There is a scene in the movie version of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago (1965) in which Zhivago (played by Omar Sharif) is taking his family by train from Moscow across the Ural Mountains in a cattle car crammed with people making the same journey during the Russian Civil War (1918–1921). Chained to a bunk bed in the cattle car is a political prisoner being transported by the Bolsheviks to a labor camp beyond the Urals in Siberia. The prisoner (who is played by actor Klaus Kinski) is said to be a revolutionary anarchist. At one point, he rattles the chain around his wrist and says, “I am the only free man on this train! The rest of you are cattle!”Yes, we are not a dictatorship, but if both major political parties advocate and insist upon the same political paternalism, with the only difference being the forms and extent of it, how far is it, in fact, from living in a one-party state?
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A “free man” chained in a cattle car destined, no doubt, to die in a Siberian labor camp? What, then, is “freedom”? In his novel Elective Affinities (1809), author and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) has one of the characters in the book write in a diary, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
In 1955, there appeared a book entitled They Thought They Were Free: The Germans (1933–1945) by Milton Mayer (1908–1986). The author, an American Jew of German background, had spent a year (1950–1951) as a visiting scholar in Germany after the Second World War. He interviewed and wrote about ten “ordinary” middle and lower-class German men who had been members of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party during Hitler’s time in power (1933–1945). He successfully hid his Jewish family background from those to whom he talked, and as a result, they spoke openly and freely to him, including sharing their general dislike of Jews.
Unfreedom as freedom under National Socialism
None of them felt guilty about his Nazi Party affiliation, and indeed, Mayer found that almost all of them viewed the Nazi era before the war to be the best time of their lives. Work was to be had after the widespread unemployment of the early 1930s during the worst of the Great Depression; they experienced improved standards of living with opportunities in life their parents had not had before the Nazi “egalitarianism” for all “real” Germans. The social safety nets (the welfare state) reduced want and worry concerning the uncertainties of everyday life, and they felt a renewed sense of national community and pride under the Nazi regime, as Hitler was making Germany “great again.”
The reduction or abolition of earlier liberal notions of freedom — civil liberties, political elections, freedom of movement, personal privacy from government surveillance, rule of law — were rationalized as “necessary” (if unfortunate) given the “emergency” domestic social and economic circumstances of the time, along with the international situation. When looking back from the perspective of our own time at the Nazi period following Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, the political and social changes seem to be all dramatic and concentrated in a short period of time. But in the minds of those living through them in the 1930s, Mayer said, the tightening of the totalitarian screws over everyday life seemed incremental, sometimes hardly noticeable in the wider stream of everyday life, until finally, the society had been transformed into something very different than what had existed before. And, besides, what could one person do, some of Mayer’s interlocutors said, when so many around them said that you’re being an “alarmist” or things are “not so bad.” After all, much of life is good now, so why complain and make things difficult for yourself and your family?
At one point in the book, Mayer says, “National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.” In other words, Nazism came to power and remained in power with no mass resistance and opposition because during the years before Hitler’s coming to power, for decades in fact, the German people had become imbued with an attitude, a desire, a need, for “unfreedom.” In 1926, for instance, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) pointed out in an essay on “Social Liberalism” that a growing number of Germans were “setting their hopes on the coming of the ‘strong man’ — the tyrant who will think for them and care for them.”
State socialism paved the way for National Socialism
For more than a generation, the German people had been told and indoctrinated into believing that unfreedom was, in fact, freedom. That state paternalism and government control were the higher and more valuable means of providing people with a better and more meaningful freedom. In his Evolution of Modern Germany (1914), British journalist and “social reformer” William H. Dawson (1860–1948), who helped design the early stages of the British welfare state, explained the nature of what had been developing in Imperial Germany under the name of state socialism. Dawson recounted a conversation he had had with the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, in which the latter said:
My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare. It is not moral to make profits out of human misfortunes and suffering. Life-insurance, accident insurance, sickness insurance should not be subjects of private speculation. They should be carried out by the state or at least insurance should be on the mutual principle and no dividends or profits should be derived by private persons.
What exactly was this state socialism that emerged out of Bismarck’s legislated welfare-state programs? In his earlier book, Bismarck and State Socialism (1890), Dawson summarized it in the following way:
While Individualism restricts the functions of the state as much as possible, Socialism enlarges them; the Individualist would do everything without the state, the socialist would do everything with it. State socialism is the mean between these directions of thought; in it the two extremes meet…. Socialism would abolish the existing political order altogether, while State Socialism would use the state for the accomplishment of great economic and social purposes…. The nonintervention principle must be abandoned, since it has only led to greater and ever greater class and personal inequalities…. Social interests can only be properly safeguarded when the state directly concerns itself with them. The aim must, therefore, be to widen the economic jurisdiction of the state.
Cradle to grave paternalism as freedom
In his book on Socialized Germany (1915), published in the midst of the First World War, American “progressive” Frederic C. Howe (1867–1940) explained that in Imperial Germany,
The state has its finger on the pulse of the worker from the cradle to the grave…. This paternalism does not necessarily mean less freedom to the individual than that which prevails in America or England. It is rather a different kind of freedom…. This freedom is of an economic sort…. Social legislation directed against the exploitation of the worker and the consumer insures a freedom in many other ways. It protects the defenseless classes from exploitation and abuse. It safeguards the weak…. Germany protects industrial and social equality.
Furthermore, Howe said that the idea guiding the policies of the German welfare state was expediency:
In the mind of the Germans, the functions of the state are not susceptible to abstract a priori deductions. Each proposal must be decided by the time and the conditions. It if seems advisable for the state to own an industry it should proceed to own it; if it is wise to curb any class or interest it should be curbed. Expediency or opportunism is the rule of statesmanship, not abstraction as to the philosophical nature of the state.
As one more example, we can turn to Monarchical Socialism in Germany (1913), written by American journalist Elmer Roberts. State socialism in Imperial Germany was designed to be a middle way between “extreme socialism … which would have … government do everything, and the individualism of the Manchester school, limiting the powers of government to the simplest functions of administration and defense.” Roberts continued:
The endeavor of German statesmanship has been to hold to everything in existing social arrangements necessary to produce individuality in the higher orders, and yet to intervene in education, sanitation, sick, accident and old-age insurance, the physical training of the youth in the army, and to participate in transportation, forestry, mining, farming, and industrial enterprises, designing thus to raise the lower orders mentally, physically, and economically, so that they too become worthier individuals, adding to the power of the state and the monarchy. The intervention of the government is to be determined by expediency. The government guided by circumstances, is ready either to take part in phases of economic life or to let individualism remain in control of them.
Thus, since the 1880s and 1890s, a growing and predominant view of man, society, and the state in Germany was that the (classical) liberal conception of freedom based on the philosophical principle and ideal of individual liberty, freedom of enterprise, voluntary association, and limited government did not provide that “other” type of freedom that only government intervention could provide – social and economic safety and security – through the emerging institutions of the German welfare state. This was “real” freedom of that “economic sort” to which Frederic Howe referred.
Germans wanted Nazi-type paternalism
Thus, by the time Hitler and the National Socialist movement rose to power and began implementing their program of a totalitarian state, many, if not most, of the German people had been prepared for it intellectually, politically, and economically under the ideology of state socialism; the belief that life was impossible without the guiding and directing hand of a strong and powerful government to ensure that “from the cradle to the grave” security resulted from these ideas permeating the thinking of almost everyone throughout Germany.
It is noteworthy, in this context, to observe that in the last really free election in Germany in November 1932, before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933, the results were that 37.3 percent of the parliamentary seats went to the National Socialist candidates, 21.6 percent of the seats to the Social Democrat candidates, and 14.3 percent of the seats to the candidates of the German Communist Party. Thus, most Germans voted for either National Socialism, democratic socialism, or communism, given that their total combined votes came to more than 70 percent of all those cast. The other smaller parties were also all nationalist, conservative, or other variations of socialism.
