Authoritarianism and Fear (2 of 2)

The first part of this post dealt mainly with a 1933 evaluation by Harold Lasswell of the psychological appeal of the Hitler movement, which then had been in power only a few months.

This portion focuses on the 1954 essay by Franz Neumann "Angst und Politik" (1954) referenced at the end of both parts. It focuses on the role of fear in politics with particular refernce to the Nazi movement and the Third Reich. As mentioned in Part 1, Neumann (1900-1954) was a legal scholar who was one of the "First Generation" Frankfurt School who had been was an analyst for the US wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and was a consultant for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials. "Angst und Politik" was his last essay.

The essay is also kind of a classical example of the combination of a Hegelian-Marxist perspective with Freudian psychological theory with which the first generation of the Frankfurt School were closely identified. It places the fear-and-politics problem in the context of alienation, whose development Neumann briefly traces from Schiller and Rousseau to Hegel, Marx, and Feuerbach. And he addresses the phenomenon of social alienation in terms of Freud's theories of individual and mass psychology.

Neumann observes that fear can be useful or destructive. It can make people alert to real dangers in their physical environment, in orgqanizations, or in politics. It can impede people from taking useful action to protect themselves in the face of real danger :"it can paralyze people," i.e., they can freeze up. Or it can lead to panic, which can lead someone to take hasty decisions that turn out to be suboptimal or make someone unable to decide on a course of action at all. Neumann also notes that fear can have a "cathartic effect" when someone overcomes fear or anxiety and learns from the experience. It can make people "more capable of taking decisions than people who have never seriously had to fight off a threat."

Axel Honneth, who is currently the head of the Institute for Social Research, writing decades later, was dubious about Neumann's reliance on Freudian psychology in "Anxiety and Politics." But he approved of Neumann's perspective in the "Anxiety and Politics" perspective there, which Honneth describes this way:

Die Pathologie, mit der sich seine Studie beschäftigt, besteht in unterschiedlichen Formen der Angst, wahrend sich ihr normativer Bezugspunkt aus der These ergibt, daß die demokratische Willensbildung ein notwendiges Maß an individueller Autonomie voraussetzt. Das theoretische Verbindungsglied, das Neumann zur Verknüpfung dieser beiden Ebenen verwendet, stammt ursprünglich wohl von Adam Smith und ist seither nur von wenigen politischen Denkern wie Michael Bakhtin oder Charles Taylor weiterentwickelt worden: Eine elementare Voraussetzung von individueller Autonomie, verstanden als die Fähigkeit, an Prozessen der demokratischen Willensbildung reflexiv teilzunehmen, ist die Freiheit von Angst.

[The pathology with which his study is concerned consists of different forms of fear {anxiety}, while its normative reference point emerges from the thesis that democratic volition assumes a necessary level of individual autonomy. The theoretical connecting link that Neumann employs to connect of these two levels comes originally from Adam Smith and since then has been developed further by only a few political thinkers like Bakhtin or Charles Taylor: An elementary assumption of individual autonomy, understood as the ability to participate in the establishment of political objectives, is the freedom from fear.] (my emphasis)

Neumann is particularly interested in showing how fear can be exploited by an authoritarian leadership. He uses the terms Caesarism for this identification of the people with a single leader. He argues that conspiracy theories are key to mobilizing this bond between a demagoge and the mass of the people, producing a hatred which the leader is trusted to act out. In this key passage, he writes:

Der Haß, das Ressentiment, die Angst vor allem, die durch große Umwälzungen erzeugt wird, werden auf bestimmte Personen konzentriert, die als teuflische Verschwörer denunziert werden. Nichts ist falscher, als die Feinde als »Sündenböcke« zu bezeichnen (wie das häufig in der Literatur geschieht), denn sie erscheinen als echte Feinde, die man vernichten muß, und nicht als Substitute, die man nur in die Wüste zu schicken braucht. Es ist eine falsche Konkretheit und darum ein besonders gefährliches Geschichtsbild. Die Gefahr besteht ja darin, daß dieses Geschichtsbild niemals ganz falsch ist, sondern immer ein Körnchen Wahrheit enthält und auch enthalten muß, um überzeugend zu wirken. Je wahrer es ist, so kann man sagen, desto weniger regressiv ist die Bewegung; je falscher, desto regressiver.

