Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa

Abstract

The impact of Naumann’s ideas on German thought and emotions during the war derived from his steady intellectual growth and political maturation in the pre-war decades. A theologian in the 1890’s, social thinker and reform advocate in the 1890’s, he became fascinated at the turn of the century by the dynamics and techniques of modern capitalism. Naumann studied and tried to comprehend these phenomena in relation to his social idealism and patriotism. The result was an unusual book, his Neudeutsche Wirtschaftspolitik of 1906. In this work he attempted to sense the changes which industrial imperialism were imposing upon the nation and the individual. Germans must look to the future, he urged, must anticipate the dimensions of the emerging industrial Leviathan and, by a combination of state and group action, give it a maximum opportunity for productivity, consistent with a just social order. These views Naumann brought into harmony with the German nationality and its cultural principles. In a sense he was following in the footsteps of Friedrich List, postulating a national system of social economy, in which economic instruments were to serve a high moral and national objective.1