So I shall speak to them of the most contemptible human: and that is The Last Human. […]
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche 1883 (1969: 45–46)1
The overman […] will have to do battle with two enemies: the mass and God.
The fight against the latter will not be dangerous. God is dead, isn’t it so?[….] The mass [la Plebe] will pose greater obstacles to the development of the overman. The mass is too Christian and too egalitarian, and it will never comprehend that in order for the overman to ascend, a higher level of cruelty is required. […] Nevertheless, the overman will overcome both the mass and God. He will impose on all his “leonine will.”
Benito Mussolini 1908 (1958, vol. 1: 183)
[Nietzsche’s] prophecy of the Last Human has found rapid fulfillment. It is accurate—except for the assertion that the Last Human lives longest. His age already lies behind us.
Ernst Jünger 1934 (2008: 13)
In the historiography of fascism and in the way this political movement is understood across academic disciplines, and indeed “remembered” by the general public, few convictions have struck deeper roots, proving more persistent and influential, than the one affiliating fascism with “the masses.” As conservative and liberal critics—but also many radical ones—traditionally aver ever since the 1930s, interwar European fascism was essentially a case of “mass hysteria,” an over-boiling of the pernicious populist tendencies inherent in mass democracy. This book will revisit the long-standing notion that fascism was mass politics at its purest, least inhibited and most vehement form. Scrutinizing such a common argument, the aim will be to show, not only that it is in some respects inadequate, as other historians have done before (see Hagtvet’s (1985) classical critique of mass society theories of fascism); going beyond specific reservations, it will be claimed that it is in fact useful to reverse the argument altogether and see fascism as the culmination of an effort on the part of the upper-class élites and their middle-class allies, especially since the 1848 revolutions, to subdue mass politics and its broader social, cultural and economic implications, to cut short the advances of the working class and the lower orders more generally. The notion of the masses, newly approached, can offer vital insight into the nature of one of the most fateful political and social phenomena of modern times. For that to happen, a critical confrontation will be necessary with the deeply-ingrained association of fascism with the masses.
Highlighting the “mass” nature of fascism has long become a commonplace, a mere statement of fact, as it were. Expounding on an alleged linkage between fascism and the French Revolution, the celebrated cultural historian George Mosse (1989: 7) could thus affirm, in one of his later essays: “The age of mass politics had begun. Stressing this aspect of the French revolution should clarify its importance to fascism.” It is as if the connection between mass politics and fascism were self-evident, a long-established historical fact, rather than a product of an interpretation, a story about fascism. Mosse’s formulations of the connection between mass democracy and fascism were quite bold. “The French Revolution,” he maintained, “stood at the beginning of a democratization of politics which climaxed in twentieth-century fascism” (Mosse 1989: 20). He spoke (14) of the “theory of democratic leadership adopted by Hitler and Mussolini” and asserted (16) that “Fascism and the French Revolution, each in its own way, saw itself as a democratic movement directed against the establishment.”
On a similar vein, in his long essay published in 2000, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defined modernity as a continuing process whereby the masses learn to see themselves as the subject of history and strive to drag all of society down to their level, banishing any attempt at a higher and more individualistic culture. For Sloterdijk, the historical phenomenon of German fascism represents one of the most notable examples of such egalitarian uprisings. Nazism is described as “quasi-socialism from the Right” embodying a fiercely anti-elitist egalitarianism. Hence the description of Hitler as “a container of mass-frustrations,” and the talk about “brother Hitler, extending his hand to all” (Sloterdijk 2000: 9–12). It was contended (26–27) that “the masses and the susceptible elements of the élites” took to him “since it was not necessary to look up to him […]; since it was enough to direct one’s own resentful vulgarity and life-ineptitude to his own eye-level.” To make no mistake possible, within little more than three pages (25–28) the author associated Hitler no less than 15 times with adjectives implying his mass nature: with “lack of exceptionality,” “commonness” (three times), “crudity,” “triviality,” “vulgarity” (four times) “lack of achievement,” “plebeianism,” “life-incompetence,” “ignobility,” “lack of talent.”
Yirmiyahu Yovel, also a philosopher, argued that Nietzsche’s historical misfortune was the mass usurpation of his ideas, which took place during the fascist era:
Inevitably, modern politics is mass politics. [….] Nietzsche’s Übermensch cannot be universalized—that is, vulgarized […. Fascism, though abhorrent to Nietzsche, is one of the tragic caricatures of such an impossible combination of the aristocratic and the vulgar. As the shopkeeper, the bus driver, and the petty intellectual worker are endowed with “Dionysian” qualities and placed beyond good and evil, the result must assume onerous dimensions.
(Yovel 1992: 132)
Such exegesis of fascism is well embedded in a long and venerated tradition of critical thinking. A fractional list would include such notables as Wilhelm Reich, Emil Lederer, many members of the so-called Frankfurt School, William Kornhauser, Fritz Stern. Whatever differentiates these approaches in terms of political leanings—which can be conservative, liberal or radical—or disciplinary vantage-points—history, literature, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and more—they are all united in the common perception of fascism, particularly Nazism, as a rising tide of vulgarity, gullibility and resentment, whereby the masses disastrously assume control of politics via their dictatorial proxies or, in the more leftist variations emphasizing “mass deception,” duped and manipulated into perpetrating terrifying acts of barbarism.
The abiding fascination and influence of the theory is indebted in part to the fact that it was never simply a matter of dry scholarly representation, receiving throughout the decades vast representation in works of art, both literary and cinematic. These have contributed to imprint the image of fascism as a mass orgy on our collective retina. A classic example is the work of the great Austrian novelist, Hermann Broch, grappling with the phenomenon of Nazism in terms of “mass madness.”2 In Broch’s acclaimed modernist masterpiece, The Death of Virgil, the Roman poet Virgil provides the author a means of conveying his own condition as a pariah artist under Nazi rule, while the Emperor Augustus represents something of an ancient Führer, inasmuch as he stands for the prototypical mass leader. In one of the opening scenes, Virgil—old, sick, estranged and helpless—is carried upon a canopy onto the shore of Brundisium where he is surrounded by the roaring “mass-beast” that celebrates Augustus’ birthday:
[T]he moment had arrived which the brooding mass-beast had awaited to release its howl of joy, and now it broke loose, without pause, without end, victorious, violent, unbridled, fear-inspiring, magnificent, fawning, the mass worshipping itself in the person of the One.
These were the masses for whom Caesar had lived, for whom the empire had been established, for whom Gaul was conquered […] And these were the masses without whom no policy could be carried out and on whose support Augustus must rely if he wished to maintain himself, and naturally Augustus had no other wish.
