The Impulse to Transcendence: DAP Origins, Völkisch Ideal, Syndicalist Revisionism, and the Fascist State

It is imagined by some people, that Adolf Hitler sat shuffling through a dictionary all-day deliberately looking for runic and magical symbols (e.g., the swastika) and terminology in a dictionary or encyclopedia to subvert for the creation of his Nazi Party. However, in regard to National Socialism, the ideology of Anton Drexler’s German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) pre-existed Adolf Hitler’s political endeavors in Munich for almost two decades and had developed solid foundations in three countries. In the 1904 Trautenau Program, the 1913, Iglau Program, the 1918 Vienna Program, and Rudolf Jung’s 1919 work Der Nationale Sozialismus lay the basis of National Socialism by its foundational theorists prior to Adolf Hitler. The Trautenau Program (national workers’ party against both liberal capitalism and Marxist internationalism), the more explicitly völkisch and antisemitic Iglau Program (1913), and Jung’s 1918 Vienna Program plus his 1919/1922 Der nationale Sozialismus is the concrete historical ground of the lineage. Jung supplied the first systematic theoretical statement of National Socialism as a Weltanschauung — anti-materialist, anti-parliamentary, class-collaborationist within the Volk, and oriented toward a productive national community. Hitler and the early NSDAP read and promoted it, and Jung attended inter-party congresses with Drexler and Hitler.

DREXLER’S DAP, THULE NETWORKS, AND THE WORKING-CLASS NATIONALIST REVOLT

The DAP (pre-Hitler foundations of the National Socialists) was a league of ex-Social Democrats and Trade Unionists (nationalist workers disillusioned with internationalist Marxism), but the DAP was not a simple Social-Democratic splinter. Drexler’s Mein politisches Erwachen already fused antisemitism, anti-Bolshevism, and a national Volksgemeinschaft.

The Volk is conceived not merely as a demographic unit but as an organic, historical-metaphysical subject, and this chain of influence follows from Fichte to Arndt to Lagarde to Chamberlain and then Guido von List.

ANTISEMITISM, SYMBOLISM, AND FOLKDOM AS PRE-EXISTING CULTURAL FORMATIONS

Antisemitism is already structural in this tradition by the 1890s-1900s as the negation of the organic community. Thule Society membership and networks (Harrer, Eckart, Feder, Rosenberg, early Hess) provided both personnel and the influence of swastika iconography from occult Ariosophy to the DAP. Hitler absorbed and instrumentalized these currents and did not create them. In our day, the political left and the right use the term Fascism in a frivolous sense, accusing each other’s very rationale of being connected to the origins of Fascism, though they represent two traditions. Hitler did not merely “bring Fascist elements” into National Socialism. He adapted Italian performance and some organizational techniques while grafting them onto a more biological-racial and German-völkisch base. The swastika was already circulating in Thule-List circles, but Hitler standardized and weaponized it.

Many find strength in the philosophy of Fascism, including the ideas of Adolf Hitler, first inspired by the philosophy and aesthetic of Mussolini’s Fascism. The pattern recurs because it answers secularized needs for meaning, hierarchy, organic belonging, and anti-materialist critique of liberal atomism and Marxist internationalism. It attracts certain personality structures (authoritarian, myth-hungry, anti-individualist) while also offering a coherent (if catastrophic) philosophical alternative to both liberalism and orthodox Marxism. This is why the ideas do not die with the regimes.

Adolf Hitler explained this in a speech:

“Those who do not understand have not experienced the same calamities among their people. These things appear enigmatic and mysterious that hundreds and thousands would be led to assemble amidst calamity and passion. Others cannot understand, that this is not an order of the State! They are deceiving themselves. The State does not order us. We order the State!”

ADOLF HITLER

VÖLKISCH ONTOLOGY, HITLER’S RADICAL SYNTHESIS

On the intellectual and emotional side of Fascism, its metaphysical idealism reflects man’s general longing for transcendence, and more deeply, finding that force immanent in life and organizing the State upon that principle.

Julius Evola explains the connection of this philosophy to the need for immanent relation between man and metaphysical existence, but from the view of the historic Right. Evola explains the political level in terms of “transcendence,” the heroic-military dimension, Fascism’s aspiration to an anti-bourgeois existence, and the problem of the human impulse toward self-transcendence.

