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The book 'Fascism and the Masses' by Ishay Landa challenges the conventional view of fascism as a mass movement, arguing instead that it was a reaction against mass politics and society. Landa posits that fascism represented an elite effort to de-massify society and suppress the lower classes, rather than a mere expression of mass sentiment. The study focuses on Italian fascism and German National Socialism, providing a critical analysis of how these movements resisted the civilizing process and the social individual.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
3 views90 pages

Fascism and The Masses First Published Edition Ishay Landa 2025 Download Now

The book 'Fascism and the Masses' by Ishay Landa challenges the conventional view of fascism as a mass movement, arguing instead that it was a reaction against mass politics and society. Landa posits that fascism represented an elite effort to de-massify society and suppress the lower classes, rather than a mere expression of mass sentiment. The study focuses on Italian fascism and German National Socialism, providing a critical analysis of how these movements resisted the civilizing process and the social individual.

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Fascism and the Masses

Highlighting the “mass” nature of interwar European fascism has long


become commonplace. Throughout the years, numerous critics have
construed fascism as a phenomenon of mass society, perhaps the ultimate
expression of mass politics. This study deconstructs this long-standing
perception. It argues that the entwining of fascism with the masses is a
remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which understood and
presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics, and
indeed of mass society and mass culture more broadly conceived. Thus,
rather than “massifying” society, fascism was the culmination of a long effort
on the part of the élites and the middle classes to de-massify it. The
perennially menacing mass—seen as plebeian and insubordinate—was to be
drilled into submission, replaced by supposedly superior collective entities,
such as the nation, the race, or the people. Focusing on Italian fascism and
German National Socialism, but consulting fascist movements and
individuals elsewhere in interwar Europe, the book incisively shows how
fascism is best understood as ferociously resisting what Elias referred to as
“the civilizing process” and what Marx termed “the social individual.”
Fascism, notably, was a revolt against what Nietzsche described as the
peaceful, middling and egalitarian “Last Humans.”

Ishay Landa is Senior Lecturer of History at the Israeli Open University.


Routledge Studies in Cultural History
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Edited by Tyge Krogh, Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Claus Bundgård
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56 Fascism and the Masses


The Revolt Against the Last Humans, 1848–1945
Ishay Landa
Fascism and the Masses
The Revolt Against the Last Humans,
1848–1945

Ishay Landa
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Taylor & Francis


The right of Ishay Landa to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-8153-8585-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-17999-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Maria, Judith and Nomi
Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Masses and the Fascist Political Unconscious

1 The Rise of the Last Human I: The Formation of Mass Society

2 The Rise of the Last Human II: The Opposition to Mass Society

3 Fascism and Mass Politics

4 Fascism and Mass Society I: Cultural Questions

5 Fascism and Mass Society II: Consumption, Leisure, Americanism

6 The Wandering Womb: Fascism and Gender

7 The Wandering Jew: National Socialism and Antisemitism

8 Epilogue: Nietzsche, the Left and the Last Humans


Index
Figures

1.1 The growth in Europe’s population (not including Russia), in town and
country (1770–1980)
2.1 Liberty Leading the People. Eugène Delacroix [Public domain], via
Wikimedia Commons
3.1 “Compulsory Spontaneous Demonstration”
3.2 Population deterioration due to insufficient propagation of the valuable
families
3.3 Left illustration (Helmut 1939: 29): “The menace of the under-man.”
3.4 Right Illustration (Helmut 1939: 25): “Number of children according to
profession.”
4.1 Katia Mann’s childhood home, Pringsheim Palace in Munich
4.2 Gino Boccasile, propaganda poster
6.1 “Decline in matrimonial fertility”
6.2 The Jazz Singer (1)
6.3 The Jazz Singer (2)
7.1 “I’ve settled the fate of Jews—And of Germans”
7.2 “Entartete Musik”
Tables

1.1 Voting percentage for the German Social-Democratic Party (SDAP)


between 1871–1912, in elections to the Reichstag
2.1 The political-demographic vicious cycle
3.1 New graduates in technical professions
3.2 National parliamentary elections, 1919–33
Acknowledgments

In the long process of writing this book, numerous people were greatly
helpful to me.
For their various incisive suggestions, kind encouragements and useful
critiques, I wish to express deep gratitude to my esteemed colleagues, Michal
Aharony, Stuart Cohen, Guy Elgat, Yuval Eylon, Donny Gluckstein, Nicolás
González Varela, Daniel Gutwein, Zohar Kohavi, Guy Miron, Inbal Ofer, Iris
Shagrir, Alberto Spektorowski, Bernhard H.F. Taureck and Shulamit Volkov. I
thank Harrison Fluss, who read the entire manuscript and made many
helpful suggestions. I am very grateful to Max Novick of Routledge for his
interest in this project and support in having it published. I am especially
obliged to Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman, whose generous, wise and abiding
assistance and encouragement were invaluable.
Very special thanks to Luis, my Argentinean Yiddishe tate, for help
beyond measure. As I was writing this book, I often felt that whatever value
this study may hope to possess for understanding the horror of fascism,
derives from the lessons he has given me all these years, in his infinitely
kind and humane way.
Ishay Landa
Summer 2017
Introduction
The Masses and the Fascist Political
Unconscious

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.

Fascism as a “Mass Beast”: An Abiding Trope


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).

Taming the Mass Beast—How Fascists Saw Things


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).
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