Modern European Intellectual History

1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 10 Politics in a New Key

2. democracy against progress • Virginia Woolf: “On or about December 1910, human nature changed.” --Virginia Woolf…” • rise of democracy and fate of liberalism

3. 1. elite theories • Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) • The Ruling Class (1892) • Machiavelli: “In any city whatsoever, in whatsoever manner organized, never do more than forty or fifty persons attain positions of command.” • “It was commonly believed that once legal inequalities were destroyed, the moral and intellectual level of all social classes could be definitely raised and they would all become equally capable of managing public affairs. … But a slow erosion of optimistic conceptions of human nature has occurred.” • “The fact that the natural adversaries of democracy are obliged to pay official homage to it prevents them from openly declaring themselves followers of theories that explicitly deny the possibility of democratic government as commonly understood.” • “the political formula”

4. elite theories, cont’d • Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923): the theory of circulating elites • Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902) • Robert(o) Michels (1876-1936) • Political Parties (1911)

5. Michels on democracy • iron law of oligarchy • technical, mechanical, administrative and organizational needs for party hierarchy • the phenomenon of bureaucracy • the masses are incompetent • the leaders have, or can draw on, necessary expertise • the mass feels a need for leadership • the mass venerates the leaders • the party is identified with the leader 

6. Michels, cont’d • “The apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has as its counterpart in the leaders a natural greed for power. Thus the development of the democratic oligarchy is accelerated by the general characteristics of human nature. What was initiated by the need for organization, administration, and strategy is completed by psychological determinism.” • “The social revolution would not effect any real modification… The socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents’ triumph. We are tempted to speak of this process as a tragicomedy in which the masses are content to devote all their energies to effecting a change of masters. All that is left for workers is the honor of participating in government recruiting.”

7. 2. democracy and the rise of populism • Austrian politics: “he laboratory of destruction” • Georg von Schönerer (1842-1921) • Pan-German League • Karl Lueger (1844-1910) • Christian Social Party • 1895: initial electoral victory • 1897: emperor relents

8. British currents • Fabian socialism, G.B. Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells • Ramsay MacDonald (1900): “The faith that the voice of the people is the voice of God is now about thirty years out of date. Those who held it assumed that an enfranchised democracy would be wide awake to every political issue, would take a constant and continual interest in matters of government, would form opinions which, by reason of the mass holding them, would be best for the nation, would steadily uphold humanity as apart from caste ideals, and would speak and move in such a way that their wishes, whatever their quality, would be easily known … [Recent history] goes to show that democracy took infinitely more interest in getting the vote that they have taken in using it, that parties have largely abandoned political principles for which they won majorities by hard work and educational propaganda, and have drifted more and more into the hands and state of mind of the skilled election agent whose business is not to build and maintain the fabric of a party, but to wild elections, that democratic opinion is neither clear nor determined, and that manhood suffrage does not guard the country against some of the most degrading forms of class ascendancy.”

9. Graham Wallas (1858-1932) • Human Nature in Politics (1908) • “Impulse has an evolutionary history of its own earlier than the history of those intellectual processes by which it is often directed and modified.” • “Because one of the effects of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of sensations… But any textbook of psychology will explain why [logic] errs if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for the purpose of stimulating us to action. • “non-rational inference” • “The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of sub-conscious non-rational inference.” • “an organized system of mental suggestion”

11. “Zionism and the fin-de-siècle” • Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1860-1904) • Max Nordau (1849-1923) • Degeneration (1892)

12. regenerated Jews • “It is the sacred duty of all healthy and moral men to take part in the work of protecting and saving those who are not already too deeply diseased. Only by each individual doing his duty will it be possible to dam up with invading mental malady. • “muscle Jews” • Muscle Jews “once existed, but for long, all too long, we have engaged in the mortification of our flesh. … In the narrow Jewish street, our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking; out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper, which only rose to a strong shout when our martyrs on their stakes cried out their last prayers in the face of their executioners. But now, force no longer constrains us, we are given space for our bodies to live again. Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, tightly muscled, courageous men.”

13. Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925)

14. Zion