Abstract
The term ‘mass dictatorship’ implies the attempted mobilisation of the masses and puts forth the position that dictatorships frequently secured voluntary mass participation and support.1 The peculiarity of mass dictatorship as a twentieth-century phenomenon can be found in its modern socio-political engineering system, which aims at the voluntary enthusiasm and self-mobilisation of the masses for state projects, the same goal shared by mass democracies. Mass dictatorship appropriates modern statecraft and egalitarian ideology and pretends to be a dictatorship from below; the study of this phenomenon needs to be situated as a broader transnational formation of modernity. Mass dictatorship as a working hypothesis denies the diffusionist conception of modernity as a movement from the centre to the periphery. Rather, it focuses on the transnational aspects of modernity through global connections and interactions of the centre and periphery, and of democracy and dictatorship.
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Notes
It is noteworthy too that Francoism is often defined as ‘despotismo moderno’ (modern despotism) because it constitutes an alliance of conservatives and the military without mass involvement. Modern despotism of this kind differs conceptually from mass dictatorship in that it does not rely on the mobilisation of the masses or on intervention in their private lives. See Salvador Giner, ‘Political Economy, Legitimacy and the State in Southern Europe’, in Ray Hudson and Jim Lewis, eds, Uneven Developments in Southern Europe (London: Methuen, 1985).
For the general introduction of mass dictatorship, see Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Series Introduction: Mapping Mass Dictatorship: Towards a Transnational History of Twentieth Century Dictatorship’, in Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone, eds Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1–22.
See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
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Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. xi–xii, 28, 152, and passim.
For ‘East’ and ‘West’ as the imaginative geography and the schema of co-figuration of East and West, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 49–72.
Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 40–71. It should be noted that Germany had to refer to France as its own putative ‘West’ because it was situated in the ‘East’ from France’s perspective. The co-figuration of French ‘civilisation’ and German ‘culture’ in Norbert Elias’s analysis shows this succinctly.
See Nagao Nishikawa, Zouho Kokkyou no Koekata (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), Ch. 6.
Daniel Schoenpflug’s attempt to comprehend François Furet’s and Ernst Nolte’s comparative history of totalitarian movements within the framework of ‘histoire croisée’ is suggestive, but its limits are clear. To say nothing of ‘linear causality’ and ‘potential oversimplifications’ in Nolte’s thesis on ‘Bolshevik’s challenge and Nazi’s response’, Furet seemed to stop at the point of making the analogies between French Jacobins of 1793 and Russian Bolsheviks of 1917. See Daniel Schoenpflug, ‘Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements’, European History Quarterly 37/2 (2007), 265–90.
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 4–9.
Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. x.
For the continuities, but not necessarily simplified, between colonial genocide and the Holocaust see Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Die Geburt des Ostlandes aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus: Die nationalsozialistische Eroberungsund Beherrschungspolitik in (post-)kolonialer Perspektive’, Sozial Geschichte 19/1 (2004), 10–43.
Benjamin Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe?’, European History Quarterly 35/3 (2005), 429–464.
Sven Lindquist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996).
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Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Der Holocaust als ‘kolonialer Genozid’? Europäische Kolonialgewalt und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 33 (2007), 445.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, tr. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 895.
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For Polish socialist irredentists, See Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Labour and the National Question in Poland’, in Stefan Berger and Angel Smith, eds, Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
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If the discursive position of Fascist Italy was ‘East in the West’, Russia at the turn of the twentieth century was regarded as a ‘developing’ or ‘peripheral capitalist’ society at best. See Theodor Shanin, ‘Introduction’, in Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. x.
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See N. Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilization, Korean trans. Mi-ae Pak (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1996), pp. 33–75.
A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 93–106.
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Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xxx.
For a persuasive Marxist critique of the national economy and Third Worldism, see Nigel Harris, The End of the Third World (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987). Perhaps it would be a too-far-fetched argument that National Socialism was interwar Germany’s version of Third Worldism. But the widespread revengism against the West among ordinary Germans implied their frustration and fear of relative ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘backwardness’.
E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Out of the Ashes’, in R. Blackburn, ed., After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso 1991), p. 318.
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See Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Befreiung oder Modernisierung? Sozialismus als ein Weg der anti-westlichen Modernisierung in unterentwickelten Ländern’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung Jg. 43, nr. 2 (2001).
S. Schram and H. C. d’Encausse, ‘Introduction’, in Marxism and Asia (London: Allen Lane, 1969), p. 4.
R. Ulyanovsky, National Liberation (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), pp. 271–72.
Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, p. 76; G. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), p. 1.
Eugene Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co, 1964), p. 139.
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy’, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghan, 2008), p. 18.
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), pp. 428–29.
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. xiii.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 400, 405.
See B. Lagowski, ‘Ideologia Polska. Zachodnie aspiracje i wschodnie sklonności (Polish Ideology: Western Aspirations and Eastern Inclinations)’, in Polska i Korea: Proces modernizacji w perspektywie historycznej, ed. Jie-Hyun Lim and Michal Śliwa (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Naukowe WSP, 1997), 88–97.
See Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Die Geburt des Ostlandes aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus’; Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Holocaust und Kolonialismus’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51, Part 12 (2003). 1098–1119; Benjamin Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz’.
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Lim, JH. (2013). Mass Dictatorship: A Transnational Formation of Modernity. In: Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_2
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