Chapter 11 covers the period from the DNVP’s resignation from the first Luther cabinet in October 1925 to its reentry into the national government in January 1927. In particular, this chapter examines the deteriorating situation in the German countryside and increased pressure from organized agriculture for the DNVP to rejoin the national government in order to protect the domestic market against agricultural imports from abroad. Industry, too, had become frustrated with the DNVP’s absence in the national government and intensified its pressure on the party for a reassessment of its coalition strategy. But the patriotic Right – and particularly the Stahlhelm, which had fallen more and more under the influence of Theodor Duesterberg and the militantly anti-Weimar elements on its right wing – strongly resisted any move that might presage the DNVP’s return to the government. Shocked by the impressive showing of middle-class splinter parties in the Saxon state elections in late October 1926, the DNVP responded to overtures from the DVP and Center to explore the possibility of reorganizing the government and entered into negotiations that ended with its entry into the fourth Marx cabinet in January 1927.

Chapter 17 examines the repercussions of the December secession from the DNVP Reichstag delegation upon the fate of the Müller cabinet and the decision to appoint Heinrich Brüning as the head of a new government based upon the parties of the middle and moderate Right. The architect of the Brüning cabinet was military strategist Kurt von Schleicher, who hoped either to force Hugenberg’s resignation as DNVP party chairman or trigger a second secession on the party’s left wing that was more extensive than the one that had taken place the preceding December. But the support that Hugenberg enjoyed at the base of the DNVP organization was unassailable, with the result that the dissidents within the DNVP Reichstag delegation found themselves increasingly isolated within the party. Consequently, when Hugenberg decided to support Social Democratic efforts to force the dissolution of the Reichstag in July 1930, their only recourse was to leave the party in a second secession that was, to be sure, more extensive than the first but failed to shake Hugenberg’s control of the party.

Chapter 1 offers a brief overview of right-parties in the late Second Empire, including the German Fatherland Party, before moving to a more thorough analysis of the way in which the German Right reacted to Germany’s defeat in World War I and the revolutionary upheaval it left in its wake. It focuses in particular to unify the various factions of the German Right that had existed before World War I into a new political party, the German National People’s Party (DNVP), in preparation for the elections to the Weimar National Assembly and the Prussian Constitutional Assembly in January 1919. It also examines the reluctance with which the leaders of the German Conservative Party – in particular its parliamentary leader Count Kuno von Westarp – embraced the new party and the problem this posed for the DNVP’s future political development.

Chapter 5 focuses on the various patriotic associations that stood outside the orbit of organized political conservatism and that represented an important counter-point to the way in which organized economic interests sought to use the DNVP and other non-socialist parties to promote their own agenda. The most important of these organizations was the Pan-German League, which along with its client organization, the German National Racist Protection and Defense League, espoused a particularly virulent brand of racial antisemitism that found a warm reception in many quarters of the DNVP. The patriotic Right also included the civilian defense leagues, or Einwohnerwehren, that played an important role in the suppression of revolutionary Marxism in the immediate postwar period as well as veterans’ organizations like the Stahlhelm and Young German Order. Efforts to unite these organizations in an umbrella organization known as the United Patriotic Leagues of Germany (VVVD) were only partly successful.

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the DNVP tried to reach out to groups that had stood outside the orbit of the prewar conservative parties, namely Catholics, youth, and women at a time when it adopted an increasingly hard line against Germany’s republican system and the foreign policy of the Fehrenbach and Wirth governments. Under Helfferich’s leadership, the DNVP was able to exploit the inflationary spiral of the early 1920s and the distress that this created in diverse sectors of German society, but particularly among the German middle strata. It was also able to solidify its position in the German agricultural community by virtue of its outspoken opposition to the continuation of war-time controls over farm prices and production quotas. The DNVP was thus able to build upon the organizational growth of the previous year and a half and to consolidate its position as the political agent of Germany’s conservative milieu.

We have arrived at economics, even though this is a book about politics. Therefore, lest we forget, here again is the overall objective. In our populist age, some political scientists should start paying special attention to a matter that I have not yet explicated, but which I have already described several times as the destruction caused by what economists call creative destruction.

A number of preliminary matters must be dealt with before we can proceed to the central arguments of this book. So let us do that now, and then get down to business starting in Chapter 2: The Temple of Science.

Here is the sequence so far. Much of the search for knowledge takes place in Kerr’s multiversity. The Temple of Science model suggests that that institution is excellent in some ways but lacks a general commitment to confront the populist age in which we live. While such a commitment is absent, modern society has nevertheless accorded unusual authority to the Temple’s economics column, as if scholars there possess especially useful knowledge as compared to what is discovered by other disciplines (columns) dealing with people.

I have discussed so far why, for general reasons, economics today enjoys special prestige compared to other social science disciplines. Let us now consider, more specifically, that the discipline of economics is held in great regard in America because its mainstream recommends very powerfully to citizens and politicians that the central policy goal of government at local, state, and federal levels should be perpetual economic growth. Consequently, we will see that admiration for economic growth brings economists to praise the process of “creative destruction,” and we will then see how that praise inspired my original proposal, that in the Age of Populism, some political scientists should take up arms against the downsides of economic creativity, which have become terribly dangerous to public life.