Nationalism and Culture is a study of the eternal destruction of man's cultural achievements by the quest for power and by his submcission to the tyranny of the state. It is not only an investigation of philosophical truths as they emerge from the matrix of history; it is also the blazing signpost of a way into the future, a way that will tend to make man the master of his own fate. It is the life-work of one of the foremost living philosophers.
Is culture national? Did Greek culture for example, achieve its peak in spite of political disunity, or partly because of it? Are the national aspects of a work of art its strength or its weakness? Mr.Rocker brings an original mind and a vast scholarship to the answering of these questions, and of many others concerning the nature of the state itself.
Can men live without the state? Is all power Machiavellian? Does the world gain when state power passes into the hands of churchmen, princes, capitalists -- or parliamentarians? Are "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" dead issues today? What can we hope from Marxism? These are but a few of the many facets upon which Rocker's passionate love of freedom and his insurgent, well-informed intellect throw a new and well directed light.
Rocker proved that culture and power, society and the state, are basically antagonistic. Every power, whether political, economic or religious, is by nature sterile and unproductive. Wherever states are dying, or wherever their power is diminishing, tbere culture thrives proporponally. Power has various patterns and the states of Plato, of the Church, of Hobbes, More, Locke, Paine, Bentham, Franklin, Jefferson, Herder, Hegel, Kant, Rosseau and many others are subjected to analysis.
In each case, wherever centralisation of power is achieved, humanity is shown to take the further step toward the destruction of its own culture. Every new institution of power has various forms, but the same content. Therefore, no change in the form of thestate, but: only its extirpation, can bring about a full flowering of human life.
Rocker deals at length with the various concepts of the "nation" and their inadequacies, making clear that what we know as "national interests" are never anything but the interests of the ruling classes and castes within the nation. He then demonstrates that all political power, as the expression of these "national interests," strives after uniformity, whereas cultural development, on the contrary, strains after every new manifestation of intellectual and social life.
Our present course, he concludes, is fatally plotted toward a dictatorship of materialism, toward the death of the humanities, and toward the triumph of the machine. Man cannot be saved until he realises that not only must economic life be saved from exploitation, but society must also be saved from the invasive state, and also organizing to secure social justice.
Re-publication of this book is an event of world importance, for in it is the final crystallization of a subject that has been the concern of great minds for generations. Tbe author has spent over twenty years in assembling material and in picking up the threads which lead with iron necessity to our present social situation. He has produced a work which must be read and heeded by all who expect help from history, sociology, economics and philosophy.
This work was originally intended for a German circle of readers. It was to have appeared in Berlin in the autumn of 1933, but the frightful catastrophe which happened in Germany -- and which today threatens ever more and more to grow into a world catastrophe -- put an abrupt end there to all free discussion of social problems. That a work like this could not appear in present-day Germany will be understood by everyone who is even superficialiy acquainted with political and social conditions in the socalled "Third Reich"; for the line of thought which is given expression in these pages is in sharpest opposition to all the theoretical assumptions that underlie the idea of the "totalitarian state."
On the other hand, the developments of the past four years in my native country have given the world a lesson not easily misunderstood, which has confirmed in minutest detail everything that is foretold in the book. The insane attempt to attune every expression of the intellectual and social life of a people to the beat of a political machine and to stretch all human thought and action on the Procrustean bed of a pattern prescribed by the state had inevitably to lead to the internal collapse of all intellectual culture; for this is unthinkable without complete freedom of expression.
The degrading of literature in Hitler's Germany, the basing of science on a dreary race-fatalism which believes it possible to replace all ethical principles by ethnological concepts, the ruin of the theater, the misleading of public opinion, the muzzling of the press and of every other organ for the free display of sentiment among the people, the brutalising of the public administration of justice under pressure from an unintelligent party fanaticism, the ruthless suppression of the entire labor movement, the medieval "Jew hunt," the meddling of the state in the most intimate relations of the sexes, the total abolition of freedom of conscience both religious and political, the unmentionable cruelty of the concentration camps, the political murders for reasons of state, the expulsion from their native country of its most valuable intellectual elements, the spiritual poisoning of youth by a stateconducted propaganda of hate and intolerance, the constant appeal to the basest instincts of the herd through an unscrupulous demagoguery for which the end sanctifies any means, the standing threat to the peace of the world of a military system developed to the extreme peak and of an intrinsically hypocritical policy calculated for the deception of friend and foe alike, respecting neither the principles of justice nor confirmed treaties -- these are the inevitable results of a system in which the state is everything and man is nothing.
