The Cause of Hitler's Germany

Zusatztext “Offers a truly revolutionary idea…The book is clear! tight! disciplined! beautifully structured! and brilliantly reasoned. Its style is clear and hard as crystal—and as sparkling… As to my personal reaction! I can express it best by paraphrasing a line from Atlas Shrugged : ‘It’s so wonderful to see a great! new! crucial achievement which is not mine!’”— Ayn Rand   “Extraordinarily perceptive…frightening insights…Everyone concerned with the collectivist trend in today’s world should read this book.”— Alan Greenspan   “A fascinating weave of German history! philosophic determinism! and Objectivist polemic.”— Chicago Tribune   Informationen zum Autor Leonard Peikoff  is the preeminent Ayn Rand scholar writing today. He worked closely with Rand in New York City for thirty years and was designated by her as heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at several places, including Hunter College and New York University. Dr. Peikoff is the author of  The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out  and  The Cause of Hitler’s Germany . He grew up in Western Canada and now lives in Southern California. He also hosted the national radio talk show "Philosophy: Who Needs It." Klappentext "A truly revolutionary idea… Clear! tight! disciplined! beautifully structured! and brilliantly reasoned."-Ayn Rand Self-sacrifice! Oriental mysticism! racial "truth!" the public good! doing one's duty-these are among the seductive catchphrases that circulated in pre-Nazi Germany. Objectivist author and philosopher Leonard Peikoff was Ayn Rand's long-time associate. In The Cause of Hitler's Germany-previously published in The Ominous Parallels-Peikoff demonstrates how unreason and collectivism led the seemingly civilized German society to become a Nazi regime. PREFACE As Ayn Rand indicates in her introduction, this book demonstrates how German philosophy led to Hitler and the Holocaust. The Cause of Hitler’s Germany is about two-thirds of The Ominous Parallels , a book of mine first published in 1982. In the book, I intended a warning: If Americans continue to accept and act on the same philosophic ideas that led to the Third Reich, then America will have to follow a parallel course and suffer the same result. The book, accordingly, studied American culture and history in as much detail as that given to Germany. Given our cultural state, however, I did not expect any such warning to be heeded or even heard, and it wasn’t. There is no improvement in the thirty years since, no change in the basic ideas ruling the United States (and the West as a whole). The Soviet Empire has collapsed, but the ideas of irrationalism, self-sacrifice, and collectivism still dominate and fuel murderous tyrannies, primarily now in the upsurging Middle East, but elsewhere, too. Unlike The Ominous Parallels , this substantial portion of it is offered not primarily as a warning but rather as an explanation. To this day, Nazism remains vivid in the public mind as the greatest evil in human history, and continues to be the subject or background of countless novels, films, and nonfiction analyses. But the artists and scholars still have no real explanation; they are no closer than they were in 1982 to identifying the fundamental roots of Nazism. For this reason, I agreed with the suggestion of Dr. Michael Berliner that I bring out this reduced version of my book. It was Dr. Berliner who first thought of such a possibility, who initiated the project, and who oversaw the development of its various stages. He wanted a book that would focus only on the Nazi aspects: on their intellectual origins in German philosophy, and then on their manifestations in Weimar culture and, as a result, in the world of Hitler. My approach to discovering the cause of Nazism is, I believe, unique and worthy ...

Product details

• Authors: Leonard Peikoff
• Publisher: Plume USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.11.2014
• EAN: 9780142181478
• ISBN: 978-0-14-218147-8
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Miscellaneous