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PARTISAN REVIEW
phasize the stupidity and herd-like character, the lack of
Jch-Bewusstsein
in
the
Massenmensch,
or who describe how, in Freud's words,
"all
the cruel,
brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics
of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratifications" in the
group mind. This deep-rooted skepticism, which often led in Europe to
a fundamental rejection of the rationalist premises of liberal-democratic
thought, was not, of course, confined to Vienna. Conservative French
writers like the historian Hippolyte Taine, the Orientalist Ernest Renan,
the previously mentioned Gustave Ie Bon, and Gabriel Tarde, or Cesare
Lombroso and Scipio Sighele in Italy, saw in the suggestibility and
volatility of the masses a dangerous byproduct of the legacy of Jacobin
revolutionism and the new industrial, urban society. For their part,
Burckhard and Nietzsche, from the standpoint of Central European high
culture, denounced the inherent barbarism and "leveling" effects of
democratic politics as such; the Italian-Jewish criminologist Lombroso
significantly inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century the scien–
tific study of crowd life as a branch of
criminal
anthropology.
Among a significant section of the European intelligentsia after
1870, this psychopathological approach to crowd behavior reflected a
climate of disillusion with democracy. Such fear and disdain of the masses
seem to have been shared by the young Freud, writing to his fiancee
from Paris in 1886 about the uncanny quality of the French capital and
its inhabitants: "I believe they are all possessed of a thousand demons.
Instead of 'Monsieur' and 'Voila l'Echo de Paris,' I hear them scream–
ing,
'A
la lanterne!' or
'A
bas dieser und jener!' They are the people of
psychical epidemics, of historical mass convulsions." Freud's youthful fan–
tasy of Paris as the dark city of Revolution reveals his early and endemic
suspicion of mass politics. His experiences in the Vienna of the 1890s
could have only reinforced his sense of the mass mind as best compared
to the mentality of children, neurotics, and despotically ruled savages, a
view that did not fully crystallize until after 1918.
Not all of the Viennese
Bildungsburgertum
shared this Freudian pes–
simism, though they undoubtedly feared the leveling power of the masses
and were increasingly traumatized by the collapse of the liberal middle
ground in Austrian politics. Right up until his suicide in 1942, Stefan
Zweig, for example, gallantly battled to maintain the values of reason
and
Bildung
inherited from the classical German Enlightenment of the
late eighteenth century, refined by the supranational European cos–
mopolitanism of Habsburg Austria. The notion. of mobilizing the masses
through national myths and religious symbols remained entirely alien to
his way of thinking, which pitted the autonomy of the individual against
the slavish, herd-like obedience of the masses. Zweig was convinced that
