Education
After graduating school he studied philosophy in Vienna, followed by Political Sciences in Zürich, Bern, and Tübingen. He received his doctorate in Political Science in 1903.
After graduating school he studied philosophy in Vienna, followed by Political Sciences in Zürich, Bern, and Tübingen. He received his doctorate in Political Science in 1903.
From 1904 to 1907 Spann worked for the "Center for Private Welfare Service" in Frankfurt am Main. By the end of 1904 Spann, along with Hermann Beck and Hanns Dorn founded a newspaper called, "Critical Pages for the whole Social Sciences."
In 1907 Spann wrote his Habilitation in Political Economy for the Hochschule in Brünn. From 1907 to 1909 he was given the position of "privatdozent" which allowed him to teach and collect fees from students. As early as 1908 Spann began working as the full-time imperial-royal vice-secretary of the statistic central commission in Vienna.
Spann was popular with students, not only for his lectures which would spill out into the hallways at the University, but also for mid-summer festivals which he would hold in the woods where he would teach that "the ability to intuit essences was nurtured by jumping over the fire..." (Caldwell 2004, 138-9).
In 1928 he joined the Militant League for German Culture. Around 1930 he also joinеd the NSDAP.
Quotations:
"The often-heard statement is in this sense correct, that liberalism and socialism are fruits from the same tree." (Der wahre Staat)
"We recognize that at heart…individualism is a fundamental error. Individualism makes the individual lonely and poor." (Der Wahre Staat)
"Democracy wants to vote about truth – that is not only unfeasible... but also frivolous, because setting the majority in the saddle means that the lower rule over the higher. To repeat, Democracy therefore means the mechanization of the organization of our lives and the state and the exclusion of any fundamental values from the construction of this organization through voting, through majority rule.... The will of the people as political will may only be built through the Leader [Führer], before it can be expressed as such." (Der Wahre Staat)
"Equality among equals. Subordination of the intellectually inferior under their intellectual betters – those are the constitutive laws of the true state.” (Der Wahre Staat)
"We believe that in reality history only knows corporately-structured states and that the blurring of the Stände in democratic times has never really succeeded, that it is always only a sickness that feeds on the healthy, true reality.” (Der Wahre Staat)
"It is the fundamental truth of all social science... that it is not the individuals that are the truly real, but the whole, and that the individuals have reality and existence only so far as they are members of the whole."
Main interests - Economics, social philosophy, political philosophy.
Notable ideas - Corporate statism.