Frege and Fascism review

Image by Nick Blinko: Counsel of Voices, 1986, 12 x 16.5 in. / 30 x 42 cm
Used without permission but I will remove it upon request.

Stephen D’Arcy, Frege and Fascism, London: Routledge, 2025.
All quotes below are from this book unless otherwise noted. Searchable in the ebook version.

Frege

Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, philosopher, and logician. He’s considered to be “the father of analytical philosophy.” He was also writing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries up to his death in 1924 which means he was an intellectual during the rise of German fascism in its early phases. Stephen D’Arcy notes that the question of Frege’s politics, and his descent into fascist political and ideological beliefs is either ignored or at best downplayed by his biographers as irrelevant to his contributions as a great thinker. D’Arcy wants to understand how someone so based in logic and reason in all of his intellectual pursuits fell down the rabbit hole of fascist ideology and enthusiastically promoted and justified it on legal, social, nationalist, political, and even religious grounds. To do that, he must trace the development of Frege’s thought over time.

D’Arcy points out that his study of Frege does what others have done regarding Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche: “Firstly, Frege’s embrace of far-right, ethnic-nationalist extremism sheds important light on the broader issue of racism (including antisemitism) in philosophy, and so furthers our understanding of philosophy’s interaction with ideologies and practices of ethno-racial subordination....”

Fascism

Like many useful books on fascism, the author provides a thumbnail definition of the term. D’Arcy took elements from three respected fascism scholars, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, and Robert O. Paxton, for his definition of fascism. It’s meant to work for any fascist regime, group, party, or movement, whether newly forming or in power. The goal is to avoid overly specific aspects of the previous definitions that might apply to one fascism at a definite stage but not to others more broadly. Considering how this book follows Frege’s embrace of various reactionary ideas in stages, and then connects them to fascism as it is emerging after World War I, having a basic definition of this type seems sensible.

Below I broke up D'Arcy's definition into a check list form:

“Fascism is a regime or social movement that
__ rejects pluralistic democracy and civic equality,
__ promotes devotion to a supposedly charismatic leader,
__ favours an ethnically exclusionary ideal of national resurgence,
__ calls for harsh repression against groups demonized as politically subversive or ethnically foreign,
__ and regards the nationalist right as uniquely exempt from moral or constitutional constraints on
political violence”

Available Sources

There is a big challenge in showing Frege’s fascist politics in his own words because his estate, perhaps intentionally, lost much of his political and personal writing that Frege himself wanted preserved. That was the source that likely had the most non-scientific political thought. Some other papers were destroyed during World War II. But D’Arcy uses the main existing preserved writings, including some that were unearthed more recently, to find ample evidence of Frege’s fascist thought. The sources by Frege which he refers to repeatedly include three full length books, collected papers, correspondence, sections of a diary, writing released posthumously, those papers making up his “scholarly estate” which were collected by Frege himself but published only in part by his son, and two books of Frege’s political writing. There are also several political statements Frege was a signatory to. All of this in D’Arcy’s hands provides more than enough for a clear and meticulously presented case showing the depth of Frege’s commitment to political fascism.

It’s all brought together in the context of German nationalism which Frege embraced in its most extreme form. In the late 19th century Chancellor Bismarck and the German state were in an ongoing political contest with the Social Democrats (SPD, founded 1875). The SPD were the most popular political party from about 1890 through World War I and most of the interwar years,. They were hated by the Kaiser, the parties of the far Right, and the fascists when they formed after the war. Frege was largely politically aligned with the latter forces.

19th Century German Liberalism

While much of the scholarship on Frege paints him as a “liberal” before World War I, D’Arcy clears up any confusion for those who might believe he was a man of the “Left” before he became a fascist. In the section titled “Two Liberalisms of the Kaiserreich” we see the two poles of late 19th and early 20th century liberalism: progressive liberalism and nationalist liberalism.

The Progressive Liberal People’s Party (Freisinnige Volkspartei FVP), while staunchly anti-socialist like many present day liberal parties, was still more what we might think of when we hear the term “liberal.” D’Arcy notes that they strongly opposed anti-Semitism, were critical of the nationalists’ worship of Bismarck as a strong man, opposed militarism and annexationist policies, and were also anti-monarchist and for limited Republican governance. Importantly, their anti-socialist sentiment did not go as far as criminalizing socialist dissent (as Bismarck had done with the Anti-Socialist Laws). While some progressive liberals of the day were influenced by “the radical liberalism of the 1848 revolution in Germany, with its ‘Enlightenment’ values of anti-clericalism and support for the rational self-governance of civic equals,” Frege was not.

Frege was a follower of nationalist liberalism which featured “authoritarianism, militarism, political antisemitism, and demonization of social democracy that fed directly into the post-First World War radicalization of German nationalism.” He was a member of the ironically illiberal National Liberal Party (NLP). The core principles of this liberalism include “affirmation of the rule of law, in contrast to absolutism; support for free trade, in contrast to both protectionism and socialism; and support for robust counter-majoritarian constitutional constraints to hold at bay any movement in the direction of popular sovereignty.” Frege’s dislike for popular democratic rule culminated in his hopes for the emergence of a political savior/fuhrer figure.

