Myth
and
History
Harold Rosenberg
"Both (democracy and dictatorship) are illogical. But"
which form of illogical thinking is the mort decent?"
Thomas
Mann-The Coming Victory of Democracy
Politics and the Values
of
Art
Thomas Mann presents himself today before huge middle class
audiences as the champion of a higher standpoint from which to
decide political and social questions. These platform appeals, sup–
ported by magazine articles, newspaper interviews, and the volume,
The Coming Victory of Democracy,
come with the authority of a
life-long rumination on the subject of human values; and their con–
vincingness
is
further heightened by the circumstance that for the
sake of his principles their author
is
a voluntary exile from his
native land.
Mann has seen in the abdication and beating down of the indi–
vidual mind the basic catastrophe of modern times. His introduction
to the German emigre magazine,
Measure and Value (Mass und
Vert),
carefully summing up his political theory, is a rallying cry to
individuals in the name of their cultural independence and creative
will.
It is the direct response of the sentiment of artistic culture to
political utilitarianism. Asserting that culture
is
menaced with
destruction by Pure Politics, Mann sees it rising to save itself by its
own action and self-affirmation. And the central force in this cultural
subjugation of politics is the individual.
Mann's thesis begins by counterposing culture's measure and
value to "revolutionary propaganda," whose essence and power seem
to him to lie in just that relinquishment of individual thinking which
in his novels are a familiar condition of the lovelorn and the hypno–
tized. "Measure and value," says Mann, are words taken "from the
world of art," a world far removed from the "scabby, herd-minded
world" which is so willing to yield itself to the momentary intoxica–
tion of slogans. Art is the opposite of revolutionary propaganda.
Yet the world
o{
art, while it is removed,
is
not isolated; it is no
mountain peak of the purely esthetic. For art is measure in the real
19