“There was also the demand to integrate man through means of an ‘immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society’. The formulation of this demand is significant, even if its content was never adequately defined. There are various possible judgments one can make regarding the concrete forms with which Fascism tried to meet this demand so as to consider itself the perfect representative of the doctrine of the state we have just discussed. Recognising the superficial and contrived character of the various initiatives and customs of Fascist Italy should not provide a pretext for neglecting a problem which is of fundamental importance no less now than then. It is basically a question of the problem of how to confront an impulse of ‘self-transcendence’ that can be repressed and silenced, but never completely eliminated, except in the extreme case of systematically degrading people into a bovine state. Yesterday’s ‘nationalist revolutions’ tried to furnish a political centre to crystallise this impulse (again, this is the action we have mentioned of ‘form’ on ‘matter’), to impede its running wild and its onset or breaking out into destructive forms. Indeed, no one can ignore the deep crisis of the ‘rationalising’ of existence attempted by bourgeois culture, given the many examples of the emerging of the irrational or ‘elemental’ (in the sense of the elemental character of a force of nature) through the fissures of this culture on every level. Today, with the return of this obsession with ‘rationalising’, there is a tendency to render service to an ideal that is not political but ‘social’ and which belongs to physical comfort, and to marginalise and discredit everything that is comprised of existential tension, heroism and the galvanising force of a myth. But it has been correctly pointed out that a profound crisis is inevitable at the point when prosperity and comfort will finally become boring. The early signs of this crisis are already apparent. They consist of all those forms of blind, anarchic and destructive revolts embraced by a youth that, precisely in the most prosperous nations, notice the absurdity and senselessness of an existence that is socialised, rationalised, materialistic, and dominated by the so-called ‘consumer culture’. In these revolts, this elementary impulse finds no object and, left to itself, becomes barbaric. In traditional societies, there has always existed a certain liturgy or mystique of power and sovereignty that was an integral part of the system, and which furnished a solution to the problem we have been addressing.”

JULIUS EVOLA, FASCISM VIEWED FROM THE RIGHT

Evola continued with points about nationalist revolutions, the crisis of bourgeois rationalization, youth revolts, and the traditional liturgical mystique of power. These ideas are therefore bound to have a hold on certain minds.

Hitler was no inventor of National Socialism from thin air. We are continuously told that fascism has no intellectual or philosophical side, and that it is not a system, though as I’ve shown numerously, we repeatedly find the Fascists and Nazis themselves saying, that it is, and anyone that says otherwise, they call them ignorant.

I must object to the argument of the Communists in this paper, that objective idealism is Fascism hence Fascism is objective idealism. Theosophy is also described as monistic and objective idealism and is yet entirely based on a teaching of compassion. Despite this, the Communist is able to identify that there is an intellectual side of Fascism:

“Who is a fascist intellectual? Fascism springs from a person’s social and intellectual attitudes and it is essential to go into its genesis. When idealists talk of fascism they usually refer to the murderous crusades carried out as a result of social, political or religious dogmas: they picture dismembered bodies and recall all kinds of physical killing and persecution. Idealist historians suggests that all of a sudden somebody, some class of people, or some society went berserk and started killing people. This is a simplistic definition of fascism, a comfortable rationalisation which ignores the reality of the human situation. Do people become murderers all of a sudden? No. The moment people believe something without undertaking the act-of-finding out they are manifesting a fascist tendency; to accept without questioning the premise involved in a statement, an analysis or a concept is to create the basis of fascism. Cold war slogans operate precisely in this manner. Beliefs devoid of experiential validity and made up of the accumulate prejudices of the society give rise to overt fascism.” (The Internationalists – Communist Party of Ireland Marxist-Leninists, Objective Idealism is Fascism: A Denunciation of Northrop Frye’s “Literary Criticism”)

The critique of Neo-Hegelianism here is to be expected, and unfortunately, writer uses Fascism like a verb (e.g., if someone does this, they are manifesting a “fascist tendency”) in the same way, the term “Jesuitical” used to be employed in a negative manner.

