Nazi rule operated through bureaucratic authority extended to state and group organizations

Evidence

Kirchheimer’s third essay, The Legal Order of National Socialism', appeared in the final issue of SPSS in 1942. It was the text of a lecture which he gave around Christmas 1941 as one of the Institute's lectures in the Extension Division of Columbia University. Its central ideasthat individuals were being held in check by social groupings and by state bureaucracy; that the authority of the group bureaucracy was growing with the number of executive duties being handed over to it by the governmentreached their climax with the observation that there was a form of technical rationality dominant everywhere which was only rational’ for those in power. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 975

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later Critical Theory work on instrumental/technical reason — directly anticipates Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment treatment of instrumental rationality, and Marcuse’s ‘One-Dimensional Man.’ — connects to: Nazi Germany turned criminal law from an independent state organ into an administrative bureaucracy — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 972; Nazi Germany institutionalized state attention capture through a propaganda ministry — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 411; Nazism inverted the Prussian ideal by prioritizing party membership over state office (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Kirchheimer’s ‘technical rationality rational only for those in power’ is an early formulation of the instrumental rationality critique central to Frankfurt School thought.

Broader Connections

• Nazi Germany institutionalized state attention capture through a propaganda ministry #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 411
• Nazi organizational boundaries were deliberately irrational and overlapping #complicates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2730
• Totalitarian movements subordinate the nation’s institutions to the movement itself #expands (0.80)
• Imperial racism and bureaucracy supply the elements of totalitarian rule #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 567
• Nazism inverted the Prussian ideal by prioritizing party membership over state office #complicates (0.75)
• Nazi ideology subordinated the state to the racial folk community #complicates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2780