Traders and Heroes
Patriotic Reflections
Werner Sombart’s Traders and Heroes, published in 1915 during World War I, is an insightful and concise treatise on the differences in national character between the English and the Germans. The bourgeois trade mentality of the English clashes with the heroic and sacrificial one of the Germans. While the former only desire individual enrichment and creating the necessary global preconditions for it, the latter crave unity with the folk in life and death, so that they become the perfect physical expression of the national soul.
The English want to avoid war because it is bad for business. The Germans, on the other hand, crave war because it tests their spirit and liberates them from the mundaneness of everyday existence while simultaneously affirming the axiom that the whole of the nation is paramount to the individual self.
Like the Jews of yore, the Germans of Sombart’s time are universally despised because of their insistence on their uniqueness. Sombart argues that Germans should justifiably be proud of their superiority and as a result need not feel shame looking down on other peoples.
Traders and Heroes ... belongs to this second, culturally pessimistic phase of Sombart’s thinking. It is dedicated to the “young heroes, out there facing the enemy”. German nationalism and veneration for the state are treated therein as an antidote to the rampant commercial spirit espoused by England. “All Great Wars”, Sombart opines, “are religious Wars”. Ideals rather than economic interests drove German statecraft, in his estimation.
— Leslie Jones,The Quarterly Review
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Additional information
Contents | Foreword by Alexander Jacob Introduction: The Religious War Part One: English Traders The Features of the English Mind English Science The English State and English Culture Part Two: German Heroism The German Mind The German Idea of the Fatherland The German Idea of the State German Militarism Part Three: The Mission of the German Nation Life before the War Desperate Rescue Attempts The Redemption from the Evil We and the Others |
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Binding | Hardcover |
Languages | English |
Author | Werner Sombart |
ISBN-13 | 978-1-914208-33-1 |
ISBN-10 | 1914208331 |
Number Of Pages | 140 |
Publication Date | 2021-06-16 |
Publisher | Arktos Media Ltd |
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