(Broch 2000: 22)
The picture of ancient Rome is an easily decodable description of the Third Reich. And it is Augustus who is seen as governed, indeed victimized, by the masses. The mass is the genuine subject of the empire, “victorious, violent, unbridled,” ruling supreme by proxy of an emperor who is essentially a marionette, a projection of the mass. Behind the Nazi crowds, Broch continues to see the independent-minded masses forcefully carrying forward their project. The masses are not victims, nor even hoodwinked fools, but the hysteric perpetrators. In this reading of history, preceding the outbreak of the war (the novel, though published in 1945, was written mainly before the war, its fourth version completed in 1940), the leader is a faithful, indeed submissive, representative of the masses. Broch/Virgil senses palpably enough the evil of the empire/Reich, which is the immanent evil of the masses, terribly erupting from below, overwhelming the anxious individual:
Evil, a tide of evil, an immense wave of unspeakable, inexpressible, incomprehensible evil seethed in the reservoir of the plaza; fifty thousand, a hundred thousand mouths yelled the evil out of themselves, yelled it to one another without hearing it, without knowing it was evil […]. What a birthday greeting! Was he the only one to realize it?
(Broch 2000: 22)
The contrast between the sensitive, intimidated, bourgeois “individual-animal” and the amorphous, evil, “crowded, snorting herd-mass” is complete (48). Time and again, the masses—namely the people Virgil’s canopy is carried over—are portrayed as dehumanized lava of filth, hatred and vindictiveness, “a single conglomerate flood of creaturekind, a massed, formed, forming, boiling human-humus” (48). Instructively, although the masses in Broch’s vague definition are supposed to mean some cross-section of the populace at large, the greatest threat to Virgil is sensed when passing through a typical working-class slum. Painfully advancing through a “frenetic street of evil that would not end” (in thinly veiled Vienna going under the name of Brundisium), Virgil is abused by the poor residents of “Misery Street.” Not even the children emerge as truly human but are animalized, made interchangeable with the beasts (41): “This began gnome-fashion, that is to say with the children, yes with the goats too, neither stepping aside and so becoming entangled between the legs of the porters, the quadrupeds bleating, the little bipeds screaming.” The mass hysteria of fascism thus infects the children as well, even the animals.
In Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, one of the most influential treatises in the aftermath of the war, the view of fascism as mass driven was taken out of the realm of art and philosophy and transferred onto that of political thought (Arendt, it should be noted, got to know Broch in the United States in the 1940s and became well acquainted with his work). For Arendt, totalitarianism was predicated on the modern phenomenon of mass society. Very early on in her discussion, she fully subscribed to the European body of anti-mass literature. She wrote:
Eminent European scholars and statesmen had predicted, from the early nineteenth century onward, the rise of the mass man and the coming of a mass age. A whole literature on mass behavior and mass psychology had demonstrated and popularized the wisdom, so familiar to the ancients, of the affinity between democracy and dictatorship, between mob rule and tyranny. They had prepared certain politically conscious and overconscious sections of the Western educated world for the emergence of demagogues, for gullibility, superstition, and brutality.
(Arendt 1960: 316)
For Arendt, as for Broch, the masses were not so much duped victims as the active agent behind totalitarianism, its genuine animating force. Arendt maintained that, although the bourgeoisie had initially supported the Nazi leaders, they failed to realize that such dictators are ultimately answerable to the masses, and the masses alone. The bourgeoisie, she asserted (318–319),
overlooked the independent, spontaneous support given the new mob leaders by masses as well as the mob leaders’ genuine talents for creating new forms of organization. The mob as leader of these masses was no longer the agent of the bourgeoisie or of anyone else except the masses.
Quite recently, Zeev Sternhell, the well-known historian of fascism, underlined the way the masses eternally form the epicenter of fanatical fascist nationalism:
From every corner of Europe the same call was heard: the common people, the peasant opening a furrow in his forefathers’ land, the artisan and his apprentices in the suburb, the non-Marxist worker, people not addicted to foreign cultures, uninterested in Kant and Rousseau, are the bearers of the national truth. By contrast, […] the freedom to criticize and to express views that the majority refutes undermines the nation’s foundation. The conclusion is evident: in order to save the nation a cultural revolution is necessary, which will turn the common people into a solid wall, resisting the tides of decomposition. This was the first great invention of those times: the mass will always be the majority, and therefore universal suffrage could be employed against the values of liberal democracy and of human rights. This, too, is well understood in Israel, since this is the meaning of the Cultural Revolution which we are going through. […] Let us make no mistake: fascism is first and foremost a radical nationalism, […] in the name of the mass that possesses “healthy” instincts, still uncontaminated by the French Revolution’s virus of the Enlightenment and human rights.
(Sternhell 2016)
The successful popularization of such a conviction, the way it has been converted into an axiom, can be exemplified by way of a children’s book on the history of Vienna. The chapter dealing with National Socialism is revealingly titled: “The power of the masses, 1930 to 1945” (Hewson 2006: 105).
In historiographic terms, this entwining of fascism with the masses emerges as a remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which, across Europe, understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics (and indeed of mass society, mass culture, and so on and so forth). The fascists were strongly opposed to the masses and, with remarkably few exceptions, saw their task as one of eliminating mass power and transforming the threatening masses into other, presumably superior and benign, collective forms, notable among them “the people,” “the nation” or “the race.” Fascism framed its mission very much in terms of delivering the nation from mass politics, rescuing the state from the grip of democratic and socialist demagogues, and placing it in the hands of responsible leaders, who will no longer be at the beck and call of a foolhardy and unruly populace. Only by reinstating social hierarchy, re-subordinating the masses and quelling their revolt, can the urgent task of national regeneration resume its course. If the masses are indeed a beast, it was one that the fascists came to tame.
In fact, if we may agree with Sloterdijk’s broad definition of modernity as the steadfast process whereby the masses attempt to take the helm of politics and culture, then we must insist that this was a project which the fascists came on the scene not to carry through but to sabotage and overturn. Consider the following lament over the demagoguery inherent in democracy, which allows malicious rabble-rousers to mobilize the mass beast and take control over the political arena:
The majority…. What force can a majority have? Brute force; it can deal you a blow; but the avalanche, when it reaches the ground, crumbles into fragments at the same time. Oh, how sickening they are, how sickening! Take them singly, they are afraid, you understand; and so they gather a thousand strong to take a step which they could not take each by himself; take them singly, they have not a thought among them; and a thousand empty heads, crowded together, imagine that they have, and fail to observe that it is the thought of the madman or mischief-maker who is leading them.
This is, unmistakably, a classic liberal-conservative admonition against the perils of mass democracy and the way it leads up to what Alexis de Tocqueville classically called “the tyranny of the majority.” It is interchangeable with the views of the likes of Broch, Arendt, Mosse or Sloterdijk. Strikingly, however, this was not a critique of fascism, representing, rather, the contrary. For these are the words of a character in an Italian novel written between 1909 and 1913, recounting the events of the peasant and worker militancy which shook up Sicily in the last decade of the 19th century. Denounced, from an anxious upper-class perspective, is not fascist but socialist and democratic demagoguery. Furthermore, this was written by an author, Luigi Pirandello (1928), who some ten years later would warmly welcome fascism, like so many of his class counterparts, seeing in it the only way of knocking some sense into the “thousand empty heads” of the Italian masses, who have grown intolerably restless. In fascism, Pirandello perceived not demagoguery but its termination, not mass tyranny but the subordination of the masses. In 1924 he declared himself in the Giornale d’Italia an “anti-democrat par excellence,” because he was convinced that “the mass itself needs those who would form it, it has material necessities, aspirations that do not go beyond practical need” (In De Grazia and Luzzatto 2005, vol. 2: 382). Fascism, if anything, banishes the chimera with which the socialist madman deluded the masses and fills their hollow minds with lofty content, supplying them with the proper ideal to guide them beyond crass materialism.
