Content area
Full Text
"On the banner of the International was not written 'Proletarians of all lands, kill each other!' but 'Proletarians of all lands, unite!"'
- RUDOLF ROCKER, "WAR: A STUDY IN FACT"
WHEN RUDOLF ROCKER'S Nationalism and Culture was released in 1937, it was hailed by no less an assemblage of luminaries than Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Thomas Mann. The historian Will Durant called it "magnificent" and "profound," and even the New Republic gave it a positive notice. It was an unusual level of mainstream acclaim for a book of political philosophy by a German anarchist refugee, especially one published by a group called the "Rocker Publication Committee," a Los Angeles-based venture set up for the sole purpose of releasing Nationalism and Culture.
Yet in the years since, Rocker's work has settled into the obscurity for which it was perhaps always destined. Unlike The Decline of the West (1926), Oswald Spengler's meditation on the destiny of civilizations, to which it was compared at the time, Nationalism and Culture is rarely cited. Though it proposes and defends a comprehensive theory of nationalism, Benedict Anderson does not even acknowledge it in Imagined Communities (1982). Contemporary mentions of the book are largely confined to anarchist circles, and even there it is an awkward outsider, its humanistic cultural analysis and rich love of history out-of-step with the contemporary anarchist inclination to immolate all sacred things.
The eclipse of Rocker's magnum opus is hardly mysterious. It is a book that fits with few of our conceptions of how such books ought to be written, a book that deliberately scorns almost all prior wisdom, and a book whose very existence is difficult to square with common understandings about its time. Rocker is a German who mocks both Hegel and Hitler in equal measure, and who writes in the uncompromising and eclectic voice of the autodidact, shunning the toothless evenhandedness demanded of academics. And writing as an atheistic Berlin anarchist in 1933, Rocker offers living proof of his own contention that individuals must not be made prisoners of stereotypes about national spirit.
Nationalism and Culture is, primarily, a 600page exploration of the origins and development of nationalism, and a scathing denunciation of the corrosive effect of national feeling on the human spirit. Yet...