1. In a social climate of intensified social conflict and
growing human casualties, hostility and frustration was easily displaced onto
political institutions and apparently influential minorities like the Jews.
Both the parties and the nation-state were on the defensive. The state was no
longer able to maintain its position above parties and was, increasingly,
pressured to take sides and come between struggling parties. This only
aggravated popular distrust of the status quo. It increasingly became easier
for the disaffected to organise large strata of people outside the party
system. This mass was the completely disillusioned, who believed their
interests no longer defended and who no longer viewed the state as the
impartial symbol of the interests of all (OT262).
2. At this point we can introduce some of the sociological
characters who play a large role in Arendt’s diagnosis of the crisis of
modernity in the Origins of Totalitarianism: these are the bourgeoisie,
the mob and the intellectual elite and the masses. It is worthwhile pointing
out that these are not strictly empirical portraits. Her sociological figures
are ideal types rather than accurate empirical configurations. For instance she
makes no attempt to explore the various graduations of the bourgeoisie or to
differentiate between the bourgeoisies in different European states.
3. Arendt's whole story of 19th century European history is
played out against the background of bourgeois society. The French Revolution
emancipated the bourgeoisie class: it is the representative of new dynamic
expansionary forces. Yet, Arendt has no love for the bourgeoisie. This class is
orientated to private interest and accumulation while its increasing social and
political hegemony had seen the decline of citizenship. In its early phase, the
bourgeoisie had fulfilled an important (albeit still exploitative) socially
productive function. However, transformed into big capital towards the end of
the 19th century seeking profits without production, the bourgeoisie itself
became socially surplus and parasitical (OT150). Imperialist policies in the
late 19th century saw the needs of capital accumulation and class greed take
priority over the real interests of the nation-state with no concern for its
fragile limits. The increasing victory of the bourgeois over the citoyen distorts politics.
4. The social strata Arendt identifies as the "mob"
plays the role of catalyst of extremism within the deteriorating dynamics of
bourgeois society. The mob is in her words "the refuse of all
classes". This strata is an inseparable by-product of bourgeois society.
As we will see Arendt also identifies a deep spiritual identity between the two.
Even large-scale beggary has been endemic throughout the early modern period as
a consequence of the ex-appropriation of the peasantry. However, Arendt draws a
qualitative distinction between these pre-modern victims and the modern
phenomenon of the mob. Unlike the "beggars" and "rabble" of
the past, the mob is not the issue of particular tragic events or changed
governmental policies but a systemic residue of the competitive mechanisms and
resulting social dislocation of bourgeois society. I have already mentioned
that as the bourgeois economy reached the limits of its domestic expansion one
of its products was human surplus in the form of unemployment. The mob is to be
distinguished both from the growing industrial working class (by the fact that
it is neither a single class nor does it work) and the people as a whole
(because its interests are particular and not common). Like Marx's proletariat,
Arendt's mob is social strata outside of bourgeois class society and deprived
of its benefits. The difference is that the mob is not even potentially a class
for itself but, as Arendt says, "the refuse of all classes". This
diverse origin generated the impression that the mob was somehow beyond the
divisions of class society and a more pure representative of the people while
its permanent exclusion from class society provided it with a set of
institutions on which it could vent its frustrations and hatred. They are not
only unemployed but they also constitute a quasi-criminal element in bourgeois
society.
5. This underclass is characterised by an essential
irresponsibility. This is the deeper sense in which the mob is an inseparable
by-product of bourgeois society. Alliance between the bourgeoisie and the mob
is the genesis of every consistently imperialist policy (OT155). The basis of
this alliance is the fact that capitalists (the much-too-rich) need the
political support of the mob (the much-too-poor) in order to pressure the
bourgeois nation-state to support imperialist ventures. At the same time, the
mob view this support opportunistically as a prospect of quick riches or at
least enjoying some of the spoils generated by a wealthy imperialism. But the
affinity between capital and mob is deeper than just a temporary political
alliance. Crises and depressions that precede imperialism embolden the
bourgeoisie to abandon its moral hypocrisy. The original primitive accumulation
of capital was a product of the ex-appropriation of the peasantry. For a long
time this original criminal act was thought merely an isolated "sin"
subsequently superseded by harmony and equilibrium produced by automatic market
mechanisms and reinforced by sound bourgeois morality (OT156). However, what
was really involved was the moral revolution captured in Hobbes’ harrowing
vision of an anti-social, atomised, competitive and egoistic bourgeois man.