In an important article published some eight months before the March on Rome in the fascist organ tellingly titled Gerarchia—hierarchy—Benito Mussolini tolled the death knell of the democratic age of mass predominance:
The century of anti-democracy commences. “Everyone” is the main term of democracy, the word which has overflowed the 19th century. It is time to say: the few and the elect. […] Capitalism may have needed democracy in the 19th century: today, it can do without it. […] The orgy of indiscipline is at an end, the enthusiasm over the social and democratic myths is finished. Life turns to the individual. […] Gray and anonymous democratic egalitarianism, which had banished all color and leveled down all personality, is about to pass away. New aristocracies come forward, now that it has been demonstrated that the masses cannot be the protagonists of history, only its instruments.
(Mussolini 1958, vol. 18: 71)
Fascism, according to Mussolini, was not the rule of the majority but the majority very much ruled. The open embrace of capitalism may have been new, yet the contempt for the masses underlay Mussolini’s worldview even when he was a militant socialist. As early as 1904, he rejected what he termed a false, “Christian” conception of socialism, in favor of a “new conception of socialism, a profoundly ‘aristocratic’ one” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 1: 70). And in 1909 he stressed the fact that “my temperament and my convictions lead me to prefer the small, resolute and audacious nucleus over the mass, which is numerous, but chaotic, amorphous, cowardly” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 2: 75).
Things were no different with Hitler. The following words from Mein Kampf reflect the National Socialist commitment to a cultural, social and economic anti-mass project:
Marxism presents itself as the perfection of the Jew’s attempt to exclude the pre-eminence of personality in all fields of human life and replace it by the numbers of the mass. To this, in the political sphere, corresponds the parliamentary form of government […] and in the economic sphere, the system of a trade-union movement.
(Hitler 1999: 447)
Hitler, to be sure, always underlined his ability to persuade the masses, and analyzed the impact of different methods of suggestion, such as the spoken word, liturgies and ceremonies, symbols, and so on and so forth. But the goal was to defuse mass power. Here it should be emphasized that concepts like “the nation,” “the race” “the people” or “the people’s community” that were so central to the fascist vocabulary, are not to be confused with the masses, since they were in fact opposites. These entities represented everything that the masses should become. The mass was perceived as independent, lazy, peace-loving, egalitarian, fickle, rebellious, feminine, spoiled, disrespectful, squeamish, sentimental, urban. The people, by contrast, was disciplined, respectful of authority, laborious, humble, decent, virile, ready to make sacrifices, of a peasant mindset and attached to the land. The mass was also crucially and inextricably attached to democracy, which was its source of power, whereas the people remain fastened to an authoritarian system of ruling. Thomas Mann (2002: 263) packed this into a formula, in 1918, when his views were still conservative: “The individualistic mass is democratic, the Volk is aristocratic. The former is international, while the latter is a mythical personality of the most distinctive characteristics.”
Antoine Rédier, leader of the Légion—the first fascist movement in France (founded in 1924)—similarly inveighed against the democratic domination of numbers. “The people,” he insisted, “are not the multitude” (In Soucy 1986: 28). To be sure, Rédier found cause to disagree with Tocqueville’s theories of mass democracy. Yet the fundamental reasons for his disagreement with the seminal liberal critic of majority rule are quite revealing: he fully subscribed to Tocqueville’s aristocratic disdain for the masses, as expressed in the following passage, which he approvingly quoted:
By reason, I approve of democratic institutions, but I am aristocratic by instinct, that is to say, I despise and fear the crowd.
I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for the rights, but not democracy. […] I hate demagoguery, the disordered activity of the masses, their violent and ill-advised intervention in the affairs, the envious passions of the lower classes, the irreligious tendencies.
(In Rédier 1925: 48)
Yet Rédier chastised Tocqueville for being an inconsistent opponent of the mass, for faintheartedly accepting democracy rather than drawing the necessary, elitist conclusions from his own analysis of its insurmountable failings. Sadly acquiescing with democracy, Tocqueville had proven himself “unfaithful to liberty,” had “betrayed” it. “He puts us,” Rédier argued (104–105),
before the alternative of being governed either by a single despot or by the mass [la foule], and it is the mass, which he is obliged to choose. He jettisons the liberating solution, condemning with a single stroke of the pen all the reasonable institutions which were overwhelmed by the revolutionary storm. He pays them, as he goes along, an admirable homage but he then makes an about-turn and circumvents them: and thus, in the name of liberty, sacred democracy rules the world.
While liberal literature perennially draws inspiration from Tocqueville to expose the fascist embrace of the masses, we have here an instructive case of a fascist denouncing liberalism for its enthrallment to majorities.
As much as the fascist worldview was eclectic and contradictory in other respects, it was of virtually one mind on this question. The judgment on the masses remains almost invariably the same, no matter if one turns to fascist politicians, intellectuals or soldiers. For Oswald Spengler (1999: 1004) the concept of the Volk “is eliminated […] through the concept of the fourth estate, the mass, which principally rejects culture with its attendant forms. […] The mass is the end, the radical nothing.” And if we turn to the Freikorps’ literature, we find many passages such as this, where a Freikorps soldier proclaimed: “Parties are a mass. Freikorps are a team!” (F.W. Heinz, in Theweleit 1978: 94). The notable anti-Bolshevik activist and subsequently Nazi politician, Eduard Stadtler (1937: 13), who boasted of having instigated the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, saw Marxist ideology as symbiotic with mass hedonism: “The materialist collective ‘mass-man’ elevates itself into a self-sufficient ‘ideal,’ as it totters along in a this-worldly rapture of mass experiences.” The virulent French fascist and anti-Semite, Lucien Rebatet (1942: 401), placed all his hopes for his country on the intervention of a determined minority, the foil of the base masses:
Dismaying as [the French people] are, I know that there yet remains, dispersed among this puerile and ignobly dull mass, the élite that suffices for a fascist revolution. Are there three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand of them, those unknown people whom I evoke with all the force of affection I am capable of? I do not know, but they exist, numerous enough to fulfill what true leaders could expect from them.
