One of them was almost certainly Martin Luther.
Not to be too elliptical, Gobineau is widely credited with being the "father" of the pernicious racial theories that led to Hitler.Studied this at George Mason University (working on a MA in History just for kicks) two years ago under Dr. Peter Black, Chief Historian for the Holocaust Museum in DC. Sold all the textbooks on eBay and am wracking my brain to remember what Dr. Black said were the anticedents to Hitler-style anti-Semitism.
Really? Well then, I was wondering what you think of Leonard Peikoff's take on Hitler's philosophical foundations?
Reality, declares Hegel, is inherently contradictory; it is a systematic progression of colliding contradictions organized in triads of thesis, antithesis, synthesis - and men must think accordingly. They should not strive for old-fasioned, "static" consistency. They should not be "limited" by the "one-sided" Aristotelian view that every existent has a specific identity, that things are what they are, that A is A. On the contrary, they owe their ultimate allegiance to a higher principle: the principle of the "identity of opposites," the principle that things are not what they are, that A is non-A.Hegel describes the above as a new conception of "reason," and as a new, "dialectic" logic.
...True reality, he holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel's version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute "externalizes" itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.
The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute's career. It is not the final truth about reality. It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute's development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, it turns out, in Hegel's view, that distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal....
The ethics and politics which Hegel derives from his fundamental philosophy can be indicated by two sentences from his Philosophy of Right: "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."
...
The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." "The march of God in the world, that is what the state is." The purpose of the state, therefore, is not the protection of its citizens. The state is not a means to any human end. As an entity with supernatural credentials, it is "an absolute unmoved end in itself," and it "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state."
The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany.
...
The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism.... These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period's intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support - by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier): "The blood which one has in one's veins at birth one keeps all one's life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all." No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.
What the theoreticians of racism did was to secularize the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes:
replaced Hegel's "Spirit" by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel's "Spirit" something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of "Spirit," Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of "Spirit," Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of "Spirit," the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modern evolutionism. [Karl Popper, 1962, The Open Society and its Enemies]