Hitler: Philosopher King

Hitler and the NSDAP presented as a social and historical phenomenon, and the aim of this book is to articulate a hypothesis about two factors that combined to create this. Citing Plato’s statement from the Republic that leaders need to be philosophers, it proposes that his personality and a philosophy combined in Hitler as a leader to enable both his personal political success and the nature of the regime that he constructed. Firstly, in the contemporary philosophical zeitgeist, in particular Nietzsche had crystallised the previous century and a half of the development of German idealism in a rigorous nihilism combining the narcissism of existentialism with the atheism and consequent amorality that underpins post-modernity. Secondly Weber articulated the emerging view that authority and domination were internal psychological processes, denoting the possibility of their external manipulation. Secondly, the particular personality. Hitler himself was clearly not a normal human being; genius and exceptional in some areas, it is proposed that the most appropriate psychiatric category into which he would fall would be that he had Asperger’s, and that this is the second critical factor that created the phenomenon. Hitler’s Aspergic personality left him unfettered by normal social and emotional ties to single-mindedly pursue the development of a post modern state, that is to say one whose ideological foundation does not rest on history, religious or cultural antecedents, but whose ideology is invented anew, and shaped instrumentally in order to yield the maximal amount of the only currency that survives the caustic deconstructionism of post- modernism, that is power itself.