Hitler, the Constructivist

The chapter challenges the prevailing view of Adolf Hitler as a primarily revenge-driven politician. Instead, it presents Hitler as a constructivist, driven by a quest to understand the nature of things so as to overcome the primary sources of Germany’s weakness and achieve sustainable security. It argues that Hitler engaged with the world of ideas in order to draw normative lessons for statecraft from his understanding of the nature of things. The answers he arrived at during the process form the ideological core of National Socialism. He identified Jews as the causal agent of the supposedly greatest existential “do-or-die” crisis that Europe had had to face for centuries, thus advocating an elimination of Jewish influence as a non-negotiable precondition for European collective survival. Furthermore, he identified insufficient territory as an obstacle to a pursuit of sustainable security, once Europe’s existential crisis had been overcome. Hitler’s ideology was therefore a function of his quest for sustainable security. It demanded a continuous commitment to National Socialist praxis, thereby creating a quasi-religious political force to inspire followers. He thus lay out an orthodoxy of National Socialism, a set of supposedly correct beliefs and rituals, as well as a National Socialist orthopraxy, that is the ethical conduct mandated by orthodoxy, attempting to ensure that the world of ideas in which he believed would continuously shape the material world.