MUSSOLINI: FROM REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM THROUGH SOREL TO FASCISM

Benito Mussolini found inspiration in Sorel, the Syndicalists, and Anarchists, and sought a balance in his own at first, new revolutionary socialism, which develops into “Fascism” in stark contrast to Marx, Trotsky and Lenin’s revolutionary socialism in Communism. Adolf Hitler truly believed in his ideas for the German workers, and the National Socialists were avowed anti-capitalists, despite being aided by the German conservatives. By studying more into the history of liberalism, I began to observe Giuseppe Mazzini’s liberal thought, and even the young Giovanni Gentile, who was early on liberal and humanist. Mussolini till his death still believed he was a socialist. There are numerous sources, where Hitler and his colleagues preach anti-capitalism, and believe themselves to be socialist. For Gentile, he stated, that his Fascist thought was an evolution of liberalism, and is an interpretation of Mazzini’s thought.

He argues exactly where this diverges into his conception of the Organic State and into Actualism based on his observations of the weaknesses and failures of Italian liberalism. This is their own words from the primary sources, which I have discussed in previous entries. So, this is not about Fascists being right-wing or left-wing. They are neither, nor it is more complex. The inability to understand this is consequential, because the binary thinking has directly affected our own political imagination in the post-war order. The original Fascists state that their rank is a mixture of both elements and more, as a “third position,” a new political theory that transcends or supersedes liberal democracy and Marxism, and the history shows this fact among its recruiters and stated intention.

Réflexions sur la violence (1908) supplied the theory of the mobilizing myth, regenerative violence, and the critique of parliamentary socialism as decadent. Italian revolutionary syndicalists (Labriola, Leone, Panunzio, Olivetti, De Ambris) fused this with nationalism after 1910-14. Mussolini moved from orthodox Marxism through Sorelian revisionism to interventionism and then to the 1919 fasci. Gentile’s actual idealism later provided the philosophical formalization with the State as the ethical realization of the pure act of thinking, where the individual finds freedom only in the immanent community of the nation. This is the metaphysical architecture, that was abandoned (see The Prophetic Tradition of Fascism against Renaissance Individualism: Vico’s Cycles and Gentile’s Humanism).

In the Organic State, there is no King Immanuel III, no right or left faction, and all are absorbed into a totalistic organism, one Hero at the apex and a unified, obedient Fasces. I invite you to read the Aegean Origins and History of the Fasces: From Minoan Crete to Republican Symbol to understand more on the full context of the history.

Just these two of ten commandments of Fascist Italy explain the limits placed on the minds of those under its law, despite Gentile’s transcendental aspirations:

XII - Complete and willing obedience is the legionary's virtue.
X - The Duce [Mussolini] is always Right ("Il Duce ha sempre ragione")

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE APPROACH OF THIS ANALYSIS

Study the historical tract of Romanticism, German folkdom and romantic nationalism.

The difference between my approach and analysis on National Socialism from far-right polemic and analysis, conservative analysis, leftist and Marxist analysis, and liberal analysis is necessary to explain. Firstly, I do not romanticize or sanitize the movement as pure racial health or traditional order. It insists on the revolutionary-socialist and syndicalist matrix, the internal critique of Marxism, and the intrinsic danger of the synthesis rather than treating catastrophe as accidental betrayal or Allied propaganda. Secondly, I reject the framing of Fascism and Nazism as essentially continuous with throne-and-altar traditionalism or organic hierarchy. One must emphasize its modernist, mass-mobilizing, anti-bourgeois, and myth-driven character. Conservatism seeks restoration or limited order; but this current seeks palingenetic rebirth through violence plus the “new man.” The concept of the “new man” has various meanings in both occult philosophy and European philosophy in general. Thirdly, my approach rejects the reduction of Fascism to the “terrorist dictatorship of finance capital” or pure right-wing reaction against the proletariat. It instead documents the endogenous origins in revisionist socialism, national syndicalism, and the rejection of internationalist materialism; and treats the ideology as a coherent (if inverted) response to the same crisis of modernity that produced Marxism, not as an epiphenomenon of class. I am not a liberal, and the tactics in liberal analysis have become too glaringly obvious. Lastly, the approach moves beyond the totalitarianism thesis, the “extremes meet” symmetry, or primarily institutional-moral condemnation. This approach attempts to supply a dense genetic intellectual history and takes the metaphysical claims (community, form, health, myth) seriously as philosophical positions rather than mere propaganda or pathology like dangling a toy-fish for a cat. Liberalism tends to treat the phenomenon as the negation of procedure and individual rights; but this approach reconstructs the positive (and lethal) content of the alternative ontology.