This vision now becomes reality. Bourgeois expansion requires new crimes abroad
to feed its inexhaustible appetite. What unites capital and the mob is the
absolute bourgeois principle of self-interest built on a shared priority of
greed. Ultimately the bourgeoisie must acknowledge this kinship and the brutal
"truths" long openly espoused by the mob. It is little wonder that
Arendt finds in the mob a potential backing for a despotism that challenges democracy.
This is the group from which the pan-Germanic and Slavic nationalist movements
and eventually the Nazis will draw their leadership.
6. Another sociological actor in this great historical drama was
the European intellectual elite. It played a vital role in the decline of
morality. Here Arendt speaks with the authority of a participant and a deep
empathy for the spirit of the milieu. A remarkable number of distinguished
intellectuals were sympathizers, fellow travelers and totalitarian party
members. In what consists this attraction of the totalitarian movements for
intellectuals? Clearly the elite shared a structural affinity with the mob.
Both these strata existed on the margins of bourgeois society and were outside
the class and nation-state system of respectability and “good society”. But
more than marginality, the intellectuals also shared the mob's cynicism
regarding the hypocrisy of bourgeois values. They were contemptuous of a
society "wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards
of the bourgeoisie" (OT328). They wanted to see the radical transformation
of a life consumed in competition, bourgeois material comfort, triviality and
fakeness. Arendt recalls that many intellectuals greeted the First World War
joyously as an opportunity for purification and self-sacrifice. For the post
war generation this desire had intensified into a hymn for the total
destruction and ruin of this society. Their enthusiasm was not cured by the
real horrors of the war. Rather this experience was cherished as a prelude to
the collapse of the old bourgeois world and the creation of a new order forged
in death and authentic equality and justice (OT329). War obliterated all
spurious identifications with origins and predetermined functions. Unlike the
early generation of imperialism that had been able to escape into the wider
world of exotic lands, the war generation was drawn to more radical solutions.
Surrounded by social chaos and entrapped in the daily routines of a bourgeois
life without meaning, they were attracted to activism and violence. The
totalitarian movements of the twenties offered an outlet for both in the form
of an activism which escaped the bourgeois world while the passionate
selflessness could be sated in identification with overwhelming historical
forces (OT331) i.e. classes, races
7. The worsening economic and social conditions of Europe in the
inter-war period provided the historico-sociological foundation of the group
Arendt terms the "masses". The late 19th century mob was the first
wave of déclassé individuals stemming from the early crisis of the bourgeois
economy. It is characterised not just by unemployment but also a criminal and
lawless element derived from inverted bourgeois standards. As Arendt explains,
between the wars this déclassé group was swelled by more unemployed, by
refugees and displaced populations of minority nationals, by ex-appropriated
small property owners and former members of the middle and upper classes,
victims of post-war dislocation and inflation. The volume of these causalities
exemplified the complete breakdown of the European class system. These
individuals were torn from former class expectations and found no
representation in a party system based on class interests they no longer shared
and saw increasingly as illusory and fraudulent. For Arendt the clearest
symptom of this collapse was the inability of the parties to recruit new
members from the younger generation and the loss of the support of the great
mass of neutral apolitical individual. This vast social group formerly believed
that the parties existed to protect their interests: now they turn elsewhere
seeking another means of expressing their political opposition and
disillusionment (OT315):
The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering
majorities behind all parties into one great unorganised, structureless mass of
furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension
that the hopes of party members were doomed ... (OT315).
This gives rise to a terrifying new "negative
solidarity": these individuals were no longer held together by class
interests nor any other positive bond at all, only a shared dissatisfaction.
Arendt underlines that this collective dissatisfaction constituted not only a
great potential threat to existing political structures and institutions. Even
more importantly, it becomes the source of real conformism because one of the
most acute experiences of the masses is that of atomisation and loneliness
(OT316).
8. Why does Arendt believe that life in the masses is atomized
and lonely? One of the features of bourgeois life is its aggressive competition
and the orientation of individual away from the duties of the citizen towards
particular interests of private existence and capital accumulation. Remember
Arendt's thesis that class membership had kept the atomising potential of
bourgeois relations in check by providing economic forms of common interest and
solidarity to replace the disappearing community relations of traditional
society. However, with the crisis and final collapse of the class system in the
twenties, a process of intensified social fragmentation asserts itself. Here
Arendt's analysis becomes psychological and speculative. According to her,
bourgeois individualism has an important bearing on the psychology of mass man
in the 20th century. Despite the uniformity of fate of all those individuals
who were victims of the inter-war years of social and economic turmoil, this
did not stop them judging themselves in terms of individual failure and specific
injustice (OT315). The generality of the fate did nothing to alleviate
self-centred bitterness. These individuals had no common interests of an
economic, social or political kind and consequently suffered in isolation.
