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Fascism and Nazism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

R. G. Collingwood
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Extract

When travellers are overcome by cold, it is said, they lie down quite happily and die. They put up no fight for life. If they struggled, they would keep warm; but they no longer want to struggle. The cold in themselves takes away the will to fight against the cold around them.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 58 , April 1940 , pp. 168 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1940

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References

1 The End of Economic Man (London, 1939), especially page 14Google Scholar, bottom, and the pages following. I owe much to this book, but I do not accept everything it contains.

1 This article was written immediately after reading Mr. Joad's Appeal to Philosophers. Mr. Joad asks for a truce of philosophical sects, a pause in logic-chopping, and an attempt to make fresh contact with the classical tradition in philosophy. The philosophers of the classical tradition, as I understand it, were men who used their trained faculties of thinking in order to think about facts, and primaHly about facts of practical importance in relation to the lives of their fellow-men. No facts, in my opinion, are of greater practical importance at the present time than Fascism and Nazism. Our own country is fighting Nazi Germany. My friend, Mr. Hooper, asks me for an article on “some urgent important theme.” The most urgent theme I can think of is the necessity for taking Fascism and Nazism seriously; to stop flattering ourselves with the belief that they are baseless follies indulged by unaccountable foreigners, or the alternative belief that they are good examples which we should be wise to follow. What our soldiers and sailors and airmen have to fight, our philosophers have to understand. If I have understood them badly, I hope someone who understands them better will correct me.