Socialism of either one form or another is what the large majority of German voters considered the path to political and economic “freedom” and security. For these and other tasks, many prominent German intellectuals insisted on a need for a strong paternalistic state with a strong leader. Werner Sombart (1863–1941), an internationally known economist and historian, expressed it in Deutscher Socialismus (1934) [English translation: A New Social Philosophy (1937)]:
If German Socialism demands any one thing of a constitution, it is the strong state. It demands it because, in contrast with liberalism, it places the welfare of all above the welfare of the individual…. The idealistic state, as it conforms with the German idea of state, is necessarily thought of as a strong state, since it must have the power against all centrifugal forces, that is, against all interests, to achieve the tasks of the nation. But a strong state expresses itself in a strong government, with great power at its disposal….
The principle of leadership, which we recognize, means the acceptance of a supreme will of a leader [Führer] who receives his directions, not as an inferior from a superior leader, but only from God, the supreme “Leader” of the world. One who wholly grasps and affirms the leadership principle must believe in a progressive revelation…. The ruler of the state receives his commission from God…. He is not required to listen to the “voice of the people,” in so far as he does not recognize in it the voice of God…. The leader cannot ascertain it through a plebiscite; he must recognize it and can only have experienced it through revelation. For this reason the approval of the “people” is not necessary for a justification of a leader’s conduct…. All plans for influencing, controlling or limiting a ruler’s will are expressions of an anti-national mindedness, attempts to serve individual interests [against those of the state]….
Hitler as one of us “little people”
In spite of Sombart’s insistence that the Führer received his commission and instructions from God, the Supreme Führer of the Universe, Milton Mayer’s ten Nazi friends believed no such thing. But what they did believe — and the basis on which they accepted him as the ultimate leader of the country — was that Hitler was one of them, one of the “little people.” After all, Hitler came from a petite bourgeois family, with his father a lowly Austrian civil servant in the customs service. Hitler served in the German Army during the First World War, just like those who Mayer interviewed who had been old enough to also fight; he lived in the trenches on the Western Front in France, suffered from mustard gas warfare, and never rose above the rank of corporal. Not an aristocrat, or a high-ranking military officer, or a wealthy businessman owning a factory, or a person holding a senior position in government until he became Chancellor of Germany. Hitler knew what it was like to be an “ordinary” German.
Furthermore, even after the destruction and defeat that befell Germany by the end of the Second World War, these ten Germans considered Hitler to have been a great leader who may have made strategic mistakes as the war progressed, but until 1943 or 1944, a political master on the world stage. As for all the various things that went wrong or to “extremes” before and during the war, these were all the fault of those senior members of the Nazi hierarchy, these ordinary Germans said, that Hitler had misjudged in trusting them in such roles. It was Hermann Goring’s fault, or Joseph Goebbels’s or Heinrich Himmler’s wrongdoing. If only Hitler had known the truth about things, those things would not have been as bad as they turned out to be. Who knew for sure whether Hitler even fully knew about the mass killings of the Jews? They, these ordinary Germans, certainly knew nothing about it, or so they said.
Nazism as the best time of their lives
In their minds, they were free and happy people, in spite of those things that may have been less than perfect in the years immediately before the war. As Mayer explained about these Germans he interacted with:
They look back at it now [at the 1930s] … as the best time of their lives; for what are men’s lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend [the Hitler Youth] to keep them off the streets…. The best time of their lives. There were wonderful ten-dollar holiday trips for the family in the “Strength through Joy” program, to Norway in the summer and Spain in the winter, for people who had never dreamed of a real holiday trip at home or abroad. And in Kronenberg [the fictitious name used by Mayer for the provincial city of Marburg] “nobody” (nobody my friends knew) went cold, nobody went hungry, nobody went ill and uncared for…. All the blessings of the New Order, advertised everywhere, reached “everybody.”…
In what you and I call the blessings of life — including uncritical acceptance by the whole of the undifferentiated community — every one of my ten friends, excepting Tailor Schwenke, who had once had his own shop and was not a school janitor, was better off than he had ever been before; and not just they and their families, but all their friends, the “whole” community, the widows and orphans, the aged and the sick, and the poor. Germany had been what many Americans would call a welfare state ever since Bismarck…. In the collapse after the first World War, and again in the collapse at the end of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic could not maintain its social services. Nazism not only restored but extended them; they were much more comprehensive than they had ever been before…. Nor were they restricted to Party members; only “enemies” of the regime were excluded from them.