Let us not deceive ourselves; this latest reaction, which under existing economic and political conditions is constantly gaining ground, is not just one of those periodical phenomena which occur occasionally in the history of every country. It is not reaction directed merely against discontented sections of the population or against certain social movements and currents of thought. It is reaction as a principle, reaction against culture in general, reaction against all the social and intellectual achievements of the past two hundred years, reaction which threatens to smother all freedom of thought, reaction to whose leaders the most brutal force has become the measure of everything. It is relapse into a new barbarism to which all the presumptions of a higher social culture are alien, and whose representatives do reverence to the fanatical belief that all decisions in national and international life are to be reached only by means of the sword.
A senseless nationalism which fundamentally ignores all the natural ties of the communal cultural circle has developed into the political religion of this latest tyranny in the guise of the totalitarian state. It values human personality only as it may be of use to the apparatus of political power. The consequence of this absurd idea is the mechanising of the general social life. The individual becomes merely a wheel or a cog in an all-leveling state machine which has become an end in itself and whose directors tolerate no private right nor any opinion which is not in unconditional agreement with the principles of the state. The concept of heresy, a concept derived from the darkest periods of human history, is today carried over into the political realm and finds expression in the fanatical persecution of everyone who is unwilling to surrender to the new political religion and has not lost repect for human dignity and freedom of thought and action.
It is fatal self-delusion to believe that such phenomena can manifest themselves only in particular countries which are adapted to them by the peculiar national characteristics of their population. This superstitious belief in the collective intellectual and spiritual endowment of peoples, races and classes has already been productive of much mischief and blocks for us any deeper insight into the unfolding of social phenomena. Where a close relationship exists among the different human groups belonging to the same circle of culture, ideas and movements are not restricted, of course, within the political boundaries of separate states but come to prevail wherever they are favoured by the economic and social conditions of life. And these conditions are found today in every country where the influence of our modern civilization is felt, even if the extent of this influence is not everywhere the same.
The disastrous development of our present economic system, which led to a tremendous piling up of social wealth in the hands of small privileged minorities and to the continued impoverishment of the great masses of the people, smoothed the way for the present day social and political reaction and favored it in every way. It sacrificed the general interest of mankind to the private interest of individuals and thus systematically undermined the natural relations between man and man.
Our modern economic system has resolved the social organism into its separate components, dulled the social feeling of the individual and hindered his free development. Internally, it has split society in every country into hostile classes, and externally has divided the common cultural circle into hostile nations which confront one another filled with hate and, by their uninterrupted conflicts, continually shatter the very foundations of social communal life.
It is silly to hold the "doctrine of the class struggle" responsible for this state of affairs so long as no one moves a finger to supplant the economic assumptions which underlie this doctrine and to guide social development into other paths. A system which in every utterance of its life is ready to sacrifice the welfare of large sections of the people or of the entire nation to the selfish economic interests of small minorities must of necessity loosen all social ties and lead to a continuous warfare of each against all.
To him who closes his mind to this view the great problems that our time has set us must remain forever unintelligible. To him there remains merely brute force as a last recourse to keep on its feet a system which was long ago condemned by the course of events.
We have forgotten that industry is not an end in itself but only a means to assure to man his material subsistence and make available to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing, there begins the domain of a ruthless economic despotism which is no less disastrous in its operation than is any political despotism. The two despotisms mutually strengthen each other and are fed from the same source. The economic dictatorship of monopoly and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state arise from the same asocial endeavors, whose directors audaciously try to subordinate the innumerable expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to force organic life into lifeless forms.
So long as we lack the courage to look this danger in the face and to set ourselves against a development of affairs which is driving us irrevocably toward social catastrophe, the best of constitutions are of no avail and the legally guaranteed rights of citizens lose their original meaning.
It was this which Daniel Webster had in mind when he said: "The freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent."
