Source: Law & Liberty
by Rachel Lu
“[George L.] Mosse had a particular genius for identifying second and third-rate thinkers that nevertheless had deep cultural impact, particularly in the half-century before Hitler’s rise. Figures like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn easily fade from the historian’s view because they were gauche and intellectually unserious; revisited today, their works are easily dismissed as trash. It’s far more interesting to debate real philosophical luminaries like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, whose genuinely groundbreaking work did nevertheless have real connections to fascism. Those thinkers are extremely abstruse, however. Normal people don’t read or understand them. Mosse grasped the importance of looking at the ‘sub-intellectual realm,’ where cranks and grifters peddle conspiracy theories and paranoid just-so stories. These, he suggests, were the men who truly paved the way for Hitler’s rise.” (12/18/25)