But this meant that many Germans had become the type of grazing and herded cattle that that chained political prisoner in Dr. Zhivago told them they were in that crammed cattle car, happily and contentedly doing what and going where the controlling paternalistic state directed them, safe and secure from cradle to grave. They just needed to look the other way, not ask any serious questions, and enjoy this best time of their lives. They were freed from being free men, and did not even realize they were unfree.
German state socialism as an ideal for America to follow
When William Dawson or Frederic Howe or Elmer Roberts wrote about the state socialist paternalism of the German welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were not merely being descriptive, they were also being prescriptive. They portrayed life in Imperial Germany as a model and ideal that could and should be developed in countries like the United States and Great Britain. Germany offered an alternative conception of freedom, not the old (classical) liberal freedom of individual liberty and responsibility, with government the “mere” securer of people’s rights to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. No, the goal was a much broader and intrusive presence of government — the “State” — in individual, economic, and social affairs for the nation and the common good.
There was behind it an ethical imperative in the arguments of some of these American “progressives.” Richard Ely (1854–1943) was one of the leading figures among the American economists who went to Germany in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s to study at the feet of the German professors professing this new political paternalism, who came to be known as the German Historical School. Ely spoke of the “divinity” of the state in imposing an altruistic brotherhood of man on all in an essay published in 1886:
Some have said that the duty of the state must be restricted to the protection of life and property against fraud and violence. This is a narrow and inadequate conception of the state…. Christianity teaches us that we are all brothers, and the recognition of this truth is forced upon us in the State. It was never intended that each one should live in and for himself…. The ethical duties and the holy privileges of a citizen of a republic must be enforced in season and out of season. There is a crying moral and economic need of the hour. Men must be taught that it is a grand thing to serve God in the state which he in his beneficent wisdom instituted and that to betray a trust in the divine State is as heinous an offence as to be false to duty to the divine Church…. When men come to look upon their duty to the state as something as holy as their duty to the church … it will be easy for government to perform all its functions.
An entire generation of American graduate students went off to study in Europe, with a large number of them going to German universities where they were imbued with such views about the role and importance of the state, even if others did not couch their language in such emotional religiosity as Richard Ely. They made up many of those who became known as members of the American Progressive Movement from the 1890s to the 1920s. “Social reformers” they called themselves, seeing the solution to all of society’s ills in a broad expansion in the responsibilities and powers of government at all levels in the United States.
They are the ones who slowly but surely brought about the change in the name of “liberalism,” from a political philosophy and ideal of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government to the idea of the state as an agent of political paternalism. They reasoned that left to their own devices, too many in society would remain poor, uneducated, exploited by those who employed them in private enterprises; capitalists placed profits before people, served their individual interests at the expense of the common good and the general welfare, leaving the large majority badly off.
State socialism as a “middle way”
But theirs was not, for the most part, Marxian socialism but German state socialism representing that supposed middle ground between radical socialism and unrestricted individualism and laissez-faire. But while the institutional means may have been different, the radical socialists and the self-styled progressive reformers in America all had the same general goals in mind.
Henry Seager (1870–1930) was one of those German-inspired American economists, who in the early 1890s spent time studying with leading members of the German Historical School in Berlin and then in Vienna studying with leading members of the Austrian School, Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. But his American professors, including Richard Ely, and those with whom he studied in Germany, made him a proponent of government paternalism. In Seager’s Principles of Economics (1913), the closing chapters are dedicated to a detailed analysis and justification for government interventionism:
Progress must be away from the present gross inequalities in opportunity and wealth toward greater equality is the view of not only socialists, but of all economists and social reformers. That a chief means of effecting such progress must be a widening of the functions of the state in the direction of future limitations on the rights of property and the more rigid regulation of industries is also a conviction commonly shared. In fact, there is so little difference between evolutionary socialists and progressive social reformers that is it often difficult to tell one from the other.
