tion, however remote, with National Socialism. For example, a very different school of anti-democratic thought found its expression in the so-called Spann Circle, based on the ideas of the Viennese Professor Othmar Spann. From his relationship to the Dollfuse regime in Austria, Spann's ideas have often been summarized as a kind of clerical fascism, particularly as represented in his book The True State which was published in 1923. Despite the fact that the National Socialists removed Spann from his teaching post when they occupied!
Vienna in 1938, recent historical research and the corporative state found an echo in the Third Reich, through the agency of the Dusseldorf Institute for Corporative Organization. Siegfried has pointed out that the course and lectures run by this Institute reached about 7000 entrepreneurs and German Labour Front officials in less than two years. This kind of evidence demands a cautious approach in assessing the exact nature of the role-played by conservative thinking in the NSDAP. In fact it is unwise to assume, m
...