Nationalism and Culture is a nonfiction book by German anarcho-syndicalist writer Rudolf Rocker. In this book, he criticizes religion, statism, nationalism, and centralism from an anarchist perspective.
Background
The ideas expressed in the book, Rocker claimed, dated back to the time before World War I, when he was a leader in the Jewish anarchist labor movement in London. Over the years, many parts of Nationalism and Culture were published in various essays and lectures. Rocker started working on the book around 1925, while he was still living in Germany. At first, he only planned a short book on nationalism, but over the years the material grew. At the time, Rocker was becoming increasingly disillusioned as a wave of nationalism spread about Germany. This development culminated when the Nazi Party under Hitler came to power in 1933. Meanwhile, the German anarchist movement and the Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union Rocker was active in, were waning. This led Rocker to even question whether Germans were at all capable of anarchist thought.
Content
Part I
Rocker begins the first part of Nationalism and Culture with a chapter attacking the Insufficiency of Economic Materialism as it was called. Rocker maintained that there is a distinct difference between natural science and the humanities. While the former was concerned with "a causality of physical necessity", the latter with "a matter of a causality of human aims and ends". He criticizes Marxism for attempting to describe human interactions with scientific terms thus neglecting the will to power, a term borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, as a motor for historical development.
The book continues by describing the emergence and development of religion. Rocker claims religion to enslave its very creator, man, since man submits himself to a mysterious power over which he has no control. He also applies this criticism to modern-day politics. According to Nationalism and Culture, man is submitted to an all-powerful state just as he is to an all-powerful god. "Thus", Rocker claims, "we arrive at the very foundations of every system of rulership and recognize that all politics is in the last instance religion, and as such tries to hold the spirit of man in the chains of dependence." He adds that nationalism is the ideology, which justifies man's coercion by the state, pointing to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas greatly influenced the nationalist ideology. According to Rousseau, the citizen's freedom presupposes his submission under the common good embodied by the state. The state claims to be the creator of culture, when in truth, according to Nationalism and Culture, it is quite the opposite. The Renaissance is considered a mixed blessing, because on the one hand it was a period of high cultural productivity, but on the other hand the basis of the modern state. Similarly, Rocker gives Protestant Reformation the credit of having liberated the individual from the Catholic Church, but accuses it of having subdued it under the absolutist state. In his analysis of the Age of Enlightenment, Rocker distinguishes between liberal and democratic ideals. Liberalism reduced government to the night watchman state and thus contributed to individual liberty, while democracy is based on the general will and the collective rather than the individual and is therefore no more than a new form of despotism. This dichotomy between authoritarian democratic and libertarian ideas can also be seen in the history of the socialist movement, Rocker claims. While in Germany, Hegelian Marxism, which Rocker considers to be authoritarian, dominated the movement, the French socialists were influenced by the more liberal Proudhon. The consequence of Marx's authoritarian socialism is the Soviet regime, a twin evil of fascism, according to Rudolf Rocker.