Since then the economic development of society has taken on forms that have far surpassed men's worst fears and that today constitute a danger whose extent is hardly to be measured. This development, and the constantly growing power of an unintelligent political bureaucracy that regiments and supervises the life of man from the cradle to the grave, have systematically suppressed the solidaric collaboration of men and the feeling of personal freedom and have in every way supported the threat to human culture from the tyranny of the totalitarian state.
The recent World War and its frightful consequences (which are themselves only the results of the struggles for economic and political power within the existing social system) have greatly accelerated this process of intellectual disfranchisement and anesthetising of social feeling.
The call for a dictator who shall put an end to all the troubles of the time is merely the result of this spiritual and intellectual degeneration of a humanity that is bleeding from a thousand wounds, a humanity that has lost its confidence in itself and so expeds from the strength of another what it cannot attain by the cooperation of its own forces.
That people today contemplate this catastrophic trend of affairs with little understanding merely proves that the forces that once freed Europe from the curse of absolutism and revealed new roads for social progress have become alarmingly weak. The vital deeds of our great predecessors are honored only in tradition. It was the great merit of the liberal line of thought of previous centuries, and the popular movements that grew out of it, that they broke the power of absolute monarchy which for centuries had crippled all intellectual progress and sacrificed the life and the welfare of the nation to its leaders' lust for power. The liberalism of that period was the revolt of man against the yoke of an insupportable overlordship which respected no human rights but treated peoples like herds of cattle that existed only to be milked by the state and the privileged orders.
And so the representatives of liberalism strove for a social condition which should limit the power of the state to a minimum and should eliminate it, influence from the sphere of intellectual and cultural life -- tendency which found expression in the words of Jefferson: "That government is best which governs least."
Today, however, we stand face to face with a reaction which, going far beyond absolute monarchy in its demands for power, strives to deliver over to the "national state" every field of human activity. Just as, the theology of the various religious systems hold God to be everything and man nothing, so this modern political theology regards the "nation" as everything and the citizen nothing. And just as behind the "Will of God" there always lay hidden the will of privileged minorities, so today there hides always behind the "Will of the Nation" the selfish interests of those who feel themselves called to interpret this Will in their own sense and to impose it by force on the people.
It is the purpose of this work to retrace the intricate paths of this development and to lay bare its origins. In order to work out clearly the development and significance of modern nationalism and its relations to culture, the author was compelled to touch upon many different fields which are intimately interconneaed. How far he has succeeded in his task is for the reader himself to judge.
The first ideas for the work came to me some time before the War and first found expression in a series of lectures and in various articles that appeared in a number of periodicals. The completion of the work was repeatedly interrupted, by a four-years' internment and by various literary labours, so that I was finally able to arrange the last chapter and prepare this book for the press only shortly before Hitler's accession to power. Then there swept over Germany the "National Revolution," which compelled me, as it did so many others to seek refuge abroad. When I fled I.was able to rescue nothing but the manuscript of this work.
Since I could not longer count upon the publication of a work of such length -- to which, moreover the circle of readers in Germany was now barred -- I gave up all hope that my work would ever appear at all. I had to reconcile myself to this thought, as to so many others that are bound up with a life in exile. The petty disappointments of a disillusioned writer are so unimportant in comparison with the terrible distress of the time, under the yoke of which miliions of men groan today.
Then, suddenly came an unexpected change. On a lecture tour through the United States I came in contact with a host of old and new friends who took a lively interest in my work. I have to thank their unselfish activity that in Chicago, Los Angeles, and later in New York, special groups were organised which took up the task of making possible the translation of my work into English, and later of effecting its publication in this country.
I feel under special obligation to Dr. Charles James, who collaborated in the translation with untiring zeal and unselfishly undertook a task, the fulfillment of which was far from easy.
I feel further impelled at this point to acknowledge my gratitude to Dr. Frederick Roman, Prof. Arthur Briggs, T. H. Bell, Walter E. Holloway, Edward A. Cantrell and Clarence L. Swartz, who interested a larger circle of support by lecturing about my book, and by collaboration in other directions also, furthered the appearance of this work.
I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Mr. Ray E. Chase, who despite the serious difficulties imposed by his physical condition has devoted himself to the translation of my work and the revision of the manuscript, and in this has executed a task that only he can justly appreciate who knows how hard it is to render into a foreign tongue thought processes that run outside the everyday channels.
