Johann Plenge

Who was Johann Plenge?

Johann Plenge was a German sociologist. He was professor of political economy at the University of Münster. Professor Plenge was regarded a great authority on Karl Marx, and his work Marx und Hegel marks the beginning of the modern Hegel-renaissance among Marxist scholars. Later his socialist views became very nationalistic, and he is regarded one of the most important intellectual forebears of National Socialism.

In his book 1789 and 1914 he contrasted the 'Ideas of 1789' and the 'Ideas of 1914'. Plenge argued: "under the necessity of war socialist ideas have been driven into German economic life, its organisation has grown together into a new spirit, and so the assertion of our nation for mankind has given birth to the idea of 1914, the idea of German organisation, the national unity of state socialism". To Plenge, as for many other German nationalists and socialists, organization meant socialism and a planned economy. He regarded the war between Germany and England as a war between opposite principles, and believed that the "struggle for victory were new forces born out of the advanced economic life of the nineteenth century: socialism and organization".