ROBERT S. WISTRICH
61
(the leader as seducer) but rather of the political leader as an educator,
physician, and organizer seeking to
humanize
the masses and sublimate
their revolutionary energy towards the classical Enlightenment goal of
Bi/dung.
The ethical ideals of Austro-Marxism, like those of European
bourgeois humanism, proved, however, to be somewhat fragile in the
face of the growing mass appeal of fascism in Central Europe between
the wars.
One of the most acute critics of the failure of Marxism to overcome
this challenge was Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian disciple of Marx and
Freud whose study,
The Mass Psychology oj Fascism
(written between 1930
and 1933), was an important analytic breakthrough in the field . The
younger, more radical Reich, who at the time gravitated towards the
Austrian Communist Party, did not share Freud's theory of sublimation,
his premise that repression sustains society and that permissiveness would
subvert civilization. Nor could Reich accept the materialist assumption
that mass psychology was rooted solely or even primarily in socioeco–
nomic factors. He deplored the ignorance of the role of sexual repression
displayed by Marxist sociology. He saw the roots of fascism, above
all,
in
the authoritarian family structure created by four thousand years of me–
chanical civilization that had disturbed the biological system of the hu–
man personality and turned the masses into accomplices of their own
oppression. The secret, unsatisfied orgiastic desires of the masses were ex–
pressed in the brutality, irrationality and sadism of Hitler and the Nazis,
whose mystical race theories faithfully reflected a deep sexual
angst
and
the unresolved fears of a patriarchal, authoritarian society. Hence, only a
revolutionary
Sexualpolitik,
a libido-saturated
GemeinschaJt,
could ulti–
mately liberate man from the kind of compulsive mass behavior, blind
obedience, and reactionary herd-mentality that made fascism possible.
This sexual revolution would finally enabk the masses to take responsi–
bility for themselves. Reich thereby sought to
politiciz e
Freud's theories,
a further reason for the old master to disown his disciple, quite apart
from his puritanical distaste for Reich's "Sexual Revolution."
Freud, like so many other Viennese intellectuals of his generation,
remained to the end deeply ambivalent about politics in general, about
parliamentarianism (once described by Karl Kraus as a way of "putting
political prostitution in barracks") and about democracy, at least as long
as the old monarchical order survived. Other Viennese cultural conserva–
tives (including not a few] ewish intellectuals), suspicious of technology
and progress, as alienated from the ethos of capitalism as they were from
materialist Marxism, also felt that to retain a meaningful belief in indi–
vidual truth and morality was incompatible with a commitment to social
and political change. Their disillusion with political ideologies; their
