Quotes & A Bit More: Wednesday 19 June 2024
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The rise of the mob out of the capitalist organization was observed early, and its growth carefully and anxiously noted by all great historians of the nineteenth century. Historical pessimism from Burckhardt to Spengler springs essentially from this consideration. But what the historians, sadly preoccupied with the phenomenon in itself, failed to grasp was that the mob could not be identified with the growing industrial working class, and certainly not with the people as a whole, but that it was composed actually of the refuse of all classes. This composition made it seem that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those standing outside the class-divided nation were the people itself (the Volksgemeinschaft, as the Nazis would call it) rather than its distortion and caricature. The historical pessimists understood the essential irresponsibility of this new social stratum, and they also correctly foresaw the possibility of converting democracy into a despotism whose tyrants would rise from the mob and lean on it for support. What they failed to understand was that the mob is not only the refuse but also the by-product of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it. They failed for this reason to notice high society’s constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring.
Arendt’s account of how totalitarianism develops is complicated, and, frankly, I don’t know how much of her account is endorsed or buttressed by historians and social scientists who’ve studied the rise of totalitarian movements. But she makes a couple of points that certainly seem to resonate with some political phenomenon that we’re seeing today. First, the MAGA movement isn’t sharply defined by social class or economic well-being. It draws supporters from a fairly wide spectrum of individuals who are willing to tear it all down, including those who are well-off. Second, she mentions “high society’s growing admiration for the underworld.” I don’t know about “high society,” but the (supposedly) wealthy, presumptive Republican nominee for president has an open admiration for tyrants, mobsters, and racketeers: from tyrants like Putin and Orbán to Roy Cohn and Al Capone among American mobsters and racketeers, which seems not at all to bother Trump’s supporters.
The concrete unity of all works of art is not itself a work of art, but the history of art, and the artist as such is not concerned with this history. In the same way, the unity of all the sciences is not itself a scientific unity, a conceptual scheme, but an historical unity. The history of science can show how the various sciences have grown up one out of another, and can make intelligible their inter-relations. Here again, history solves the question which science asks but cannot answer: the unity of history at once annuls and makes intelligible the pluralism of science.
Speculum Mentis, Or, the Map of Knowledge (1924) is the first of what are considered Collingwood’s mature works. This quote gives a hint of where Collingwood will be going in his further injuries into his philosophy of history.
The conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak observed that the party had been taken over by “Republicans [who] want to unmistakably establish the Party of Lincoln as the white man’s party.”
I don’t know when Novak said this, but I do note that he died in 2009.
For the new cosmology there can be no natural differences of quality; there can only be one substance, qualitatively uniform throughout the world, and its only differences are therefore differences of quantity and of geometrical structure. This once more brings us back to something like Plato and the Pythagoreans, or again to something like the Greek atomists with their denial that anything is real except atoms and void and their reduction of all else to patterns of determinate atomic structure.
N.B. Collingwood is discussing the Scientific Revolution (17C) in this quote.
More:
I remain fascinated—and horrified—at the abject sycophancy at among most Republican office holders and Trump. I realize that pride isn’t a viable stance in public among democratic politicians (as in politicians in a democracy), but still. The ability to compromise and switch positions is a part of the politician’s stock-in-trade. Some haughtiness and pride behind closed doors, maybe, but not in public. But on the other hand, a little pride, some dignity, some concern with one’s self-image shouldn’t be completed ignored. If nothing else, one shouldn’t want to appear to be nothing more than a wind sock, flopping here and there as the winds of public opinion—or the boss’s whim—-shift from moment to moment. Even a politician shouldn’t want to appear small and weak. But then I see this: