HCJ Exam Revision

1. “Poland Invades Germany”- headline in Volkishcer Beobachter on the outbreak of World War 2. Discuss with reference to Hannah Arendts concept of totalitarianism and John Careys thesis on the Intellectuals and the Masses.

Hannah Arendt believes that totalitarianism rests on mass support, and totalitarianism movements are mass organisations isolated individuals. Totalitarianism regimes seek to dominate every aspect of an individuals life, usually with terror involved. Individual loneliness and isolation can be predetermined conditions for totalitarianism domination.
Totalitarianism is based around a society that has a purpose, to achieve an ultimate goal. This mission is usually to create Utopia on Earth.

Totalitarianism destroys human plurality, which is a system or philosophy which acknowledges the existence of different political opinions, moral and religious beliefs, and cultural and social behaviour. Fascists see human plurality as a dysfunctional aspect of the state.

John Carey: The masses become the mob when they achieve basic literacy and so are able to sustain mass organisation. This makes them a political force. The intellectuals begin to fear the masses as they were rising in power and influence, and believed they were going to destroy aristocracy. Therefore some intellectuals wanted to exterminate the masses. This can be related to Fascism. The masses are the fascists, and with mediocrity in politics, Hitler was elected, as he was an intellectual good at manipulating the masses. Hitler attempted to overcome the issue of immigration, and decided that the Jews had no place in an all-German perfect state. He used terror to create a totalitarian state, in order to reach an ultimate goal. Hitler introduced racial laws to deliberately discriminate against other groups, and the state was prepared for war, rejecting concepts of rationalism in favour for those of action, discipline, hierarchy, spirit and will. This led to the unprovoked attack on Poland, which led to World War II.

Nietzche would disagree with these ideas of totalitarianism, as he hates the idea of democracy because it forces the idea of equality into society. He believes in the “Overman” as in his book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. The overman is the goal of humanity, and obeys no laws other than the ones he gives himself. The overman is free from the prejudices and assumptions surrounding him and has completely overcome himself. Therefore, an overman would not exist within a totalitarian state.

2. How does the modern state differ from the classical or medieval state, according to Hannah Arendt? Discuss with reference to philosophical writing about the modern state with reference to Hobbes, Rousseau, JS Mill, Hegel and Marx.

Hannah Arendt believed in national mass literacy and mass culture, meaning the state dominates civilisation.

A nation state is a state or country with defined borders or territory, and where the same type of people exist, e.g race or language. This kind of collective identity is known as nationalism, where the people are united together. This could be linked to totalitarianism, as it is a state where every individual follows one leader to achieve an ultimate goal.

Hobbes says that the state is an artificial man, and his theory of power says that the state of nature would be living in fear. This means that if there was no Government, society would be chaos. His solution would be to alienate our rights to a supreme sovereignty in order to live in peace. Life would be nasty, brutish and short without political authority.

Marx believes the State is the word of the ruling class. It looks after the rich and oppresses the poor. He stood Hegel on his feet, because he does not believe in God, and so therefore sees no purpose in the State.

Hegel believes the Prussian state is God on Earth, and that for individuals to be free they must have a complete relationship with the state, hence Germany was one of the “freest states of all”.

However, Rousseau believes in the social contract, and that the state is the source of our problems and discontent. People give up their power to a government or other authority to maintain a social order. This is known as the general will. Those who do not want to be free will be forced to be free.

J.S Mill believes “the individual is sovereign” People can do what they like as long as it does not harm others. He also believes in the greatest good for the greater number.

Locke also believed that people have the right to protect their life, liberty and property, but that a civil society should be established to resolve conflicts with help from the State or Government.

3. Attempt and Analysis of the impact of Nietzsche and the modernist literary movement on journalism, popular culture and the mass media.

