Political Ideals

This edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Politische Ideale (1915) reveals the historical significance of Chamberlain in German conservative political philosophy. Contrasting the vital nationalistic state with the sterile commercialism of liberal democracies, moral freedom with the unruly selfishness of democratic parties, and the decaying culture of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with the relatively pure Teutonic, Chamberlain evokes in this work, with the deftest of strokes, the principal elements of a genuinely conservative state. Apart from studying the salient points of Chamberlain's political doctrine of state-formation, the Introduction to this translation surveys the Prussian intellectual antecedents of Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde and Heinrich von Treitschke. The works also examines the legacy of Chamberlain's political thought in the Neoconservatism and Prussianism of the Weimar conservatives, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Edgar Julius Jung, as well as in the work of the National Socialist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.