Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie Today (original) (raw)

Mid-20th-century studiesoffascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism are enjoying arenaissance. Representative of this trend is Verso's2019 republication of TheAuthoritarian Personality,o riginallyr eleased 1950 under the co-authorshipo fT heodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford.¹ The new spine of this thick volume features al ong quote from MollyW orthen of the New YorkT imes,e xclaiming that "Adornoa nd his colleagues could easily have been describing Alex Jones'sparanoid InfoWars rants or the racist views expressed by manyT rump supporters." If this seems al ittle too on-the-nose, one might instead refert ot he Peter Gordon'sp reface, which concludes: "Most troubling of all, however,isthe sense that we did not reallylearn the first time around how to address the deeper reasons for fascism'sl asting appeal" (Gordon 2019 [1950], xxxix). Understandably absent from Gordon'sthorough mappingofthe pre-and posthistory of TheAuthoritarian Personality'swatershedinvestigation into the psychosocial sources of fascism is Hermann Broch'sfragmentary mass psychology,which was also ap roduct of the 1940s (1939-1948). The 1959R hein Verlag editiono f Broch'sw orks onlyc ontained af raction of what was later published in 1979 under the title of Massenwahntheorie [theory of mass delusion] as Volume 12 of the Kommentierte Werkausgabe [collectedworks with commentary]. The latter remains afragment in the sense thatitwas nevercompleted or published by Broch in his lifetime; also because there weres ignificant changes and developments in Broch'sconception over the course of the decade (partlybasedonchangingimperativeso ft he wartime and postwar period);a nd numerous overlapsa nd connections with his other projects,such that the Massenwahntheorie cannotbefullyseparated from Broch'svaried literary,political, theoreticaland philosophical projects of his last two decades. Givent hese complex conditions of its genesis and correspondingly limited reception, it is not at all surprising that Peter Gordon omitted Broch in his survey of the tradition of mass psychology. Broch'st heory was never translated into English, and it had onlyavery limited impact in the postwar social sciences-except perhapsindirectlythrough Hannah Arendt(Lützeler2021, 185-204).These factors of the reception are furthercom- Quotations from The Authoritarian Personality (AP) refer to the new edition, which retains the same pagination as the original publication. Spaced oes not allow me to thoroughly review the older and newer scholarship, but onlytomention the two journal issues edited by Robyn Marasco (2018 and 2022). Open Access. ©2 023 bei den Autorinnen und Autoren,p ubliziert von De Gruyter. Dieses Werk ist lizenziert untereiner CreativeCommonsNamensnennung-Nicht kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung 4.0 International Lizenz.