Nietzsche style of writing is fractured, non-linear, incoherent and body centred. He believes that people are amoral and have no soul. His writing is also shocking, which is now used in all media forms. Nietzsche does not attempt long narratives and his work is subjectivist, the meaning arrives in the mind of the reader, and so everyone will have a different interpretation.
Nietzsche moves away from the objective of telling a story by using abstract symbols. This is contemporary with modern art. The main idea with Nietzsche is that the reader creates the meaning. Nietzsche focuses on amorality. For example, God is Dead. Nietzsche focused on what was happening rather than why it was happening. This led to new journalism. New journalism focuses on telling it like it is, not moralising why people are doing it. This is now known as sensationalist writing.
Nietzsches writing was blunt and to the point, which is exactly what journalism is now. This is where adverts and slogans came from.


Question 4: Explain the enduring fascination for many intellectuals and some journalists of the film Citizen Kane.

• Childhood spent in poverty
• Taken away from mother at an early age
• Entered the news business aged 25 into Yellow Journalism
• Began to take control of the industry
• Cheats on his wife
• Rosebud-The name of his childhood sled: The only time he was truly happy.

Use this as a Freudian case study. The id is the pleasure principle-disregards the consequences. Could explain why he cheated on his wife.

The Electra complex, like the Oedipus complex, it is a sexual attraction to the opposite sexed parent, which is overcome as the child grows older, however Kane/Hearst was taken away from his mother at an early age and so may not have had the chance to overcome this.

Kane is driven by hidden needs. Inner conflicts in the unconscious mind men he is repressing the real "Kane" and is wearing a mask to the world. This can be explained because on the inside Kane was a broken man, and the only time he was truly happy was as a child, hence "Rosebud" the sled.

Locke believes in Life, liberty and property. The pursuit of happiness, as property is a natural right. Whoever has the most stuff has the most power, and so in that sense, Kane was one of the most powerful men alive.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906, and was the only child to her Jewish parents. She became a 20th century political philosopher whose writings cover totalitarianism, revolution, freedom and the faculties of thought and judgement. Her work essentially undertakes the nature of political existence.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s first major work, published in 1951, and is a response to the devastating events that have occurred during her lifetime, such as the rise of Nazi Germany, and the mass genocide of the Jews, along with the rise of Stalinism and the annihilation of millions of peasants. Arendt insisted that these examples of political evil could not have come from previous models, but that they represent an entire new type of government, built upon terror and ideological fiction.
The book focuses on the two major totalitarianism movements of the 20th Century: Nazism and Stalinism.

The book describes the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the early and middle 19th century and continues with an examination of the New Imperialism period from 1884 to the outbreak of Worl War 1.

The word anti-Semitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. The Holocaust, the state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, is history’s most extreme example of anti-Semitism.

Along with bureaucracy, Arendt says that racism was the main trait of colonialist imperialism, characterized by its unlimited expanision, which necessarily opposed itself and was hostile to the territorially delimited nation-state. Arendt traces the roots of modern imperialism to the accumulation of excess capital in European nation-states during the 19th century. This capital required overseas investments outside of Europe to be productive and political control had to be expanded overseas to protect the investments. She then examines "continental imperialism"and the emergence of "movements" substituting themselves to the political parties. These movements are hostile to the state and antiparliamentarist and gradually institutionalize anti-Semitism and other kinds of racism. Arendt concludes that while Italian fascism was a nationalist authoritarian movement, Nazism and Stalinism were totalitarian movements that sought to eliminate all restraints upon the power of the State.

Ardent talks about the schematic outline of the Nation State in Europe and its dramatic rise and fall. She states that it takes places in these stages:
1) Under the leadership of a monarch, the 17th and 18th centuries saw a slow development in nation-states. Jews took over the financial transactions of the princes; however the slow development still majorly affected the masses who continued to live life in the feudal age.
2) After the French Revolution, nation-states emerged in the modern sense. Jews were not able to organise themselves into a separate group, financially supportive of their government, because of their numbers and the general backwardness of regions.
3) The rise of imperialism at the end of the 19th century brought an end to the relationship between the Jews and the government, a relationship based on the indifference of the bourgeoisie to politics.
4) Before the years of the war, western Jewry and the nation-state had disintegrated. After the war and the decline of Europe, the Jews were deprived of their original power in the state and society. In the imperialist age, Jewish wealth had become insignificant. Inter-European Jewish relations became a thing of universal hatred because of its ‘useless’ wealth and of contempt because of its now lack or power.

