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ard Schapiro, "is a new form of dictatorship which grew up in the
conditions of mass democracy after the First World War." Hannah
Arendt took up a theme of Franz Neumann's when she traced total–
itarianism not only to the "structurelessness of a mass society" but to
the "specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass." In
his very last (unfinished) article, Neumann returned to the idea and
described totalitarian techniques
inter alia
by "the atomization and
individualization of the individual, which involves negatively the
destruction or at least weakening of social units based on biology
(family), tradition, religion, or cooperation in work or leisure; and
positively the imposition of huge and undifferentiated mass organi–
zations which leave the individual isolated and more easily manip–
ulable ." Characteristically, several authors on the subject quote with
approval Tocqueville's fears of the tyranny of the majority and the
risks of a new "democratic despotism."
The analysis corresponds to the experience of those involved. "I
became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disin–
tegrating society thirsting for faith," Arthur Koestler wrote in
describing his conversion to communism. The theme is familiar.
It
has to do with modernity and the loss of community, of linkages, of
those time-honored deep bonds which I have called ligatures.
An
an–
timodern streak, a revolt against modernity is indeed unmistakable
in the temptation of totalitarianism. But we must not be misled by
easy language . Structureless mass societies? What were these au–
thors talking about? Europe in the 1920s? Surely there is something
wrong here .
Tocqueville wrote, of course , about the United States, where
feudal structures had never existed and individualist values had
been enshrined in the Constitution.
If
there was one mass society in
the 1920s, it was American society . However, America adopted
Model T Fords and early Hollywood ftlms and perhaps the attitude
of "keeping up with the Joneses" which David Riesman was to
describe much later as "other-directedness," but it did not become
either fascist or communist, nor was it ever at risk. Germany and
Russia in the 1920s, on the other hand, were hardly prototypical
modern mass societies. Weimar Germany was shot through with ac–
tive remnants of an earlier age, East Elbian landlords and industrial
cartels, estate-conscious civil servants , and stable church alle–
giances . In the Soviet Union, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of the
deliberate destruction of surviving premodern structures , but no one
would describe Russia in 1917 or the Soviet Union in 1927 as a
