Figure 2.1 Liberty Leading the People. Eugène Delacroix [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
We now have a broad picture of the historical phenomenon known as “mass society” in its different manifestations: political, demographic, social and cultural. In this chapter the goal will be to describe the resistance to massification, surveying the criticisms and anxieties to which it gave rise. Here, too, the criticisms will be divided into subsections: politics, demographics, society and culture. The theme that will take center stage in the next chapters, the fascist response to the mass, will not be dealt with here. The period covered will be, roughly, from the mid 19th century to the verge of the First World War. On a few occasions, when this will be necessary, events will be discussed from outside this timeframe. Geographically, we remain in Europe, with occasional visits to the United States, the most important overseas Western country. Since mass society is a pan-European phenomenon, no distinction will be drawn at this stage between countries that will subsequently turn fascist (Italy, Germany) and countries that will maintain their parliamentary democracy (England, France—the latter succumbing to an authoritarian regime only with military defeat and occupation). This does not mean that this important difference has been forgotten, yet for the time being the focus will be on processes jointly experienced by Western European countries, under the assumption that fascism is a political and ideological plant that grows on European soil everywhere, even if it bears fruit only in certain countries, offering a particularly favorable climate.
The gradual extension of the franchise and the demand of the masses to participate in political life triggered deep fears among the élites and the middle classes. The result was the blossoming of a fierce anti-democratic polemic, admonishing against the insidious implications of mass rule. Already in the 19th century, and as limited as the political enfranchisement of the masses was, critics of democracy glimpsed in it a fundamental threat to all the goods of civilization: social order, the rule of law, hierarchy, private property, culture and so on and so forth. The masses were seen as a force subverting all that, leaving anarchy, disobedience, and cultural decline in their trail.
At the root of the fear was the acknowledgment that, for all their cultural, spiritual and intellectual inferiority, there was one advantage enjoyed by the masses, which democracy converted into a lethal weapon: their quantitative superiority. This led to one of the most common tropes of the opposition to mass politics, i.e., the claim that democracy displaces “quality” and brings “quantity” to the fore, relying on the arbitrary advantage of “numbers,” whereas worthy rule reflects qualitative stature.
Such reproaches were by no means the exclusive fare of die-hard conservatives rebuffing all reform. Many liberals regarded the triumph of the masses as the triumph of quantity—the very term “mass” in many different European languages of course designates a clear quantitative criterion. And so, the English liberal Robert Lowe, who held several important offices under W.E. Gladstone in various governments (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary), strictly opposed the extension of the franchise demanded by the Conservative Disraeli, and during the campaign surrounding the proposed reform of 1867 gave several passionate speeches warning against democracy. In one of them he defined this political system as “a right existing in the individual as opposed to general expediency … numbers as against wealth and intellect” (Hansard July 15, 1867: 1540). He further admonished against the democratic empowering of the trade unions:
It was only necessary that you should give them the franchise, to make those trades unions the most dangerous political agencies that could be conceived; because they were in the hands, not of individual members, but of designing men, able to launch them in solid mass against the institutions of the country.
(1546)
Lowe concluded his speech (1549–50) with an apocalyptic vision according to which the extension of the franchise signifies nothing less than the terminal decline of English civilization:
Sir, I was looking to-day at the head of the lion which was sculptured in Greece during her last agony after the battle of Chaeronea [a 338 BC battle in which the Greek were defeated by the Macedonians], to commemorate that event, and I admired the power and the spirit which portrayed in the face of that noble beast the rage, the disappointment, and the scorn of a perishing nation and of a down-trodden civilization, and I said to myself, “O for an orator, O for an historian, O for a poet, who would do the same thing for us!” We also have had our battle of Chaeronea; we too have had our dishonest victory. That England, that was wont to conquer other nations, has now gained a shameful victory over herself; and oh! that a man would rise in order that he might set forth in words that could not die, the shame, the rage, the scorn, the indignation, and the despair with which this measure is viewed by every cultivated Englishman who is not a slave to the trammels of party, or who is not dazzled by the glare of a temporary and ignoble success!
In their clamor to contain the political rise of the mass, critics of democracy often embraced positions that anticipate, in part, the fascist vision. This was the case of the Scottish social critic Thomas Carlyle, one of the most influential writers of the Victorian period. Carlyle illustrates the fact that the difficulty in coming to terms with mass society yielded authoritarian conclusions not only in countries with relatively young and unstable liberal and parliamentary traditions, such as Italy and Germany, but in Britain, the liberal political milieu par excellence. This, in turn, underscores the need to understand fascism in a wide European context. In the first decades of his intellectual career Carlyle gained a reputation as an acerbic critic of modern Britain, which he portrayed as narrow-minded, materialistic and greedy. He lashed out against what he termed mammonism and the laissez-faire that subordinated all social procedures to the whims of the market, draining modern life of its moral and spiritual content, abusing the poor and instilling them with social resentment, driving a wedge between them and the upper classes and thus sowing the seeds of revolt. These attacks on capitalism and its underlying economic doctrine, that he called “the dismal science,” might create the impression that the Sage of Chelsea was a man of the left. Yet what truly concerned him in reality was not the suffering of the vulnerable members of society as much as the pit that unrestrained capitalism was unwittingly digging for itself, its short-term quest for profit at all costs endangering the long-term stability of the class system. Exploitation he deemed natural and inevitable in any healthy society, yet too much of it, or an exploitation that was too naked and unembarrassed, will endanger capitalism. At the same time, Carlyle faulted laissez-faire less for its ruthlessness and more for the leniency he attributed to it. Politically, capitalism emancipates the worker, basing his labor on a strictly voluntary and contractual agreement. Unlike past epochs, the worker is under no extra-economic obligation to his employer, and both seek each other out of sheer self interest. Yet this was too flimsy a basis on which to found an enduring society. Class inequality cannot remain economic only but must be anchored legally, politically and ethically; hence his support for the “permanent contract” of slavery over the “nomadic contract” of liberal modernity. This explains Carlyle’s ultraist rejection of mass politics, of political liberalism, democracy and socialism. He saw them as myopic and sentimental, rushing headlong to free the slaves without recognizing the acute dangers this entailed for the entire social order. Already in 1849, during a public campaign to improve the living and working conditions of the black plantation workers in the West Indies, then partly under British control, he defended slavery as a natural system, well suited to extract from the worker the labor he owed to society:
[W]ith regard to the West Indies, it may be laid down as a principle, which no eloquence in Exeter Hall, or Westminster Hall, or elsewhere, can invalidate or hide, [t]hat no Black man who will not work according to what ability the gods have given him for working, has the smallest right to eat pumpkin, or to any fraction of land that will grow pumpkin, however plentiful such land may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled, by the real proprietors of said land, to do competent work for his living. This is the everlasting duty of all men, black or white, who are born into this world.
(Carlyle 1869a: 299)
Some 20 years later, Carlyle naturally became one of the most stringent critics of the 1867 reform, who many regarded as the triumph of democracy in Britain. He fully shared Robert Lowe’s bleak view of democracy as the twilight of civilization, and held that the only way to prevent this outcome is to enact a counter move that will restitute proper order. In a famous polemic treatise against the reform, he repeated the assertion that the abolition of slavery, that is of the political subordination of the workers, necessarily ushers in socialism or revolution:
One always rather likes the Nigger […]. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant. […] The whole world rises in shrieks against you, on hearing of such a thing:—yet the whole world […] listens, year after year, for above a generation back, to “disastrous strikes,” “merciless lockouts” and other details of the nomadic scheme of servitude; nay is becoming thoroughly disquieted about its own too lofty-minded flunkeys, mutinous maid-servants […] and the kindred phenomena on every hand: but it will be long before the fool of a world open its eyes to the taproot of all that, to the fond notion, in short, That servantship and mastership, on the nomadic principle, was ever, or will ever be, except for brief periods, possible among human creatures.
(Carlyle 1867: 5–6)
While capitalism, for its own good, needs to somewhat moderate its exploitative ways, the political solution to the democratic slide is the reinstatement of a neo-aristocratic rule where the many are governed by the few. “Democracy,” he claimed (1869b: 74) “may be natural for our Europe at present; but cannot be the ultimatum of it. Not towards the impossibility, ‘self-government’ of a multitude by a multitude; but towards some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe struggle.” Carlyle’s diagnosis of the modern political conundrum led him to advocate stances that many have retroactively regarded as proto-fascist. “Carlyle,” wrote one scholar, “appears to be a violent conservative, or, as some have argued, virtually a fascist. That some aspects of his political position are similar to fascism is beyond dispute” (Abrams 1986: 943). Carlyle goaded the chosen few, the champions of order, and summoned their courage before the decisive clash against the masses, the carriers of anarchy. He was confident that in spite of their numerical disadvantage, the élite will prevail:
For everywhere in this Universe,[….] Anti-Anarchy is silently on the increase, at all moments: Anarchy not, but contrariwise; having the whole Universe forever set against it; pushing it slowly, at all moments, towards suicide and annihilation. To Anarchy, however million-headed, there is no victory possible. Patience, silence, diligence, ye chosen of the world!
(Carlyle 1867: 50)
The invoked “chosen of the world” would come, Carlyle hoped, out of a union between the traditional nobility and the middle-class, the industrial heroes of the present. They will close their ranks and defeat the millions of the rabble. He envisaged a militarization of social life, wanting to mold society and economy after a military fashion, as attested to by his expression “the captains of industry.”1 Carlyle, it is interesting to note, was an admirer of German culture and tradition, which he saw as a wholesome alternative to the crass materialism infecting England. He popularized in Britain the tenets of German idealism—heavily filtered through his own cult of heroes—as expressed in the works of J.G. Fichte, Schiller and Goethe, and equally praised the German, particularly Prussian, political tradition, where he identified the military and heroic nobility so dear to his heart: in 1858 he published the biography of Friedrich “the Great.” His writings, in turn, were highly appreciated in Germany and influenced intellectual developments there during the second half of the 19th century. And while Nietzsche liked to ridicule the Scottish writer’s style and ideas, a close reading of his own texts reveals unmistakable Carlylean traces, especially in what concerns the social and political dimension of his thought.2
One might argue that Carlyle’s extreme critique of democracy is unrepresentative of the age’s Zeitgeist, at least within the moderate British context. This is true to an extent, but Carlyle’s exceptionality should not be overstated. Few in Britain went as far as he did, for instance on the issue of reverting to feudal labor relations, but many shared his basic fear that mass democracy poses a serious social threat, unless a way is found to significantly constrain and dilute it. The position of the liberal Lowe was already mentioned. And there are many other cases. One of them is Matthew Arnold, who like Carlyle was an eminent Victorian social critic, with a long-term impact on 20th-century conservatives and mass critics such as Ortega y Gasset and T.S. Eliot. (See Femia 2001: 136.)
Arnold, formerly engaged in literary writing, began in the early 1860s to publish a series of essays reflecting on the significance of the move to a more democratic regime. His most famous and important book, Culture and Anarchy, was written in 1867–69, accompanying the reform of the franchise. These writings express the conviction, close to Carlyle’s view, that culture is presently retreating before anarchy, and that the former must be protected from the latter. Democracy was typically seen as the victory of quantity over quality, of the indistinct collective over the talented individual. The English, he claimed in an 1861 essay titled “Democracy,” are historically an aristocratic and competitive nation, relying for their advance on the triumph of the best competitors. All this is jeopardized by the democratic, mediocre ideal, which strives toward joint action and the narrowing of gaps at the expense of national greatness:
Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself; democracy accepts a certain relative rise in their condition, obtainable by this concert for a great number, as something desirable in itself, because though this is undoubtedly far below grandeur, it is yet a good deal above insignificance. A very strong, self-reliant people, neither easily learns to act in concert, nor easily brings itself to regard any middling good, any good short of the best, as an object ardently to be coveted and striven for. It keeps its eyes on the grand prizes, and these are to be won only by distancing competitors, by getting before one’s comrades, by succeeding all by one’s self; and so long as a people works thus individually, it does not work democratically. The English people has all the qualities which dispose a people to work individually; may it never lose them! [….] But the English people is no longer so entirely ruled by them as not to show visible beginnings of democratic action; it becomes more and more sensible to the irresistible seduction of democratic ideas, promising to each individual of the multitude increased self-respect and expansion with the increased importance and authority of the multitude to which he belongs, with the diminished preponderance of the aristocratic class above him.
(Arnold 1993: 10)
Arnold was no sworn elitist. He took to task all classes in England of his day and affixed them with unflattering epithets. The nobility he called “barbarians,” members of the middle class he referred to as “philistines,” a term he made popular in the English language, and the working class he disparaged as “populace.” This creates the impression, which Arnold certainly wanted to nurture, that he was an impartial observer standing beside the classes, committed to none of the great social camps. Central to his teaching was the stress on the need to overcome social divisions and form policies serving the nation as a whole. Yet this objectivity claim does not withstand a closer scrutiny of his works, which reveals that of the three great social classes he mostly feared the last one, the populace, chastising the other two fundamentally for failing to contain the mass and integrate it in the nation, as a result of both their weakness and their corruption. That working-class empowerment was the development truly disquieting him, emerges clearly from the following sentences:
This is the old story of our system of checks and every Englishman doing as he likes, which we have already seen to have been convenient enough so long as there were only the Barbarians and the Philistines to do what they liked, but to be getting inconvenient, and productive of anarchy, now that the Populace wants to do what it likes too.
(Arnold 1993: 120)
Arnold’s descriptions of the working class are suffused with fears of their new and bold political demands, and recoil from their crude and aggressive demeanor. Compared to Carlyle’s prophetic tone, and his quasi biblical, fiery language, Arnold cuts a relatively moderate figure, much closer to the political center. Next to the Scot, his style is dry and cautious, he often takes care to qualify his assertions and in general appeals more to his readers’ logic than to their emotions. Arnold’s name is therefore not mentioned in any genealogy of proto-fascism, and rightly so. It is therefore interesting to observe how even he, confronted with mass society, looks to authoritarian solutions. Central to his political doctrine is the recurring insistence that the time has come to moderate the moderation characteristic of English political culture and to embrace, however selectively, less permissive models of government, used by other countries. Passing through his political writings like a crimson thread is the call for the English to conquer their instinctive aversion to the state and realize that without a strong state, capable of assuming the tasks of social containment and molding, impending anarchy will not be halted. Arnold believed that the English middle class must educate the populace, shape and direct it, yet without state action it will find it difficult to do so, narrow-minded as it is (Arnold 1993: 22). Instructively, in presenting the state as a supra-class body that can conciliate the classes and bind them into a harmonious nation, Arnold (88) employs a term that will become pivotal in the fascist discourse, namely the corporate state:
[The workman] is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the rest of us,—as the country squires in the aristocratic class, as the political dissenters in the middle class,—he has no idea of a State, of the nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as government, the free swing of this or that one of its members in the name of the higher reason of all of them, his own as well as that of others.
Was Arnold willing to contemplate the use of force and coercion for attaining the so desired social peace? In principle, he makes clear that coercion is not legitimate and recommends in its stead the unifying force of a common culture, spiritual and above interests, a “harmony of ideas,” as the glue that will connect all social “organs.” Yet a more belligerent stance occasionally comes forward, since culture and ideas may not always suffice. He thus points to the supposed passivity of the forces of order facing demonstrators and rioters—the immediate background for this was the rioting of protesters in Hyde Park in 1867, clamoring for an extension of the franchise. He decries the way the working class, “our playful giant,” the representative bar none of modern anarchy, takes full advantage of the leniency of the liberal system, screams, riots, breaks and devastates as he wills, while the forces of order remain complacent. The “outbreaks of rowdyism tend to become less and less of trifles,” he observes (85), while “our educated and intelligent classes remain in their majestic repose, and somehow or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming strength, like our military force in riots, never does act.” It is thus not completely surprising that Arnold exhibits a marked admiration for countries on the continent whose government is central and authoritarian, such as Prussia (117–18), or France under Napoleon III and advises liberal England to take a leaf out of their book. “The growing power in Europe is democracy,” he writes in 1861, “and France has organized democracy with a certain indisputable grandeur and success.” “Being an Englishman,” he adds a little later (13), “I see nothing but good in freely recognizing the coherence, rationality, and efficaciousness which characterize the strong State-action of France.” Carlyle seems not so far removed, after all; in stopping the playful but anarchic giant, harmonic national ideas are indispensable, but so is military force.
The profound fear caused by mass democracy is the ground on which flourishes the different theories of the élite, which will eventually be enshrined at the heart of fascist ideology, in Italy, Germany and elsewhere.3 The three main proponents of this theory, regularly mentioned in the scholarly literature, are two Italians, Vilfredo Pareto—who introduced the term “élite” into the sociological discourse—and Gaetano Mosca, and one German, who lived mostly in Italy and Switzerland, Robert Michels. Minor differences between their theories notwithstanding, all three regarded democracy as impossible since the people or the mass cannot rule but always only small minorities, élites. Mosca and Pareto saw this positively, since for them mass rule was not only impossible but undesirable. They sharply attacked the mass for its purported irrationality and recklessness, while Michels regretted this insight: at least to begin with he saw in democracy an ideal worth striving for, yet with time he reached the pessimistic conclusion that genuine democracy can never be established since every organization, no matter how democratic it might be in its intentions and ideology, is bound sooner or later to develop an authoritarian structure where an élite takes command, whether this happens for all to see or behind the scenes. This was conceived by Michels as a true sociological inevitability, which he termed “the iron law of oligarchy.” As observed in Chapter 1, the theories of Pareto and Mosca exhibit a peculiar paradox: they sharply attack the rule of the masses at the same time that they claim that it is impossible. The danger of the masses is in its irrational onslaught on the laws of the capitalist economy, which for both sociologists are the laws of nature itself. As proclaimed by Pareto (1966: 122), “Above, far above, the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable they are the expression of the creative power; they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be.” If, however, democracy is ruled out by nature itself, why write entire books to dismiss it? If the monster is just a bogeyman, why guard against it? And if the rule of the élites is indeed a sociological given, why invest so much energy in recommending it? Certainly, both writers see a great difference between different variants of élites. Élites they may all be, but some among them are painfully susceptible to democratic pressures. As a consternated Mosca (1939: 478–481) observed:
The ruling classes in a number of European countries were stupid enough and cowardly enough to accept the eight-hour day after the World War, when the nations had been terribly impoverished and it was urgent to intensify labor and production. […] Slave to its own preconceptions, therefore, the European bourgeoisie has fought socialism all along with its right hand tied and its left hand far from free. […] A powerful labor union or, a fortiori, a league of labor unions can impose its will upon the state.