“Victory or death” – it is a policy that spelt the destruction of the Jews existence.
However, there is an argument that Jews would have become Nazis as easily as the German citizens if only they were allowed to join the movement – similar to when they joined the Italian Fascist Party right before the Italian legislation. This is true because of the individual views and thoughts of Jews, and these views did not differ much from the beliefs of their background. But, it is not true in a historical sense. Nazism, without anti-Semitism would have been the deathblow to the existence of the Jewish race in Europe.

Important ideas featured are that:

• Totalitarian leaders and their regimes command and rest upon mass support.
• Neither Hitler nor Stalin could have maintained leadership of large populations and faced other struggles without having confidence in the masses.
• The propaganda of totalitarianism rulers usually start their careers by boasting of past crimes and future plans. Unfortunately, this attraction of evil and crime in mob mentality is nothing new.
• Arendt says “totalitarian movements are mass organisations of atomised, isolated individuals”. These individuals were ordered to act on the will of their leader to achieve as part of the state.
• She also says “the insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses.”
• Arendt referred to the concentration camps as “medieval pictures of hell”
  

The book's final section is devoted to describing the mechanics of totalitarian movements, focusing on Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Here, Arendt discusses the transformation of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the non-totalitarian world, and the use of terror, essential to this form of government. Totalitarian movements are fundamentally different from autocratic regimes, says Arendt, as autocratic regimes seek only to gain absolute political power and to outlaw opposition, while totalitarian regimes seek to dominate every aspect of everyone's life as a prelude to world domination. Arendt discusses the use of front organizations, fake governmental agencies, and esoteric doctrines as a means of concealing the radical nature of totalitarian aims from the non-totalitarian world.

A final section added to the second edition of the book 1958 suggests that individual isolation and loneliness are preconditions for totalitarian domination.

Sources
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/
http://libcom.org/forums/history-culture/hannah-arendts-origins-totalitarianism-28072009
http://www.enotes.com/origins-totalitarianism-salem/origins-totalitarianism

HCJ Seminar: John Carey

John Carey was born 5 April 1934 and is a British literary critic, and emeritus Merton Proffesor of English Literature at the University of Oxford . He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St Johns College, Oxford. He served in the East Surrey Regiment, 1952-1954, and was commissioned. After posts in a number of Oxford colleges, he became Merton Professor in 1975, retiring in 2001.

He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes such as Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.

The sub-title of his book, Intellectuals among the masses is: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.The book comes in two parts. The first part contains various ‘themes’ and the second offers case studies of several writers.It seems that Carey doesn’t have much time for the literary intelligentsia and comes across that he despises large numbers of them.

The general thesis of the book is that the (largely self-anointed) intellectual classes were deeply shaken by nineteenth-century social developments. Although Carey doesnt mention the French Revolution of 1789 it is possible that the event was deeply disturbing to all those in Europe who held positions of influence, power, and wealth.

What the French Revolution demonstrated was that you weren’t necessarily safe even if you were a King. You could still end up in prison, or with your head chopped off.As the nineteenth century moved on, the ruling classes (from whom intellectuals were exclusively drawn in those days) began to be aware that the masses were rapidly growing in power and influence and also being taught to read! This led to a widespread and deep-seated fear of the masses through the intelligentsia.

As far as literature is concerned, Carey argues that, in the face of this much enlarged reading public, the response of the intellectuals was to create new forms of work which were deliberately exclusive. The whole point (conscious or unconscious) of modernist literature was to exclude the ordinary people. It was to create a class of writers and readers who could feel comfortably superior to the masses, because only they – the new intelligentsia – were clever enough to understand the new literature, and to be aware that there were still people like themselves – people who were so infinitely superior, in every way, to the great unwashed masses who revelled in sordid crime stories and slushy romances.