And Colonel François de La Rocque, leader of far-right league Croix-de-Feu and, after the latter’s dissolution by the government, head of the highly successful Parti Social Français, considered by some historians a fascist party, affirmed the following: “I hear talk here of the mass. Members of the Croix-de-Feu are an élite” (De La Rocque 1934: 53). Somewhat more optimistic than Rebatet, he clang to the reassuring belief that “French temperament is the temperament of cadres and not of masses.” With the latter, he associated his political arch-enemies: “Revolutionary socialism appeals to violence, to the law of the mass and of number, and so to injustice.”3
In Spain, equally, fascism was predicated on a resolute rejection of mass society which, as José Antonio Primo de Rivera warned in 1935, was perceived as the common thread leading from capitalism to communism:
Quickly or slowly, but implacably, Marx’s forecasts become a reality. We are heading to the concentration of capital, to the proletarianization of the masses, and, finally, to social revolution, which will bring a terrible period of communist dictatorship. And this communist dictatorship has to terrify us, Europeans, Westerners, Christians, since it will signify the terrible negation of man; the absorption of man in an immense, amorphous mass, where individuality is lost […]. Notice well that this is why we are anti-Marxists; that we are anti-Marxists because we are terrified […] of being an inferior animal in an ant-nest. And we are terrified by it because capitalism gives us a hint of such a condition; capitalism, too, is internationalist and materialist. That is why we want neither the one nor the other; that is why we wish to avert—since we believe in their accuracy—the realization of Marx’s prophecies.
(Primo de Rivera 1976: 484–485)
Ernesto Giménez Caballero (2005: 189), one of the central intellectual figures of Falangism, avowed that “we cannot tolerate the tyranny of an art of absolute masses that Russian communism, the Orient, wishes to impose on us.” A fervent Nietzschean, he credited the German philosopher with nothing less than a “resurrection” of the Spanish national spirit, rising like a magnificent dawn after the dark night of the national humiliation in the Spanish-American war of 1898. “Zarathustra did his magic,” he recalled (51), and “from these moments a germ of a complex rebirth was fertilized in Spanish life, to the warmth of the Nietzscheans.” In agreement with the spirit of this rebirth, he often denounced the massification of modern Spain, and of Europe more broadly, in profoundly elitist observations such as the following one, where the fate of erstwhile aristocratic sports is described, once they are appropriated by “the riffraff”: “The destiny of many of the games which become popular is just like that of the gentleman’s suits: they are handed down from hand to hand until they reach the man of the street, already dirty, patched, ignoble” (14).
It is highly significant that unlike other major keywords or concepts favored by the left, “the masses” was not a concept which the fascists strove to appropriate and transubstantiate. The term “socialism” itself was adopted by some fascists, and was of course incorporated into the very name of the Nazi movement; “the worker” was occasionally viewed positively, although not quite as much as the peasant or craftsman: the worker could and had to be saved, cured of his Marxist madness; the concept of “revolution,” too, was newly interpreted by the fascists and enthusiastically embraced in the form of “national” or “conservative” revolution. Nothing comparable occurred with the notion of the masses. The masses were seen by fascists almost uniformly as something negative, obscene, threatening and contemptuous. The masses could not hope to be semantically reborn in some purified form. The destiny of the masses was to be eliminated, at least as an independent social phenomenon, and to be subjected to, replaced by or absorbed into something else, and better: “Volk,” “nation,” “race,” “army” and so on and so forth.
The best that the mass could hope for on fascist terms was to remain strictly subordinated to the élite, forfeiting any aspiration to shape society’s values, let alone be its governor. Only this was a concept of the mass which fascists could stomach. A good example is provided by the Spanish Nietzschean José Ortega y Gasset, who was revered by the leading Falangists, José Antonio, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, and Giménez Caballero, among others. (See Gracia 2005: 120.) In a 1977 interview Giménez Caballero affirmed that the “roots of fascism are Nietzschean, pagan, of ‘overmen.’ Our Generation of ’98 was Nietzschean, and Ortega [sic], and I proceed from them. Nietzsche was the spiritual father of Mussolini, of Hitler … and of [Pío] Baroja, and of Ortega. Our masters” (Giménez Caballero 1979: 318). When push came to shove in the 1930s, Ortega himself refused to draw dictatorial conclusions from his trenchant elitism, opting for a paternalistic defense of the Republic, which has earned him the rebuke of a dismayed José Antonio (1976: 577–579). Yet Ortega’s denunciations of the rise of mass power in modern society, particularly in his two most important political works, Invertebrate Spain (1921) and The Revolt of The Masses (1930), were hugely influential in ideologically underpinning Spanish fascism and furnishing it with sense of social mission. (See Saz Campos 2003: 98–99.) That mission, for Ortega, seems at first glance to be far removed from enmity to the masses as a social factor; on the contrary, he wished for the mass to remain, at all costs, precisely that—a mass. “A nation,” Ortega stated, “is an organized human mass, structured by a minority of select individuals.” A sickness fatally affects the social body only when “the mass rejects being a mass—that is, refuses to follow the directing minority.” When this “anomaly” happens, “the nation disintegrates, society is dismembered and the result is social chaos, the historical loss of structure [invertebración]” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 96–97). While the mass, here, is deceptively defined as a positive entity, this is so only inasmuch as it accepts its prescribed role as passive matter in the hands of the rulers. The unruly mass, the mass striving to preside over society, is the worst social and political disease—and Ortega, like many of his contemporaries, was fond of employing pseudo-biological language in diagnosing the political situation, talking of “healthy” versus “sick” social bodies and classifying peoples and “races” as distinct “zoological and biological” species. Significantly, he identified the characteristic attribute of the “superior” races in their ability to engender a relatively high number of “eminent individuals” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 113), whereas in the inferior or “degenerate” races such individuals are rarer than normal and it is the mass that dominates. Thus, while Ortega defends the mass as mass he nonetheless attacks mass society as one where the mass rebels and becomes the ruler. One might imagine that, to introduce his discussion of the modern ailment, he will choose some such title as “the disappearance of the mass”: the modern mass, after all, is said to have “rejected being a mass.” The actual subtitle is very different, and very revealing: “The empire of the masses” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 96). This conveys Ortega’s true problem and, by extension that of his Falangist pupils: the masses have become insufferably strong and independent. Anticipating fascism, Ortega recommends at the very conclusion of the book the stringent application of “selection” as the only corrective to Spain’s fatal “lack of eminent minorities and the unperturbed empire of the masses.” “The imperative of selection” will be the precondition for any putative national “resurrection,” setting itself the task of “forging a new type of Spanish man and [producing] the refinement of the race” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 140). Ortega’s choice was ultimately not fascist, yet this does not diminish the compatibility of many of his ideas with fascism. Apart from the aspects already discussed, there are noticeable parallels, for instance, between the way he diagnoses modern society as fallen and degenerate and the views of the irascible Italian extremist Julius Evola. Both thinkers denounce modernity as an extreme manifestation of popular sovereignty—which Evola (1995: 24) associated “with the triumph of the collectivistic world of the masses and with the advent of radical democracy” and Ortega (2006: 86) termed “hyper-democracy”; both draw on the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Puranas, and see in modernity the realization of the prophecy of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when the time-honored caste order falls apart (Ortega 2015: 101; Evola 1995: 177); and both identify “mass-man” at the center of these developments.4 And like Pirandello, who as we saw reduced democracy to the chimeras produced in the masses’ “empty heads,” Ortega (2015: 99) sneered at the way the subjects attempt to impose “on their leader the international politics which has nested in their light and impetuous heads, their ‘mass’ heads.”