However, the paradoxical result-- and as you will note Arendt loves to
formulate such paradoxes-- was that this self-centredness ‘went hand in hand
with a decisive weakening of the instinct of self-preservation’ (OT315). Thus,
the phenomenon of surplus, which had been a product of the economic and social
processes of bourgeois society, was now internalised into the very psyche of
the mass individual. Each felt they did not matter and were expendable. This
overriding sense of personal failure registered in the loss of a secure
lifeworld simply destroys the ego. The mass individual loses interest in their
own well-being. This loss of ego strength-- which is also evident in other
theories of the mass psychology of fascism like that of the Frankfurt School's
totally administered society-- manifests itself in a peculiar selflessness. The
individual is willing to fanatically subordinate his/herself to a movement or a
supra-individual task. Yet this selflessness is not the product of individual
idealism but of a radical loss of self-interest; it stems not from individual
decision but from the individual's embeddedness within a movement that is the
manifestation of total conformism (OT307).
9. As we will see, the totalitarian movements are anti-bourgeois
not just because they reject bourgeois individualism but because they supposed
that mass organisation could extinguish individual identity permanently
(OT314). The crux of Arendt's theory is that the extreme individuality of
bourgeois society finally implodes, destroying the ego and leaving the mass
individual a hollow and disorientated vessel especially prone both to
conformist behaviour and to the rigid dogmas of totalitarian ideology. We
cannot conclude from Arendt's analysis that the concept of the masses applies
only to the growing strata of casualties or victims of the processes of
European reconstruction after the First World War. While it certainly includes
them, Arendt primarily wants to give the concept of the masses a political
connotation. Bourgeois society engenders not only the collapse of traditional
communal bonds but also an anti-political disinterest and apathy regarding
public affairs and civic duty. Arendt makes it clear that her notion of the
masses incorporates not just the large numbers of bitter, displaced and
disorientated individuals but also all those who felt themselves outside the
institutions of political representation. She continues:
The term masses applies only where we deal with people who
either because of their sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both,
cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest, into
political parties or municipal governments or professional organisations or
trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of
those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a
party and hardly ever go to the polls (OT311).
10. It is now apparent that the masses are not just the human
refuse of bourgeois society in the phase of its imperialist escapades but even
the great majorities in all the advanced Western countries who may not be
casualties of bourgeois economic and political processes in the ordinary sense
of being unemployed, disenfranchised or stateless. These individuals are
nevertheless "superfluous" in another important sense. Large numbers
and social chaos simply defy effective articulated organisation: the masses
lack collective interests and no longer have any active participatory
relationship to the institutions that shape their own fate. Arendt is not saying
that indifference to public affairs or political neutrality is the
"cause" of totalitarian movements. However, the privatized interest
and public apathy generated by the bourgeois lifeworld makes a decisive
contribution toward the erosion of structures, which underwrite individual
personality. This was the vital precondition for enrolment in the cohorts of
totalitarianism (OT313).
11. The individual of mass society presupposed the conformism
that was a product of the final internal collapse of bourgeois individuality.
For Arendt, the final product of bourgeoisification and the proper
representative of mass society is the "philistine". The philistine
epitomises individual retreat into private self-interest: committed exclusively
to private existence, the "philistine" is primarily a jobholder and
good family man. This singular devotion to career and love ones lead to
complete impotence. In the face of the collapse of his world, all the
philistine can think of is private security. He is willing to sacrifice anything
for it- including belief, honor and dignity (OT338). This exclusive focus on
private life allowed ordinary individuals to ignore the persecution and
political crimes they witnessed without raising a finger. Commitment to career
and duty also allowed the family man to participate in the machinery of the
death camps and mass crime without overt complaint. The exclusive interest in
private security lends the behaviour of the philistine a compliant
predictability making them dependable cogs in the organisation of mass
domination and death. This conformism of mass society marked the final internal
collapse of bourgeois individuality. In Arendt's account of the historical
emergence of the masses there are two elements. Firstly, she outlines the
historical crisis of bourgeois society, its surpluses and casualties.