One of Pareto’s central and most famous ideas concerned the circulation of élites, the thesis that history follows a circular pattern in which one ruling minority displaces another, and is displaced by a new ruling group in its turn. Among these élites he distinguished two main types, a lion-like, aristocratic élite, ruling via men and classes that are majestic, strong, determined and inflexible; and élites that resemble foxes, and rule with cunning, sophistication, smooth-talk and adaptability. Historically, the latter kind characterizes the period of bourgeois, liberal rule, which governs by coalitions and alliances, accommodates the popular classes and tries to cajole the masses. What is mistakenly called “democracy” is therefore not the rule of the people, but that of an élite of foxes flattering the masses that as a result become ever more impudent in their demands and infringe with impunity the law of the liberal economy, defying their employers and the—spineless—rulers. Once the situation becomes intolerable, the lions make a comeback, brushing aside the foxes and re-yoking the familiar, over-playful giant. In the context in which Pareto was writing, the reign of foxes is a clear allusion to the government of the liberal Giovanni Giolitti, who ruled Italy almost uninterruptedly in the years 1901–14, mediating between the industrialists and the socialists, interfering in the economy on behalf of the workers, and thus further abetting mass impertinence. Pareto predicted that the lions will sooner or later have to rescue Italy from the engorged mass trolls fed by the liberal élite, and when Mussolini’s troops marched on Rome in October 1922 the old Pareto, according to one account, rose from his sickbed and declared: “I told you so!” (In Livingston 1935: xvii).
With Mosca and Pareto we are already on the threshold of fascism, and they are commonly regarded as key figures in the evolution of the fascist worldview. Yet the conclusion should be avoided that their élite theories, alongside that of Michels, reflect the backward or otherwise unique attributes of Italy and Germany, as compared with the classical liberal countries. Pareto’s political and economic role model was always the liberal English one, and he highly esteemed the Swiss one as well. If he saw political liberalism as betraying economic liberalism, and hence yearned for the coming of the rescuing lion, this was not fundamentally so unlike Carlyle or Arnold wishing for England to move in an authoritarian direction in order to put a stop to mass unruliness. Or consider the following polemic against mass democracy by the English liberal Henry Maine, which might have been copied down from Pareto’s doctrines were it not for the fact that it preceded them. This is from 1885:
History is a sound aristocrat. […] [T]he progress of mankind has hitherto been effected by the rise and fall of aristocracies, by the formation of one aristocracy within another, or by the succession of one aristocracy to another. There have been so-called democracies, which have rendered services beyond price to civilisation, but they were only peculiar forms of aristocracy.
(Maine 1909: 42)
Maine also partakes of the ambiguity of his Italian counterparts with regards to whether democracy is real or nominal. Like them, he reassures his readers (29–30) who identify with the élite—and discourages those who do not—that democracy can never mean more than the façade of popular rule, since behind the scenes the professional “wire-puller” always prevails, moving the masses like marionettes. Yet this confidence is shallow, and just a few pages later (38; emphases added) Maine concedes the real political power of the mass:
The relation of political leaders to political followers seems to me to be undergoing a twofold change. The leaders may be as able and eloquent as ever, […] but they are manifestly listening nervously at one end of a speaking-tube which receives at its other end the suggestions of a lower intelligence. On the other hand, the followers, who are really the rulers, are manifestly becoming impatient of the hesitations of their nominal chiefs, and the wrangling of their representatives.4
One of the critical quandaries the élites were facing in an age of unfolding mass democracy was the frequent reluctance on the part of the masses to be absorbed into “the nation,” conceived of as a hierarchic working and fighting unit under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. If this was a thorn in the flesh of British nationalists such as Arnold or Carlyle, who were exasperated by the ever growing assertiveness of the populace, the problem was all the more vexing in newly established countries such as Italy, where national traditions and a collective sense of identity were far less developed than in England or France. The euphoria of the eventual political triumph of the Risorgimento, led by the middle classes in the face of frequent aristocratic hostility and widespread popular indifference, soon gave way to dismay at the masses’ perceived lack of gratitude for the heroic efforts of the bourgeoisie on their behalf, and lack of comprehension for the national mission, which was to cement and aggrandize Italy’s standing and reputation among the nations. The new ruling élite of post-unification Italy, composed predominantly of Piedmontese liberals, counted on the masses of the peasantry as foot-soldiers in the cause of the national revolution but was by no means eager to see them as equal political partners. As observed by Jonathan Dunnage (2002: 4–5):
Because of their frequent mobilization in the cause of counter-revolution, the fathers of the Risorgimento mistrusted the masses to the extent that […] they were reluctant to concede power to them. Even figures like Giuseppe Mazzini […] belonged to an enlightened middle class and aristocratic élite that was not prepared to overturn economic injustice or consider redistribution of land.
This situation meant that many liberals who had begun as radicals and revolutionaries, when it was a matter of terminating foreign rule in Italy, eventually transmogrified into conservatives and even outright reactionaries, when it was a matter of stemming internal opposition to their own rule in the post-unification era. A notable example of this trend was the right-wing hardliner Francesco Crispi, prime minister during the late 1880s and then throughout most of the 1890s, a strongman whose policies of internal repression and external adventurism earned him a reputation as a precursor of Mussolini, but who actually started as a fervent democratic patriot alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi. “During the 1860s,” writes Dunnage (2002: 5), “the rule of the Liberal Right (Destra Storica) often appeared to take on the characteristics of a dictatorship rather than a politically enlightened power.” This rule derived its popular mandate from an electorate that in 1870 was restricted to just 2 percent of the population, and relied on police and criminal codes largely adopted from the times of the ancien régime and the Napoleonic occupation.
Liberal rule in Italy generally catered to the interests of the industrial north of the country, advancing policies which, either by design or miscomprehension of the realities of the Mezzogiorno—the southern parts of the country—could not resolve the socioeconomic disparities geographically dividing the peninsula. This meant that popular alienation in the South towards the national project could never be truly surmounted. During the 1860s, especially, a traumatic gap opened up between the liberal élite and the Southern peasant masses, a wound that subsequently proved nearly impossible to heal. The liberals meted out severe punishment to Southern “brigands,” who were often discontented peasants who could not see how Italy’s rulers better served their interests than former local élites with whom they had developed complex interdependencies for decades, at least. In suppressing social disorder in the South, observes Giuseppe Finaldi (2012: 53), “far more ‘Italians’ were killed than all the heroic dead who had lain down their life for the ideals of the Risorgimento,” the number of the dead estimated at “several tens of thousands.”
But “the social question” was not merely a Southern one; the Italian masses in general responded lukewarmly to a country that would have them serve it, as workers, soldiers and tax-payers, but largely deprive them of political rights. While the Liberal left—Sinistra storica—has proven more attentive to popular grievances and sought to nationally incorporate the masses via piecemeal reforms and gradual extension of the franchise, its Trasformismo policies, too, were less than wholly successful. The Italian masses had, and were in the process of developing, strong allegiances to alternative, non-national identification loci, notably Catholicism and its political ramifications and then, slowly but surely, also socialism and other variants of radical politics.5 The Liberal order could never emerge as a truly legitimate representative of the people, either being too repressive, in its right-wing variant, or too corrupt, in its left-wing incarnation, that seemed to be offering a tepid, second best alternative, to the genuinely autonomous popular parties.
The state hoped to nationalize the masses by massive spread of patriotic propaganda, whose goal was to produce hard-working, hard-fighting and self-sacrificing Italians. The type of ethos propagated by the liberal élite could be exemplified by a passage from Edmondo De Amicis’s 1886 best-selling pedagogic book, Cuore, where a father explains to his son his love for Italy (De Amicis 1915: 100–101):
Why do I love Italy? Do not a hundred answers present themselves to you on the instant? I love Italy because my mother is an Italian; because the blood that flows in my veins is Italian; because […] all that I see, that I love, that I study, that I admire, is Italian. Oh, you cannot feel that affection in its entirety! You will feel it when you become a man […]. You will feel it in more proud and vigorous measure on the day when the menace of a hostile race shall call forth a tempest of fire upon your country, and when you shall behold arms raging on every side, youths thronging in legions, fathers kissing their children and saying, “Courage!” mothers bidding adieu to their young sons and crying, “Conquer!” You will feel it like a joy divine if you have the good fortune to behold the re-entrance to your town of the regiments, weary, ragged, with thinned ranks, yet terrible, with the splendor of victory in their eyes, and their banners torn by bullets, followed by a vast convoy of brave fellows, bearing their bandaged heads and their stumps of arms loftily, amid a wild throng, which covers them with flowers, with blessings, and with kisses. Then you will comprehend the love of country; then you will feel your country, Enrico. It is a grand and sacred thing. May I one day see you return in safety from a battle fought for her, safe,—you who are my flesh and soul; but if I should learn that you have preserved your life because you were concealed from death, your father, who welcomes you with a cry of joy when you return from school, will receive you with a sob of anguish, and I shall never be able to love you again, and I shall die with that dagger in my heart.
Thy Father.
This mass education in fighting and, if need be, dying for the patria was not merely intended to steel the people for the eventuality—rather unlikely at the time of writing—of a foreign invasion by “a hostile race.” As the ominous cry of “conquer!” indicates, it looked forward, if anything, to an Italian invasion of the lands of foreign races. For these were precisely the years when Italy was starting to enter the fray of colonialist enterprise, in a way which was itself largely meant to provide a solution for domestic unrest, both by providing a proper national destination for the millions of Italian migrants who could not find employment on the peninsula, and by finally uniting Italians in a glorious, shared venture. But this liberal-imperialist hope again proved elusive, and the “wild throng” greeting the victorious troops remained largely a fantasy. In March 1896 the fantasy even became a nightmare when Italy was humiliatingly defeated by Ethiopian forces in the Battle of Adowa, resulting in demonstrations and riots in many Italian cities, forcing Crispi’s resignation. Colonialism failed to provide the glue that will bind the masses to the state since, as Finaldi (2017: 3) explains in a fine study of 19th-century Italian colonialism, the
reality of migration to the Americas kept the gaze of many among Italy’s poor away from colonial daydreams. Other places could be metaphorically migrated to as well: socialism promised a world that contradicted the self-sacrificing patriotism and obedience expected by the liberal order.
Thus, by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century the sense of middle-class elation brought about by the successful culmination of the Risorgimento some four decades earlier, gave way to profound disillusion with a reality of a divided nation, whose masses have not only failed to live up to the bourgeoisie’s expectations, but were busily undermining the national edifice by way of their independent class politics. In many bourgeois politicians and intellectuals this produced profound resentment of the masses that seemed intractable to both Giolitti’s conciliatory carrot and Crispi’s authoritarian stick. Other, even more drastic means for nationalizing the masses began to be contemplated in nationalist bourgeois circles.
An excellent glimpse into this mindset is afforded by one of the great historical novels of the era, Luigi Pirandello’s pre-war I vecchi e i giovani of 1913 [The Old and the Young], which unfolded a vast panorama of Sicilian society and politics in the turbulent 1890s. At the story’s center was the uprising and eventual brutal suppression of the Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori during the early 1890s. The Fasci Siciliani was a democratic and socialist federation of peasant and workers leagues that took inspiration from earlier workers’ Fasci formed in the North of Italy in the 1870s. While led by urbane socialist intellectuals, it was infused with a millenarian outlook that foresaw the imminent coming of an egalitarian order, abolishing all injustice and poverty (Hobsbawm 1959: 93–107). Amidst profound economic crisis, the Fasci gathered behind it the island’s poor and confronted Sicily’s landowners and industrialists with a series of radical demands for land redistribution, raising the minimum age for work at the sulfur mines to 14 years of age, reducing working hours, etc. When most of these demands were rejected, the social conflict intensified and eventually reached the proportions of a popular uprising, with the élites asking for the government to send in armed forces to restore order. While prime minister Giolitti complied with this demand, his measures were still relatively mild, and it was only after his resignation in 1893 in association with a banking scandal and the much harder line imposed by his successor Crispi in 1894, including declaring a state of siege throughout the island and sending in some 40.000 troops, that the movement was finally quashed. The Fasci’s “leaders were arrested and sentenced to long terms in prison; the Socialist Party was suppressed; and the electoral registers were ‘revised,’ and more than a quarter of all Italian voters (most of them poor) were disenfranchised” (Duggan 1994: 167–168).
Pirandello’s novel, that heavily draws upon autobiographic materials and displays a broad first-hand knowledge of Sicily’s political and economic conditions—Pirandello came from a wealthy family involved in the sulfur industry—is to a certain extent polyphonic, in that the viewpoints of various classes (especially the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, but also the working class and the peasantry) and of different political factions (die-hard adherents of the deposed House of Bourbon, right-wing liberals, left-wing liberals, conservatives, and radical socialists) is represented. But the predominant perspective is by far the allegedly impartial, merely patriotic one, of the veteran heroes of the Risorgimento, now being besieged on all sides by vilifying forces, their historic and self-sacrificing work dragged in the mud, on account of their own failings, but mostly since it is ill-understood by the ingrate, cynical and self-seeking nation. Pirandello himself embodies the aforementioned transmogrification of liberalism, shifting from a progressive to a reactionary position: coming from a family of zealous patriots that participated in the struggles of the Risorgimento, as a young man he was radical in outlook, and supported the Fasci’s bid for social justice; by the time the novel was written, however, he had long left behind him such radicalism, and was an embittered national conservative (for a detailed account of the author’s political trajectory, see Providenti 2000), espousing a pessimistic life philosophy stressing the absurdity of existence, which he derived to a significant extent from the German idealism he admired (on Pirandello’s profound affinities with Nietzsche, see Romano 2008). Later on, Pirandello would become a supporter of fascism and in 1935 he will gladly donate the literature Nobel Prize medal he won a year earlier as part of the “Gold for the Fatherland” campaign, launched by the regime to finance the war with Ethiopia in defiance of the international economic sanctions imposed on Italy (on the general compatibility between Pirandello’s worldview and fascist politics, see Venè 1971).
Élite anxieties vis-à-vis the unruliness of the poor find expression throughout the novel but are most systematically articulated during a private meeting of several old heroes of the Risorgimento, who have come to support the candidacy of an old liberal friend who has returned to Sicily from Rome, amid rumors that the Fasci’s socialist candidate, a certain Zappala, is quickly gaining ground among the discontented. “One Zappala only?” fumes one of the old liberals, and continues sardonically:
“No! Five hundred and eight Zappalas, one for every constituency in the Peninsula! [….] The first thing would be to abolish all the schools! Abolish all taxation! Abolish the army and the police! Law and order, soap and water! The frontiers levelled, and universal brotherhood!”
(Pirandello 1928)
He then recites a lampoon on humanism by the poet Giuseppe Giusti, bemoaning the way the masses reject Italy in favor of vacuous internationalism:
Differences of custom and clime are fancies of the past; we have changed the tune. Deserts, mountains, seas, are frontiers only in the almanacs, dreams of geographers…. And do you keep silence now, O Muse, who weary me with the plea of love of country. I am a child of the universe, and it seems to me a waste of time to write for Italy.
When he finishes, the patriots rise up and enthusiastically applaud. Another speaker then laments the rise of “the Fourth Estate,” whose preposterous “drunkard’s nightmare” of a welfare state benefitting all at the expense of the well-off, pampering the ever more ambitious proletariat, is abetted by the feeble resistance of a confused and sentimental ruling classes. While this picture of élite meekness seems questionable as a description of the actual bourgeoisie of the 1890s, it was certainly inadequate at the time the novel was written, for this was a period marked by what historian Alexander De Grand (1982: 13) called “new bourgeois militancy,” in which leading young critics of the Giolittian establishment, such as Enrico Corradini, Alfredo Rocco or Luigi Fedrezoni, brandished an “antidemocratic, elitist, imperialist ideology of extreme bourgeois politics.”
The novel’s tragic hero—perhaps the only figure who emerges as unambiguously worthy of admiration—is Mauro Mortara, a selfless, rugged, and aging Risorgimento foot-soldier of humble origins, who has dedicated his entire life to the cause of Italian renaissance without expecting any reward. A firm believer in the glory of the nation and its right to imperial expansion, which he eagerly anticipates, he lives isolated from the world, working as a housekeeper in the decaying estate of a dreamy, life-weary, petty-aristocrat. Mortara’s old age is sweetened by the blissful illusion of the nation’s grandeur, but he is gradually exposed to the sordid reality of contemporary Italy and the way the heroes of the past are everywhere on the defensive. And while he is furious with all social and political intrigues, undercutting the sacred cause of the patria, the worst renegades are by far the ignominious socialist Fasci, wreaking havoc in his beloved Sicily. Upon hearing of the clashes between the army and the rioters, Mortara, now over 80 years old, takes to arms to render Italy a final service by ridding her of the anti-patriotic brigands and traitors. He rushes to the aid of Crispi’s troops, which, mistaking him for a member of the mob, shoot him down, symbolizing the travesty which is modern Italy.