Ortega y Gasset, for example, in The Dehumanization of Art, argued that it was the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. The intellectuals could not prevent the masses from learning to read. But they could prevent them reading certain types of literature by making it too difficult; and this they did.

Carey reveals that intellectuals such as Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset were quite nasty people. ‘I believe,’ said Nietzsche, ‘that the mob, the mass, the herd, will always be despicable.’ The immense popularity of Nietzsche’s ideas, Carey tells us, is indicative of the sheer panic that the threat of the masses induced.F.R. Leavis declared that the mass media arouse ‘the cheapest emotional responses. Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction – all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.’The fear of the masses also acted as the cover for an equally nasty attitude among the intelligentsia, and that was the fear of women. Popular newspapers were hated and despised because they encouraged women to better themselves. A whole array of intellectuals are revealed by Carey not merely to be snobs and fuzzy thinkers, but possessed of singularly unattractive opinions based on nothing more than prejudice, stupidity and fear for their life style.

Carey shocks the readers when he relates that some of the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century anticipated Hitler in favouring the extermination of the old, the sick, and the suffering. Lawrence was among them. ‘If I had my way,’ he said in a letter of 1908, ‘I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace.’

The literary intelligentsia created a class of literature which was impossible for the average reader to understand. But it probably didnt provide much pleasure for the elite, except that it allowed them to demonstrate, to their own satisfaction at least, that they were infinitely superior in every way to the masses. That is the price you have to pay for being allowed to feel superior; you don’t actually enjoy anything very much.All these attitudes were reflected in the book.

The principal aim of all this, says Carey, was ‘to acquire the control over the mass that language gives.’ After all, if the masses exercised power, they would probably start spreading out wealth more equally. Democratic government, thought Thomas Hardy, would lead to ‘the utter ruin of art and literature.’The masses were feared because it was thought that they would behave like crowds: i.e. they would be ‘extremely suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and capable only of thinking in images – in short, just like women.’ The process of civilising women was considered by the intellectuals to be one of extreme difficulty.

Every development which favoured the middle or working classes in England was viewed with deep suspicion if not outright hostility. Suburban growth, with improved new housing, was decried for ruining the countryside. Cyril Connolly considered suburbs worse than slums.Carey shows that in the period covered by his book, 1880-1939, English intellectuals (in particular) were an unpleasant, snobbish group. Terrified that they might lose all their privileges, they objected on the one hand to anything which might be called progress, while on the other hand they busily reinforced their own all too fallible self esteem through the creation of ‘superior art’ which the masses could not understand.The trend continues to this day.

After the general introduction of part one, part two of Carey’s book provides several case studies. He deals with George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis, particularly the latter’s connection with Hitler.Gissing, though now forgotten, ‘was the earliest English writer to formulate the intellectuals’ case against mass culture, and he formulated it so thoroughly that nothing essential has been added to it since.’ Gissing, incidentally, was a charming fellow whose sexual appetites required women who were his intellectual and social inferior, and he could only get it up by humiliating and punishing them. He claimed to have beaten both his wives with stair rods.

H.G. Wells views are also unattractive from our perspective. What will we do with the black and the brown races, he wondered, since they are so obviously inferior to us in intelligence and initiative, and there are so many of them. He became obsessed with reducing the world’s population.

Arnold Bennett is included by Carey because the author views him as a hero. ‘His writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses.’ But Bennett was despised by the intelligentsia because he made money from literature. Intellectuals, Bennett believed he should write to appeal to a wider audience, and he did not see why a book which the masses liked should automatically be thought of as trash. Between the popular and the highbrow reader there was, he argued, no essential difference. Neither is there: in fiction both seek emotion; in non-fiction both seek information.

Wyndham Lewis wrote several books in the 1930s, all of which were enthusiastic about the German Fuhrer. Contempt for women was perhaps the key to Lewis’s character. ‘Stay to dinner,’ he asked a friend. ‘I’ve a wife downstairs. A simple woman, but a good cook.’Wyndham Lewis suggested that Whiteness ‘is in a pigmentary sense aristocratic’, and is the proper colour for a gentleman. As far as Hitler himself is concerned, Carey tells us that ‘the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.’

