Modern European Intellectual History

1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 14 Mass Psychology and the Leadership Principle

2. outline • intro • crowd theory and the origins of social psychology • Freud and collective psychology • Carl Schmitt and the nation • Thomas Mann, “Mario and the Magician” • masochism and the leader

3. Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) • The Psychology of the Crowd (1895) • Cf. Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904)

4. crowds have a mind of their own • “a sort of collective mind which makes [the members of a group] feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.” (22-3). • “the law of the mental unity of crowds” (24) • In a mass, the individual becomes a “barbarian —a creature acting by instinct.” (27-8). “Like a savage, the crowd will not admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire” (33). • “The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life” (28). • “Crowds are to some extent in the position of the sleeper whose reason, suspended for the time being, allows the arousing in his mind of images of extreme intensity which would quickly be dissipated could they be submitted to the action of reflection” (60). • The crowd “thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first.” (36).

5. heredity and irrationality • “The unconscious substratum [was] created in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race.” (24). • “As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together, whether they be animals or men, they place themselves under the authority of a chief” (117). • “The individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself … in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer” (31). • Crowds show “worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted” (65, 67).

6. Freud’s answer • Freud, “Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921) • “The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely.” “[I]t seems difficult to attribute to the factor of number a significance so great as to make it capable by itself of arousing in our mental life a new instinct that is otherwise not brought into play” (628). • “It is noticeable that writers who concern themselves with explaining the characteristics and reactions of the adult have devoted much more attention to the primaeval period which is comprised in the life of the individual’s ancestors ... than to the other primaeval period, which falls within the lifetime of the individual himself — that is, childhood.” • Le Bon: “It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood requisite for the triumph of very belief” (37). • “a very lofty morality” (56) • “Whatever force it may reserve for us, we shall have to submit to it” (17).

7. the democratic critique of liberal parliamentarism • Carl Schmitt (1888-1985)

8. Schmitt’s critique • The Contemporary Crisis of Parliamentarism (1926) • “Today, parliament itself appears a gigantic antechamber in front of the bureaus of committees of invisible rulers” (334). • “Democracy requires therefore first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity” (335). • The Concept of the Political (1927) • Jünger: “Today the level of a mind is determined by its relationship to armament. You have made an unusual military-technical discovery: a mine which silently explodes. As if through magic one sees the ruins crumbling; and the destruction has already occurred before it has become audible.” • Italy and the USSR as “certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic.”

9. Schmitt’s trajectory • “state of emergency” • decisionism • Weimar Constitution, Art. 48: “If public safety and order in Germany are materially disturbed or endangered, the President may take the necessary measures to restore public safety and order, and, if necessary, to intervene with the help of the armed forces. To this end he may temporarily suspend, in whole or in part, the fundamental rights established in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153.” • Schmitt, “The Protector of the Constitution” (1929) • the Röhm purge, June 30, 1934, a.k.a. “The Night of the Long Knives” • Schmitt, “The Leader [Führer] Protects the Law” (1934) • Führerprinzip (leadership principle)

10. Mann redux • “Mario and the Magician” (1929): return to south • “That national cement, the mother tongue, is paid symbolic honours down here, and there is something blithely symbolical in the pleasure people take in their respect for its forms and phonetics” (202). • “The suffering, receptive, performing part was now his, the will that he had before imposed on others was shut out, he acted in obedience to a voiceless common will which was in the air. But he made it perfectly clear that it all came to the same thing. The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

11. the relation between authority and freedom • “Freedom exists, and the will exists, but freedom of the will does not exist, for a will that aims at its own freedom aims at the unknown” (209). “There was involved here that recoil of the will upon itself which paralyzes choice — as our tyrant had previously explained” (215). • “the burden of voluntary choice” (217) • “a drunken abdication of the critical spirit” (217) • “It looked unmistakably like enjoyment” (217).