The novel ends on an ominous note, one of its last passages containing heavy hints of Italy’s near future and the rise of a new movement, an anti-fascist fascism, whose goal will be to subdue the revolting masses and salvage the Risorgimento. The following is written, remember, in 1913, when a certain Benito Mussolini is still an ultraist socialist leader:
Mauro […] begun to make preparations for departure. At his age? Sangue della Madonna, what had age to do with it? Who dare speak of age, to him! […] Armed to the teeth, ready for any provocation, he would go up to Girgenti, to discuss and arrange some plan of campaign with the other veterans, Marco Sala, Celauro, Trigona, Mattia Gangi, who surely, if the blood still flowed in their veins, must feel, as he did, the need to arm themselves and rally in defense of their common handiwork. If their enemies were united, banded in Fasci, why could not they unite, band themselves in a Fascio of their own, of the Old Guard? The troops were not sufficient; civilians must give them solid support, forcibly disband these Fasci, scatter all these dogs with powder and shot, if need be.
(Pirandello 1928)
Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience. […] To heighten the impression of the crowd’s baseness, he envisioned the day on which even the fallen women, the outcast, would readily espouse a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except money. Betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind.
Walter Benjamin (2003: 343)
Let us now turn to the response to the demographics of mass society, which as observed encompassed above all population growth and urbanization. To many members of the upper classes, the nobility and the bourgeoisie, these developments gave cause to a feeling of suffocation, spiritual no less than physical, intolerable congestion, dirt, pollution, moral and physical decline (or “degeneration” as it was widely referred to), loss of intimacy and of personal security, and even a threat to one’s sense of selfhood, as the individual felt that he or she were about to be swallowed up by the crowd.
Ortega’s description has numerous antecedents going many decades back. But it should be kept in mind that this fear and loathing were the result of a certain social sensibility, expressing the subjective viewpoint of the writers, who nearly always came from the ranks of the “better” classes. It was a product of an interpretation of modern society, reflected, one might say, through a distorting mirror, to use the apt formulation proposed by Susanna Barrows (1981) in her excellent study of upper-class’ responses to the masses in late 19th-century France. The same phenomena could be construed—as indeed they sometimes were—in a positive way, not with fear but with hope.
To illustrate this fact, let us examine a text, in this case a visual one, Eugène Delacroix’s celebrated La Liberté guidant le people (Figure 2.1), one of the iconic paintings of the 19th century, drawn in 1830 as an homage to the popular uprising of the same year in which commoners—workers as well as members of the middle class—rose up against King Charles X and deposed him, thus terminating the Bourbon Restoration in France.
This visual hymn to the popular revolt, has two main protagonists: “liberty,” represented by the female flag carrier holding a gun, and “the people,” that is present as the sum total of the participants. Among them, to the left of liberty, is a gentleman wearing a cylinder hat and a black jacket and holding a musket gun. Although this cannot be known without additional information, this is a self-portrait of the painter, Delacroix (Néret 2000: 25). He joins the street fighters (at least vicariously: Delacroix did not actually take part in the fighting), and in spite of his somewhat more elevated social status, indicated by his attire, sees himself as one of the crowd. A common third estate front of workers and middle-class individuals closes ranks in defiance of the enemies of the people, the nobility and the monarchy. The vision reflected in the painting is boldly popular, democratic and plebeian. Liberty herself is one of the populace; the people are “guided” by one their own, not by any élite, whose corrupt members they in fact seek to depose. The mass is positively depicted, indeed celebrated. The identity of the participants is not lost once they join the crowd, as a later trope would have it, but is enhanced. They gain individual expression precisely because they have joined a group that fights for its rights. One could assume, for example, that the urchin depicted to the right of liberty, waving two revolvers, would not have been represented in another painting, and certainly not as a distinct protagonist of the events. In fact, he got to express his individuality further in the field of literature, since Gavroche of Les Misérables was reputedly inspired by his figure. At this, relatively early historical phase, the people has not yet been transformed into a rabble. The definitive rift between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has not yet opened: this will happen only during the next revolutionary wave, the 1848 revolutions, when for the first time full-scale fighting between the middle class and the working class shook Paris.
Ten years later, in 1840, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his short story The Man of the Crowd, which also centers on the adventures of a bourgeois among the common people in the big metropolis, in this case London. Like the character of Delacroix in Liberty, this story’s narrator and protagonist is not a member of the lower orders. Very little information concerning him is provided, yet he is sufficiently well-off to spend the day in a coffee house—“with a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap” (Poe 1982: 475)—and the night chasing figures stirring his curiosity. While a story’s narrator, of course, is not automatically or seamlessly the mouthpiece of the author, in this instance everything indicates a basic resemblance and affinity between them, in terms of social origins, sensibility and worldview, so that, like the painter’s delegate in Liberty, we have here the writer’s representative on the scene of action. This supposition is also supported by further information, not included in the story itself, to which we shall return.
Yet here the resemblance between the two figures—“Delacroix” in Liberty and the narrator of The Man of the Crowd—exhausts itself. In the former case, the artist is an integral and empathetic participant in the revolutionary collective storming Paris; in the latter, the narrator is a detached observer of the crowd, removed, reserved and even, as becomes increasingly clear as the story unfolds, hostile. As in the usual detective story, a genre pioneered by Poe, here too a mystery needs to be solved and a crime explained: the narrator, it turns out, seeks to fathom the riddle of the crowd, which is generally associated with criminality. While no concrete crime is committed, The Man of the Crowd can be read as the ultimate crime mystery, since the crowd is construed as the criminal par excellence. Already at the beginning it is stated that “the essence of all crime is undivulged,” (Poe 1982: 475) and the offender’s identity is revealed a few lines before the end (481): the man of the crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime.” The mass is defined as “the worst heart of the world.”
While in Delacroix “the people” is a noble and admirable entity, the man of the crowd is demonic. In terms of his social origins, while it appears initially to be unclear—the masses observed are said to display “innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance” (476)—it becomes evident that the core of the mass, its innermost essence, are the lower and poorer social orders: we approximate the wicked and evil inside of the mass the more the day fades and the night deepens. The mystery increases the more the upper classes evacuate the scene and it is filled with the commoners. Thus, in describing the respectable passers-by, the lack of mystery is underlined (476):
There was nothing very distinctive about these two large classes beyond what I have noted. Their habiliments belonged to that order which is pointedly termed the decent. They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers […] men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own—conducting business upon their own responsibility. They did not greatly excite my attention.
Crime, clearly, need not be sought after in the “decent” classes. The bourgeois, moreover, exhibit passivity, embarrassment and impotence when dealing with the proper crowd, with whose aggression and pushiness they do not know how to cope (476):
By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied business-like demeanor, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. [W]hen pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering, but re-doubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon the lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.
When the narrator finally detects genuine crooks, he explains that these pickpockets merely try, in vain, to look respectable: “I watched these gentry with much inquisitiveness, and found it difficult to imagine how they should ever be mistaken for gentlemen by gentlemen themselves” (476–477). Real horror and mystery begin only when one climbs down the social ladder: “Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation” (477). The hierarchy of crime runs inversely to the hierarchy of class: “As the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene,” states the narrator, and further elaborates:
the general character of the crowd materially alter (its gentler features retiring in the gradual withdrawal of the more orderly portion of the people, and its harsher ones coming out into bolder relief, as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den).
(478)
This is the context in which there suddenly leaps forward the monstrous criminal after whom the story is titled, the devilish “man of the crowd”:
I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before. I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend.
(478)
This demonic quality is a class token of the cockney, re-emerging in its fullest horror towards the end of the story as the man of the crowd reaches a den of gin, that typical working-class drink, signifying that we have landed at the very opposite side of the spectrum from which we have started: the respectable coffee-house in which the narrator was sitting as the story began: finally
large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro. The spirits of the old man again flickered up […]. Once more he strode onward with elastic tread. Suddenly a corner was turned, a blaze of light burst upon our sight, and we stood before one of the huge suburban temples of Intemperance—one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin.
(481)
Demographically, the story takes place in the urban congested center par excellence, London, which as the American reader is instructed, is characterized by inconceivable population density (479):
It was now fully night-fall […]. [T]he press was still so thick that, at every such movement, I was obliged to follow him closely. The street was a narrow and long one, and his course lay within it for nearly an hour, during which the passengers had gradually diminished to about that number which is ordinarily seen at noon in Broadway near the Park—so vast a difference is there between a London populace and that of the most frequented American city.
The liberty hailed by Delacroix is for Poe mere anarchy, a helter-skelter of senseless pleasures, sin and crime. The modern metropolis is for the French artist a site of social struggle, embodying not just poverty and crime but also hope for a better world. Poe’s London, by contrast, is just a huge den of corruption. There is no politics in The Man of the Crowd. It is not known whether the narrator supports the extension of the franchise or not, endorses or opposes the right of workers to unionize, and so on and so forth. Yet given the disparagement of the commoners permeating the story, it would be surprising if one discovered that Poe was a zealous democrat. And indeed, he was democracy’s staunch opponent, refusing all social forms in which the people are sovereign. This stance emerges in the following story (Mellonta Tauta) where a future state of things is imagined—the date is 2048—in which democracy and republicanism are a thing of the past, leaving behind them just a memory, and a bad one at that:
A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident […] that a republican government could never be any thing but a rascally one. While the philosophers, however, were busied in blushing at their stupidity in not having foreseen these inevitable evils, […] the matter was put to an abrupt issue by a fellow of the name of Mob, who took every thing into his own hands and set up a despotism, in comparison with which those of the fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a foreigner, by-the-by), is said to have been the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy, had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him. Nevertheless, he had his uses, as every thing has, however vile, and taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger of forgetting—never to run directly contrary to the natural analogies. As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the “prairie dogs,” an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs.
(Poe 1982: 390–391)
In Poe, as can be seen, criticism of the demographics of mass society went hand in glove with a refutation of its politics.
It should be noted that while the man of the crowd is described as “the type and the genius of deep crime,” the narrator, although pursuing him for a whole day and night and scrutinizing his every move, does not actually catch him red-handed committing any illegal act. His criminality is merely assumed, and the narrator fancies he has detected some incriminating signs, although he admits that they were quite intangible:
I had now a good opportunity of examining his person […] and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely-buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaire which enveloped him, I caught a glimpse both of a diamond and of a dagger.
(479)
His “crime,” it would seem, is actually a very paltry one: that of sociability itself. “He refuses to be alone,” states the narrator in the concluding lines, as if this provided cause for legal action. Yet for Poe, the seclusion of the individual within himself and the distancing from the others, especially when they come from the lower classes, was considered of great merit, as testified by the story’s motto, taken from La Bruyère: “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul” [This great unhappiness, of not being able to be alone]. This conviction also found expression in one of Poe’s early poems Alone, written when he was 20 years old.
Alone
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
(Poe 1982: 1026)
Already here the tendency is evident to take distance from the common—in the sense of something “general” and possibly also in the social sense of that which is “low” and “simple.” In a romantic and expressionistic vein, Poe’s writing gives precedence to his inner feelings and subjective impressions over external, objective reality. The poet projects onto the nature surrounding him—the cloud, the sky and so on and so forth—his internal sensations and bestows upon it a sense of “mystery,” a “demonic” aspect, in the same way that he would later invest a man in the crowd with fiendishness.
This reflects a distancing from realism, the literary genre that was dominant in the first half of the 19th century, and which strove to reflect objective reality as closely as possible, registering, in particular, social and historical processes. The great realistic novels of the age, by writers such as Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, or Charles Dickens, attempted to unfold the vastest possible panorama of society and of the relationship between its various groups and classes (as discussed by Frye 1990; Lukács 1964; Jameson 1981). In realistic literature a great number of characters, representing all walks of society, were given the possibility to speak, hence the characterization of the novel as a “dialogic” genre. In addition to this polyphonic nature, many of these novels were characterized by a sympathetic point of view of the commoners, members of the third estate, and their heroes and anti-heroes were often plebs. Poetry, by comparison, is mostly a form of personal expression, giving voice to the poet’s thoughts, moods and mindset, in a way that is less concerned with reflecting the views of those around him or deciphering the relationships between them. In the move from realism to romanticism, from objectivity to subjectivity, and from dialogue to monologue, it is possible to discern, however indirectly, the historical process whereby the middle-classes—from whose ranks came most artists and writers—and the working classes drifted apart. Delacroix, although he is considered a quintessential painter of the romanticist movement, which was certainly not of one cloth, was content to portray figures of the common people, among whom he counted himself. In Poe’s story, by comparison, the narrator is hermetically shielded from society: in the course of the story he exchanges not a word with the countless people he intermingles with. Following the man of the crowd and totally intrigued by him, the possibility does not occur to him to try to engage him in conversation, ask him who he is and what is the purpose of his roaming through the streets of London. His far-reaching conclusion regarding the nature of this figure is totally one-sided and subjective: he decides that this is the fiendish “man of the crowd” and weaves an entire theory about him, without ever asking his opinion or trying to make contact with him. In that respect, Poe anticipates one of the salient features of the vast literature on the masses, which, whether scholarly or literary, is written almost universally from external and condescending perspective: no matter whether we are dealing with Hippolyte Taine, Nietzsche, Gabriel Tarde, Scipio Sighele, Le Bon, Ortega, or any other would-be mass expert, the preconceptions of the writer, mostly negative and judgmental, are projected onto the crowd, without in any way engaging it or any of its perceived members. “The idea of empirical investigation”—writes Susanna Barrows (1981: 87) apropos Taine, the pioneer of mass psychology in France—“was wholly alien to Taine; when conversing with Gabriel Monod about his impending research trip to Italy, Taine asked, ‘And what theory are you going to verify there?’”
The rise in average life expectancy, the decrease in the rate of mortality and the growth of population are presumably salutary developments. One would have expected that contemporaries would enthusiastically welcome the possibility to live a healthier and longer life. Yet at least as far as mass critics were concerned, these demographic trends were construed as fundamentally negative, both quantitatively and qualitatively. With regards to quantity, a common complaint alleged that there were now too many people. And as far as quality is concerned, it was presumed that population growth is no neutral process, benefiting all in equal measure, but one that decisively favors the masses, the lower orders, the supposedly inferior segments of the population at the expense of the upper and middle classes.
The assumption underlying such complaints was that birth rate was highest among the poor, while the number of middle-class’ births remained, at most, stable, which meant that their proportion in society diminished from generation to generation. Several key processes were perceived as contributing to this social deterioration in which the “better” classes were dwindling while the lower classes were multiplying, primary among them the slowing down or outright cessation of the process of natural selection. According to the theories of social Darwinism, fashionable and prestigious in equal measures, under “normal” conditions the surplus population naturally thins out since it comprises those who are physically weak, too poor to provide for themselves, too lazy, reckless or stupid to succeed, for which they frequently pay with their lives, or at least cannot be expected to live very long. Thus, the balance is kept between the better and lesser members of society.
Yet modern developments, and here demographics and politics seemed to be feeding off each other, were undercutting this process: the medical improvements that have been described—medicines, vaccinations, hygiene and improved diet—presently permitted to artificially extend even the lives of those who should duly and naturally have passed away. Under natural circumstances, i.e., pre-modern ones, members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, whose livelihood was guaranteed, who enjoyed good diet and led a healthy way of life, tended in any case to live long. But now, it was argued, the lives of the poor were extended, those who in the past could scarcely survive to old age. Now they receive vaccines that turn them less vulnerable to natural culling. Worse still, modern, mass politics boosted further the effects of demographics and medicine: due to the extension of the franchise the poor can now extend the range of medical services provided by the state, and therefore lengthen their life expectancy even more. This they do fundamentally by progressive taxation that comes at the cost of the affluent taxpayer from the middle and upper classes. As a result, these classes, thrifty, industrious and productive, grind under the “tax burden” and are compelled to finance the services enjoyed by the undeserving. If all this is not bad enough, argued the critics of the mass, the problem gets even worse once the long-term impact of the demographic changes on the political power relations is considered: the population growth of the lower orders becomes a superb political tool, allowing them to accumulate ever more power vis-à-vis the élites.
Democracy was seen as the displacement of quality by quantity, the triumph of “the great number.” Consequentially, the greater the number of the masses the more they can cash in on politically, empowering themselves from one election to the next, while the parties of the bourgeoisie, whose number of voters stagnates, progressively lose ground. As we saw, the advances of the workers’ parties seemed to confirm this scenario: in Germany, as will be recalled, the socialists were growing apace up to the First World War. And the more political power they enjoy, the more they can, in principle, tax the bourgeoisie, extort more and more services from the state, and thus live longer, procreate more and increase their number and then further expand politically. Seen from the vantage point of the upper and middle classes, this process looked like a dismal vicious cycle allowing no escape (Table 2.1), at least as long as democracy continues to exist.
Confronted by this abysmal cul-de-sac, at least as perceived by many among the élites, the complaint against “parasitism” became a recurrent trope in the political discourse, and would later feature prominently in fascist—especially Nazi—ideology. The mass was blamed for living parasitically, feeding off the strong and extorting from their talent and hard labor undue advantages. This condition was perceived as morally distorted—the weak, being the majority, exploit their numbers to prey on the strong, who are fewer and thus cannot defend themselves—and economically detrimental: the more the masses would burden the economic engine (i.e., the industrious bourgeoisie, pulling the rest of the train’s cars along) the more the economy will lose momentum or stop altogether. For Pareto (1966: 139), the liberal critic of mass democracy, it was a system that delivered the helpless economy into the hands of the unfit: “Tilling a field to produce corn is an arduous labor,” he wrote.
On the other hand, going along to the polling station to vote is a very easy business, and if by so doing one can procure food and shelter, then everybody—especially the unfit, the incompetent and the idle—will rush to do it.
This condition, he asserted (302–303), is unsustainable and sooner or later the economy will collapse under the weight of the bloated mass parasites:
[T]he workers prefer the tangible benefits of higher wages, progressive taxation and greater leisure […]. It may be “just, laudable, desirable, morally necessary” that the workers should labor only a few hours each day and receive enormous salaries; but […] is this in reality possible, that is, in terms of real, not merely nominal, wages? And what will be the consequence of this state of affairs?
A highly interesting example of the complaint against mass parasitism is provided by Nietzsche. His use of this trope is intriguing both on account of its habitual flagrancy, which helps clarify the issues at stake, and because it exposes the contradictions and inner tensions characterizing the discourse on the parasitism.