[The hate, the resentment, the fear/anxiety about everything that is produced by big upheavals, are concentrated on particular people who are denounced as devilish. Nothing is more false than designating the enemies as "scapegoats" (as often takes place in the literature) because they appear as real enemies who must be destroyed and not as substitutes one just needs to send into the desert. It {the conspiracy theory} is a false concreteness and therefore and a particularly dangerous conception of history. The danger contained therein is that this conception of history is never completely false, but rather that it contains a kernel of truth and must include that in order to be convincing. The more true it is, one can say, the less regressive is the movement. the more false, the more regressive.] {my emphasis in bold}

There's a lot packed into that. The targets of such demogoguery have to be real people, not space aliens or lizard people, as Alex Jones might prefer. The reference to sending them into the desert is to the function of the original scapegoat in the religious rituals of the Hebrew Bible. Although in the case of immigrants, sending them into the desert could be literally a way to destroy them. The concreteness of the targets - Jews, Muslims, blacks - is a false specificity because the target groups aren't the cause of the public fear being exploited by the demagogue. But they are real people who can be hurt or killed.

In the German example on which Neumann focuses here, "The Jews" were not the cause of Germany's defeat in the First World War, of the Versailles Treaty, or the Great Depression. Or Chancellor Heinrich Brüning's austerity policies that exacerbated them desastrously.

I tend to think the infamous hyperinflation of 1923-4 in Germany is typically overrated as a cause for the rise of Nazism. The chart of parliamentary elections in Part 1 of this post does not show a huge surge in Nazi votes in 1924 or 1928. But in 1930 and mid-1932, in the midst of the Depression and Brüning austerity, the surge is obvious. The hyperinflation was traumatic. But, despite the favorite fairy tales of conservative economists, hyperinflation was part of a very conscious policy by the Weimar government that was part of subsidizing the resistance in the Ruhr district, then still under French occupation. As Karl Schleunes writes in the "German" entry of the 2014 Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Although the inflation was rooted in the huge debt that Germany had amassed in financing its war effort, the hyperinflation of 1923 was triggered by the French-Belgian military occupation in January 1923 of the German industrial district in the Ruhr valley. The occupation occurred in retaliation for Germany's having fallen behind in its reparation payments and was intended to force German industry to provide compensation for the French and Belgian losses. Rather than accede quietly to the humiliation of occupation, the German government urged workers and employers to close down the factories. Idle workers were paid during the following months with a currency inflating so rapidly that printers gave up trying to print numbers on bills. By mid-1923 the German mark was losing value by the minute ... [my emphasis]

But the hyperinflation was real. It happened. But it wasn't the fault of the Freemasons or the Elders of Zion or gypsies. Blaming "The Jews" for it would involve what Neumann calls "false specificity" because it blames real people (actual Jews) for a real problem that the blamed group didn't really cause.

"The more true it is, one can say, the less regressive is the movement. the more false, the more regressive" isn't necessarily an optimal way of expressing the notion Neumann is enunciating there. But I understand it to mean that blaming, for instance, speculative trading by big banks on mortgage-based derivative for causing at least some of the problems that produced the massive financial crash of 2008 would be progressive in Neumann's view because it's accurate. Blaming it on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as many conservatives prefer to do, is a regressive view in that scheme. And it also provides the "false concreteness" that Neumann takes as a necessary element of the effective conspiracy theory, because Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are real institutions. But the idea that they were the main cause of the Great Recession is cracked.

Neumann also uses a historical example to explain how expectations become invested in a political leader: Cola di Rienzo (1313-1354), not really someone you're likey to see casually referenced in the daily newspaper. He was the leader of what passed for a popular revolt in the 14th century Rome. As Neumann observes, Cola wanted to Make Rome Great Again: "Cola's conception of history and the Roman people was very simple: Rome was ruined by feudal lords; their destruction would let Rome return to its old greatness."

