Abstract

One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has been that politics should take precedence over economics and that the power question was more fundamental than the property question. 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 promoted to the status of an ontological “last instance.” Speaking in March 1933, at the height of the political Gleichschaltung following the January coup, Hitler was characteristically straightforward about his intentions: “We want to restore the primacy of the political.”