This framing is closest to the Sternhell-Payne-Mosse-Griffin lineage of study on Fascism and National Socialism as revolutionary and modernist, neither-right-nor-left synthesis, and I argue that it must be understood in its own terms before it can be effectively opposed.

RECOMMENDED PRIMARY SOURCES

• Georges Sorel. Reflections on Violence.
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The Secret Doctrine. (1888).
• Guido von List. The Secret of the Runes. (Translated by Stephen E. Flowers, 1988.)
• Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron. (English translation, 1989.)
• Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. Ostara. (periodical issues, 1905-1917)
• Rudolf Jung. National Socialism: Its Foundations, Development, and Goals. (1922 second edition.)
• Anton Drexler. My Political Awakening: From the Journal of a German Socialist Worker.
• Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Austria). Trautenau Program (1904), Iglau Program (1913), and Vienna Program (1918).
• Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile. The Doctrine of Fascism. (Standard English title; multiple translations of the 1932 text.)
• Julius Evola. Fascism Viewed from the Right. (trans. by E. Christian Kopff, Arktos, 2013)
• Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. (1925-26)
• Alfred Rosenberg. The Myth of the Twentieth Century. 1930.
• Gottfried Feder. Manifesto for the Breaking of the Interest Slavery of Money (also rendered as Manifesto for Breaking the Bondage of Interest or The Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money). 1919.

APPENDIX

The second-half importance of my approach is a counter in a defense of THEOSOPHY against the pre and post-war narratives against Theosophy that were instigated, perpetuated and argued. It is also in another sense, not solely a defense of Theosophy alone. Nevertheless, it rejects any claim that Blavatsky or core Theosophical doctrine (root races, Aryan terminology, esoteric cosmology) supplies authentic occult-racial legitimacy for Germanic supremacy, Ariosophy, or National Socialist ideology. It stresses that List, Liebenfels, and Hitler radically biologized, dualized, and politicized selected concepts into an Aryan-versus-Jew framework, cryptozoology, and exterminatory racism, which are positions that Blavatsky’s own writings explicitly contradict (e.g., Semites as related to the Aryan root race, spiritual rather than blood hierarchy, and the first object of universal brotherhood). My approach refuses to dismiss the entire occult and modern Theosophical current as mere irrational decadence or superstition. Instead, it performs a precise textual and historical separation by defending the philosophical integrity of traditional Theosophy against guilt-by-association while documenting exactly how Austrian völkisch occultists (List and Liebenfels) and later National Socialists transformed a few concepts and Eurasian iconography into a political-racial weapon. My writings reject the broad-brush reduction of Theosophy or the 1880s-1930s German occult revival to “proto-fascist” or “the occult roots of Nazism.” I insist on primary-source fidelity, where Blavatsky’s evolutionary root-race scheme is neither equivalent to Nazi biological racism nor the direct cause of it. The decisive modifications occurred in the specific Ariosophic reinterpretation that inverted her internationalist and spiritual emphases into nationalist dualism and antisemitic theozoology. It also moves beyond both sensationalist “Nazi occult” mythology and the simple equation that esotericism equals irrationality thus leads to totalitarianism. It supplies a detailed comparative reading of Blavatsky against List, Liebenfels, Hitler, and Rauschning to demonstrate concrete contradictions on the status of Jews, the nature of racial hierarchy, and the goals of occult knowledge, thereby treating the history of ideas with analytical precision rather than moral abstraction alone. There is a limited conceptual relationship between Blavatsky’s Theosophy and the broader German-Austrian occult milieu, but Blavatsky’s actual teachings negate the racial dualism, antisemitism, and political program of Ariosophy and National Socialism.