D’Arcy quotes historian of socialism Geoff Eley here who warns against projecting current definitions of liberalism onto “any nineteenth-century liberals” because of their “highly restricted and exclusivist systems of political representation.” But D’Arcy says that’s not a reason to ignore the very real differences within the factions of 19th century German liberalism.

Post War

After World War I Frege embraced ethno-nationalism and further developed his rationalizations for anti-Semitism. He joined the Deutsche Philosophische Gesellschaft (German Philosophical Society), his first membership in an officially anti-Semitic nationalist organization.

Shortly thereafter he commited to fascism, especially after learning of the Kapp Putsch of 1920 that failed in toppling the Weimar Republic, and the 1923 Beerhall Putsch led by Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff. We are shown Frege’s trajectory toward fascism via a thorough examination of his writing. Where there may be any uncertainty, as in where Frege might have only begun preliminary sketches of ideas, D’Arcy makes excellent use of primary texts that were positively referenced by Frege that show a clearly elaborated version of the fascist, anti-Semitic, or ethno-nationalist ideology in question.  

In the year of his death, he was expressing support for “Erich Ludendorff’s ultra-anti-semitic Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei (DVFP) at a time when it was joined in a formal electoral alliance with Hitler’s Nazi Party (NSDAP) in the runup to the May 1924 Reichstag elections.”

The Arbitrariness Problem

One chilling aspect here is the way in which Frege employed what he considered to be logical arguments to justify exclusion and or violence against outsiders or vulnerable groups. He started with rationalizations for denying women the right to vote. He eventually developed arguments and papers on denying rights, the vote, citizenship, and civic participation to Jews. There could be no “arbitrariness” in his arguments as he saw it, but today’s readers will see little more than sophistry and ultranationalist chauvinism used as cudgels against basic Enlightenment concepts such as equality before the law or social inclusiveness. When it came time to write actual legal documents outlining legal blueprints to revoke equal rights from Jews, he admited he hadn’t totally solved the problem of even defining what a Jew is. Of course he didn't let that stop him.

Refusing to resort to claims common to many anti-Semites of the day that the Jews should be excluded because of their inherent inferiority, Frege found a backdoor ethno-nationalist argument, here described by D’Arcy:

“His argument... is that favouritism towards a specific ethnic group or ‘Volk’ (in this case, Germans ‘of Aryan descent’), to the disadvantage of another ethnic group subjected thereby to civic exclusion (in this case, Jews), can be defended against the charge of arbitrariness, if that favouritism is grounded in a special bond between members of a Volk, where that bond is ‘hereditary (in a logical, not a biological, sense) in a genealogical sequence, that is a ‘family tree.’”

I find this genealogical justification for citizenship or national belonging to be as equally disturbing as other more obvious forms of 19th century racism. It can be used to mobilize all the same exclusions and violence against non-citizens, and against the same people who would not have made the cut based on straightforwardly “racial” lines.

Though D’Arcy refrains from drawing lines to present day examples of repugnant legal sleight of hand I couldn’t help but think of the Roberts Court under Trump. Casey Blake wrote in USA Today that when overturning Roe v Wade, Justice Alito cited a 17th century colonial era judge who believed in witches. Alito wrote that there was “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment...from the earliest days of common law until 1973.” The Judge he cited, Matthew Hale, had sentenced two women to death for witchcraft, helping pave the way for the Salem Witch Trials.

Forgive my digression there but so much of Frege’s thought process and argumentation will sound insane to the present day reader. The continuity in ridiculousness between the Frege and Alito examples reflects that aspect of fascist political thought that embraces irrationality and contradictory beliefs as long as they can be effectively weaponized against an opponent/victim.

Irrationality

However, this idea that fascism always rejects rationality is one thing D’Arcy wants the reader to reconsider. He shows again and again that Frege never rejected scientific rationality in favor of fascism. Instead “he aimed to bring reason and science to bear on his political project to promote the emergence of an anti-democratic, ultranationalist, but also scientifically legitimated far-right regime in Germany.” A large portion of the academic movement in support of various fascist projects was not inherently anti-Enlightenment. Hitler himself promoted something called “the anti-Semitism of Reason.” Of course we can identify politicized pseudo-scientific rhetoric in 19th and 20th century imperialist, Social-Darwinist, and nationalist thinking, and we see it up to the present day. But that doesn’t change the commitment to science and reason, as they understood them, by at least some fascists.

Conclusion

Though when I messaged with him D’Arcy noted that his book is a bit “niche,” it’s a great read if you appreciate the work that goes into meticulously crafting an argument, embedding it in highly readable history, and analyzing a set of primary sources gathered through years of research. As someone who avoids weighing in on debates involving philosophy concepts, I found this book extremely accessible.

Comrade Motopu
June 24th, 2025