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In response to the discussants this essay places Wages of Destruction in its historio-graphical context. In dialogue with Riley's call for a reading of Nazi Germany in terms of a theory of imperialism, it calls for an account of the 'variable geometry' of regime-business relations. In conclusion, however, we must insist on the 'vacuum' of causal logic that is a defining characteristic of the history of the Nazi regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the connection between the structure of the German economy in the 1930s and German aggression in World War II? Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction forcefully poses this issue, but fails to adequately resolve it. Instead, on this decisive question, his analysis oscillates uneasily between two equally unconvincing models: rational-choice theory and cultural determinism. This surprising explanatory failure derives from an inadequate theorisation of German imperialism as the expression of the combined and uneven development of the German economy and society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seven years ago, Adam Tooze's comprehensive study of the Nazi economy found a vast and predominantly favourable resonance in the media and the historiographical community of the anglophone and German-speaking worlds. There are indeed many merits to Tooze's study that deserve to be emphasised. But there are also some astonishing deficiencies and shortcomings. The gravest is Tooze's failure to offer any argument whatsoever regarding the widening rift between the corporate business community and the cadres of the political-military institutions. The growing distance between the two precedes the terminal stage of the Nazi dictatorship, which began in the last quarter of 1943. If Tooze had addressed the well-established facts on this issue, he would likely not have been able to conclude on such an affirmative note and insist on the transatlantic happy end that supposedly put paid to the German elites' adventures between 1931 and 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction has received a fair amount of scholarly attention since its publication in 2006, particularly among historians. What has received much less attention, however, are the many theoretical insights to be gleaned from Tooze's history of the inner-workings of the Nazi war economy in the lead-up to the Second World War. This is particularly true of the numerous theoretical subjects and themes covered by Tooze of direct relevance to Marxist theories and understandings of Nazism. From his analysis of the relationship between Nazi economic policies and Hitler's geopolitical objectives to the relations between capital and state to the specificities of Nazism as a distinct ideological and cultural apparatus to the role of the Nazi regime in triggering the 1939 cataclysm - in all these ways, Tooze's work speaks to a number of core issues at the heart of Marxist debates on Nazism, fascism, and the causes of the Second World War. This introduction outlines a number of these themes and more in Tooze's work, contextualising them within extant Marxist debates on Nazism, before then going on to highlight some of the main arguments and criticisms advanced in the symposium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]