The notion of parasitism was of some importance in Nietzsche’s social thought. Like many middle-class individuals of his time he was greatly distressed by the demographic imbalance, perceivably favoring the masses at the expanse of the élites. He gave a lot of thought to the matter, and advocated a variety of ways of coping with this problem. First, he wanted to affect the consciousness of the weak, those who he felt did not deserve to go on living, and to encourage them to forsake their lives of their own accord with a view to the greater social good. In Twilight of the Idols (1888–89), Nietzsche demanded that invalids be given clear indications by their doctors that their presence among the living is no longer appreciated. This is the proposition of the passage whose title is “A moral code for physicians”:
The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt—not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients. […] To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life—for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live.
(Nietzsche 1990: 99)
It needs to be borne in mind that this was asserted at a time that the German state was exasperatingly moving in the opposite direction: rather than pushing the invalids to suicide, it introduced legal and material measures that encouraged them to go on living, such as health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884) and the Invalidenversicherung (1889). Going on, Nietzsche turned from the parasite’s physician, to the parasite himself; here, his strategy was not to threaten but to convince the parasites to do the right thing, i.e., put an end to their unworthy life:
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time […]. We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this error—for it is sometimes an error. When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live…. Society—what am I saying! life itself derives more advantage from that than from any sort of “life” spent in renunciation, green-sickness and other virtues—one has freed others from having to endure one’s sight, one has removed an objection from life.
(Nietzsche 1990: 99–100)
Nietzsche’s notion of what it means to be sick or invalid, moreover, was very broad and inclusive. It encompassed not only those deemed physically unfit, but the mentally ill as well, those suffering from a spiritual defect and even those who were simply considered mediocre, without any special abilities, and hence categorized as failures. As Zarathustra proclaimed: “The earth is full of the superfluous, life has been corrupted by the many-too-many. Let them be lured by ‘eternal life’ out of this life!” (Nietzsche 1969: 72). Or in the passage entitled Of Voluntary Death:
For many a man, life is a failure: a poison-worm eats at his heart. So let him see to it that his death is all the more a success.
Many a man never becomes sweet, he rots even in the summer. It is cowardice that keeps him fastened to his branch.
Many too many live and they hang on their branches too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!
I wish preachers of speedy death would come! They would be the fitting storm and shakers of the trees of life!
(Nietzsche 1969: 98)
Elsewhere (224), Zarathustra recommends a shock-therapy that will sift those who fake sickness from those who are genuinely incurable. The former should be forced to abandon their parasitic shirking of competition; the latter should be extinguished:
But you world-weary people! You should be given a stroke of the cane! Your legs should be made sprightly again with cane-strokes!
For: if you are not invalids and worn-out wretches of whom the earth is weary, you are sly sluggards or dainty, sneaking lust-cats. And if you will not again run about merrily, you shall—pass away!
One should not want to be physician to the incurable: thus Zarathustra teaches: so you shall pass away!
“The weak and ill-constituted,” Nietzsche (1990: 128) defiantly declares in The Anti-Christ, “shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.” And in his last book, Ecce Homo, one finds the following prediction:
Let us look a century ahead, let us suppose that my attentat on two millennia of anti-nature and the violation of man succeeds. That party of life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless extermination of all degenerate and parasitic elements, will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life out of which the dionysian condition must again proceed.
(Nietzsche 1992: 51–52)6
Social parasitism was therefore fiercely combated by Nietzsche who saw it as a paramount threat to life; or maybe not quite so fiercely? A class theorist, representing the views and defending the interests of the élites, Nietzsche in truth rebuked the ruling classes of his time precisely for slackening the parasitic hold on society that no aristocracy worthy of the name must ever relinquish. For Nietzsche, the main political defect of the modern élites of the post French-Revolution era was their inability to function as proper élites vis-à-vis the masses. The bourgeois ethos, he argued, was hampering the élites with an excessive weight of democratic commitment and the reminiscences of the revolutionary past. The traces of this egalitarian ethos made it difficult for the bourgeoisie to stand firm before the spread of mass society and its escalating demands. The bourgeois élite conceives of its task too much in terms of rendering service to a reputedly higher goal such as “the general good” or “the progress of humanity.” A genuine élite, by contrast, shuns any notion of rendering service, and instead unabashedly takes pride in its parasitic existence:
The crucial thing about a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it does not feel that it is a function (whether of monarchy or community) but rather its essence and highest justification—and that therefore it has no misgivings in condoning the sacrifice of a vast number of people who must for its sake be oppressed and diminished into incomplete people, slaves, tools. Its fundamental belief must simply be that society can not exist for its own sake, but rather only as a foundation and scaffolding to enable a select kind of creature to ascend to its higher task […] much like those sun-loving climbing plants on Java (called sipo matador) whose tendrils encircle an oak tree so long and so repeatedly that finally, high above it but still supported by it, they are able to unfold their coronas in the free air and make a show of their happiness.
(Nietzsche 1998: 152)
This was written in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) in direct response to the mass politics of statesmen such as Bismarck, who sought to contain socialism by using social legislation. While Nietzsche realized that the purpose of such goal was conservative, he regarded it as counter-productive: instead of quashing socialism, the state provides the masses quasi-socialism, and therefore gets bogged down still deeper in the quicksand of mass society. Mass politics and mass society were for Nietzsche an inversion of the natural order of things. Instead of the masses serving the élites, the élites busily serve the masses. As he wrote early on, in 1874:
[T]he kind of history at present universally prized is precisely the kind that takes the great mass-drives for the chief and weighty facts of history and regards great men as being no more than their clearest expression, as it were bubbles visible on the surface of the flood. Greatness is, under this supposition, the product of the masses, which is to say order is the product of chaos […]. But is that not a quite deliberate confusion of quantity with quality?
(Nietzsche 1997: 113)
One of the most fateful ideological struggles waged in the 19th-century concerned the appropriation and social application of Darwinism. The outcome, as is clear retroactively, was a triumph for the camp of “social Darwinism”: a justification of capitalism as a system of ruthless competition, selection and ultimately annihilation, and a concomitant denunciation of state intervention in the economy as perverting the laws of nature. Yet there was a moment when such an interpretation was not yet hegemonic, and in which social Darwinism might have been invested with a radically different significance. The immediate impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution was simply to remove divine intervention and supervision from human affairs; in Nietzsche’s unsurpassable formulation, it killed God. It gave atheism its strongest ever impetus, but beyond that it did not contain an intrinsic lesson on what a society without god should look like. The social implications of Darwinism were therefore up for grabs. While there were of course many ideas on how to fill the vacuum left by god and by religion, it is helpful to distinguish between two main options: the humanist and egalitarian proposition, and the anti-humanist and anti-egalitarian one. As I have argued in some detail elsewhere, the former is best identified with the thought of Karl Marx, while the latter’s most important representative was Nietzsche (see Landa 2006).
To many, it seemed that a society without god would be free of oppressive religion, which for centuries had provided the social hierarchy with one of its most effective props. “Social Darwinism,” if they had defined it, would have signified a society in which humans come into their own, bring to an end all relations of exploitation that were sanctified in the name of god, and create a fraternal and egalitarian order. For them, one might say, only the death of god facilitated the arrival of the social messiah. For Marx, the notion of evolution seemed to chime in with the theories of social progress, the advance from simpler forms to more complex ones, culminating with communism, and the vindication of materialism and the free and creative play of atoms, to which Marx adhered already as young scholar, writing his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus (for a useful survey of Marx’s materialism, see Bellamy Foster 2000). This goes a long way toward explaining the enthusiasm with which Marx and Engels greeted the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Such a sanguine reception of Darwinism was shared by others, who did not believe in the socialist revolution, but hoped to witness the emergence of a freer and more humane world. As the French critic Jacques Novicow wrote before the First World War:
The triumph of Darwinism marks the release of the human mind from the bonds of theology. […] Immutable order in the universe replaced an arbitrary divinity. Man could raise his head, and feel himself the master of the world. He saw unbounded horizons open before his eyes, with no authority now able to stop him in his conquests.
(In Pichot 2009: 37)
Yet by the time Novicow was writing these lines, as he was all too painfully aware, another reading altogether had cornered the market of Darwinism, one based not on enlightenment, progress and fraternity but on pitiless competition and irrationality. For fairly soon after Darwin’s first publications, another interpretation of his theories established itself alongside the humanist one, ultimately displacing it. The weakening of religion, it was argued, need not entail the weakening of social hexarchy, as progressives had hoped. On the contrary, the death of god may finally rebound in favor of an even stricter social hierarchy, for it will allow the rulers, the powerful and the affluent, to shake off the antiquated social inhibitions imposed on them by Judaeo-Christian egalitarianism and other, outmoded and non-scientific concepts, seeking to succor the weak. Nature could perform god’s former social duties in supervising and chastising the lower orders, indeed might do so even more thoroughly and ruthlessly.
Nietzsche’s doctrines were amongst the sharpest formulations of the new concept and played a vital role in disseminating it among the European educated classes. In the demise of religion Nietzsche identified a great opportunity to discard its egalitarian and humanist legacy, especially as embodied in what he decreed were its modern, secular offshoots: democracy and socialism. It was vital to ensure that with god, not the ethics of Rangordnung shall evacuate the scene, but rather those of egalitarianism. As Zarathustra preached, not the rabble, but the Übermensch must inherit the god-less earth:
“You higher men”—thus the mob blink—“there are no higher men, we are all equal, man is but man; before God—we are all equal!”
Before God! But now this god has died. And let us not be equal before the mob. You Higher Men, depart from the market-place!
Before God! […] You Higher Men, this god was your greatest danger.
Only since he has lain in his grave have you again been resurrected. Only now does the great noontide come, only now does the Higher Man become—lord and master! […]
God has died: now we desire—that the Superman shall live.
(Nietzsche 1969: 297)
In order to resist the rise the humanist atheism envisioned by the progressive camp, whose premises were the dignity and sovereignty of humanity, Nietzsche developed an alternative brand of atheism, prioritizing nature rather than humanity, which explicitly discarded such “illusions.” This is the gist of the following passage in which Nietzsche numbers several typically human errors that should be avoided. One of these misconceptions was the assumption that humanity occupies a privileged place in the natural order or possesses a special value within it. Against this, Nietzsche underscores humanity’s negligible position in nature, and proceeds on this basis to dismiss the belief in the social and political rights of man: “Third, [man] placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature. […] If we removed the effects of these four errors, we should also remove humanity, humanness and ‘human dignity’” (Nietzsche 1974: 174). It is as if Nietzsche’s theory was written in specific rebuttal of Marx’s contention that “the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that for man the supreme being is man” (Marx 1992: 251). For Nietzsche (1968: 398–399), the criticism of religion rather ends by the realization, that “One has no right to existence or to work, to say nothing of a right to ‘happiness’: the individual human being is in precisely the same case as the lowest worm.” While Marx (1992: 251) animated his readers “to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being,” Nietzsche strove to create precisely such a new condition, for which the cosmic insignificance of humanity will serve as a presupposition.
Nietzsche’s solution to the political problem of humanizing atheism was thus to attempt and develop a dehumanizing atheism. By introducing a form of atheism-cum-pantheism that places nature above humanity, one can deny the political demands of humanistic socialism. François Bédarida, in an informative essay, has characterized National Socialism as an Ersatzreligion that was meant to take the place of Christianity. It was, moreover, a “naturalistic religion,” substituting immanency and this-worldliness for transcendentalism and the afterlife. At the heart of this “secular religion” lay a project—we may add, a Nietzschean project, compatible at least in that respect with Nietzsche’s teaching—of a “naturalized humanity”:
Such a world stands completely under the sign of naturalism. Man is only a part of nature. “The earth will continue to spin,” claims Hitler, “whether man kills the tiger or the other way around; the world does not change. Its laws are eternal.” The only thing that counts is to adapt to these laws.
(Bédarida 1997: 161)
Philippe Burrin (1997: 181–182) likewise stresses the naturalistic character of Nazi ideology as a means of “re-enchanting” a world that has dangerously gone secular, combined with an effort to dehumanize the world:
The human species is a part of nature and subject to its “eternal laws.” The important thing is the struggle for survival and the selection of the strongest. The role of this desacralized and nature-fixated mode of thought cannot be overestimated when considering the crimes of the regime. […] Auschwitz is the culminating point of a specific anti-humanistic reenchantment attempt, as the mythical-symbolic inspiration of Nazism clearly shows.
And Mark Neocleous (1997: 76) writes:
For the Nazis especially, the concept of “humanity” is biological nonsense, for man, “species-man,” is part of nature. […] [I]n place of God and any idea of divine humanity, Nazism puts life itself. This in effect downgrades man: “Man is nothing special, nothing more than a piece of earth,” Himmler tells us.
Elsewhere in this excellent introduction to fascist ideology, the author briefly refers to Nietzsche’s important contribution to the formation of the fascist worldview. (See Neocleous 1997: 3–13.)
National Socialism as Ersatzreligion was but one historical instance of this naturalistic fetishism, though surely the most far-reaching and extravagant one. But the general principle of applying the reputed inhumanity of nature to legitimize the inhumanity of society was an ideological stratagem ubiquitous throughout the West in the form of social Darwinism and its diverse sociological, anthropological and cultural manifestations. The “divine scheme” of the past was everywhere replaced, or at any rate complemented, by the “natural plan,” according to which the strong “naturally” survive and the weak “naturally” perish (or exterminated: Nietzsche, for one, wrote: “To gain that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of failures, and not to perish of the suffering one creates, though nothing like it has ever existed!”) and any intervention in that process amounts to heresy against the pagan yet monotheistic deity of Nature. Nietzsche’s philosophy was thus instrumental in the creation of a new, pantheistic quasi-religion. In this context as well it is useful to juxtapose this doctrine with Marx and Engels’s position, as it was expressed in their early writings. Even before the rise of Darwinism, they were pointing to the obstacle placed by the cult of the nature in the path of humanism. Thus, in 1844, Engels (1988: 500) criticized traditional materialism for rising against Christianity yet falling short of emancipating humanity: “The fundamental assumptions remained everywhere the same. Materialism did not attack the Christian debasement and contempt for the human being, and merely replaced the Christian God with nature, as the Absolute facing humanity.”
Nietzsche exemplifies the way the cult of nature established itself ideologically as a powerful means of combating the mass ideologies threatening to transform the social order after the weakening of traditional religion. If, at the start of the 19th century the priest is still the one standing above humanity, in the course of the 19th century and at the start of the 20th century this place is increasingly occupied by nature, and by the overman (revealing himself as the priest’s surprising, secular successor). In fact, substituting nature for God meant that the struggle against the masses could assume considerably more aggressive forms. The emphasis on remorseless competition and the repression-cum-elimination of the unfit signified a marked upping of the ante, a strikingly offensive move, as compared with the more defensive nature of conventional religious conservatism. An express call for the extermination of millions could hardly have been possible in the framework of the old conceptions. Yet now dehumanizing atheism provided more than a stronghold that could repel the advances of social revolution: it formed a basis from which attacks could be launched against the state promising social rights. This was the meaning of the social Darwinist call for selection, which Nietzsche echoed:
Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endure only through human sacrifice—All “souls” became equal before God: but this is precisely the most dangerous of all possible evaluations! If one regards individuals as equals one calls the species into question, one encourages a way of life that leads to the ruin of the species: Christianity is the counterprinciple to the principle of selection. […] The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish: but it was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a conserving force […]. What is “virtue” and “charity” in Christianity if not just this mutual preservation, this solidarity of the weak, this hampering of selection?
(Nietzsche 1968: 142)
This line of thought had many adherents, who keenly embraced the possibility to replace Christianity with an even more hierarchical cult of nature.7 Notable among them was Ernst Haeckel, the foremost German Darwinist, who some see as an important precursor of fascism and Nazism (notably Gasman 1998). Haeckel was a scientist of world renown and a propagandist for the political and social agenda that he believed was implied in Darwin’s teaching. He did possibly more than anyone else to redirect atheism into pantheistic channels, by founding a quasi-religion which he called “monism” (not to be confused with Spinoza’s radically different understanding of both monism and pantheism). This attempt is reflected in the title of his 1892 book, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science, where one finds a scientific corroboration of Nietzsche’s more impressionistic assumption that an estranged nature takes the place of a compassionate God:
We now know that the whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. Thousands of animals and plants must daily perish in every part of the earth, in order that a few chosen individuals may continue to subsist and to enjoy life. […] The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of the unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world. The beautiful dream of God’s goodness and wisdom in nature, to which as children we listened so devoutly fifty years ago, no longer finds credit now—at least among educated people who think.
(Haeckel 1895: 73–74)
A few pages earlier (68), Haeckel reassured his readers that the monistic ethics he advocates is not revolutionary but conservative:
Against this monistic ethic […] it has been objected that it is fitted to undermine existing civilization, and especially that it encourages the subversive aims of social democracy. This reproach is wholly unjustified. […] Political ‘free-thinking,’ so-called, has nothing whatever to do with the ‘freedom of thought’ of our monistic natural religion.