Another interesting case displaying some terminological ambiguity vis-à-vis the masses, is the thought of the court philosopher of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile. On the one hand, Gentile resorts to a strategy sometimes employed by fascists to present their movements as democratic ones, embodying the will of the people, and, in this instance, explicitly of the masses:
The nationalist state was aristocratic state, that constructed itself out of the force it inherited from its origin, that made it valued by the masses. The Fascist State, on the other hand, is a popular state, and, in that sense, a democratic State par excellence. Every citizen shares a relationship with the State that is so intimate that the State exists only in so far as it is made to exist by the citizen. Thus, its formation is a product of the consciousness of each individual, and thus of the masses, in which the power of the State consists.
(Gentile 2007: 28)
Almost instantaneously, however, Gentile refutes this very claim and concedes that the allegedly “intimate” state-masses relationship is in fact extremely tense and arduous, necessitating control, subjugation and indoctrination. And thus, in direct continuation (28–29), he convolutedly asserts the following:
That explains the necessity of the Fascist Party and of all the institutions of propaganda and education that foster the political and moral ideals of Fascism, so that the thought and the will of the solitary person, the Duce, becomes the thought and the will of the masses. Out of that arises the enormous difficulty in which it is involved, to bring into the Party, and into the institutions created by the Party, all the people, commencing from their most tender years. It is a formidable problem, the solution of which creates infinite difficulty, because it is almost impossible to conform the masses to the demands of an élite Party of vanguard morality. Such a conformity could only happen slowly, through education and reform.
Strangely enough, it turns out that making the masses conform to their own consciousness is an “almost impossible” task. But of course this cannot but be so, since the “democratic state par excellence” must at all time conform to the will of the Duce and his élite Party. The leaders will represent the masses, certainly, but only if, and after, the masses will come to embody the leaders’ thought and will. In order to represent you, in other words, I first have to brainwash and to subordinate you.
This incongruity, trying to graft popular commitment onto a stringent elitism, runs through Gentile’s doctrines. Still, no matter how patently weak, the very pretense to embody mass will is rather exceptional since for the most part fascists dismissed the masses, taking a line more in agreement with Nietzsche:
The masses seem to me to deserve notice in three aspects only: first as faded copies of great men produced on poor paper with worn-out plates, then as a force of resistance to great men, finally as instruments in the hands of great men; for the rest, let the Devil and statistics take them!
(Nietzsche 1997: 113)
Why, it might be asked, should Gentile be different? Not, certainly, in the substance of his political position; shorn of his papier-mâché populism Gentile, like all fascists, sees in the masses only a force of resistance to great men or their instrument. The answer may lie in Gentile’s roots in right-wing Hegelianism. For Hegel, unlike Nietzsche, the great men of history were indeed, whether they realized it or not, envoys of the masses. Their very greatness depended on the extent to which they were seen to embody and facilitate historical tendencies and necessities far exceeding their own conscious and often petty, motivations. (See, for example, Hegel 1984: 52, 63, 76.) So Gentile’s contradictory stance may be traced back to his tortuous effort to absorb a Hegelian concept within a framework which is in its essence Nietzschean. It should be noted that Nietzsche’s concept of the masses which we have quoted, from On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, was part of a fierce polemic against the Hegelian view of history. And given that, in general, Nietzsche’s impact on fascism was enormous (as will be observed on many occasions throughout the book) while Hegel remained peripheral—in truth, the German dialectician was in many cases ardently opposed by fascists—it is understandable why such positions as Gentile’s remained atypical within the fascist discourse. Another figure displaying a somewhat similar predicament of trying to subsume Hegelianism under Nietzscheanism was Alfredo Oriani, the Italian thinker who died before the First World War, who was hugely admired by the fascists, especially by Mussolini, who even edited his collected works. In Oriani, too, extravagant aristocratism and vitalism in the spirit of Nietzsche—whom he valued as “possibly the greatest poet of philosophy” (Oriani 1924: 284)—are punctured by conflicting moments of more popular sentiment, owing to his profound admiration for Hegel, whom he referred to as “the greatest philosopher in history” (250). And thus we can find in his work typically proto-fascist protestations against “the ascent and tyranny of the plebs” and of the masses (331), alongside an endorsement, infinitely less typical of the fascist worldview, of the plebs, even to the point of denying the right of putative “overmen” to “believe themselves distinct from the mass” (284).
The fact should be emphasized that fending off mass society was for the fascists by no means a simple restoration of the status quo ante. They were aware of the fact that merely traditionalist or conservative remedies in general no longer apply to modern conditions, and adopted radical and militant positions far exceeding conservative politics. In a momentous departure from 19th-century conservatism, the fascists embraced rather than curbed nationalism, indeed they drove nationalism to its limits. This led many commentators to perceive fascism as keenly practicing “mass politics.” Historians correctly identified the effort to “nationalize the masses” at the very core of fascism (for example, Mosse 1991; Gentile 2002: 161–164). There can be no doubt that the stubborn reluctance of the masses to be incorporated into the bourgeois nation and their frequent adherence to autonomous and sometimes antagonistic projects of class politics and international solidarity, gave fascism one of its strongest rationales for taking over the state and displacing the old, and presumably ineffectual, political elite. This was most obvious in the latecomer nations Italy and Germany, whose elites and middle classes were exasperated by the popular lack of enthusiasm for the projects of national renewal. As the prominent Italian fascist Dino Grandi (1985: 26) speculated, had Italian socialists
in 1914 agreed to take part in the First World War, thereby definitively inserting themselves in the history of our risorgimento and automatically resolving the dramatic problem of the insertion of the popular masses into the unified state, which was formed without the peasant and the Catholic masses, […] fascism would not have emerged as a rebellion of the youth that had fought the war and that could not accept that it should be blasphemed by Italian Marxism.
