightful and concise treatise on the differences in national character between the English and the Germans. The bourgeois trade mentality of the English clashes with the heroic and sacrificial one of the Germans. While the former only desire individual enrichment and creating the necessary global preconditions for it, the latter crave unity with the folk in life and death, so that they become the perfect physical expression of the national soul.

The English want to avoid war because it is bad for business. The Germans, on the other hand, crave war because it tests their spirit and liberates them from the mundaneness of everyday existence while simultaneously affirming the axiom that the whole of the nation is paramount to the individual self.

Like the Jews of yore, the Germans of Sombart's time are universally despised because of their insistence on their uniqueness. Sombart argues that Germans should justifiably be proud of their superiority and as a result need not feel shame looking down on other peoples.

Notes

[←1 ]

See Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973, p. 194.

[←2 ]

Werner Sombart, Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin: G. Bondi, 1903 (my translation).

[←3 ]

Ibid.

[←4 ]

Werner Sombart, Das Proletariat, Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 1906, p. 59 (my translation).

[←5 ]

Germany joined forces with Austria-Hungary against Russia in August 1914, and Britain declared war against Germany when the latter invaded Belgium in the same month in order to gain access to France.

[←6 ]

Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen, Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1915.

[←7 ]

Sombart particularly recalls Nietzsche’s similar low evaluation of the English mind and its typical representatives: ‘They are not a philosophical race, these English. Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit in general, Hobbes, Hume and Locke a degradation and devaluation of the concept of a “philosopher” for more than a century.’

[←8 ]

See Principles of Sociology, Art. 575.

[←9 ]

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) also published a wartime work Politische Ideale in the same year as Sombart’s Händler und Helden, in which he defended the German social ethos with the same doctrine of the state as the arena in which man fully realises his humanity. The ideal state, according to Chamberlain, must be infused with a sense of Kantian inner freedom, and its self-discipline will resemble that of the German Army, where all the soldiers are united unto death for the achievement of the same national goal (see my English edition of this work, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Political Ideals, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005).

[←10 ]

Adam Müller, Die Elemente der Staatskunst, Erste Vorlesung.

[←11 ]

Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, I, p. 54.

[←12 ]

Treitschke, ‘Das constitutionelle Königthum in Deutschland’.

[←13 ]

Ibid.

[←14 ]

Ibid., 65.

[←15 ]

Sombart and the other German nationalists are clearly problematic thinkers for European nationalists like Jean Thiriart (1922–1992), who urged his followers to disregard all national differences in order to erect a pan-European political unit on the continent (see my editions of Jean Thiriart, The Great Nation: Unitarian Europe — from Brest to Bucharest, Melbourne: Manticore Press, 2018; The Geopolitcal Unification of Europe, Russia and Central Asia, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2019; Istanbul: The Geopolitical Capital of the United States of Europe, Russia and Central Asia, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2019; Europe: An Empire of 400 Million, London: Arktos, 2021).

[←16 ]

See Homer, Iliad, IX, 410ff. In fact, it is the Trojan prince Hect...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• English Traders
• German Heroism
• The Mission of the German Nation
• Other Books Published by Arktos
• Notes