The French Leon Dumont, in a 1876 book, promoted Haeckel’s ideas amongst his country’s conservatives and explained to them that there is no reason to fear Darwinism, the only theory, in fact, which can scientifically confirm their political values of competition, economic disparities and human inequality (see Pichot 2009: 7–8). Dumont, it is interesting to note, influenced Nietzsche’s ideas (see Small 2001: 167). In 1891 another influential Darwinist, Otto Ammon, who espoused the notion of German racial superiority, published a book explaining how Darwinism batters socialism (Ammon, 1891). Nearing the end of the 19th century, the German Alexander Tille, who was close to Haeckel, recounted the rise of social Darwinism and the crystallization of its messages as a story that begins with Darwin and Alfred Wallace and reaches its ideological culmination in Nietzsche. He considered the first Darwinists too timid, hesitating to draw from the radical evolutionist theory they embraced the inevitable ethical and social conclusions, namely ultraist aristocratic ones, implacably opposed to the Christian-humane-democratic-socialist morality that they proved to be devoid of any scientific value. Contemptible Christianity is different from Darwinism as “peace is different from war, the slave from the free citizen, the sick from the healthy, the weak from the strong” (Tille 1895: 6). Darwin’s generation was too emotionally embroiled in the old morality, which it never managed to completely shake off. Only gradually did social Darwinist ethic evolve, until reaching its sharpest form in Nietzsche’s writings, in which the uninhibited morality of the masters was promoted and the slave morality of Christianity, democracy and socialism demolished. At the beginning
it could not be established whether or not the modern, Christian-humanist-democratic ethic could be squared with the account of the world emerging out of the research of nature. […] Darwin said yes, Nietzsche [who was still alive when this was written. I.L.] says no.
(Tille 1895: 10)
As can be seen, Tille fully subscribed to Nietzsche’s view that the egalitarian politics of the modern era is a direct consequence of Christianity, an argument which was repeated over and over in his book. Yet he also clarified, and this too in agreement with Nietzsche, that the truly serious conflict is not with Christianity proper but with its perceived political ramifications. “The theory of evolution,” he argued (20), “squared better with the realm of divine grace than with universal franchise, with the cult of heroes than with the cult of the masses, and with individualism more than with social democracy.” Tille also well internalized the necessity of uprooting humanism—since it is the source of the dream of equality, peace and international fraternity—and replacing it with a worldview founded on humanity’s marginal place in nature. He hopefully looked forward to the new century in which the man would be found capable of instilling humanity with the new gospel:
From the doctrine that all humans are God’s children and equal before him, the ideal finally grew of humaneness and socialism, according to which all humans have an equal right to exist and an equal value. This had affected very significantly the policies of the previous century and of the present one. This ideal is incompatible with the theory of evolution. […] It recognizes only the fit and the unfit, the healthy and the sick, geniuses and atavists. In place of the welfare of all human beings presently living on the earth, a bright future must come for the most developed races. And just as humanism and socialism tried to derive from human equality norms for human behavior, so will the evolutionist ethic do, out of its ideal of the future of the race. […] The man who will be able to concretize these norms and pack them into a formula that will gain the masses’ enthusiasm for the new ideal, […] will take his place in the history of the life of the spirit, the history of morality, alongside Moses, Buddha, and Jesus.
(Tille 1895: 22)
Evolution, as can be appreciated, was regarded by many of its advocates as a new, or a surrogate religion, one that already exists in embryo yet awaits its founder, or at least its propagandist, to become an active force in the world. The reference to the masses is highly significant, too, since it indicates the clear social and political role of the new religion, as well as the fundamental contradiction at its ideological base, a contradiction that will come to characterize fascism as well. For Tille—like Haeckel, Nietzsche and most of their colleagues—is a member of the educated middle class, sharing its deep elitist commitment. We have seen how Haeckel writes about “educated people who think.” Tille, similarly, identifies with individualistic heroes, not with the masses, and writes about “the great fortune of cultivated humanity” that the theory of evolution arrived in time to defeat the threatening ideas of equality (Tille 1895: 19). Nietzsche’s acute elitism need not be reemphasized. Yet for all their disdain of the masses, in fact precisely because of such disdain, these elitists cannot stay aloof from mass society and politics, in an age when both have become lamentable realities. Thus, as many fascists will later do, Tille yearns for the charismatic leader who might rally the masses behind an anti-mass ideal. This echoes the way that Zarathustra, disgusted as he is by the rabble, had to try and spread his aristocratic message in the marketplace to begin with, rubbing shoulders with vulgar entertainers. Zarathustra
found in that very place many people assembled in the market-square: for it had been announced that a tight-rope walker would be appearing. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people: I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
(Nietzsche 1969: 41)
The subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra contains the paradox of elitism in a mass age: “A book for everyone and no one.” And while Zarathustra advises the higher-men to stay aloof of the marketplace, he himself might be the best candidate for the role of the new religion’s prophet, so eagerly awaited by Tille, to spread the word among the masses.
Tille is aware of the fact that Nietzsche often criticized Darwin and Darwinism. He correctly point out that this criticism primarily addressed the defensive character of Darwinism, identifying survival as the goal of the natural struggle. Nietzsche, by contrast, strove to develop an offensive doctrine, in which struggle is not simply a means to survival but to empowerment, growth, dominion: “Not a defensive but an offensive battle, which takes on a defensive form only under certain conditions” (Tille 1895: 222). Only on one point does Tille (241) find cause for serious disagreement with Nietzsche, and this is the question of nationalism. For all his accomplishments in extracting the anti-humanist meaning of Darwinism,
in this sense [Nietzsche] did not overcome humanism. He still believed that one can directly serve humanity. He did not yet think that each person belongs firstly to a certain people, and that no one could better serve humanity than by serving his people.
In retrospect, Tille represents a more “advanced” proto-fascist position than the one offered by Nietzsche.
Fascism, as we shall see further in the next chapters, inherits from social Darwinism and from the romantic cult of a nature, a mystic glorifying of nature and its supposed laws. This tendency should not be seen as exclusively characteristic of Germans such as Haeckel, as implied by the historian Daniel Gasman, who emphasizes the anti-Western facet of this Darwinism. The quasi-religious potential of the new doctrine was also noted outside Germany. One of those who explicitly acknowledged this potential was Francis Galton, the originator of eugenics, and Darwin’s half-cousin. This doctrine was one of the most important practical implications of social Darwinism. It assumed that once the laws of natural selection were understood it was imperative to practically apply them to human affairs in order to guarantee the improvement of “the stock,” mainly by encouraging greater birth rates among the fit and intelligent (coming, it was argued, from the well-off upper classes) and restricting births among the unfit (stemming mostly from the lower classes). This intervention was seen as a counter-measure to the prevailing demographic trend, which we have described as the political-demographic vicious cycle. Eugenics took two main forms, according to the recommended course of action, “positive,” and “negative.” The former wished to encourage births among the fit, for example by using financial incentives; the latter to decrease propagation, by a number of ways, ranging from economic sanctions, through voluntary or forced sterilization and up to euthanasia. Among “educated people who think” the movement gained widespread support, especially in England and the United States, yet its scope of action remained seriously restricted by the democratic order. In Britain, for example, a proposed Sterilization Bill was rejected in parliament, on account of a strong resistance put up by the labor movement (Child 2001: 6). In Nazi Germany, by contrast, where such restrictions have been eliminated, eugenics experienced its finest hour, and humanity one of its darkest. Between 1934 and 1939 some 380.000 people were sterilized in Germany; with the outbreak of the Second World War the sterilization officially stopped, not on account of any change in policy, but simply because under the cover of war quasi-legal authorizations were no longer required and it was possible to battle “the unfit” and even exterminate them much more straightforwardly. It is thus interesting to observe how Galton was well aware of the religious potential of his doctrine:
[Eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operate with the works of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.
(In Childs 2001: 3)
This expectation was wholly shared by the salient English biologist Julian Huxley, who wrote: “Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion” (In Childs 2001: 4). In his fascinating book on the presence of eugenic thought in the ranks of the British and American intelligentsia from the 1880s to the 1930s, the historian Donald J. Childs provides two lists, the first with names of famous Anglo-American supporters of eugenics, the second with some its preeminent critics. Tellingly, the first reads like a Who’s Who list of the great Nietzsche fans of the period, including such names as W.B. Yeats, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, H.L. Mencken and Jack London. In the second list—a much shorter one—no such famous Nietzscheans are to be counted, but at least one staunch opponent of Nietzsche, the writer G.K. Chesterton, who in 1922 wrote a magisterial polemic against eugenics, Eugenics and other Evils, described by Angelique Richardson as “both prescient and profound” (Richardson 2003: unnumbered page). And while Nietzsche himself is mentioned only once in the book, at least one indirect reference suggests the pertinence of his thought for the eugenic milieu: “Thus eugenics was positioned […] to assume responsibility for a creation recently orphaned by the death of God” (Childs 2001: 4; on Nietzsche’s great significance for the British eugenic movement, see Stone 2002).
Another aspect of mass modernity strongly resisted by Nietzsche was the way modern medicine has managed to reduce sickness and, by way of painkillers and anesthesia also to alleviate the suffering of patients. Nietzsche, however, turned even this against modernity, citing it as a proof that the era was sanitized and sedated. Mass modernity was linked with a nearly universal condition of mild satisfaction. Yet, as the counter-argument went, such contentment comes at great cost: to Nietzsche and other critics, “the civilizing process” described by Norbert Elias, far from representing an undiluted boon, signified the dwarfing of humanity, a social and economic leveling down. Political and social institutions, such as democracy and the welfare state may have made life safer and more comfortable for average people, but they have simultaneously drained life of the elements that make it truly worthwhile: risk, adventure, battle and last but not least, pain. One of the most characteristic features of the Last Humans despised by Nietzsche is their squeamishness and aversion to pain. As stated in The Gay Science,
The general lack of experience of pain [has] an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly […]. [T]he refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malignant.
(Nietzsche 1974: 113)
And in that context pain assumed an unexpected redeeming role, as an enlivening spur amidst a deadened monotony. Past ages were evoked as healthier times when pain was not only accepted as integral to life, but appreciated as one of life’s attractions:
Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshaled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain—I say this to comfort the squeamish—did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction;—they do not do that to Negroes. (human capacity to pain does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural élite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing).
(Nietzsche 1994: 47)
From its earliest expressions this nostalgia for pain was closely associated with a critique of the perceived social and political leveling down of modernity. Joseph Conrad, for instance, was deeply nostalgic about the docile and manageable working classes of the past, and conscious of the fall signified by modernity, following what he called “the rush of social-democratic ideas” (In Baines 1967: 80–81). In his 1897 novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad glorified the pious seamen of the past, untouched by radicalism, while sternly portraying their deplorable modern successors. What makes the present so different from the past is a new hyper-sensitivity to pain and suffering. The crew aboard the Narcissus becomes obsessively concerned with the life of one its members, a sickly black person, James Wait. One sailor, who is particularly thorough in tending to the patient, becomes “as gentle as a woman, […] as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slave-owner” (Conrad 1997: 104). The fact that the crew goes out of its way to care for its “nigger” is an unmistakable sign of the times. “He was demoralising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, […] as though we had been over-civilized, and rotten, and without any notion of the meaning of life” (102–103; all emphases added). The modern sense of compassion, for Conrad as well as Nietzsche, is not a beneficial improvement of the human character, but a symptom of enervation. As Nietzsche (1968: 34) once avowed: “precisely pity I recognized as more dangerous than any vice. […] One has to respect fatality—that fatality that says to the weak: perish!” The effeminate crew of the Narcissus, however, rejects precisely such fatality. A veteran seaman who is the voice of a bygone era, the solitary Singleton, reproaches the rebellious, younger sailors, recalling the times when pain was acknowledged as an irredeemable aspect of existence:
“And a black fellow, too,” went on the old seaman, “I have seen them die like flies.” He stopped, thoughtful, as if trying to recollect gruesome things, details of horrors, hecatombs of niggers; and they looked at him absorbed. […] What would he say? He said:—“you can’t help him; die he must.”
(Conrad 1997: 95)
In the last third of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, the elitist discourse on demographics became increasingly biologist and racist. The opposition to the masses interlocked with social Darwinism and eugenics. The struggle of the nobility and the bourgeoisie (that now close ranks and put past feuds behind them) and the masses was presented as a conflict between two human species, whose differences are natural and inborn rather than results of education or environment. Élite and mass were often perceived as different races, in a way that does not lend itself to social alteration. Attempts on the part of the state to narrow socioeconomic gaps are worse than useless, since not only will they fail to eliminate poverty and social backwardness, both being natural products, but they will also drag down the whole of society by increasing the ranks of the inferior and decimating the élite. The ways to interrupt the vicious demographic cycle were to reverse democratization and embrace authoritarian rule or at least to maintain a diluted democracy, where property qualifications are reinstated, and/or introduce wide scale eugenic measures to arrest “degeneration.”
The alleged parasitism of the mass was lamented as undermining society’s ability to switch economic activity into the highest gear. The criterion of productivity was ever more important in a capitalist society, where profit making through industriousness became one of the most central considerations, if not the most central one, by which to measure the individual’s merit and social contribution. The productivist ethos was used not only to evaluate an individual’s performance but also the health and vigor of the entire nation, as international competition between the industrial powers was intensifying. Encouraging births among the productive segments of society and suppressing it among the non-productive appeared to many as a useful way to advance the nation’s position. (For a discussion of productivist ideology, see Spektorowski and Ireni-Saban 2010.)
These concepts took hold across the Western world. There developed a kind of international racist colloquium, to which scholars, intellectuals and propagandists of different countries contributed. Ideas circulated between the countries and enriched—if that is the right term in this context—racist thinking. Already in its early phases racism was a way of classifying not only different ethnic groups but also social classes. This class function of racism manifested itself even before the French Revolution, for instance in the writings of the French count Henry de Boulainvilliers who argued in the 17th and early 18th century that French nobility descended from the ruling classes, the Francs, whereas the common people were of inferior, Gallic stock (Lukács 1962: 578; Mosse 1978). In the mid 19th century these ideas were refurbished by another French count, Arthur de Gobineau, to meet the new circumstances of mass society. Gobineau “was a firm believer that an aristocratic elite had always ruled the masses […]. In the modern age, the masses had risen and destroyed the natural order” (Jackson and Weidman 2005: 107). In his highly influential Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (four volumes, 1853–1855) he gave a constitutive expression to the ideas of Nordic superiority:
He affirmed the widely accepted division of the races into white, black, and yellow, and introduced the idea that civilization itself was based on race. The white race, which Gobineau called the “Aryan” race, was the only one capable of creative thinking and civilization building. The downfall of such great civilizations as Egypt and Greece owed to the commingling of Aryan blood with that of the lesser races.
(Jackson and Weidman 2005: 107)
In Western Europe the bourgeoisie increasingly referred to the masses under the codename “the dangerous classes,” the social source of crime and political revolt, which were construed as biologically rooted phenomena: these classes were attributed low intellect, bestial violence, wanton sexuality and so on and so forth (Chevalier 1973). A key figure in the attempt to anchor crime and social unrest in defective genes was the Italian anthropologist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Coming from a wealthy Veronese merchant family, Lombroso developed and expanded the old method of phrenology, the measuring of skulls, in order to diagnose inborn anti-social tendencies, which he supported by numerous photographs supposedly displaying the defects of the criminal “type,” whose transgressions are inborn and transmitted from one generation to the next. (See MacMaster 2001: 36.) Lombroso’s theories of crime, it should be noted, were meant to explain not the problems of the modern world as such, but the backwardness of Italy in the post-unification years. He saw crime as rooted in the country’s past and concentrated in its non-developed, especially southern parts, insufficiently affected by modern industry. His strong emphasis on “atavism,” the pathological retreat to or resurgence of the primitive past, reflected an approach that still favored progress. Later theorists transferred Lombroso’s critique from the past to the present, to the paradigmatically modern metropolis and the masses crowding its slums.8
During these years and decades the social explanation of crime went on the defensive, increasingly marginalized by what criminologists refer to as the “positivist approach to crime,” namely a theory which conceives of crime as separate from politics and society, rooted in some purely individual attribute, whether genetic or psychological. (See Maguire 2002: 12, 155.) Precisely this shift from the social to the biological was satirized by Dickens (1996: 346), who had Magwitch, one of the protagonists of Great Expectations, exclaim: “they measured my head, some on ’em—they had better a measured my stomach.” It was common to view the poor as a different race altogether. In a social research of the 1850s Henry Mayhew wrote, apropos London:
The transition from the artisan to the labourer is curious in many respects. In passing from the skilled operative of the West-End to the unskilled workman of the Eastern quarter of London, the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.
(In Richardson 2003: 22)
Or consider the way in which the 19th-century German national-liberal Heinrich von Treitschke (1916: 226–227) conveniently conflated class with race:
Still more significant is the growth of the population when two different races meet on the same soil. In Austria, for instance, the Slovaks and Vlaks breed like rabbits, and the superior German and Magyar stocks are in danger of being swamped by the rising flood of the proletariat. We see with astonishment that it is precisely to the lowest races that the word “proletariat” can be applied in its literal meaning. […] Our Saxon country folk in Siebenbürgen, who are themselves all of the upper class, have a general term for their servants, derived from the word which means “menial,” which they use freely in speech, without the least intention of giving offence. This is because all their domestics are Vlaks, or gipsies, and utterly inferior to themselves.
An important center of racist and eugenic thought was the United States, producing prolific propagandists of white supremacy wedded to acute elitism such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. In the latter’s The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (1922), poverty, criminality, mental and physical illness, as well as success, are directly related to an individual’s biological starting point. Like Treitschke in the passage just cited, his doctrine combined both horizontal and transversal racializations, to employ the categories suggested by Domenico Losurdo (2004: 823–826), to distinguish between the racist taxonomy which is directed primarily against other races and nations (razzizzazione orizzontale) and that which targets the masses within one’s own country (razzizzazione transversale). Stoddard thus endorsed a strict hierarchy of races, with the Anglo-Saxons at the top, who are naturally superior intellectually and ethically, being industrious, decent, virtuous, etc., etc., the physically strong but intellectually feeble Negroes at the bottom, and other ethnic groups occupying the middle echelons: Poles, Jews, southern Italians, and so on and so forth. Yet he also insisted on the stark differences of quality between the classes of the same race, a true genetic wall separating the well-off and successful middle classes from the mass of the poor, beggars and vagabonds. Since social differences derived from genetic ones, the conclusion was that the social groups must be kept strictly apart and that miscegenation must be prevented at all costs, whether involving races or classes. To illustrate its dangers he used an example favored in eugenic literature, the case of the Juke family, whose forefather was said to be “one lazy vagabond nicknamed ‘Juke,’ born in rural New York in 1720.” His “two sons married five degenerate sisters, six generations numbering about 1.200 persons of every grade of idleness, viciousness, lewdness, pauperism, disease, idiocy, insanity, and criminality were traced,” finally costing the state some $2.500.000. Similarly corroborating the way that “superiority and degeneracy are alike rigidly determined by heredity” was the illicit affair of one “young soldier of good stock […] with a feeble minded servant-girl.” From his marriage to a “woman of good stock” stemmed an eminent family, whose descendants “are doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, landholders, in short, respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of social life.” In sad contrast, the line began by the one feebleminded girl produced some 480 wretched and costly failures: “Their record is: 143 clearly feebleminded, 36 illegitimate, 33 grossly immoral (mostly prostitutes), 24 confirmed alcoholics, 3 epileptics, 82 died in infancy, 3 criminals, 8 kept houses of ill fame” (Stoddard 1924: 95–97). Stoddard’s book was quickly translated into other languages, and appeared in German as early as 1925. Its notion of the “Under Man” would achieve notoriety once Germanized as the Untermensch, excoriated by the Nazis. (See Losurdo 2004: 886–887.)
