Started in 1934, never completed and published posthumously, the Theory of masses madness is a monumental work. At the articulation of philosophy and political psychology, Hermann Broch analyzes the pathologies of modern masses that led to the advent of Nazism.
Just as we have some reluctance to consider the novels of Hermann Broch from the only literary angle-himself had forged to speak about it the expression of “ epistemological novel »-Likewise, we have a hesitation when tackling his Theory of masses madness. This treaty of political psychology, whose subject, if he borrows from Freud and Gabriel Tarde, is far from sticking to psychoanalysis or the theory of political behavior, frightened by its magnitude. Started in the early 1930s, the author returned to it several times without ever succeeding in giving him a completed form. It is not only a question of understanding how totalitarian regimes, Nazism in particular, knew how to gain the adhesion of the masses but to explore the individual psychic mechanisms which led there. Close to the analyzes of Elias Canetti or the State myth From Ernst Cassirer, whom he also wrote since his American exile, the originality of Broch’s words lies in the fact that he delivers, in concentric circles, a theory of history based on the forces of human psyche. Translated for the first time in French by P. Rusch and D. Renault, this monument book, which, in the eyes of its author, constituted well before his romantic work his true contribution to thought, opens a gigantic field of human experience, prolonging in his own way the universal character of the claimed literature already by the German romantics.
A political psychology
By the accumulation of facts to which it refers, by the multiplicity of disciplines and plans of reflection which it compares – philosophy, political science, law, psychoanalysis, literature etc. -, there Theory of masses madness rout. Built in a scientific way, under a systematic appearance which is from the Russellian model, the text actually escapes from all sides. To grasp the Broch project, it is actually necessary to enter it through the door of the philosophy of history, including a novel, Virgile’s deathwritten in parallel, gives us the key. The author describes the last hours of the Roman poet when he returned to Rome to die there. In the state of feverish lucidity which is his, Virgile is seized when he arrived at the port of Brindisi of the oppositions which he perceives both in the landscape and through the conducts of those around him. These contradictions bring him back to the diffracted character of his own existence. He becomes aware of having voluntarily sacrificed a whole section of emotions linked to sadness to allow beauty to triumph. Discussions in the morning with his friends, his interview with the Emperor Augustus illustrate this duality to which only death comes to end. The last hours of the poet are thus an opportunity for Broch to stage the presence of irreconcilable points of view which compete in the same time. Like the existence of the poet, history is made up of a succession of eras, each of which responds to a “ spirit of time Which refers to the then dominant values system. The passage from one to the other is never made without clashes, the coexistence of a given values system and its progressive replacement causing contemporaries a violent identity crisis. Ordered around the three times of history, the “ do not “, THE “ Not yet “And the” Yet already », The political constitution of societies therefore results from the psychic tensions that these temporal hiatus provoke in individuals who experience them. Virgile’s temptation to destroy theBishopric In the end, testifies to his refusal to maintain the illusion of eternity born of beauty and affirms the moral responsibility of man in the conduct of history.
There Theory of masses madness translated in political terms the psychic effects induced by “ This beginning ” And “ this end “Of which H. Arendt spoke, the tilting from one era to another. The fifty years of “ Absolute Machiavellianism Which lead to the triumph of Nazism provided H. Broch a field of choice to observe the political effects of the disintegration of individual consciences and their identification with the masses subjected by an authoritarian power. The originality of H. Broch’s analysis lies in his refusal to hypostasize the masses by always bringing their conduct to the responsibility of the individual. Faced with the psychic upheavals that involves the questioning of a system of values, the alternative which is offered to individuals consists either in fleeing the anxiety born of these tensions by falling into drunkenness or the mysticism of reality, or in fighting them by trying to overcome the partial points of view to rebuild a general vision of the world, which condemns them in general. To understand how these choose to switch to adhesion or resistance and analyze the way in which a relationship perverted to reality is set up, it is not only necessary to situate yourself from the point of view of a logical structure of thought but perceive behind it-and fully autonomous-a second structure which renews mythical thought. Events will tip individuals in a rather rational sense or will lead them to opt for the irrational. Thus we find it to ask the essential question, namely, against a background of gnoseology, that of human consciousness and its orientation.
As soon as Broch does not believe in the definitive disappearance of pathological states in the movement of history, it must therefore develop a psychology of politics capable of embracing this double structure so as to strengthen its rational part. “” I am interested in the processes that lead the human being to lose and recover their fundamental truthsin short to his religious attitudes He wrote to his friend Aldous Huxley. Nothing guarantees that in the periods of alternation between humanism and barbarism, between democracy and totalitarianism, humanism is winning. The most interesting intuition of Broch, which prevented part of the criticisms that is confronted today, consists of admitting that, far from systematically taking the opposite of totalitarianism and invoking rationalism against the irrational, the open system of values that humanism advocates must mobilize the same channels. Democracy, if it wants to prevail in the face of totalitarianism, will therefore have to compete with it on the psychic field which is its, to use the same stratagems. She will play the register of myths and rituals, not hesitating to place herself too on the ground of propaganda, even if this one is based this time on a rational education of individuals and throws anathema on the opposing discourse.
A masked autobiography
Broch’s work is far from being exclusively of a normative genre. On the contrary, it is crossed by a constant balance between a discourse which, making the bet of the juridico-political, develops on a systematic level and a level of reflection, infra-conceptual, which is placed in terms of affects. As if H. Broch sought to convince himself of the chances of humanity to win the spheres of a “ total democracy “In the words of a project which he himself had analyzed for the first time in 1937 around the hopes that the society of nations aroused, without being able to silence in him the objections which oppose this happy end. If the field of law is that where rational society is most effectively replaced by magic thought, we perceive the need for democracy to also gain the favors of individuals on a more emotional basis. Undoubtedly this is the raison d’être of the theory of “ conversion That H. Broch develops throughout the volume. It is under this term that he indeed designates the change of mental device which leads individuals to turn away from anonymous comfort provided by totalitarian regimes to embrace the values of democratic individualism. The objective of conversion is twofold: defeat the mass, preventing the individual from trying to blend into her. Where the Church once assumed this missionary task, it returns today to politics. “” For years I have been working on my Masses psychologywhose subject is nothing other than ‘conversion’, not religious conversion, for which I have no vocation, but a kind of secularized conversion to very simple moral cleanliness He wrote on February 28, 1949.
This moral dimension could surprise in a work claiming to be the most pragmatic political realism, if we did not see that the political theory presented to us is, at the same time as a question on the powers of art and literature, a masked autobiography, as a theoretical counterpartPsychic autobiography that H. Broch also wrote during the war and posthumously published. If he indeed abandons the literary form for scientific discourse, Broch never abandons the subject. It is therefore like a dialogue between literature and history, the ultimate condition for the survival of man in modernity, that the moral sense must be understood to give to politics. One cannot defend ourselves of feeling by rising against the evil power of images, by investing the words of the power of a critical reality, literature is, in the eyes of Broch, the ultimate bulwark against totalitarianism and one of the safest instruments in the fight against the madness of the masses. No doubt it is because of this ability to translate into words the reality of things, of this critical power of which the writer is invested that literature was one of the first victims of totalitarianisms.
“” Writer despite himself “As H. Arendt called him in 1949 or” philosopher despite himself In his son’s words ? Broch’s work goes beyond this alternative. If through his theory of masses psychology, he hoped to weigh indirectly on the events of his time (cf. the letter to Hans Sahl of November 11, 1943) it is undoubtedly as much as theorist as as a writer.