Carey ends his survey at 1939, but he reminds us that the old intellectual prejudices have not died out yet. The ever-expanding mass media have ‘driven the intellectuals to evolve an anti-popular cultural mode that can reprocess all existing culture and take it out of the reach of the majority.’ This mode is variously called ‘post-structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’, or just plain ‘theory’, and it began in the 1960s with the work of Jacques Derrida. It has managed, says Carey, to evolve a language that is impenetrable to most native English-speakers.

Carey has summed up all the modern apparatus of criticism and reviewing very neatly. Every department of Literature in every university and college in the world takes the line that there is a form of ‘serious literary fiction’ which is inherently superior to popular or commercial fiction. But there are no sound arguments or research data which demonstrate this. There is no evidence for seeing the world of fiction as a hierarchy.

Much of Carey's vitriol has been deployed, over the years, against snobbery and intellectual pretension. His championing of conventional values against those of the intellectual and social elite, a recurrent theme of his journalism in the 70s and 80s, found its fullest expression in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992).

When it was published, The Intellectuals and the Masses was criticised for going too far in eliding British intellectuals' snobberies with fascist ideology, as if modernism taken to its logical conclusion would automatically lead to Nazism.. The idea that some people should be regarded as more valuable than others - or that culture should be divided into high and low, or society into upper and lower classes - clearly causes Carey almost physical pain. "I think the distribution of wealth is disgusting," he says. On the one hand, he passionately believes in the moral equality of all, and thinks everyone should have a chance to prove themselves regardless of background. But perhaps, at some level, his onslaught against elitism also reflects an irrational guilt about the fact that he and his successful sisters - one became a headmistress, the other a senior manager at Barclays - were born with greater life-chances than their brother.

Sources
John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses
http://www.wikipedia.com/
http://www.grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/.../art.oxforduniversity
www.faber.co.uk/work/intellectuals-and-masses/978057/1169269/

HCJ Lecture: Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a system of rule, driven by an ideology, that seeks direction of all aspects of public activity, political, economic and social, and to a degree, propoganda and terror.

Looking back at history indicates that it was not used as a critical judgement on a government, and was probably first used in the earlier years of Italian Fascist rule to describe a comprehensive socio-political system.

It was defined more fully in the post 1945 Cold War period by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956). Their theoretical model, derived from the history of the 20th Century, had 6 key features:

• An official ideology to which general adherence was demanded, the ideology intended to achieve a "perfect final state of mankind"


• A single mass party, hierarchically organised and closely interwoven with the state bureaucracy and typically led by one man.


• Monopolistic control of the armed forces
  
• A similar monopoly of the means of effective mass communication


• A system of terroristic police control


• Central control and direction of the entire economy

The government of Nazi Germany was a fascist, totalitarian state. Fascism is a form of right-wing totalitarianism which emphasises the subordination of the individual to advance the interests of the state. Nazi's fascism ideology included a racial theory against the Jews. There was extreme nationalism which called for the unification of all German-speaking people, the use of primary paramilitary organisations to stop dissent and terrorize opposition, and the centralisation of decision-making by, and loyalty to, a single leader.

Totalitarian regimes, due to technology and mass communication, has made it so that everything is subject to control: Economy, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, science, history and sport.

A totalitarian state was a fully mobilized society, constantly moving towards a goal, but as soon as one goal was reached, it was replaced by another, such as Stalin's Russia. During the Five Year Plan to build up the Soviet Union, another Five Year Plan was announced.

Stalinist society did feature an existence of brutal and unrestrained police terrorism. They were first used against the Kulaks, and terror was increasingly used against party members, administrators and ordinary people. Some were victims for deviating from the party line.

3 years after Stalin died, Krushchev's secret speech was held, illuminating the terror, criminality and totalitarian regime of Stalin. He was also accused of mass murder and genocide of the Kulaks.

Sources

www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture10.htm

www.history-ontheweb.co.uk/concepts/totalitarianism.htm

www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html