German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back

A will to dominate the world has been central to Germans' conception of the nation-state ever since Prussian unification in the late 19th century, asserts Dumont in this unsettling, rich, demanding, profound study. Applying a social anthropological approach, the noted French thinker links Germans' reputed proclivity to obey and willing subordination to authority to the decisive influence of Luther's ``Christian individualism.'' Dumont contrasts Germans' embrace of collective identity with individualism in France, which he deems more liberating, not bound to nationalist sentiment. Yet he goes on to offer a scathing critique of French ethnocentrism and an analysis of the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in the context of French chauvinism. Elsewhere, he follows the ideal of self-cultivation (Bildung), from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship to Thomas Mann's apolitical stance during WWI and his later rejection of Nazism. Dumont also ponders the divisive rift between the political left and right in Western democracies, a phenomenon whose roots he locates in the ideological battles of the French Revolution. (Jan.)