Pribram’s essay explains the affinity between German nationalism and German socialism through their shared construction of collective entities. Its starting point is the wartime and postwar reinterpretation of socialism as Germany’s national vocation: writers could reject Marxist class struggle while celebrating Prussian duty, organization, and economic coordination as socialist. Pribram locates the possibility of this substitution beneath political programs, in the conceptual structure common to “class” and “nation.”
Es ist heute in Deutschland eine ganz eigenartige, auf den ersten Blick verblüffende Erscheinung zu beobachten.
English translation: Today a quite peculiar phenomenon, astonishing at first glance, is to be observed in Germany.
This apparent paradox opens an inquiry into the intellectual premises of political allegiance. Pribram distinguishes three modes of thought. Nominalism constructs concepts through empirical abstraction, recognizes individuals as bearers of purposes, and treats collective ends as contingent. Universalism attributes independent reality and absolute purposes to wholes such as the Church or a divinely authorized state. Between them stands “pseudo-universalism,” which begins with individuals but synthesizes them into entities possessing purposes independent of their members’ wills. Liberal economics, Marxism, and Catholic social doctrine supply contrasting examples.
Class and nation emerge as parallel constructions. In Pribram’s reading, Marxism transforms an empirical grouping by property ownership into a historical agent charged with overcoming capitalism. Class struggle becomes a purposive development whose completion abolishes its own bearer. The German national idea similarly transforms language, history, and sentiment into an enduring personality with cultural and political missions.
Zur deutschen Nation werden die Germanen, die im Teutoburger Walde gegen die Römer kämpften, ebenso gerechnet, wie die Nürnberger Meistersinger und die Preußen der Gegenwart.
English translation: The Germanic tribes who fought against the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest are reckoned part of the German nation just as much as the Nuremberg Mastersingers and the Prussians of the present day.
Continuity across radically different historical circumstances exemplifies the conceptual work performed by the national idea. Pribram distinguishes the observable effects of national consciousness from the alleged reality of a supra-individual will. Both class and nation acquire absolute claims upon their members, demand organized unity, and confront opposing collectivities as obstacles to their mission. Their structural similarity explains their rivalry as well as the wartime elevation of national solidarity above class allegiance.
The pursuit of political power gives these constructions institutional consequences. In the analysis of class struggle, the state becomes an instrument for realizing collective ends:
Er ist bestrebt, die Verfügung über die politischen Machtmittel zu erlangen: der Staat wird als Instrument der Klassenherrschaft aufgefaßt.
English translation: It strives to obtain command over the instruments of political power: the state is conceived as an instrument of class rule.
Pribram extends the argument to constitutional organization. Since a national collective will cannot simply mean an electoral majority, imperial Germany made the emperor its visible representative. Organic state theories likewise presented the state as rooted in individuals yet entitled to subordinate them to higher purposes. Democracy, by contrast, requires revisable purposes and bargaining, whereas ideological parties claim to embody binding ends of nation, class, or Church. Constitutional democratization therefore need not transform the political mentality underlying institutions. Pribram’s broad national characterizations remain interpretive premises rather than systematically demonstrated comparative findings.
The argument then turns to socialization. Marxism faces a logical difficulty: abolishing classes removes the antagonism supposedly driving historical development. Continuing development through new antagonists, perhaps administrators and workers, would compromise socialism’s promise of deliverance. In Pribram’s account, Bolshevism turns toward universalist authority and an unconditional revolutionary mission, while pragmatic reform moves toward nominalism by judging socialization through consent and relative expediency. The 1919 Regensburg debates illustrate how incompatible premises obstruct agreement beneath shared terminology.
His criticism of German guild socialism concerns its combination of capitalist enterprise forms with collective purposes. Representation of workers, consumers, and public authorities multiplies objectives without supplying the criterion profitability offers private enterprise. Technical improvement cannot replace economic calculation; production-centered organization risks prescribing consumption and weakening responsiveness to changing wants. Full socialization intensifies difficulties of valuation, investment, and external economic relations, although Pribram stops short of declaring it impossible.
The conclusion returns to the ethical affinity between devotion to class and devotion to nation: both demand subordination to a privileged whole. Replacing one collective bearer with the other makes socialism’s national reinterpretation intelligible. The essay thus connects conceptual reification with political authority and economic organization. Its methodological qualification is important: doctrines should be examined for contradictions within their premises, not dismissed merely because they employ a different mode of thought.
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