Introduction: The Agency of the “Masses”

Abstract

The concept of “mass dictatorship” is distinguished from other analytical accounts of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes by its insistence on the subjectivity and agency of ordinary people. In Western languages, at least, deploying the term “mass” in this analytical frame involves a self-conscious appropriation and revisioning of a key word of classical modernity: the vision of the mass as a political actor was a product of the cultural pessimism of the fin de siècle, in which anxieties about the growing confidence of organized labour and the anomic conditions of urban life found support in new theories of crowd psychology. In this analysis, the crowd (foule, folla) of Gustav Le Bon (1895) and Scipio Sighele (1891) and the subject of Freud’s Massenpsychologie (1921) was typified by irrationality and suggestibility; while the mass could be moved to action by certain stimuli, its inherent intellectual state was passivity. It was in this character that radical politicians, mainly of the right, simultaneously celebrated and objectified the mass—as the subject of a new kind of political revolution and the object of calculated campaigns of propaganda and mobilization both before and after the seizure of power. We know that Hitler read Le Bon (Wiesen 2008, p. 150). Accordingly, when historians and political scientists speak the language of “mass” (as distinct, for example, from class), there is always a danger of recapitulating the vision of ordinary people as passive, brainwashed or at best suffering from false consciousness. “Mass dictatorship,” by contrast, invokes a dialectical relationship between the structures of domination which envision the population as a mass in order to contain it and that population as a body of autonomous actors whose actions and habitus are co-constitutive of those structures. Even in the preceding chapters, which focus on the objectives and methods of the respective dictatorial regimes, ordinary people have been at the centre of consideration, because each of the regimes in question placed a vision of the whole nation or body politic at the centre of its ideology and its planning for the future. The chapters in this section explore the ways in which people appropriated those visions: how they responded to what the regime offered, invested time, energy and sentiment in the projects it proposed, evaded its claims or indeed openly resisted its demands.