The biologization of crime also offered “an explanation” for another development that elitists found exasperating, namely the spread of socialism and anarchism. Just as the positivist approach denied the possibility that crime many be a response to social conditions such as scarcity, neglect, want and hunger, so did it dismiss the idea that socialism and other radical movements were inevitable responses to genuine social problems. Instead, it was easier to ascribe radicalism to the personal pathologies of mentally sick and distorted individuals. This tenet, too, came to impinge on fascism, which identified the roots of social discontent in a revolutionary virus whose carriers were first and foremost the Jews. Stoddard emphatically subscribed to the theory that the revolutionary was a pathological individual, thereby joining a long tradition, including such notables as Joseph de Maistre, Edmund Burke, Taine and Lombroso, for whom the revolutionary was a born criminal.
* * *
From the sum total of complaints raised by opponents of the masses in the demographic context, a basic paradox emerges: the more the general standard of living improves, the more life expectancy rises, and the more medicine develops, the more the representatives of the élites speak of “degeneration,” focus on poverty, denounce corruption and so on and so forth. The congestion and narrowing of space they repeatedly lament were not, it is important to realize, objective facts. They were to a large extent reflections of reality though a class prism. When Ortega, for instance, compared the present condition—that is, the one he encounters in the 1920s—with the past and sees deterioration, he forgets, or rather neglects the fact, that this was not true in an absolute sense: for most people, the early 20th century is a less crowded and more spacious time than past epochs. During the mid 19th century, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, living conditions for most people in the urban centers were appalling and congestion nearly unimaginable in working-class dwellings, as classically described by Engels apropos 1845 Manchester. The first decades of the 20th century, by comparison, are a time of general, albeit relative and restricted, improvement in living conditions, in the state of hygiene, etc. Mass politics, together with economic and technological processes introduce electricity and running water into many working-class homes, and some nuclear families of the lower classes now have a private apartment, no matter how small. Yet all this, far from encouraging observers such as Ortega and his class members, is a source of concern: they assume that what the masses gain is taken from their “betters,” comes at the expense of the traditional élites. When Ortega describes the revolt of the masses, he points to the way it gains a foothold in areas that were formerly closed to it, places providing services and entertainment that not long ago were exclusive to the upper and middle classes: “consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theaters full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.” Yet the “problem” is only such from an elitist point of view; seen by the mass, it is a source of hope and expectation. Demographically, the feeling of suffocation and congestion felt by the élite is one of freer breathing, of opening spaces and expanding possibilities for many among the lower classes. Thus, for all the insistence of mass critics on the scientific underpinning of their grievances, their basis in objective fact, what is striking about them is rather their arbitrariness, the wild nature of racist affirmations, the capricious employment of statistics, the apodictic rather than genuinely analytical character of eugenic theories, as well as the fantastic methodologies they espouse, skull measuring being only the most extravagant example. All this reveals what may be described as the auto-referential structure of élite positions: they claim to diagnose defects in reality, but in doing so mostly expose their own. This auto-referential structure, eugenic abuse returning boomerang-like to its hurlers, was repeatedly played upon by Chesterton in his brilliant assault on eugenics. “I need not pause to explain,” he wrote, “that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease” (Chesterton 1922: 167). Trying to characterize the typical supporter of eugenics, Chesterton argued that he had started as a liberal or a radical, but has changed his political affiliation and become a Tory, or a wrong kind of socialist. “It is a sad history,” he continued (116), “for he is certainly a less good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is really behind Eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has come to talking of Degeneration.” And of the Mental Deficiency Bill, he wrote (19–20): “I will call it the Feeble-Minded Bill, both for brevity and because the description is strictly accurate.”
The power of unionized workers was a source of dismay for critics of mass society, whose premise was that the extraction of hard and tedious labor from the masses was the sine qua non of society and culture. As Treitschke put it (1916: 42),
mankind is by nature so frail and needy that the immense majority of men, […] must always and everywhere devote themselves to bread-winning and the material cares of life. To put it simply: the masses must for ever remain the masses. There would be no culture without kitchen-maids.
In modern times, however, to say it with Ortega, the masses increasingly refused to be masses. This created a major problem from the point of view of the representatives of “culture,” as an exasperated Nietzsche observed in 1888:
The labour question.—The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct.—I simply cannot see what one wishes to do with the European worker now one has made a question of him. He finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently. After all, he has the great majority on his side. […] The worker has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote […]. But what does one want?—to ask it again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.
(Nietzsche 1990: 106)
Less than ten years later, in 1895, the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon published his hugely influential, Psychologie des Foules, a book that was issued in tens of editions and attracted numerous avid readers, as different from each other as Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, and Benito Mussolini, the originator of fascism. At least until the mid 20th century this was the basic textbook consulted by all who wished, for either scholarly or political purposes, to fathom “mass psyche.” In the introduction it was written:
The entry of the popular classes into political life—that is to say, in reality, their progressive transformation into governing classes—is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition. It is by association that crowds have come to procure ideas with respect to their interests which are very clearly defined if not particularly just, and have arrived at a consciousness of their strength. […] The masses are founding syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; they are also founding labour unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages. […] To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to destroy utterly society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalization of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, etc., such are these claims.
(Le Bon 1960: 15–16)
The threat of the masses according to Le Bon is not restricted to the existence of democracy, but stems from the way democracy interconnects with, and draws nourishment from, deeper social and ideological processes: “communistic” workers’ unions determined to press society into a radically egalitarian mold. Despite the claim that the masses wish “to destroy utterly society as it now exists,” their menace is not represented in terms of armed insurrection. Their power is in their numbers—being the popular classes they enjoy a clear quantitative advantage; in their determination—they are conscious of their collective will; and finally in their organization—their ability to concretize their numerical edge and form pressure groups, unions and committees, which compel the rulers to do their bidding. The mass gradually takes over the political system from within, without having to resort to violence.
The mass, for Le Bon, is active and militant. It is, essentially, another term for the organized working class. Its new-found autonomy is precisely the reason that it is dangerous. Like many other critics, he clarifies that for as long as democracy was under the control and guidance of the élites, and the masses’ role remained only peripheral, the danger to the socioeconomic order was trivial. But once it liberated itself from such tutelage, it became a serious and powerful factor:
But may this result be prevented? […] Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. […] When the structure of a civilization is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. […] Is the same fate in store for our civilization?
(Le Bon 1960: 17–18)
One of Le Bon’s innovations, and a major reason for his rather surprising success in spite of the almost complete lack of originality of his theories, is that he was not content with merely describing the problem of mass empowerment—this was done before him9—but dedicated a significant part of the discussion to suggesting a possible antidote, a way of minimizing the damage caused by the masses and drawing them back to their previous, passive role. For that purpose, charismatic leaders were called for who might, by mastering mass psychology and speaking the right language, put themselves in charge if the mass:
[A]ll the world’s masters, all the founders of religions or empires, the apostles of all beliefs, eminent statesmen, […] have all been unconscious psychologists, possessed of an instinctive and often very sure knowledge of the character of crowds, [which] enabled them so easily to establish their mastery […] A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them—that is becoming a very difficult matter—but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.
(Le Bon 1960: 19)
The challenge of modern politics was thus to contain as much as possible the rising masses, and convert them from the anarchic, barbaric and destructive force that they presently are, to “virtuous and heroic crowds” (19). The latter, by definition, would be passive crowds, since as Le Bon made quite clear, only minorities could rule civilizations, while crowds, unless strictly governed, can only destroy them. Le Bon’s thus writes a leader’s guidebook, explaining how to sway the mass, mainly by use of suggestion and rhetorical manipulation. The modern leader will be above all a virtuoso of language, able to sell to the masses policies that, if called by their proper names, they would have loathingly rejected:
One of the most essential functions of statesmen consists, then, in baptizing with popular or, at any rate, indifferent words things the crowd cannot endure under their old names. The power of words is so great that it suffices to designate in well-chosen terms the most odious things to make them acceptable to crowds. […] The art of those who govern, as is the case with the art of advocates, consists above all in the science of employing words.
(Le Bon 1960: 106–107)
The changes in the role of women, however slow and partial, were strongly protested by critics of mass society. They were taken to indicate a general social emasculation, whereby society gradually loses its supposedly masculine traits, such as vigor, initiative, competitiveness, assertiveness, etc., and takes on stereotypically feminine attributes: sentimentalism, squeamishness, hedonism or hysteria, to name some of the most notable clichés. The liberation of women was understood as a clear symptom of the general reversal of the natural order. It became for many the unsurpassable example of the modern tendency to flatten hierarchy and cancel gaps and differences created by nature and sanctified by tradition. In that regard as well, Nietzsche’s writings can be used to exemplify the sort of anti-feminist arguments that were common:
To address the fundamental problem of “man and woman” in the wrong way, either by denying a most profound antagonism and the need for an eternal-hostile alertness, or by dreaming perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal ambitions and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallowness, and any thinker who has demonstrated that he is shallow (shallow in his instinct!) in this dangerous area may generally be considered not only suspicious, but also revealed, exposed: he will probably be too “short” for all the fundamental questions of life or of the life to come and be unable to reach down to any depth. A deep man, on the other hand, deep both in spirit and in desire […], can think about women only like an Oriental: he has to conceive of woman as a possession, as securable property, as something predetermined for service and completed in it. He has to rely on the tremendous reason of Asia.
(Nietzsche 1998: 127)
Women’s social struggle Nietzsche sees as the product of a wrong idea on the part of men. He stresses the way woman is understood by man: “A deep man, on the other hand,” etc. Men are those who have disseminated the notion of equality between the sexes, in a way which is fundamentally alien to women’s nature, for they do not truly strive for a presence in masculine domains—politics, science, economic activity. Regrettably, the modern ideas of equality adhered to by men, at least the shallow among them, have now infected women. The outcome of the liberation of women is an inappropriate change in both sexes: their approximation means a loss of virility on the man’s part and of femininity on the woman’s. Countering nature, modernity is a depressing display of feminine men and masculine women: contemporaries often talked about weak, castrated men, unable to provoke women’s fear and respect, and about strong, enervated women, unable to attract men. Both sides are involved in a game with no winners, as Nietzsche argues:
[Women] are forgetting how to fear men—but a woman who “forgets how to fear” is abandoning her most womanly instincts. It is fair enough, even understandable enough if women dare to assert themselves when the fear-inducing element in men (let’s put it more definitively: when the man in men) is no longer desired or cultivated; what is harder to understand is that this is enough to result in—the degeneration of women. This is happening today; let’s make no mistake about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military or aristocratic spirit, women are striving for the economic or legal independence of office clerks: “Women as clerks” is written over the entrance-way to our developing modern society. While they are gaining these new rights, aiming to become “master,” and writing about women’s “progress” on their flags and banners, it is terribly clear that the opposite is happening: women are regressing. Ever since the French Revolution, women’s influence in Europe has decreased to the same extent that their rights and ambitions have increased.
(Nietzsche 1998: 128)
Nietzsche’s (1969: 93) allegedly misogynic advice has become notorious: “Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!” What is usually forgotten is that this advice was not given to the reader by Nietzsche’s direct mouthpiece, Zarathustra, but to Zarathustra himself, and by a woman—“a little old woman” he has encountered in his wanderings, and with whom he converses on the nature of the relations between the sexes. This is an important point, since it shows how Nietzsche was keen to present his position not as misogynic but as women-friendly. Elsewhere (1998: 125) he portrays himself as “a real friend of women.” Nietzsche’s argument, largely typical of the paternalistic discourse of his times, is that the subjugation of woman by man is not some wrong that she has endured but the fulfillment of her own deepest longings. It is the woman who desires the whip, as well as the cane, as an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil explains: “From old Florentine tales, and in addition—from life: buona femmina e mala femmina voul bastone [Good women and bad women both need the stick]” (Nietzsche 1998: 68). Nietzsche’s defenders, and they are legion, tried to qualify the reproach that his writings are misogynic. For instance, referring to the saying mentioning the whip, Richard Elliott Friedman (1995) argued that it is by no means clear who is supposed to wield it: will the man necessarily apply it to the woman? Or will it be a reverse procedure? In justifying this claim he refers to a famous photograph, taken about a year before the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche is seen together with his friend Paul Rée and his unreciprocated love interest, Lou Salomé. Nietzsche and Rée are standing before a cart, like two horses, while in the cart itself sits Salomé, looking straight at the camera with a hint of mischief in her gaze, while holding a whip!
This interpretation has a lot to recommend it, as far as it goes. Nietzsche certainly stressed that the “eternal-hostile alertness” between the sexes is irreducibly reciprocal: not only the woman, in his view, wishes to be afraid of man, but he too longs to fear woman. And here it is Zarathustra himself who is talking:
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything. […] Let man fear woman when she loves. […] Let man fear woman when she hates.
(Nietzsche 1969: 91–92)
It is thus by no means impossible within Nietzsche’s framework, that in certain circumstances the woman will be the one carrying the whip.
And yet, the protective argument according to which Nietzsche does not take a clear stand on the question of the hierarchy between the sexes is flimsy. Socially and politically his denial of all the claims and attainments of the women’s movement is unmistakable. Against it, Nietzsche’s writings re-raise the Victorian idea of “the separate spheres,” the absolute biological and spiritual differences between the sexes, from which a totally different social role follows. But this insistence is made no longer from a position of superiority and security but with deep pessimism. Nietzsche and his conservative contemporaries are well aware of the fact that the clear-cut separation line is no longer such, that the boundaries have been crossed, that the modern ideas of the French Revolution have significantly advanced on this terrain, too. It is probably against this background that the extremism and defiance in Nietzsche’s (1969: 91) emphasis on sexual dichotomies can best be understood: “Everything about woman is a riddle,” avows Zarathustra, “and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. […] Man should be trained for war and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly.”
Like the positivist criminologists, Nietzsche is here biologizing the sexes, anchoring their essence in a presumed physical, inborn attribute. Woman is biologically programmed to give birth rather than for intellectual or political activity, and hence her riddle is solved with pregnancy. The aim of this argument is to dismiss the social and cultural plane, where more and more women demonstrate their desires to be more than mothers and wives, or not to be such at all, and were fighting for their right to be so. As against this development, Nietzsche wants to reduce women again to their biological basis. He wants in fact to sexualize them, so that they shall (continue to) find their ultimate self-realization only as objects of re-creation for the warrior man. He also ties men to their supposed biological essence, casting them as warriors, and implying that men who reject that role, who have no desire to fight and arouse fear, are not “true men,” are defective in their masculinity, degenerate, effeminate.
While Nietzsche avows that man is interested in fearing woman, this is a very specific, and delimited, kind of fear: that of losing her love, ceasing to be the object of her admiration, etc. Real men, according to Nietzsche, have no interest whatsoever in fearing women as their intellectual equals, and they are terrified of having to confront them as economically and politically independent. Woman should by all means be dangerous, yet only in so far as she remains the man’s plaything.
In this Nietzsche lends voice to widespread contemporary anxieties. A common trope recurring in the art and polemics of these decades is that of the frightening, dominant, castrating woman, the femme fatale. This was a central phobia of men of the period, fearing that women will rob them of their employment, undermine their position of primacy within the family, and in general put their masculine identity in doubt, an identity that relies on the very existence of the conventional division of roles and of the separate spheres. Hence the complaint against women who turn masculine and men who become effeminate, weak, vulnerable and dependent. This fear also stemmed from the modern woman’s sexual assertiveness. In that respect, Nietzsche’s position seems less typical: his discussion implies productive erotic tension between the sexes, which he sought to preserve and maybe intensify. In this lies part of his attraction, a generation later, for Freud, and his influence over the latter’s path-breaking theories of sexuality. Yet for many conservatives this unleashed erotic energy on the part of women was perceived as a threat. They missed the Victorian past when, at least as far as the hegemonic ethos was concerned, feminine sexuality was modest, functional and often downright suppressed. Now, according to a common lament, too many women disown the inhibitions of the past and begin to flaunt their sexuality in a blunt and defiant way.
Moreover, this aggressive permissiveness of women was identified with the rise of weak groups in general. Women’s liberation was diagnosed as an extreme case of mass empowerment: just as workers and commoners defy the rule of the upper-classes so do women, immemorially the “weak,” flout men. The clear hierarchy starts to wobble, just as the distinction between “high” and “low” in all spheres, including that of cultural production and consumption, can no longer be taken for granted. Here, the question of woman’s new role can be connected with the issue of mass culture, which will be the topic of the next section: in contemporary discourse mass culture was frequently seen as somehow interchangeable with the new, defiant woman. Woman and mass were seen as two sides of the same coin. As the historian Andreas Huyssen (1986: 52–53) wrote in a chapter titled “Mass Culture as Woman”:
In Le Bon’s study the male fear of woman and the bourgeois fear of the masses become indistinguishable: “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics. […] Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problem offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.” Male fears of an engulfing femininity are here projected onto the metropolitan masses, who did indeed represent a threat to the rational bourgeois order. The haunting specter of a loss of power combines with fear of losing one’s fortified and stable ego boundaries, which represent the sine qua non of male psychology in that bourgeois order.