Yet the whole point of “nationalizing the masses” was that they shall cease to be masses and become, at long last, a nation. “Totalitarian fascism,” writes historian Emilio Gentile, approximating the heart of the matter, “maintained that the organization and the control of the masses were the conditions for transforming their character, their mentality, their behavior, thereby producing the active adherence to fascism” (Gentile 2002: 162; emphasis added). In other words, the masses as they actually were before such grand transformation, enormous pedagogic act, were of no use at all to the fascists; they had to be totally re-educated to become something other than they had hitherto been, redirected onto wholly new tracks. The “integral and totalitarian” education of the masses, affirmed the Popolo d’Italia on December 15, 1929, constitutes “the central problem, is one and the same with the political problem of fascism” (In Gentile 2002: 161). That is why fascists regularly promoted other collective entities against the masses, variously substituting a given X—perceived as legitimate and positive—for the anathematized “mass.” In 1933, criticizing 19th-century Bonapartism, the Nazi author Franz Kemper (1933: 13) thus defined the purpose of modern politics: “Bonapartism failed because it lacked a true élite principle. The revolting masses were not structured into a people. The great and only political task since the dissolution of the unity of the medieval world has remained unaccomplished.” As editor, he revealingly chose to add the words Mass or People to the original title of a book written in 1852, thereby packing into a formula the National Socialist political imperative. Another Nazi politician, Count Ernst Reventlow, concluded his 1930 treatise, German Socialism, with the following sentences:
The Germans, who have been degraded by Marxism into a “mass,” German socialism must not, nor does it want to, lead by way of panem et circenses, appealing to the lower drives. Germans want to obey freely, out of a conviction independently arrived at. They want even more, and they are entitled to more, their longing and their abilities go farther still, much farther. And thus will the Germans, internally disunited, confused and alienated, find their way to a people.
(Reventlow 1933: 312)
In 1925, the German nationalist Max Delmar likewise contrasted the values of “the mass” with those of a superior collective entity, in this case “the race”:
(Delmar 1925: 143, 78)5
José Antonio, similarly, was guided by the assumption that the mass is inferior to the people. He inveighed (1976: 538; emphasis added) against those revolutionary leaders who “believe in the innate capacity of the people—considered inorganically as a mass—to find its own way.” Genuine leaders, he was convinced, are only those who are able to “resist and discipline” the mass (539). “The masses,” he similarly complained (545), “always consider what their chiefs do to be inadequate: they always consider themselves betrayed. […] Paradoxically, those traitors to the masses are the only loyal and effective servants of the people’s destiny.” And the Spanish fascist sympathizer, the author Francisco Camba, clearly differentiated between “the people” (pueblo) and “the rabble” (chusma): “Is the people, perchance, the rabble?” he asked, and provided the answer: “This is not the people. The people are the professional man, the decent worker, the decent woman” (In Puértolas 2008: 512).
As indicated by these examples, the likes of which could be multiplied many times over, the masses qua masses were not something about which the fascists found anything positive. Taking a people, a race, or a nation, and re-educating them to become a mass, was for the fascists a scandalous prospect, a political suicide. It was the very reverse of genuine and valuable politics; this was precisely what the nemeses of fascism, Marxism and liberalism, had been doing all along, Marxism forcefully, consciously and deliberately,6 liberalism weakly, reluctantly and faintheartedly. That is why seeing mass society as the goal of fascist politics is a complete misconstruction; mass society represented everything that fascism aimed to move away from, to transform and overcome.
“Socialism,” “revolution” and “the worker” were terms which had direct political implications. It was important for the fascists to appropriate these concepts in order to deliver a direct blow to their enemy, and in order to repel the charges that they were, in truth, a bourgeois, pro-capitalist force. To admit, for example, enmity for the workers would have been as good as admitting, to oneself as well, the class character of the movement, to say nothing of the fact that without workers no nation can hope to “reawaken” or to speed up its rearmament plans. But “the masses,” not being a directly political concept, provided a semantic field relatively free from political obligations, where the fascists could uninhibitedly express their real contempt and loathing at those same “workers” they otherwise pretended to respect or admire. Here their elemental elitism could freely vent itself, and they could bemoan “mediocrity,” the “power of numbers” or the loss of the individual’s value. In that respect, the concept of “the masses” gains a special importance from a historical point of view in providing access to the fascist political unconscious, as it were, exposing the real social character of the movement.
This paradoxical situation, whereby fascism is linked to the masses, is all the more glaring in view of the fact that in the last three decades or so historians have increasingly agreed on the need to take fascist ideology seriously and analyze it at face value in order to gain a clearer understating of what this political phenomenon was all about. This approach was prescribed as an antidote to the traditional left-wing perspectives, especially Marxist leaning, that have supposedly imposed a narrow, class-oriented way of looking at fascism. Thus, in 1996, George Mosse observed with gratification that the
study of fascism is slowly emerging from the period when this movement was almost solely discussed from the point of view of socialist theory, anti-fascism, or parliamentary government—measured by the standard of other ideologies—to a time when we can take the measure of fascism on its own terms, investigating its self-representation, and attempt to grasp it from the inside out.
(Mosse 1996: 245)
Even more explicit in his polemic against Marxist historiography was the sociologist Michael Mann (2004: 21), who argued that “by centering on ‘social base’ and ‘objective functions,’ most class theorists obviously ignore fascists’ own beliefs. They view fascism ‘from outside,’ from a perspective that made little sense to fascists, who rebutted class theories as they did all ‘materialism.’”7 In practice, this has meant that fascist avowals of being a force above class interest, fostering national reconciliation independently of both the capitalists and the working class, and even breaking down old social barriers and performing a true social revolution, have all been upgraded: no longer dismissed as so much rhetorical humbug, as was the habit of “class theorists,” they are now widely accepted as bona fide declarations. The upshot of this theoretical reorientation is that fascism has been rewritten as a force significantly informed by egalitarianism and populism, if not outright socialism of a national, non-Marxist variant. The former view of fascism as a dictatorship against the majority of the people has become something of a minority position.8
This methodological tenet, however, has so far remained largely inoperative when it comes to addressing the relationship of fascism to the masses. Blatantly disregarding the fascists’ own avowals and “self-representation,” this relationship is still widely seen as one of harmony, even symbiosis. When fascists claim that they endorse the people, this is taken literally; when they scream to high heaven that they abhor the masses, they are mostly ignored.
This inconsistent reading of fascist ideology is difficult to justify. In fact, while there are all-too-obvious reasons to be wary of fascist affirmations to being “revolutionary” or “socialist,” there emerges no clear vested interest that might lead us to question the sincerity of the fascists when disparaging the masses. Suppose, just for the sake of discussion, that the fascist is in fact committed to the protection of the socioeconomic élites and to disempowering the workers; at the same time, he is working within a parliamentary framework and striving to gain as many votes as possible among the lower orders, who after all form the bulk of the population. He would then have a very good reason to camouflage this design and vouch instead for his social impartiality, indeed present himself as the champion of “the people.” Yet what good can come of feigning contempt for the masses? Surely, the political advantages, electoral or otherwise, which one might therewith accrue, are negligent. Then again, as already observed, there is also relatively little to lose by speaking one’s mind in that regard. One is not directly offending any single constituency, since few people think of themselves as part of “the mass,” and are therefore not very likely to take offence when it is disparaged. One can thus speak and write more or less candidly. In short, while there is excellent reason to fake populism, there is no good reason to fake elitism. So here, precisely, we have an opportunity to “take fascists at their word” with little qualms.9 Yet curiously, this has seldom been the case.