And he offers a somewhat jarring version of Cola's failure: "Cola's basic mistake was that was not Caesar enough, so that he humiliated the barons but didn't liquidate them - out of cowardice, uprightness, or tactical considerations."

Neumann isn't recommending murder as a desirable tool of statecraft. He's instead using Cola as an example of a leadership that created a politcal rallying cry of a false concreteness that mobilized a public fear to get his followers to identify with him. "That fear, already the purely physical fear of the barons' arbitrariness, drove the people to Cola can scarcely be doubted. But the leader himself should not have any fear or at least not show it. He must stand above the masses."

In other words, rallying political followers around fear can create a dynamic of escalation, in which the leader must show that he's actually moving physically against the flesh-and-blood enemies he has identified. And if he fails to deliver the persecution his followers expect of their percieved enemies as he's invited them to conceive of them, it can undercut his leadership. In other words, if his followers thought he was serious about restoring 14th-century Rome to an imagined ancient Greatness, they came to expect him to exercise Roman Imperial ruthlessness against their enemies.

Cola was eventually killed by a mob. Richard Wagner later wrote an opera about him.

Neumann also calls attention to an ambiguity in the nature of Cola's political program. "I have referenced Cola di Rienzo because it deal with a borderline case in which it can be doubtful whether we're dealing with a regressive movement or a progressive one, that is, a movement that really has the development of human freedom as its goal."

There is more to this rich essay. Including an interesting discussion of five kinds of conspiracy theories: the Jesuit "Conspiracy", the Freemason "Conspiracy", the Communist "Conspiracy", the capitalist "Conspiracy", and the Jewish "Conspiracy". I'm not sure "capitalist conspiracy" is the best description for the thinking of the groups he mentions here, all of them American: the Know-Nothings (xenophobic, anti-Catholic), the Ku Klux Klan (white supremacist, xenophobic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic), and the Populist Party (anti-monopoly). The Know-Nothings and the KKK relied on conspiracy theories which would qualify as providing examples of "false concreteness." But whatever the problems of the Populist Party and its ideology, including the occasional rhetorical extravagence of some of its speakers, it didn't run on conspiracy theories. It did advocate for nationalizing the railroads, which socialists also advocated. But that doesn't count as a conspiracy theory.

But what I wanted to call attention to here in Neumann's 1954 essay was this sequence of: fear/an enemy of constructed by using "false concreteness"/moblizing fear into hate with conspiracy theories/a dynamic of escalation against the enemy targeted in the conspiracy theory.

And this ties back to Neumann's point about democracy that Honneth also stresses. As Neumann puts it, "fear can make free decisionmaking impossible." In Honneth's words quoted above, "An elementary assumption of individual autonomy, understood as the ability to participate in the establishment of political objectives, is the freedom from fear." Fear generated by panic over real threats, or by conspiracy theories creating a phony threat, can lead people to make decisions that wind up undermining democratic goverenment. It's happened before. It's happening again in countries like Hungary, Poland, and the United States.

References

• Axel Honneth, "'Angst und Politik': Stärken und Schwächen von Franz Neumanns Pathologiendiagnose", Pathologien der Vernuft: Geschichte un Gegwenwart der Kritische Theorie (2007) The quotations here are my own translation from the German.
• Harold Lasswell, "The Psychology of Hitlerism" Political Quarterly 4:3 (July 1933)
• Franz Neumann, "Angst und Politik" (1954) in Neumann, Wirtschaft, Staat, Demokratie: Aufsätze 1930-1954 (1978). An English version appeared as "Anxiety and Politics" in The Democratic and Authoritarian State (1964). "Angst" can also be translated into English as "fear". Neumann in the first paragraph cites Franklin Roosevelt Four Freedoms, including freedom from fear. So I would be inclined to use "Fear and Politics." The quotations here are my own translation from the German.