This combined threat posed by the woman-mass to the male-élite had countless expressions in the culture of the period—in philosophy, literature, theater, visual art, research and journalism.10 Interestingly, it was abundantly present in mass culture itself, in popular literature and highly successful commercial films. Two examples taken from Weimar Republic cinema, a few years before the Nazi takeover, would here have to suffice. The first film is G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), based on a play with the same title by Frank Wedekind (1904). Its bourgeois and comfortably off male protagonist is madly in love with Lulu, a frivolous courtesan played by the aforementioned Louise Brooks, the actress who perhaps more than any other embodied for contemporary viewers, for good or ill, the figure of “the new woman.” Sensual and careless, Lulu freely interacts with the masses, represented by Schigolch, an aged and wanton circus artist. Step by step Lulu leads her respectable bourgeois lover, unable of mastering his drives, to the abyss of self-destruction and debasement. At the end of the film the viewers experience a catharsis of sorts when reckless Lulu meets her due punishment as she falls victim to Jack the Ripper, in the heart of the depraved East End. In this terrible way a certain poetic justice is meted out, and the good bourgeois order is, to some extent, restored. A year later, a very similar motif was at the heart of an even more successful film: Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), freely adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat (1905). The film launched the legendary international career of Marlene Dietrich. Here, too, a miserable love affair is recounted between a bourgeois man and a mass woman, yet the mismatch between them is even more grotesque. The man, the film’s tragic hero, is the elderly gymnasium teacher, the conservative and fastidious Immanuel Rath, an unmistakable representative of the old bourgeois order, who falls in the net of seduction spread by a quintessential femme fatale, the cabaret performer Lola Lola. In an early scene, a minimally clad Dietrich sings what will become one of the most famous songs in the history of cinema, “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt,” whose lyrics fully convey the fatal erotic attraction of her figure.
The mass woman drives the hapless Professor to his ruin, as he marries her, leaves his respectable occupation and joins The Blue Angel wandering cabaret as a regular clown, touring Germany. He goes bankrupt and must witness his wife flirting with other entertainers. In one of the film’s last scenes the cabaret returns to the city in which the Professor used to teach, and he goes on the stage as a pathetic and humiliated buffoon, to the ecstatic jeers of his former city folk, celebrating his downfall. The revenge of the feminine crowd is complete, and the élite is resoundingly defeated, but this time no catharsis is provided and Lola Lola remains unpunished.
Mass culture in its different facets—mass production and the rise of consumption, commercial culture engaging wide publics, the proliferation of entertainment outlets, cinema, sports and “Americanization”—was a major source of concern for the upper and middle classes. There was hardly a social critique coming from the right or center that did not point out these phenomena in recoil, annoyance and alarm, and responding either with passive melancholia and nostalgia for the past or with a call to arms, demanding cultural action, and political steps, to stop the rot.
Mass culture was seen as variously problematic. Aesthetically, it was denounced as a vulgarizing of taste, a leveling down of culture. Ethically, it was identified as the root of modern humanity’s materialism and self-centered hedonism, the abandonment of higher values involving care for the collective and self-sacrifice. Socially and politically, mass culture was described as naturally leading to a society that is inclusive and tolerant, sanctifying the shallow, easy and low, and marginalizing what is profound, exceptional and difficult. Here, too, as happened in the political domain proper, quantity was seen as outweighing quality and excellence losing ground to mediocrity.
The rise in the consumption levels of the masses and the cheapening of products by the use of assembly-line production, from collection cards and tinned food to the relatively affordable private car, were attacked by many as indications of a contemptible, spoiled, hedonistic, self-satisfied, philistine and peaceful way of life, which has gradually come to replace the noble one, founded on heroism, sacrifice and struggle in all its manifestations including the most drastic one: war. This way of life was routinely denigrated under the general term “materialism,” while its alternative was understood as more spiritual. The supposed contrast between matter and spirit was much talked about: in Germany, for instance, the term Geist became a banner waved by the educated middle classes, used both as a mark of distinction from the vulgus and in order to underscore a general national difference between the spirituality, frugality and depth of the German people, and the materialism and pleasure-seeking of other nations, mainly the French and the English. This polemic intensified in the run-up to the First World War, and during the conflict itself, when it was condensed into patriotic formulas such as Werner Sombart’s famous Händler und Helden contrast, merchants and heroes, representing the military clash as a decisive confrontation between the heroic German “culture” and the commercial “civilization” of the English.
Nietzsche baptized modern humans, the products of mass culture, as the Last Humans, deriding the results of progress and of Enlightenment, so eagerly anticipated in the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Nietzsche did not dispute the prognosis of progress as much as he inverted its value judgment. He agreed with Hegel and other believers in the triumph of reason and freedom, that rational modernity looks set to gain a decisive victory, yet of a classically Pyrrhic nature. Instead of leading humanity to new cultural summits, modernity signifies a social and economic leveling down, the formation of a mass society at the heart of which stands
the most contemptible human: and that is the Last Human. […] The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Human, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Human lives longest. […] Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd.
(Nietzsche 1969: 45–46)
The Last Human is mass society incarnate. He or she epitomizes the nightmare of social subversion, an egalitarian dystopia, consisting of increased consumption and mass happiness—Zarathustra says (46–47) that the Last Humans “still work, for work is entertainment. […] They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Humans and blink.”
The Last Humans, as is clear from Zarathustra’s rebukes, may be contemptible but they are satisfied and their spirits are high. They laugh at the beginning of the sermon—“There they stand […], there they laugh: they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears”—and continue to laugh when it concludes: “And now they look at me and laugh: and laughing, they still hate me.” Zarathustra knows that he is dealing with a contented human being, and it is not difficult to see why: his needs are satisfied, his days and nights are spiced up with pleasures, puny as the aspiring prophet may deem them to be, he lives long and his work is easy. The Last Human lives, moreover, in a society with insignificant socioeconomic gaps and where human relations are conducted on an egalitarian and cordial basis. It is not the mass that comes to listen to Zarathustra, but the latter who seeks to influence the mass. And at least for the time being, unsuccessfully: the crowd in the marketplace asks Zarathustra to fulfill the Last Human’s vision and dismisses his noble alternative: the overman. One of the things that stand out is Nietzsche’s readiness to employ any means, no matter how drastic, to prevent the rise of the Last Humans. To be sure, at the end of the passage he complains, being a highly sensitive soul, about the alleged cruelty of the masses, and believes that “there is ice in their laughter.” But in reality the mass is only amused by the self-appointed pedagogue, and there is no suggestion of violence on its part, not even a verbal one. It is Zarathustra who from the very beginning contemplates severe violence towards the crowd: “Must one,” he asks, “first shatter their ears to teach them to hear with their eyes?” Later on he seems to lament the fact that one cannot actually exterminate the Last Humans outright, and compares them to resilient fleas. Is this just a joke or a rhetorical hyperbole? It is hard to tell, but it should be remembered that Nietzsche elsewhere recommended “the annihilation of millions of failures.” This burning hostility and unleashed fury against the masses is also reflected in many other places, for example in a passage in which Zarathustra attacks “the rabble:”
Life is a fountain of delight; but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned. […] And many a one who came along like an annihilator […] wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and stop its throat. […] And like a wind I will one day blow among them and with my spirit take away the breath from their spirit: thus my future will have it.
(Nietzsche 1969: 120–122)
Here, too, a sharp asymmetry reveals itself between Zarathustra and the mass: the latter is not violent, and gains its advantages through a gently unfolding social revolution. When Zarathustra looks in the well, now expropriated by the mass, he sees neither a knife, nor a gun nor a bomb, but, once again, merely a “repulsive smile.” The limitless aggression is strictly one-directional, coming from Zarathustra’s side. The rabble may at most “spew and spit” but Nietzsche’s prophet talks of “annihilation,” and fantasizes about putting his foot into the jaws of the rabble and stopping its throat.
The criticism of mass consumption as a symptom of social and cultural decay was deeply installed in the dominant discourse. In his seminal book on the protestant ethic, Max Weber (2002: 112) took his cue from Nietzsche and viewed the pleasure-seeking, soulless capitalism of modernity as a daunting fall from the early “heroic age of capitalism,” characterized by lofty moral values and an “asceticism” which “turns all its force […] against one thing in particular: the uninhibited enjoyment of life.” The early, admirable capitalist specimen “had no wish to consume but only to make profits” (22). Dutifully accompanying this heroic capitalist was an exemplary early worker, “kept in poverty” and hence highly productive. The incipient capitalist ethos, Weber emphasized (119),
glorifies the faithful worker who does not look for profit […]. Indeed, the entire ascetic literature of all denominations is imbued with the attitude that faithful work, even for low wages, by those to whom life has dealt no other opportunities, is highly pleasing to God.
In the famous, elegiac passages concluding his book, Weber (121) lamented what he called a “monstrous development,” which has led to the demise of the admirable ascetic spirit and facilitated the rise of a crass materialistic civilization. Such anti-climactic civilization appears destined, unless a cultural revolution takes place, to be presided over by “the last men.”
Werner Sombart, too, lamented a few years later the historical transition from early capitalist production of luxury goods for the consumption of a small élite, deliberately keeping the masses at arm’s length, and with considerable margin of profit, to the frenzied activity of modern capitalism, catering to the masses, where prices are low and so is profit:
Little volume, big profit: that was the business principle of the entrepreneur, back in those days. […] That, for example, was the principle of the Dutch East India Company: to conduct “Small business with great profit.” Hence their policies: to eradicate the leguminous trees, to burn up plentiful harvests, etc. This was done also in order to prevent the poor from partaking in the harmful consumption [Genuss] of the colonial products. It was basically selling to the rich, which is always more comfortable than selling to the great mass.
(Sombart 2003: 201–202; some emphases added)
Regretfully, all this changes in the course of the 19th century, giving way to the new, debased, properly modern form of production and consumption, whose common denominator is massification. Now all that counts is “the supply of ever greater masses of products at the lowest prices” (221). The venerated old principle of great profit at small investment is totally reversed: “Today the aim is to earn a little out of many business transactions.” This unwholesome shift comes complete with a sweeping moral erosion: “Obligations of any sort, scruples of any sort, whether concerning ethics, aesthetics, or comfort, are no more” (233).
These positions were by no means exclusive to Germany but were rife across Europe. For example, in 1927 the French conservative René Guénon (2001: 93–94) admonished against the destruction unleashed by consumerism:
[M]odern civilization aims at creating more and more artificial needs. […] If modern civilization should some day be destroyed by the disordered appetites that it has awakened in the masses, one would have to be very blind not to see in this the just punishment of its basic vice […]. [T]hose who unchain the brute forces of matter will perish, crushed by these same forces, of which they will no longer be masters; having once imprudently set them in motion, they cannot hope to hold back indefinitely their fatal course. It is of little consequence whether it be the forces of nature or the forces of the human mob, or both together; in any case it is the laws of matter that are called into play, and that will inexorably destroy him who has aspired to dominate them without raising himself above matter.
British culture was similarly awash with hostility to mass consumption. As John Carey (1992: 21–22) argued in an illuminating study, cans of tinned food—seen as a particularly repulsive token of the crass modern age—provided a favorite target for the derision of English writers. In this context, too, the various manifestations of mass society were seen as interlinked and were consequently attacked conjointly. Mass consumption was thus seen as primarily feminine, and women were chastised as compulsive spenders. One example out of a virtually endless supply of this trope is provided by the essayistic work of Wyndham Lewis, the brilliant and radical intellectual who supported both Mussolini and Hitler. In 1927 he wrote about the blind “will” that “causes, daily, millions of women to drift in front of, and swarm inside, gigantic clothes-shop in every great capital, buying silk underclothing, cloche-hats, perfumes, vanishing cream, vanity-bags and furs” (Lewis 1957: 321).
Mass sport was equally the butt of strong invectives on the part of elitists, dismayed at the admiration awarded to “mere” athletes and resentful of the fact that the attention they drew often overshadowed that of intellectuals and artists. In the same place where he commented on women’s obsessive consumerism, Lewis (1957: 321) mentioned another effect of the blind will that “enables Dempsey to hit Firpo on the nose, or Gene Tunney to strike Dempsey in the eye.” Guénon (2001: 93), for his part, decried in apocalyptic terms the fact
that the Anglo-Saxon mania for sport gains ground day by day: the ideal of the modern world is the ‘human animal’ which has developed his muscular strength to the highest pitch; its heroes are athletes, even though they be mere brutes; it is they who awaken popular enthusiasm, and it is their exploits that command the passionate interests of the crowd. A world in which such things are seen has indeed sunk low and seems near its end.
Ortega (1957: 12), too, insisted on the insuperable spiritual barrier that separates the intellectual from the mass sports enthusiast: “This faculty of wonder is the delight refused to your football ‘fan,’ and, on the other hand, is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary.” Albert Camus, who in youth was a passionate football goalkeeper, would probably have disagreed with this view. “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations,” he once said, “I owe to football.”11 In Robert Musil’s great modernist novel The Man without Qualities, one finds the following protest against the way in which sporting triumph, massified and bestial in equal measures, increasingly overshadows artistic and scientific prowess in the fallen modern world, and therefore produces resignation and apathy in the novel’s hero, Ulrich, who once had dreamt of becoming a great scientist:
And one day Ulrich stopped wanting to be promising. The time had come when people were starting to speak of genius on the soccer field or in the boxing ring, although there would still be at most only one genius of a halfback or great tennis-court tactician for every ten or so explorers, tenors, or writers of genius who cropped up in the papers. The new spirit was not yet quite sure of itself. But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of ripening summer, the expression “the racehorse of genius.” […] Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when as the result of his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it. […] [A] horse and a boxer have an advantage over a great mind in that their performance and rank can be objectively measured, so that the best of them is really acknowledged as the best. This is why sports and strictly objective criteria have deservedly come to the forefront, displacing such obsolete concepts as genius and human greatness.
(Musil 1995: 41–42)
Like so many European writers of his generation Musil was profoundly inspired by Nietzsche, whom he quotes shortly thereafter. Nietzsche, it should be pointed out, regarded sport positively, yet not, needless to say, on account of its popular appeal, but since he saw it as a means of renewing the spirit of struggle and competitiveness against affable modern egalitarianism, of reinstating the much admired “agonistic” spirit of the ancients. (On Nietzsche’s approach to sport, see the following essays: Crowell 1998; Hatab 1998; Schacht 1998.)
That was the pervasive, bleak approach of mass critics to sport. Yet it was not shared by all intellectuals: on the left, among people whose general attitude to mass society was less condemning, there were many sport aficionados or those who believed it should be defended. As notable examples one might mention Bertolt Brecht, a passionate fan of boxing, who said that “one must go to the theater as one goes to a sport feast” and who learned from the audience of boxing contests, as one scholar put it, “to what wisdom, passion and enthusiasm, identification and empathy, judgment and justice the crowd is capable of” (Kleinschmidt and Hörnigk, 2006: 7); the great Austro-Hungarian author Ödön von Horváth, who frequently wrote on positive and humane characters out of the world of sport (for example Horváth 1988); and Thomas Mann, who started as a conservative but developed more and more in a left-wing direction until finally becoming one of the most outspoken critics of National Socialism. In 1932, in a lecture he gave to Viennese workers, he defended sport as follows:
As things presently stand, the big city, with the new sensitivity that characterizes it to hygiene and to sport, and with the new forms of life that take place in the open air, can contribute to a vital renewal no less than the way of life of the country.
(Mann 1981: 363)
Mass culture was criticized both for its presumed aesthetic defects and for the egalitarian social implications ascribed to it. Against the spread of literacy, the possibility of many to read newspapers, visit museums, watch shows and later on movies, mass critics began to emphasize the idea that the beautiful by its very nature resists being generalized, and that only a select minority of connoisseurs and truly gifted spirits could genuinely appreciate art.12 Nietzsche used to repeat a favorite Latin motto: “Pulchrum est paucorum hominum”: beauty belongs to the few (Nietzsche 1967: 167). This was said by Nietzsche in 1888 as part of a heated polemic against the initiative of his former friend and tutor, Richard Wagner, to create operas for the widest possible public, which he performed in a specially designed theater in Bayreuth, where all differences of seats and stands were abolished in order to create a formal equality between all visitors. In that, Wagner anticipated modern mass culture, especially cinema, earning him the rebukes of Theodor Adorno (2009), a bitter enemy of cinema. Wagner, who began as a revolutionary and went to exile in France following his participation in the aborted 1848 revolution, later on carved himself a comfortable niche in post-unification Germany, and both in his political writings and artistic works embraced a nationalistic and conservative line. This, as well as his virulent antisemitism, allowed numerous critics to routinely use him as a dark foil against which to foreground Nietzsche’s supposed enlightenment and moderation. This complex debate will be revisited in Chapter 7; here it should be noted that alongside this or that criticism of Wagner’s nationalism, Nietzsche was profoundly hostile to what he saw, justly or not, as the democratic and egalitarian residue underlying the composer’s artistic and social concept. This stood in stark contrast to the pronounced elitism of Nietzsche, who already in his early writings understood culture as the exclusive asset of the few, a domain forever closed to the wider public, and justifying, moreover, the subjugation of the majority.13 As he explained in no second terms in his 1872 essay, The Greek State:
In order for there to be a broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in the service of the minority […]. Accordingly, we must learn to identify as a cruel-sounding truth the fact that slavery belongs to the essence of culture […]. The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympian men. Here we find the source of that hatred which has been nourished by the Communists and Socialists as well as their paler descendants, the white race of “Liberals” of every age against the arts.
