Political Ideals

This edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Politische Ideale (1915) reveals the historical significance of Chamberlain in German conservative political philosophy. Contrasting the vital nationalistic state with the sterile commercialism of liberal democracies, moral freedom with the unruly selfishness of democratic parties, and the decaying culture of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with the relatively pure Teutonic, Chamberlain evokes in this work, with the deftest of strokes, the principal elements of a genuinely conservative state. Apart from studying the salient points of Chamberlain's political doctrine of state-formation, the Introduction to this translation surveys the Prussian intellectual antecedents of Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde and Heinrich von Treitschke. The works also examines the legacy of Chamberlain's political thought in the Neoconservatism and Prussianism of the Weimar conservatives, 'swald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and Edgar Julius Jung, as well as in the work of the National Socialist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.

This edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Politische Ideale (1915) reveals the historical significance of Chamberlain in German conservative political philosophy. Contrasting the vital nationalistic state with the sterile commercialism of liberal democracies, moral freedom with the unruly selfishness of democratic parties, and the decaying culture of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with the relatively pure Teutonic, Chamberlain evokes in this work the principal elements of a genuinely conservative state.

Dr. Alexander Jacob obtained his doctorate in the History of Ideas at the Pennsylvania State University and has published eleven books on natural and political philosophy, including De Naturae Natura: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious and Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the Early Twentieth Century. His English editions of German Conservative thinkers include Edgar Julius Jung's The Rule of the Inferiour and Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870-1940, Selected Readings.