This study will aim to redress this interpretative imbalance by giving due credit to the fascist enmity to the masses, and will even construe it as a unifying theme, underlying interwar fascism in its different manifestations: social, political, economic and cultural. The emphasis will be on the all-embracing nature of the fascist assault on mass society: while the struggle against working-class organizations, as Marxist historians have rightly emphasized ever since the 1920s, was pivotal in these efforts, fascism cannot be reduced to this single aspect, however vital. Rather, the anti-mass thrust of fascist movements needs to be analyzed also with regards to the sphere of culture and the general ethos of mass society. Hence the importance of interpreting fascism as an effort to unseat what Nietzsche has scornfully termed “The Last Humans” from their allegedly underserved and unnatural position of social supremacy. In an important way, fascism can be seen as a counter-hegemonic movement, in the sense that its ideologists and militants regarded the masses as the hegemon in modern society and culture. If the fundamental feature of the modern age was “the revolt of the masses,” as Ortega famously argued, then fascism was a counter-revolt meant to force the masses to resume their subordinate position. The following words, used in 1931 by Ortega’s disciple, José Antonio, to pay homage to his recently deceased father, the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, attest to this insurgence against the masses:
He did not flatter the lobbies in Palace, where he was defeated by the courtiers, nor, which is even more valuable, did he flatter the masses in revolt, who are today stronger than kings and therefore more demanding of praise.
(Primo de Rivera 1976: 94)
The comprehensive nature of the fascist opposition to the mass explains why fascism rejected mass power not only qua violent and insurrectionary, but also in its more peaceful and democratic manifestations. The aim was therefore both to impede social revolution, as defined by Marx, and to undermine what Norbert Elias referred to as “the civilizing process”: indeed, it is useful to de-dichotomize these notions and see them not as distinct options but as moments of a single process: evolution can be quite revolutionary and socially destabilizing in its effects, while Marx’s revolution can be conceived as a dramatic intervention meant less to create a new society ex nihilo as much as to activate processes and actualize potentialities that are very much present, no matter how dormant and hampered, in society as it already is. The fascist bid to reverse the civilizing process will be elucidated via an analysis of the fascist opposition to, and domestication of, mass culture and mass consumerism, to the perceived “effeminacy” perverting Western patriarchy—the association of the masses with femininity is of central importance here—and to “Americanism.” Indeed, even our understanding of one of the most insidious and inscrutable aspects of fascism, National Socialist antisemitism, can profit from an exploration of the ways “the Jew” was cast, in the Nazi imaginary, in the role of the agent par excellence of mass empowerment, both as a leader of revolutionary movements and as a promoter of social and cultural egalitarianism.
The renewed attention to the concept of the masses will in that way, it is hoped, contribute to a broad and integrative understanding of the nature of European fascism. It will shed light on many issues which have divided historians and political scientists so far, for example the question of whether fascism was “left or right,”10 how to explain the specific form of extreme nationalism characterizing fascism,11 or the debate between the historians focusing on fascist practice and those seeing fascism above all in ideological terms.12 It will also bear on an issue which has often accompanied the research of fascism: the imperative, whether implied or explicitly stated, of “never again,” involving the best way to impede the reoccurrence of fascism. Liberal strategy regularly revolves precisely around the conviction that anti-fascism must entail curbing and diluting as much as possible the political influence of the mass, seen as an irascible force, threatening to undermine liberal democracy, either acting on its own impulses or being goaded by reckless demagogues into a frenzy of destruction. Given the presumed “affinity between democracy and dictatorship,” the best recipe is to ensure that liberal democracy stays just that, liberal, keeping the mass beast contented, perhaps, but never allowing it to roam free around the social arena. Much of left-wing theory echoes these concerns in its critique of the culture industry and of mass consumerism, understood as forms of political indoctrination, mind-numbing, and pacification. Mass society is seen as the hotbed of fascism, promoting its growth in ways which are both passive and aggressive. Here, too, therefore, although from a somewhat different vantage point, the challenge is seen as one of overcoming massification. Since Nietzsche’s ideas have strongly influenced the left, as well, The Last Humans are de facto resisted by a common front of “radicals” and “reactionaries,” although each group has a very different goal in mind: the former would like to combat fascism, the latter to promote it.
If, however, the hypothesis of this book is correct, and fascism is better conceived as an anti-mass movement, the standard political diagnosis must also be reversed. The best way to preempt fascism, seen thus, is not to restrain massification but to unleash it, to create a society which is truly, and for the first time, governed by the masses. Whereas liberals, and in truth many radicals, too, embrace paternalism as their remedy, the alternative is seeing the masses as a solution, not a menace. Looking at interwar fascism tells us, as few would doubt, something important about modern society and history. Yet fascism was, and remains, not simply an indication of the failures of that society and the dangers inherent in it—although it is clearly also that. It equally attests, in spite of itself, to the strengths and to the values of mass society. If indeed the final nemesis of fascism was “mass-man,” then it is a good idea to comprehend this human specimen more precisely and see it under a new light. And, perhaps, a new understanding of The Last Humans will drive home the need to offer them succor in their struggles to come into their own and complete their evolutionary-revolutionary project.
To many readers this might seem like a strange proposition, at a time when left-wing discourse is dominated by critiques of consumerism, disdainful scrutinies of the brutalities and inanities of mass culture, and anxieties concerning the recrudescence of right-wing populisms across the Western world. Why, it may be objected, should we endorse the mass, rather than realize that the goal is precisely to (re-)transform the masses into a class? Was not this unaccomplished task at the very heart of 19th- and 20th-century radicalism? Against this study’s argument, a counter-case could be made that if the goal of the right was to transform the mass into a nation, people or ethnic group, the left wanted to displace it in favor of a superior X of its own: i.e. “class.” Hence the mass cannot provide a particularly stable anchor for emancipatory politics. Yet such an argument would overlook the crucial differences between the way the radical left has approached the masses and that of the right. To begin with, the concept of the masses was never anathematized by the left to the same extent and degree as happened on the right. Far from being seen as the very enemy which needs to be taken down, it was often regarded favorably, as an ally of egalitarian politics, indeed as its subject. For illustration sake, the fact could be mentioned that in Italy at the start of the 20th-century the progressive writer Paolo Valera founded a journal called La Folla [The Crowd], where radical socialist positions were voiced, attacking chauvinism, monarchism and imperialism and defending the class struggle. At roughly the same time radical American socialists published a journal called The Masses (1911–17) subsequently called The New Masses (1926–48). (See Fishbein 1982; O’Neill 1966.) It is true that for other socialists the masses was a more ambiguous concept, and that many insisted, as they continue to do, on the need to move from mass to class. Yet while this claim formally resembles the desire on the right to supplant the mass with something better, there were substantial differences between the two positions. On the left, class was mostly conceived not as the antithesis of mass, let alone the latter’s dispossession or destruction; on the very contrary, the class was regarded as an upgraded mass, a mass not disarmed but precisely armed, politically, ideologically, culturally, in some cases even armed in a literal sense. The class was the mass fulfilling its inherent potential, maturing, empowering itself. And the emphasis indeed was on self-empowerment. As Marx famously put it, a class was a mass for itself:
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.
