Johann Plenge was a Germansociologist. 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".
Plenge set up the Research Institute for Organisational Studies and Sociology. Ludwig Roselius, a coffee manufacturer, financed this institute in the year 1921 with 250,000 Reichsmark capital stock, 30,000 Marks for basic purchases and another 100,000 Reichsmark for the first five years of operation. Plenge developed a cult of personality around himself, placing a bronze bust of himself in the institute. The philosopher Josef Pieper became his student and then his assistant, although he was threatened with dismissal when he did not show the required degree of hero worship for Plenge. Plenge was Ph. D. advisor of Kurt Schumacher and an ancestor of today's right wing tendency in SPD, the Seeheimer Kreis. Plenge had a strong influence; the Marxist theorist and SPD politician Paul Lensch, along nationalistic lines.
Works
Westerwälder Hausierer und Hausgänger, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1898
Gründung und Geschichte des Crédit Mobilier. Zwei Kapitel aus Anlagebanken, eine Einleitung in die Theorie des Anlagebankgeschäftes, Laupp, Tübingen 1903
Marx und Hegel, Laupp, Tübingen 1911
Von der Diskontpolitik zur Herrschaft über den Geldmarkt, Springer, Berlin 1913
Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft, Borgmeyer, Münster 1915
1789 und 1914: Die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des politischen Geistes, Springer, Berlin 1916
Die Revolutionierung der Revolutionäre, Der Neue Geist, Leipzig 1918
Durch Umsturz zum Aufbau, Munster i, Westf, 1918
Zur Vertiefung des Sozialismus, Der Neue Geist, Leipzig 1919
Die Altersreife des Abendlandes, Robert Kämmerer, Düsseldorf 1948
Cogito ergo sumus. Ed. Hanns Linhardt, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964