Simultaneously, she presents a deeper sociological/ philosophical analysis that
stresses the ultimate logic of bourgeois attitudes. The increasing apolitical
attitude and focus on private life. Arendt clearly believed that the impact of
the bourgeois processes of modernity account for both and ultimately produce
the psychology of mass man.
12. Arendt is not the first theorist to warn of the potential
dangers of mass society. What distinguishes her theory is the extent to which
she places atomisation at the heart of mass society. Already in the early19th
century de Tocqueville had draw attention to the atomisation of modern
democratic mass society. For him, one consequence of the combined disappearance
of a feudal social hierarchy and the bourgeois emphasis on the individual was a
homogenisation of lifestyles and weakening of communal ties. But in
Tocqueville's account the emphasis falls on the dangers of an exclusive
preoccupation with "equality" and the social processes of
equalisation. The great threat of mass society is that it will produce a world
of sameness where the lack of social diversity gives rise to the potential
tyranny of the majority. Arendt takes up another theme in Tocqueville. In this
reading the mass individual is not a consequence of growing equality nor of the
lowering of standards that follow from the general spread of education but from
the crisis of extreme bourgeois individualism. This brings about an ego
destroying social atomization that hollows out the individual leaving them
vulnerable to social conformism. As she puts it ”The philistine is a bourgeois
isolated from his own class”(OT338). The ultimate danger remains the same: a
disappearance of individuality and the domination of conformism. However, in
Arendt's historical context of historical crisis and political extremism, it
does not take the form of a relatively ”benign” tyranny of the democratic
masses. It now assumes the far more radical shape of a projects aimed at the destruction
of civilisation and the radical transformation of human nature.
13. Arendt considers loneliness to be paradigmatic condition of
the mass individual. Such loneliness even in the crowd had become an everyday
experience of the ever growing masses (OT478). I want to dwell a little on this
notion of the loneliness of modern mass society. This is a vital link to
Arendt's later thinking. Her account of its historical emergence is only
fragmentary but the main outline is quite clear. Extreme bourgeois individualism
loosens the old communal bonds and turns the individual away from common
interest through competition and a preoccupation with private interest. In the
crisis of the inter-war epoch, these effects were compounded by the further
disorientating consequences of social dislocation--mass unemployment, financial
ruin, homelessness, uprootedness and statelessness. Such compounding produces
intensified feelings of impotence and superfluousness. The result was a
lifeworld of frightening insecurity and accidentality. In this environment the
individual was completely thrown back on himself. They had to psychologically
absorb the impact of this social chaos and feeling of self-responsibility for
their own position. Arendt makes it clear that for many the result was profound
disorientation and loss of ego strength.
14. In her accompanying essay "Ideology and Terror: A New
Form of Government" (1953) which was only added to the second edition of The
Origins of Totalitarianism in 1958, she provides the philosophical
foundations of her account of loneliness. She maintains that ‘human beings need
the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a
man-made pattern of relative consistency (OT352)’. The pre-condition of such a
transformation of human experience from chaos to relative consistency is the
social processes of inter-subjective confirmation of individual experience.
This is the bedrock of the constitution of both the self and common sense. Even
our experience of the sensuously and materially given world presupposes others
who confirm our experience and reinforce our common sense. To the extent that
we are liberated from enclosure in the particularity of our own sense data we
can trust our senses (OT 475). Of course, this is also an argument for the
barrenness of the classical early modern epistemological model. In her model,
social experience as intersubjectivity plays the decisive role in the
confirmation of knowledge and it is not surprising to find that Arendt’s ideas
have found contemporary exponents like Habermas.
15. Arendt maintains that in the inter-war period, a rapidly
increasing number of individuals were deprived of the inter-subjectively
confirmed social existence that reinforced common sense and self-identity. In
enumerating some of the characteristics of the individuals drawn to the
totalitarian movements, Arendt mentions, amongst other things, that the
movements represented "those masses that were no longer willing to live in
any kind of structure, regardless of its nature"(OT398). The mass
personality is characterised by adaptability, conformism and absence of
continuity (OT306). This reflects not flexibility but ego weakness and the
disorientation of lost structure. Social dislocation, homelessness and
alienation from institutional structures of bourgeois politics and the
nation-state had made it impossible for them to be at home in the existing
world. I have already mentioned the fact that the collapse of protective class
walls in this epoch destroyed the idea of common interests constituting the
mass as a multitude of unstructured individual interests. Interest as a
collective force depends upon the existence of stable social bodies that
provide the necessary transition belts between individual and group. They
represent proportionate strengths, facilitate formation of opinions and allow
for the determination of specific goals. Yet precisely these were missing in
the epoch of social dislocation, unemployment and homelessness. For Arendt,
this provides an explanation of one of the most puzzling features of
totalitarianism. She finds its 'radical departure from the strictly utilitarian
concerns of other mainstream political movements to be grounded in the fact
that the masses have drifted away from a concern with mere interests' (OT347).
