Table of Contents
The Ominous Parallels offers a truly revolutionary idea.... The book is clear, tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly reasoned. Its style is clear and hard as crystaland as sparkling.... As to my personal reaction, I can express it best by paraphrasing a line from Atlas Shrugged: Its 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 todays world should read this book.
Alan Greenspan
A fascinating weave of German history, philosophic determinism, and Objectivist polemic.
Chicago Tribune
THE
OMINOUS PARALLELS
LEONARD PEIKOFF is universally recognized as the pre-eminent Rand scholar writing today. He worked closely with Ayn Rand for thirty years and was designated by her as her intellectual heir and heir to her estate. He has taught philosophy at Hunter College, Long Island University, and New York University and is now host of the national radio talk show Philosophy: Who Needs It.
Introduction
It gives me great pleasure to introduce the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself.
Perhaps the best recommendation I can give this bookand its author, Dr. Leonard Peikoffis to say that it and he are not of todays cultural mainstream. They will be part of tomorrows.
It is not necessary for me to prove that something is wrong with todays world. Everybodyof any creed, color, or intellectual persuasion, old and young, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, foreign and domesticsenses that something monstrous is destroying the world. But no one knows what it is, and people keep blaming one anotherwith some justice.
As a symptom of todays cultural anxiety, observe the unusual interest in and the deluge of books dealing with Nazi Germany. Every sort of semi-plausible and wholly impossible theory has been offered in futile attempts to find the cause and explain the rise of Nazism. The failure of those explanations intensifies the quest: men seem to sense that the collapse of what had been a civilized country into such monstrous evil must be understood if we are to make certain that it will not be repeated. We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism, states Dr. Peikoff. If we do not know its causes, how can we be sure that our own country is not traveling the same road?
Dr. Peikoff answers these questions. He identifies the cause of Nazismand the ominous parallels between the intellectual history of Germany and of the United States. He demonstrates that there is a science which has been all but obliterated in the modern world. Yet this science determines the destiny of nations and the course of history ... , he writes. It is the science which had to be destroyed, if the catastrophes of our time were to become possible. The science is philosophy.
The non-modern (and non-old-fashioned) aspect of Leonard Peikoffs book is the breadth of his vision and the stunning scale of his philosophic integration. He does not share the concrete-bound, college-induced myopia of those alleged philosophers who study the various meanings of the word but (the contemporary empiricists)nor does he share the foggy stumbling and the floating abstractions of their predecessors (the rationalists). He presents the history of Germanys philosophy, in telling essentialsthen the history of Americas philosophy and what destroyed it. (The chapter The Nation of the Enlightenment is the most inspired and inspiring tribute to the Founding Fathers that I have ever read.) Then he presents the practical resultsthe way in which philosophic ideas direct the course and shape the particular events of the history of both countries, as reflected in politics, economics, art, literature, education, etc.
This last is the cardinal achievement of Dr. Peikoffs book. While todays philosophy departments make it a loud point to proclaim that philosophy has nothing to do with practical life or with reality (which, they add, does not exist)Dr. Peikoff shows to their mangled victims what philosophy is, what it does, and how to recognize its influence all around us. He gives a virtuoso performance of shuttling effortlessly between abstractions and concreteskeeping the first tied firmly to reality and thus illuminating the second. He shows that a nation brought up to regard the principles of duty and self-sacrifice as cardinal virtues will be helpless when confronted by a gang of thugs who demand obedience and self-sacrifice.
It is a tragic irony of our time that the two worst, bloodiest tribes in history, the Nazis of Germany and the Communists of Soviet Russia, both of whom are motivated by brute power-lust and a crudely materialistic greed for the unearned, show respect for the power of philosophy (they call it ideology) and spend billions of their looted wealth on propaganda and indoctrination, realizing that mans mind is their most dangerous enemy and it is mans mind that they have to destroywhile the United States and the other countries of the West, who claim to believe in the superiority of the human spirit over matter, neglect philosophy, despise ideas, starve the best minds of the young, offer nothing but the stalest slogans of a materialistic altruism in the form of global giveaways, and wonder why they are losing the world to the thugs.
As an example of why the cause of Nazism should be understood (but is not), I would like to mention a recent television interview with Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany. Asked to name his favorite philosopher, he answered in a changed tone of voice, a stiff, solemn, deaf-and-blind, heel-clicking toneMarcus Aurelius. He taught that we must do our duty above all. If he is typical of his country (and I believe he is), Germany has learned nothing.
The ineffable monster destroying the world is not an entity but a vacuum, an absence, the emptiness left by the collapse of philosophy. In that lightless emptiness, mindless men rattle frantically, bumping into one another, seeking desperately some way to exist on earthwhich they cannot find without the tool they have discarded. This leads to phenomena such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, as Dr. Peikoff demonstrates.
If you do not wish to be a victim of todays philosophical bankruptcy, I recommend The Ominous Parallels as protection and ammunition. It will protect you from supporting, unwittingly, the ideas that are destroying you and the world. It will bring order into the chaos of todays eventsand show you simultaneously the enormity of the battle and the contemptible smallness of the enemy.
The Ominous Parallels offers a truly revolutionary idea in the field of the philosophy of history. The book is clear, tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly reasoned. Its style is clear and hard as crystaland as sparkling. If you like my works, you will like this book.
As to my personal reaction, I can express it best by paraphrasing a line from Atlas Shrugged: Its so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine!
AYN RAND
New York
November 1980
PART ONE
THEORY
The Cause of Nazism
Here is the theory:
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nations spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual....
