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T he relationship between ethics and politics stands at the center of Mosse’s work, connecting his early modern writings with his major works on nationalism and fascism. His interpretation of Machiavellism lies behind both, strengthening the “continuity of interests” and attributing a comprehensive quality to his ideas. His books before The Culture of Western Europe stressed the link between Machiavellism and totalitarianism. His later work points to the Holocaust, which appears as the triumph of Machiavellian ethics over individuality. Corrupted bourgeois respectability, viewed by Mosse as one major factor leading to the Final Solution, enters this scheme as part of that ethical dimension of public morality that had its origins in the divorce of Christian ethics from politics. Thus Machiavellism, intended as a component of the secularization process leading to the creation of an ethics dictated by the state, comes to play a crucial role on the road to the Holocaust. In 1924 Friedrich Meinecke argued that Machiavellism had led to nationalism ; in 1946, speaking of the modern age but referring in particular to National Socialism, he wrote that “politics is no longer the a¤air of the few. . . . This widening of the circle of politically active people multiplies the keys to the chest of poisons in which lie the essences of Machiavellism. From being an aristocratic 115 5 R From Machiavellism to the Holocaust As a matter of fact, the new man of National Socialism was the ideal bourgeois. —george l. mosse The emphasis on action was supposed to distinguish the new man from the bourgeois, associated in the fascist mind with passivity, cynicism, and decadence. —george l. mosse a¤air, Machiavellism became a bourgeois a¤air, and finally became mass Machiavellism .”1 Meinecke also referred to the amoral consequences of reason of state; Mosse wrote in 1961 that fascism had substituted nihilism for the “eternal verities” of Christian ethics. And yet he would soon substitute, in his scheme of things, bourgeois morality for nihilism, thus linking the former to fascism, and particularly to National Socialism, viewed as the most abhorrent outcome of reason of state. In 1976 he claimed that the new man of National Socialism was the “ideal bourgeois.” Bourgeois respectability, once it became “everyone’s morality,” came to represent that cement of society that paved the way for the Holocaust: ethical principles shared by a mass society took the form of a secularized ethos that dictated the di¤erence between good and evil, between normal and abnormal, leading to the persecution of the outsider: in Mosse’s view, modern persecution was the “new Leviathan.” As early as in 1940, in a paper on Nietzsche in which a young Mosse passionately chastised bourgeois Gemütlichkeit, he wrote that “the relations between National Socialism and the doctrines of Machiavelli are very close.”2 At the Stanford seminar he defined totalitarianism as “the stretching of the old ideas of raison d’état.”3 Mosse regarded totalitarianism as one possibility inherent in the idea of reason of state: Machiavelli’s ethics was the beginning of a new ethics linked with modern materialism, where the state substitutes for God and becomes a new source of virtue: this brings the need to “choose between the State as a thing of morality, or the good of the individual.”4 Thus, the problem of the relationship between ethics and reason of state, raised in the early modern context of the growth of absolutism, was apt to be transferred to the new field of studies Mosse was about to enter. Machiavellism lies at the core of modernity, he wrote in 1952, in that it leads to the “fateful divorce of ethics from politics”: Machiavelli “supplied the inspiration for this double standard of morality,” which confronted public and private morals and “endowed the state with a moral personality of its own.”5 The concern with the liberty and dignity of the individual passed into Mosse’s study of the modern age, which was in fact its point of origin. The Culture of Western Europe, Mosse’s first contribution to the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was written as a warning against totalitarianism and as a passionate defense of the individual. The chapter on National Socialism is an outstanding example of Mosse’s beliefs and ideas. “Individualism,” he wrote, “was easily sacrificed for the sake of security and for the feeling . . . that life was worth living again.” This climaxed in the National Socialist “destruction of individuality ”; the concentration camp was the final...

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