Even an economist such as Frank A. Fetter (1863–1949), who was one of those Americans who studied in Imperial Germany, and who is often identified with the Austrian School, especially on the theory of capital, interest, and rent, insisted in Modern Economic Problems (1915) that, “The state, through the public insurance office, must ultimately be the sole agency for insurance…. There should be a unification of various kinds of insurance in one general plan and under one general administration for the whole state.”
America’s drift into unfreedom
What is most noticeable about this current of ideas reaching America from Germany through American economists, political scientists, historians, and philosophers is how little intellectual opposition there was to it. When Seager said that “all economists and social reformers” held such views just before the First World War, he was not greatly exaggerating. The result was that by the early 1930s, at the time of the Great Depression, the thinking and the character of the American people had begun to change so sufficiently that the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt could transform the United States as much, in its own way, as the changes brought about by the National Socialist regime in Germany at the same time.
There were, of course, opponents, one being James M. Beck (1861–1936), who served as Solicitor General during the Warren G. Harding Administration in the early 1920s and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1927–1934) from Pennsylvania until his resignation under protest that the Congress had reduced itself to a rubber stamp approving anything FDR wanted. His Constitution of the United States (1922) is an eloquent explanation and defense of the traditional conception of the U.S. government as one of narrow and limited powers to secure and not to abridge individual liberty. But after three years of the New Deal, Beck published Neither Purse Nor Sword (1936), emphasizing an America different from what it had been before the Progressive Era and, now, the New Deal:
Individuals have been merged into classes which look to political authority to redress their grievances. Government power has become so centralized in Washington that the states have become little more than subordinate agencies of the Federal government…. An ever-growing and stupendous bureaucracy …. has impaired the spirit of a once reliant citizenry and destroyed the potent energy of their individualism….
The American people since the turn of the [twentieth] century have lent a willing ear to the seductive appeals of the politicians who set out to convince him that he was the slave, not the master, of the social order, that it owed him more than he owed it, and that he would gain more than he would lose by the sacrifice of personal rights … and that his way of salvation lay in less liberty and more government.
Americans think they are free, but are they?
Now, 90 years after Beck’s book, can we say about the American people that they think they are free when they are not? Read and listen to any of the discussions, debates, or discourses on the state of America today, whether it is about the insolvency of the Social Security or Medicare programs, or the case for raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour, or taxing “the rich” to shore up the fiscal bankruptcy of the federal and state and local governments, or restricting freedom of speech in the name of “sensitivity” for the feeling of others, or government regulation or partial ownership of “big tech” and the emerging artificial intelligence industry, or the wide latitude for presidents to use “executive powers” to declare and impose things not approved or legislated by Congress that are outside the limits of the Constitution, or….
Americans celebrate the 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. They hail being a free people. They thank veterans and active military personnel for their service in keeping America free. But are we any more free in terms of the pervasive presence of government oversight, control, regulation, and planning of virtually every corner of everyday life than those Germans thought of themselves as free in the 1930s?
Yes, we are not a dictatorship, but if both major political parties advocate and insist upon the same political paternalism, with the only difference being the forms and extent of it, how far is it, in fact, from living in a one-party state? Or in a social environment in which virtually all intellectuals, editorial pundits, interest groups, and politicians insist on imposing a “collective good” through government power over the rights of the individual? Or in a cultural setting in which so many Americans consider such government paternalism as living in a free society and cannot imagine life without it? Someday in the future, maybe someone like Milton Mayer may befriend a handful of Americans, and write his own version of how they thought they were free.
This article was originally published in the September 2026 issue of Future of Freedom.