(Marx 2010: 159–160)
The class is thus an organized, a potentiated mass. And in stark contrast to fascism it was seen as its own liberator, acting on its own initiative. To the strictly limited extent that the fascists could see any redeeming quality about the masses, it was in their ability to serve as instruments in the hands of great men. The masses thus represented in the very best of cases a passive raw material, “mass” in the sense of pliant matter, to be shaped at will by politician-artists: this ambition of fascist leaders to defend great art, indeed to be artists—a recurrent claim that will be discussed in Chapter 4—derived principally from their view of the masses as passive. Nothing similar can be found on the left. Even the concept of the avant-garde, important in certain forms of radical left-wing politics, was conceived in terms of fulfilling a necessary function, of showing the masses the way and pushing them in what was regarded the right direction rather than shaping them against their will, let alone against their interests.
But there might be another, and even more important difference, between the left and the right in their respective approaches to “the masses.” Surely, the fact that the left could use terms such as la folla positively, cannot be explained solely on account of the potential attributed to the masses to become something else; one does not treat a precondition as admiringly as that, one does not celebrate it. Rather, something valuable was identified about the masses themselves. In the fascist variant, the people, the race, the nation and so on, were not just desired stations, but represented the final destiny, the last horizon, beyond which there was nothing. For socialists by comparison, the class was emphatically not such an end. Their dream was in fact that of moving onto the classless society. And that implies a return, albeit by way of a Hegelian circle of sublation, to the masses. “Progress,” as Hegel (1984: 149) argued, “is not an indeterminate advance ad infinitum, for it has a definite aim—namely that of returning upon itself.” And this was the reason that the putative realm of The Last Humans, of a mass society for itself, gave cause to such profound anxieties on the fascist camp, on account of its promise to transcend classes. “Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden,” shuddered Zarathustra, giving voice to widespread upper-class’ fears. “Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden.” The fascists, in truth, were the ones adhering to class as a rigid, insurmountable historical reality, and dreading its abolition. They wanted class to stay, and the mass to remain at bay. And precisely on that account the mass was seized upon by radicals, as programmatically stated by Paolo Valera in the first issue of La folla:
The title is our enterprise. Everybody understands that we are of the CROWD, for the crowd, with the crowd […]. With the human sense that is in us and with the theories that emanate out of life, we enter the stockade of the CLASS STRUGGLE to occupy our place as combatants and to affirm the physical and intellectual superiority of the crowd that yearns for the abolition of rich and poor.
(In Rainero 1983: 59)
Here we see how the celebration of the condition of being masses, is at one and the same time an enterprise, a striving towards a new condition, towards becoming a mass. And inasmuch as fascism was a refutation of that utopia, it unwittingly underscores it. Rather than simply a dispiriting tale of human wickedness and the vacuity of progress and of civilization, there is folded in fascism a surprisingly encouraging lesson, obscured by the liberal-radical tale of mass hysteria. And because it diagnosed The Last Humans as the most normal and familiar human beings, fascism indicates that utopia might in fact be much more realizable, at any rate much closer at hand, than the tales of apocalypse and modern hopelessness suggest. From time immemorial people have dreamt of an earthly paradise where freedom, equality, joy and abundance will be found. But it was little more than a dream of an unreachable place, somewhere over the rainbow. And while the upper-classes, from a position of privilege and plenty, were traditionally mindful to scoff at this dream,13 there was never in history, until the 20th-century, a full-blown rebellion against such a vision, a war to forestall Cockaigne or Schlaraffenland. And if that is what fascism signified in its effort to subdue mass society, then the latter emerges as harboring a utopia which is no longer a no-place but an omniplace.
* * *
The first two chapters will deal mainly with the 19th century, exploring mass society as a comprehensive West European phenomenon, integrating closely linked political, social, demographic, economic and cultural dimensions. Subsequently, the response to these developments on the part of the elites and some of their leading spokespeople, especially Friedrich Nietzsche given his later resonance throughout the Western world, will be discussed. The remaining chapters will turn to the 20th-century and focus on fascism, especially in its birthplace, Italy, and in Germany. It will be shown how fascism continued and exacerbated the concerns of the previous century, and signified an effort to forcefully repel the perceived encroachment of the masses on all fronts: political and economic (as will be discussed in Chapter 3), as well as social and cultural (Chapter 4, dealing with fascism and mass culture and Chapter 5, whose focus is on the fascist approach to mass consumption). The concluding chapters will examine two faces of fascism which at first blush do not closely correlate with its social position, yet in truth also form central pieces of the anti-mass puzzle: the fascist attitude to gender issues, and the fascist—particularly National Socialist—hatred of Jews. In the Epilogue, the historical problem of left-wing Nietzscheanism—a problem both in that it seems to fly in the face of this study’s main contention, and on account of its abiding political import—will be revisited.
1Here, and throughout the book, I use the term “Last Human,” consulting the original German, for two main reasons: The Last Humans are usually rendered “the Last Men” in English, yet this is problematic, since, first, the German term is the gender-neutral Mensch, encompassing both men and women. Second, and more importantly, in view of their alleged deterioration and loss of vigor, the Last Humans—as Nietzsche saw them—are more womanly and effeminate than virile, making the term “men” doubly misleading.
2As reflected in the title of Broch’s uncompleted theoretical work: Massenwahntheorie—theory of mass madness. See Aschheim (1996: 181).
3Both quotes are from the following webpage: http://lesmaterialistes.com/croix-feu-psf
4The “hombre-masa” is a key concept in Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses; for Evola’s use of the concept, see Evola (1995: 350).
5See also the discussion in Theweleit (1978: 89–93). This classic study is in general extremely informative and insightful with regards to the enmity of the German far-right in the interwar period to the masses.
6Consider, among numerous comparable cases, the way the French fascist Georges Valois identified communism with the masses: “To Valois’ mind the communists’ attack on private property was evidence of their nomadic impulse, instinctive to Asian cultures. Thus in fascist imagery the communists are presented as “la horde,” the nomadic restless masses who attack the propertied ‘combatant,’ the farmer rooted in the soil of France” (In Antliff 1997: 158).
7For a fuller critique of the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the methodology that will have us “take fascism seriously,” see Landa (2010: 1–20).
8For a useful critique of this emerging consensus, from a vantage point that refuses to relinquish the older notion that fascism—in this case National Socialism—was a regime based primarily on oppression rather than on consent and fraternity, see Chapters 7 and 8 in Evans (2016).
9“My objectivity,” argued Eugen Weber early on, showing the way to future historians, “consists of taking Fascists and National Socialists at their word, whenever possible” (Weber 1964: 3).
10An issue seminally raised in Sternhell (1996).
11A question associated mainly with Roger Griffin and his many publications, for example, Griffin (1993).
12The latter position represented, for instance, by Mann (2004).
13Consider Hans Sachs’ poem Das Schlaraffenland or Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting of the same title (1567), both of which satirize the popular dream as a paradise of fools, idlers and debauchees.
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