And, last but not least, I must here remember my friends H. Yaffe; C. V. Cook; Sadie Cook, his wife; Joe Goldman; Jeanne Levey; Aron Halperin; Dr. I. A. Rabins; I. Radinovsky, Adelaide Schulkind, and the Kropotkin Society in Los Angeles, who by their self-sacrificing activity have provided the material means for my work. To them, and to all of those who have given support by their efforts but whose names cannot all be mentioned here, my sincerest thanks for their loyal comradeship.
A foreigner in this country, I have met with so kind a reception that I could hope for nothing better, and to such kindness man in banishment is doubly sensitive. May this work contribute to the awakening of the slumbering consciousness of freedom. May it encourage men to face the danger which today is threatening human culture and which must become a fatal destiny for men if they do not bestir themselves to put an end to the mischief. For the words of the poet hold good also for us:
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whatever it touches;
... and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.
RUDOLF ROCKER
Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., September 1936
At the outset the writer of this preface wishes to make an acknowledgment and an explanation. Both are rather difficult to put briefly and clearly. After the collapse of the first arrangements for the translation of this book (details irrelevant to this discussion) Charles James, with a courage that cannot be over-valued, volunteered for the task. His understanding of the proper attitude toward the translation was the finest possible; the devotion with which he applied himself to the task was without limit. Unfortunately, the technique which for certain personal reasons he felt constrained to employ proved unsatisfactory. The transcription of his rendering from the cylinders of a dictating machine was so faulty as to make necessary an almost complete re-translation of most of the chapters he undertook and drastic revision of all the others. It would therefore be unjust to hold Mr. James responsible for any part of the translation as here presented. It would be outrageous not to make plain that but for the impetus that he gave and the example that he set this translation would probably never have been made. The writer is glad to record his recognition of this fact.
For the faults which remain in this translation the writer is alone responsible.
One who has undertaken a task of this magnitude while practically bound to an armchair must needs have owed much to others much than can never be acknowledged in detail. Mention must, however, in decency be made of some of the many obligations incurred:
First, to all of the Los Angeles members of the Rocker Publications Committee, whose names are given in the author's preface, and among these more particularly to H.Yaffe and to C.V.Cook and Sadie Cook for painstaking care of the business and financial details; to Edward A. Cantrell for invaluable assistance in verifying quotations from English language sources; to Clarence L.Swartz for formal revision of the manuscript and for useful suggestions as to renderings; to T. H. Bell for critical assistance and-especially-for friendly approval.
Second, and above all, to De De B. Welch for the unceasing loyal encouragement which has kept the writer at his task and for her indispensable help in verifying historical and artistic references.
Nationalism and Culture is the first of the works of Rudolf Rocker to appear in English. Although the author is known as a platform speaker to wide circles both in England and the United States some introduction of him to the wider reading public seems appropriate, the more so as his book is in a rather unusual degree an expression of the man.
Rudolf Rocker was born on March 25, 1873, in the ancient Rhine city of Mainz. He refers with a touch of pride to the fact that the city of his birth was founded by the Romans in 57 B.C., and that it was the birthplace of Johann Gutenberg and the site of his first printing house.
With mingled pride and affection he refers to its record of fruitful cultural activity, of democratic spirit and ready acceptance of advanced social ideas -- he specifies the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" -- and of resistance to oppression -- he specifies its antagonism to the encroachments of the Prussian state. He mentions the friendly attitude of a large part of the population of Mainz to the South German federalist, Constantin Frantz, one of Bismarck's most determined opponents.
It seems clear that the atmosphere and the traditions of his native city profoundly inftuenced him in his youth.
Rocker's father was a music printer (Notenstecher, "music typographer"). His mother came from one of the old Bürger families of Mainz.
Rocker early lost his parents, and his boyhood was passed in a Catholic orphans' home.
