ABSTRACT
One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has notoriously been that politics should take priority over economics, and that the power question was more fundamental than the question of property (cf. Lebovics 1969:219; Herf 1984:2, 4, 227; Vincent 1992:167). With the purpose of resolving the economic and cultural crisis, fascists and national socialists typically demanded a restoration of the primacy of the political and a repoliticization of economic life, which both liberal and Marxist theory had illegitimately promoted to the status of an ontological ‘last instance’. Speaking in March 1933, at the nervous height of the political Gleichschaltung following the January coup, Hitler was characteristically straightforward about his intentions: ‘Wir wollen wiederherstellen das Primat der Politik’. In Mein Kampf of 1924 he had already pleaded a reversal of the relationship between economics and the state, advising that ‘industry and commerce recede from their unhealthy leading position and adjust themselves to the general framework of a national economy of balanced supply and demand’. Capital was to remain ‘the handmaiden of the state’ and not fancy itself ‘the mistress of the nation’. A strong state was needed to act as ‘intelligence’ and ‘organizer’ of national production; economics was only one among its instruments, and could never be its cause or aim (1969:127, 137, 190; cf. Sontheimer 1978:138).
