Epilogue

Weimar

Herbert Spiegelberg

pp. 167-176

in: Robbie Shilliam, German thought and international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

In the preceding part of this book I argued that ultimately the development of the Jacobin subject, and its expression within German politics, was not intellectually confronted in its own right, but subsumed under, or mixed with, the problem of engaging with the British impersonalized individual. The focus of this narrative was the intellectual reception and engagement with this problem, although this itself was contextualized within the wider transformations enacted by German political strata through the challenge presented by these foreign political subjects. In what follows, I will suggest how the conclusion to Germany's Sonderweg, the wider transformations that produced National Socialism, might be better understood as a final substitution project for the French road. Certainly, all I can do here is suggest an alternative interpretation of such a contested phenomenon; yet this suggestion must be made in order to better contextualize Morgenthau's Weimar response to Weber's Realpolitik: his Political Realism.