During his childhood and youth Rocker was strongly influenced in his intellectual development by his uncle Rudolf Naumann, his mother's brother, whom he described as an extremely intelligent and well-read man. The uncle instilled in young Rudolf a fondness for serious studies and assisted him in every way in the pursuit of them. He initiated the youth into the socialist movement, which at that time in Germany was completely under the intellectual domination of Marx and Lassalle. The Bismarckian anti-socialist law was still being rigorously enforced, so that open activity of any sort was out of the question, and the movement was entirely an underground one. Socialist literature was printed abroad, smuggled into the country and distributed secretly. The influence of this situation on young Rudolf is perhaps best described by a slightly condensed rendering of some extracts from one of his recent letters:
This underground activity had a peculiar attraction for me as a young man and appeaied strongly to my romantic imagination. It also early developed in me a profound aversion for the brutal suppression of ideas and personal convictions. This personal sense of justice was also the reason why the socialist movement of Germany could not hold me long. Its dogmatic narrow-mindedness and especially its outspoken intolerance of any opinion that was not in complete accord with the letter of the program very soon brought me to the conviction that I had no place there.
It was not the idea of socialism that repelled me but their dogmatic interpretation of it, which assumed that they had found a solution for every social problem, and in particular the total lack of any libertarian concept, which was especially characteristic of the German social democratic movement. Socialism in so far as it opposed the monopolising of the soil, the instruments of production and social wealth was certainly a sound and serviceable idea, but the permeation of this idea by all sorts of vestigial political theories robbed it of its real significance.
It was clear to me that socialism was not a simple question of a full belly, but a question of culture that would have to enlist the sense of personality and the free initiative of the individual; without freedom it would lead only to a dismal state capitalism which would sacrifice all individual thought and feeling to a fictitious collective interest. Allied with the liberal lines of thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which aimed at the freeing of personality and the elimination of political power from the life of society, it would lead to the development of a new social culture based upon free agreement among human beings and the principle of cooperative labor. And so I turned logically to libertarian socialism as expressed in the writings of William Godwin, Proudhon, Fourier, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoi, Reclus, Tucker and others.
When his school years were over Rocker was apprenticed to a bookbinder, and he followed that calling until his twenty-fifth year, when he abandoned it to devote himself wholly to his studies and his literary activities. After the German custom he traveled as a young journeyman through several countries. Everywhere he got in touch with the libertarian movement and took an active part in it. A natural gift for oratory and the ability to set down his ideas in writing made him an effective worker.
Later, personal acquaintance, warm friendship and close association with men like Peter Kropotkin, Elisee Reclus, Domela Nieuwenhuis, Errico Malatesta, and others furthered his intellectual development and his literary labours, so that his name became known in the libertarian circles of all countries.
From 1893 to 1895 he lived as a political refugee in Paris. This was for him a fruitful period, as it afforded him an opportunity to acquaint himself thoroughly with the social movements of the day.
From Paris he went to London where he became interested in the Jews of the East Side. He went to live among them and learned their language. From 1898 until the outbreak of the World War he was editor of the Yiddish Workers' Friend and of the monthly journal of social theory, Germinal.
As a non-Jew who speaks and writes Yiddish and has a clear understanding of the problems of the Jewish people and a fine sympathy for their difficulties, Rocker has had and still has a large following among the Jews of every land.
At the outbreak of the World War Rocker was arrested in London and interned for the duration of the war as an alien enemy. The story of his experiences in a British concentration camp he has embodied in a book, Hinter Stacheldraht und Gitter, which as a picture of a terrible but somewhat neglected aspect of the war is unsurpassed by any factual narrative to which that bloody period has given rise. It is soon to appear in English.
After the end of the war Rocker returned to Germany, where he carried on his work until Hitler's seizure of power made him once more a fugitive. He escaped with the manuscript of this book and practicaIly nothing else. His personal belongings were seized. His private papers and correspondence and the greater part of his library of some five thousand volumes were confiscated and probably burned. For three years now he has been a man without a country.
So much for the personal background of our book.
And here it will perhaps not be out of place to remind the English-speaking public, accustomed to a much narrower meaning, that in general Rocker uses the word "socialism" in the broad sense which it commonly has on the Continent to cover all proposals for a society in which production and distribution are carried on and controlled for the benefit of all. This includes not only Marxist and other socialist programs in which collective ownership and control are administered by a central authority, the state, but also the various anarchist and syndicalist schemes which reject central authority on principle. Either specific qualifying words or the obvious implication of the context will always show when the author is referring to some particular Socialist school or program.