(Nietzsche 1994: 178–179)
For Treitschke (1916: 42), similarly, “education could never thrive if there was nobody to do the rough work. Millions must plough and forge and dig in order that a few thousands may write and paint and study.” These typical observations plainly reflect the fact that the struggle against mass culture was never simply, or in the first instance, about resistance to commercialism, to bad taste, and to the political pacifying of the masses. “Radical” cultural critics who reduce the issue to these concerns obscure the crucial fact that the original sin of mass culture, as far as the élites were concerned, was no more and no less than the fact that it was, precisely, mass culture. This very oxymoron constituted the elemental scandal in their eyes. For according to their conception, once culture becomes a mass asset, once it escapes “the thousands” and is appropriated by “the millions,” it annihilates itself eo ipso. Culture is by its very definition the prerogative of the few. Hence, far from lamenting the political pacification of the populace, the struggle against mass culture was integral to the campaign to contain democracy, to put a stop to the political and social ascendancy of the masses.
A further insight into the widespread feeling that the cultural advance of the masses threatens the social hierarchy is provided by the following passage from Thomas Hardy’s diary, in which he describes his sentiments upon encountering masses of visitors assaulting the British Museum, the citadel of culture laid open to democratic invaders, in 1891:
Crowds parading and gaily traipsing round the mummies, thinking to-day is for ever, and the girls casting sly glances at young men across the swathed dust of Mycerinus [?]. They pass with flippant comments the illuminated MSS.—the labours of years—and stand under Rameses the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge in proletarian, and when these people are our masters, it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature! […] Looking, when I came out, at the Oxford Music Hall, an hour before the time of opening, there was already a queue.
(Hardy 1985: 247)
Hardy’s deep fear of the mass also found expression when he described how he felt when lying awake in bed in his London apartment, one night in 1880, unable to fall asleep on account of the horror of lying so close to “a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes” (141).
While the roots of such conceptions and anxieties are in the 19th century, they bear important cultural consequences mainly in the 20th century. Among them was the demand to develop an alternative to mass culture designed especially for connoisseurs, keeping the masses purposely at arm’s length. In order to insulate themselves and their audiences from the masses, many artists chose to write, draw or compose in such a way that the person of average education, now universally available, would not be able to comprehend the work’s messages, would not be thrilled by such art and would not, therefore, wish to take part in it. Many advocates of “high culture” started to espouse works of art that are difficult, complex, abstract, combining elements of special or antiquated education, such as phrases in Latin and ancient Greek in order to exclude the mass. This does not imply that the attempt to innovate in artistic form or subject matter was necessarily elitist: experimentation, personal expression, crossing of boundaries and violation of consecrated codes and norms, are integral to artistic creativity in all fields, and often involves social and political defiance. Yet it is possible that never before the 20th century did the bid to remain incomprehensible form such an integral part of art. In the first part of the 19th century, when the bourgeoisie was still a class with revolutionary pretentions and claims to represent the whole of society, appreciated artists and writers were often also popular ones, whose works held an appeal to wide audiences. This was the case with authors such as Scott, Gogol, Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, or Tolstoy, to name but a few such greatly acclaimed authors, whose work was sometimes serially published in widely distributed magazines; this was also the case with distinguished composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Rossini, Bizet or Wagner, whose themes were hummed by the man in the street somewhat like the radio hits of later times. Thematically, as well, no barrier existed as yet between the subject matters of these works and the masses: Mozart composed light-hearted operas revolving around romantic themes and colorful and sensual protagonists, and distinguished authors often wrote crime mysteries and adventure tales, such as Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist, or La Rabouilleuse. Even sworn elitists, such as Poe, did not yet write for the élite alone. Yet in the course of the 19th century and increasingly during the 20th century, a marked difference began to be noticed between two forms of art, “low” and “high.” In literature there were ever more difficult novels, whose plots were sparse, descriptions were many and sentences very long and sometimes replete with classical references, as in the works of Joyce, Proust, or Musil. These were strikingly original writers, whose works are considered masterpieces of modern prose, and yet their readership has remained relatively limited when compared with that of the masters of past ages. Modern visual art, too, has largely abandoned realism and romanticism, that were fairly accessible, and offered easily identifiable characters, landscapes and scenes—contemporary, historic, biblical, etc.—and moved on to ever more abstract art, whose link with reality became weak or at least very hard to decipher. And in music, partly in protest against the success of popular music and genres such as jazz or tango, and in refusal to partake in what was seen as a pernicious commercialization of art, composers began to compose mainly for their colleagues, music that was unapproachable and unattractive but to a limited circle of experts: the classic example is the music sometimes referred to as “atonal,” unsurprisingly admired by Adorno, of such composers as Arnold Schönberg or Alban Berg. Here, too, the artistic accomplishments of these composers are undisputed, but so is the fact they have remained, and intentionally so, un-popular.
Artists and critics were not always fully conscious of these trends and of their social significance. But occasionally the need to draw a fence around high art—which was alone considered proper art, “artistic art,” as opposed to the commercial “trash” produced below—and debar the masses from its domain was expressly and programmatically stated. The clearest spokesperson of such an agenda was probably Ortega, whose following words, written in 1925, amount to a manifesto for art against the masses:
Romanticism was the popular style par excellence. Democracy’s first born son, it was treated most affectionately by the mass.
The new art, by contrast, finds the mass, and will always find it, opposed to it. […] In my judgment, what characterizes the new art, “from the sociological point of view,” is that it divides the public into two classes of men: those who understand it and those who do not. And this implies that the former are in possession of a capacity of comprehension denied to the latter; that they are two distinct varieties of the human species. The new art, therefore, is not for everyone, as was romantic art, but directs itself to a specially gifted minority. Hence the irritation it provokes in the mass. […] Used to predominate in all things, the mass feels offended by the new art in its “human rights,” for this is an art of privilege, nobility, and instinct—of an instinctive aristocracy. […] For a century and a half [that is, at the time of writing, almost exactly the time that has passed since the start of the French Revolution. I.L.] “the people,” the mass, has pretended to be the whole of society. The music of Stravinsky or the drama of Pirandello has the sociological merit of forcing it to recognize itself for what it is, namely as “mere people,” one ingredient among others of the social structure, inert matter of the historical process, a secondary factor of the spiritual cosmos. Moreover, the new art also contributes so that the “best” know and acknowledge each other amidst the grey multitude and learn their mission, which consists in being few and in fighting the many.
(Ortega 2007: 46–48)
For that reason Ortega asked to bring into completion the process of “de-humanization of art,” in which art detaches itself from the affairs of common people, the loves, hates, sufferings, hopes, excitements and so on and so forth which attract the masses, and deals with abstract art, art for art’s sake, “an artistic art,” that disowns humanity and soars high above it, thereby separating the wheat of élite, special people, from the human, all-too-human chaff of the mass.
Ortega’s theory of art again displays the same tendency to biologize social differences that we have noted in several other contexts. It is crucial for him to identify an inborn, natural difference between two kinds of audiences, those susceptible to art and those who are not, in a way that generates a nearly racist division between “distinct varieties of the human species.” Strictly obliterated in this account are, first, the historical dimension in the evolution of art: if indeed real art deals not with human questions but with pure aesthetics, why does that become so only at the time in which Ortega is living, and not before it, at the times of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, or Cervantes, who have all dealt with quintessentially human dramas and have gained numerous admirers, as opposed to a coterie of fans? Second, it is vital for him to banish the role played by social and class position, with its attendant education, when decreeing that the comprehension of art, or lack thereof, is innate in different sorts of people. These are the reasons that have lead Pierre Bourdieu (1979) to critically engage with Ortega’s writings, and use them as a starting point from which to unfold a sociological theory about the role of education and of art in reflecting, indeed in creating and sustaining, social distinctions. Artistic taste, argued Bourdieu, is neither natural nor innate: it is learned and acquired through a complicated social process, in which the masses are excluded even in the modern, and allegedly equal, system of education, and the members of the élite make their own the “proper” taste, the “cultural capital” which will sustain their elevated status.
Like Ortega, many other contemporaries took notice of the new phenomenon in which the masses are alienated from art. One of them was the writer Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1915. Yet unlike Ortega, for Rolland this development was to be regretted rather than celebrated and further nurtured. This emerges from things he wrote on the 18th-century composer George F. Handel, whose work, addressing the wide public, he contrasted with contemporary, aloof, art:
[W]hat I wish to notice chiefly in the popular character of Handel’s music is that it is always truly conceived for the people, and not for an élite dilettanti […]. Without ever departing from his sovereign ideas of beautiful form, in which he gave no concession to the crowd, he reproduced in a language immediately “understanded of the people” those feelings in which all could share. Our epoch has lost the feeling of this type of art and men: pure artists who speak to the people and for the people, not for themselves or for their confrères. To-day the pure artists lock themselves within themselves, and those who speak to the people are most often mountebanks.
(Rolland 1920: 191–192)
Not all participants in “high art,” of course, were complicit with Ortega’s anti-democratic political goals. Some were of the political left and saw themselves as part of an avant-garde whose role was to boldly lead the masses onto new victories. The debate between “high” and “low” culture, however, had a clearly defined geographical demarcation line. Élite culture was associated with Europe, “the old continent,” the bastion of venerated tradition, whereas mass culture, democratic and commercial, was affiliated with “the new continent,” America, or more precisely, the United States. This division was common already in the 19th century, as evidenced in the words of Heinrich Heine, written in 1840:
Or shall I travel to America, that huge prison of liberty, where the invisible chains will press me even more painfully than the visible ones at home, and where the most repulsive of all tyrants, the rabble, exercises his rude domain!
(Heine 1997, vol. 4: 38)14
The United States, for its part, had embraced its image as the motherland of the masses rejected by Europe, as most famously conveyed by the lines of The New Colossus, written by the Jewish, pro-socialist poet, Emma Lazarus (2002: 23) in 1883:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, these words indeed welcomed, in the next decades, millions of Old continent immigrants, mostly penniless, representing the hope signified by America to “the common man.” They also poignantly express the American mass defiance of European elitist pomp, and equally befitting, of course, is the bond between the woman and the mass, whom it greets.
Matthew Arnold, who as remembered was impressed by the strong-state model of France under Napoleon III, warned the English against replacing their aristocracy with the massified and anarchic rule he associated with the United States: “what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanised? I confess I am disposed to answer: On the action of the State” (Arnold 1993: 12–13). If the English will refuse to acquiesce with a stronger rule capable of uniting the nation, he admonished (15), “then the dangers of America will really be ours; the dangers which come from the multitude being in power, with no adequate ideal to elevate and guide the multitude.”
Given this association of America with the masses and the challenge it was seen to pose to the bourgeois and aristocratic order, a more favorable image of America was formed precisely on the European left, among socialists and communists, in a way which may look surprising today, long after “America” has become widely identified with neo-imperialism, becoming the bane of radicals worldwide. Yet even on the left attitudes were often ambivalent, since America was also the capitalist country par excellence. It was similarly unclear how to interpret the masses’ attraction to the American way of life: was it politically radical? Was it compatible with socialism? Or was it rather seen by workers as an alternative to socialism? These uncertainties are reflected, for instance, in a 1929 book documenting the life of proletarian youth in Berlin, written by the protestant and socialist cleric, Günther Dehn, who would in a few years become a target of Nazi persecution. Dehn wrote with empathy on the life of workers in the German capital’s poverty districts, describing their difficulties, struggles and ambitions. Yet he saw a tension between socialism, as he understood it, an ethical and spiritual approach, and the materialistic mindset of the working-class youth, sanctifying the here and now:
The proletarian youth [unlike its bourgeois counterpart] does not write poetry. At most, when it has the opportunity, it writes poems of class struggle. It has no time for aesthetic, egocentric pursuits. It must work and earn a living. […] If you were to ask them about the meaning of life, they will only tell you: “What it actually means, we don’t know, nor are we interested in finding out. But since we are alive, we want to get all we possibly can out of life.” To earn money and to enjoy, these are the two cornerstones of existence, whereby under “enjoyment” one must understand both the noble and the ignoble, from primitive sexuality and jazz music, to new proletarian living culture and a rationally kept bodily hygiene. […] From this world, and from this world alone, they try to extract for themselves as much as can possibly be extracted. This is a truly Americanized people, rationalistic to the core, consciously and as a matter of course superficial [oberflächenhaft]. Coming into contact with them, one cannot but think time and again: not socialism, but Americanism will be the end of all things.
(Dehn 1929: 38–39)
For all the vast differences between their political and social vantage-points, Dehn too, like Nietzsche, cannot contain a certain frustration at the sight of young workers, whose approach to enjoyment, labor and life in general is not so unlike that imputed by the German philosopher to the Last Humans.
Chapters 1 and 2 have surveyed mass society, as it is agreed upon by nearly all scholars that this society provided the basis upon which fascism grew. The survey was thematic, dividing mass society into its various components, but it was seen that they were strongly interrelated: mass politics rested on social and demographic developments, which in turn drew upon and reflected cultural changes. The perspective taken was European, even Western, under the assumption that the roots of fascism were not in the ground of one or another single country.
Chronologically, we have come quite close to the fascist era but have mostly deliberately refrained from crossing this time-line: the relationship between mass society and fascism—the question of whether it is one of continuity, disruption or synthesis—will be the center of the discussion in the remaining chapters.
In Chapter 2 the opposition to mass society was discussed, again divided to different sections for the sake of clarification. A strong mismatch revealed itself between the developments themselves and the responses, which often bordered on hysteria. In many cases, where objective improvements affected the lives of most people, the critics of mass society perceived deterioration and pointed to great dangers lying ahead, including the final breakdown of civilization. Yet this incongruity is not, of course, coincidental. It reflected a class bias, the consternation aroused by the élites in the face of the ascent of the masses. This meant that even phenomena that were eminently positive and whose political implications seem minor, such as advances in medicine or the rise in average life expectancy, were perceived as problematic and threatening.
The extremism, fanaticism and pessimism we have so frequently encountered might be interpreted as reactions to a fundamental defeat: racism was exacerbated at a time when masses and cultures migrated and interpenetrated; the “natural” differences between the genders were emphasized precisely when it became increasingly evident that they were essentially social and historical products, when it was seen that women could with great success earn their living, undertake “masculine” jobs, write and create; the stress on crime as genetic and biological and the effort to detect a clear-cut, innate difference between the élite and the mass ought to be understood precisely in the context of greater social mobility and the entry of the masses into domains of activity, of material and cultural consumption, from which they were until recently excluded. This was a response, in other words, that combined desperation, denial and aggression: the Last Human was seen as a scandal, as something unnatural, almost unthinkable, and yet he was already roaming the streets, a living reality or one that seemed imminently to become such. This dissonance bred impotence, which in turn bred the willingness to employ violence. Let us, in conclusion, recall Zarathustra’s words, which speak of the past at the same time that they envision the future:
And many a one who came along like an annihilator […] wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and stop its throat. […] And like a wind I will one day blow among them and with my spirit take away the breath from their spirit: thus my future will have it.
1For a more extended discussion of Carlyle’s position and its affinities with fascism, see Landa (2010: 153–164).
2See, for more details, Landa (2010: 157).
3On political elitism in the Italian context, see, for instance, Paxton (2004: 34–37). For a comprehensive account of elitism in Germany, see Struve (1973).
4Other English liberals also anticipated the elitism of Pareto and Co., for example Walter Bagehot, who advised the élites to appeal to the emotions of the masses in order to control them. See Mandler (2006: 79). On the continuity between the classical liberal critique of democracy on the part of J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, and that of Pareto and Mosca, see Joll (1973: 128).
5For useful overviews of the rise of Italian socialism during the Giolittian era, see Dunnage (2002: 22–29); and Di Scala (2009: 163–181).
6The translation of Vernichtung was changed from “destruction,” to “extermination.”
7On Nietzsche as one of many “scientifically illiterate pundits” promoting eugenics during the late 19th century, see Burleigh and Wippermann (1996: 34–36).
8For a discussion of Lombroso, the context in which he wrote and his influence, see the following two books: Bosc (2007); Pick (1989: 109–154).
9Mainly by the Italian sociologist Scipio Sighele who a few years before Le Bon published, to some resonance, a study of The Criminal Crowd (La folla delinquente, 1891). Sighele was influenced by his countryman, Lombroso, whose model of criminality he transferred from the individual to the mass. The book was translated into several languages, among them French, and influenced Le Bon, who was a notorious plagiarist. Unlike Le Bon, Sighele’s approach to the masses was less conservative and more popular and democratic. This made him write another book in which he pointed, rather, to the crowd’s supposed moral and political advantages, called The Crowd’s Wisdom (L’intelligenza della folla, 1903). The most comprehensive discussion of Sighele and his wide and ramified impact is probably in Bosc (2007). Also very useful is Barrows (1981) which discusses at some length Le Bon’s heavy borrowing from the likes of Sighele and Gabriel Tarde.
10On the reversal of gender roles and its accompanying anxieties as expressed in interwar French culture, and also after the Second World War, see Drury (1994). For an example of the debate surrounding the topic in the Weimar Republic, see “Enough is Enough! Against the Masculinization of Women,” in Kaes and Jay (1995: 659). For an overview of the changes in the role of women in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, and the responses to it, see Peukert (1993: 86–106).
11As quoted in Russell Trott, Marrying Football and Philosophy, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7604620.stm.
12On the great anxieties provoked among 19th-century British élites by the spread of mass literacy and the expansion of the “bad” habit of reading novels, see Brantlinger (1998).
13For a good discussion of the Nietzsche-Wagner ideological contrast, refreshing in its departure from the standard tendency to simplistically pit the good philosopher against the bad musician, see Geuss (1999). Also recommended is the following volume of essays: Wildermuth (2008).
14These, and other aristocratic sounding verdicts may help to explain the great admiration expressed by Nietzsche for Heine, several decades later. It should be noted, however, that in continuation Heine rebukes America not on account of its egalitarianism but for its abhorrent treatment of blacks and mulattoes, which did not elicit Nietzsche’s protestations. On the contrary, during the American Civil War he sided rather with the slave-owning Confederacy. See Losurdo (2004: 1030–1031).
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