The masses wanted victory and success but this was a quite abstract desire
without regard to specific common class articulated interests and not expressed
in limited and obtainable goals (OT31O). Allegiance to the leadership was to
the person and not based on any special collective interests (OT350). In
another place Arendt comments that the unconditional loyalty demanded by the
totalitarian movements of its individual members was of a degree only to be
expected of completely isolated individuals who had no other ties and could
only derive their sense of place in the world from the completely contrived and
artificial world of the movement (OT323). (She follows this up by arguing that
such total loyalty is only possible when it is emptied of any concrete content
in terms of aims and goals (OT323). Open-ended, total loyalty corresponded to
the weakened self of the disorientated mass individual who could only find a
substitute self-definition and self-importance from the externally offered
sources of totalitarian ideology like anti-Semitism. Here at least the masses
find a negative point of identification, self-definition and stability (OT356).
In Arendt's eyes what characterises the mass individual is not brutality nor
backwardness but the lack of normal social relationships. (OT317). The psychic
impact of lack of stability, ego weakness, constant insecurity and distrust of
all existing political and social structures is evident in the masses’
disbelief in anything visible and their pronounced preference for the
mysterious. Although totalitarian propaganda so often clashed with common
sense, this was not as politically debilitating for the movements as might at
first appear. The language of mystery and prophecy appeals to the masses as it
corresponds to their loss of place and home and their radical preparedness to
be integrated by the forces of fate and supra-individual historical laws. The
atomisation of the masses not only undermined the processes of collective
confirmation which enhance common sense but it also created the disposition to
believe in mysteriousness which was the chief criterion of totalitarian
propaganda (OT351). The masses cannot believe in the fortuitous character of
reality and are inclined to look for hidden and omnipotent forces. This makes
them especially gullible and susceptible to the simplistic totalitarian
ideologies that expound theories of worldwide conspiracies of race or class or
the inexorable "laws of history". What is convincing in this vision
is its very systematicity, consistency and constant repetition (OT351). Having
been displaced from the real but chaotic bourgeois lifeworld of this period,
the mass individual could only find the sort of security and certainty he/she
sought in a simplistic and rigid ideology and the movement which propagated
it).
16. To reinforce atomisation as the explanatory key to the
modern masses and to emphasize the depth which it had attained in their case
Arendt draws a distinction between isolation and loneliness. The former is a
condition long known in the history of tyranny that follows from the denial of
public space. The individual that suffers such a severance of political contact
is excluded from participation in all public forums. Arendt remarks that this
result in feelings of frustration and impotence but it does not destroy all
human capacities. Loneliness, on the other hand, represents a new pitch of
desperation where isolation has also invaded the private sphere. The capacities
for experience, fabrication and thought which survived political tyranny in
tact are now under threat as loneliness concerns life as a whole and amounts to
the experience of not belonging to the world at all (OT474). Of course the
complete devastation of private life only reached its culmination in the prison
and death camps of the totalitarian regimes, There the experience of not
belonging to the world at all was first played out figuratively in a range of
personal humiliations and degradations being realised also literally. However,
Arendt's most startling conviction is this new intensity of modern alienation
has its sources in the far less obvious routines of everyday bourgeois
experience and the radical atomisation to be found there. I have already
mentioned Arendt's emphatic critique of atomising competition in bourgeois
society. At this point she deepens this critique by concentrating on what she
views as the dominant form of activity in this society:
In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as a human
artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity...is
destroyed, isolation becomes unbearable. This can happen in a world whose chief
values are dictated by labor, that is where all human activities have been
transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only the sheer effort to labor
which is the effort to keep alive is left and the relationship with the world
as a human artifice is broken. Isolated man who lost his place in the political
realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer
recognised as homo faber but treated as an animal
laborans whose necessary "metabolism with nature" is of concern
to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness.....(OT475).