Rudolf Rocker's Nationalism and Culture is a work sui generis. It is at once a scholarly survey and analysis of human culture and human institutions throughout the range of known history and an eloquent, poetical, often almost passionate expression of the feeling of the writer about all of the content of the realm he surveys.
Rocker is a scholar of very unusual attainments, as all will discern from his book. He is an intellectual of keen insight and tremendous power of logical analysis. He is a competent dialectician. Somewhat unusually for one thus endowed he is also an imaginative, poetic, emotional being, incapable of indifferent attitudes, passionately participant, at least in spirit, in every struggle in which he sees imperiled those human values which he regards as precious. This, too, all will probably discern from his book, because it is this above all which permeates and vivifies the book and sets it apart decisively from all mere works of pedantry, however conscientious and scholarly. That Rocker is also a literary artist of very high rank is not so readily discerned perhaps from this translation, but no translation could entirely conceal it.
In his social thinking Rocker takes off from the teachings of Peter Kropotkin, but on the basis of these teachings he has constructed a philosophy that is essentially his own. In conversation, and for the most part in his lectures, Rocker reveals himself as highly realistic and practical; the slightly exaggerated hopefulness that breathes from his printed pages is not so prominent. When he writes, the poet in him sometimes insists on guiding the pen. But the poet guides it pleasingly and well, and though he may on occasion for a moment forget the realities, he never disputes them.
It is hardly necessary to say that Nationalism and Culture is not a handbook of Rocker's philosophy. It is, of course, just his analysis and evaluation of the material treated: an analysis and evaluation, naturally, in the light of his philosophy.
The contrast between Rocker's conception of man, his history, his culture, and his institutions and such conceptions as underlie the economic determinism of Marx, the mystic destiny of Spengler, the almost mathematical patterning of Pareto, and so on, will be recognized, of course, by every reader.
Having recognized that the contrast exists the reader may at first feel impatient to find that it is nowhere explicitly defined in the book and that he is unable to state for himself in just what, on the whole, it consists. A moment's analysis will dispel the impatience: Rocker has made it his guiding principle to take man as given and, taking him as given, he finds him altogether too complex and incalculable to be formulated at all -- unless it be a formula to say that he is complex and incalculable.
And the standard of value, the test that he applies to cultures, institutions, social forms, is that they shall leave to this incalculable complexity the utmost possible freedom -- the utmost opportunity to be complex and incalculable. His indictment of authority is that it seeks always and inevitably to make man simple and calculable, seeks, to make sure that he will always do the expected thing at the expected time; and so must also decree that he may do only certain sorts of things at all.
It will be recognised also that Rocker has not always been completely objective in his conception of man, has not always succeeded in taking man quite as he is given (or at any rate as he seems to the translator and probably to some others to be given) but has sometimes had in mind a man of finer sensibility, of loftier character, of profounder and more sympathetic social feeling than -- to employ what Rocker calls a loan-translation from the German -- the cross-sectional man of whom any society is chiefly composed. That is, Rocker sometimes projects into the world he is evaluating an ideal he has set for himself and fails to recognise it as a projected thing. When he does this he does only what every writer on man and his ways has done, and must do. And he does it chiefy in some of his more rhapsodic finalés when the scholar has finished with the topic under discussion and the poet for the moment seizes the pen. Moreover, Rocker's project-man is still always the complex, incalculable human being who is for him the man given; he is never the over-simplified, easily formulated semi-robot of thinkers like Marx and Pareto, a construct-man about whom can be built a system. And when this project-man does appear in Rocker's work his presence is never allowed to vitiate the factual accuracy of the description, and he in no way alters the standard of value -- the test is still that both he and the Durchschnittsmensch shall have a field in which to be as complex and incalculable as they severally are.
And all who have been so unconventional as to read this preface before reading the book, or so conscientiously thorough-going as to read it at all, are reminded that it contains, not Rudolf Rocker's analysis and estimate of his book, but the translator's; and if to any of them the estimate seems incorrect or the analysis inadequate, it may be because they are incorrect and inadequate; it may be -- the translator believes it more likely to be -- because Nationalism and Culture is not only a masterpiece of scholarly analysis and an important contribution to social philosophy but also a work of art, and therefore, like every work of art, in great degree plastic to the moods and purposes of the reader.
RAY E. CHASE
Los Angeles, March 1937.
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