Abstract

This essay reconstructs the German philosopher and cultural sociologist Helmuth Plessner's reading of Germany's fall into the catastrophe of National Socialism. The conceptual foundations for his reading were developed in The Limits of Community (1924). There he argued that post-WWI political extremism was characterized by the anti-modernist concept of “community.” In The Belated Nation (1935/59), he went on to identify the Lutheran Reformation as the determining turning point in German history. The Lutheran type of consciousness stands at the origin of a self-destructive hermeneutics of suspicion that finally resulted in völkisch thinking. Second, unlike the formation of a democratic spirit in the Calvinist middle classes in Holland and England, in Prussia the Lutheran alliance of throne and altar led to the exclusion of the middle classes from politics, relegating them to the liberal professions of science and art. Finally, I argue that Plessner's own theoretical model of a political anthropology was developed in opposition to the German intellectual classes’ failure to prevent or oppose Hitler's rise to power, including his plea for Germany to align with Western European nations shaped by the Calvinist version of the Reformation.