Examine the quotes from Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Mussolini, Huber, Freud, and Fromm. Then, construct an essay in which you discuss the problems of “social disintegration(Dewey 1935, see above) and the serious threat to our democracy (Dewey, 1939 cited in Fromm, see above). Your essay should, at a minimum, consider the basic components of fascist ideology and explain what Fromm views as the fundamental obstacles to human freedom. In your essay, you might also consider if any of this applies to the contemporary social and political landscape and what might be a path forward. Be specific. The quotations are a guideline, not a mandate. Sources must be
Quotes:
“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
from Carl Cohen, Communism, Fascism, and Democracy (p. 78)
“God is Dead.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (p. 41)
“The rise of national polities that pretend to represent the order, discipline, and spiritual authority that will counteract social disintegration is a tragic comment upon the unpreparedness of older liberalism to deal with the new problem which its very success precipitated [emphasis added].”
John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (1935) (pgs. 53-4)
“The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here — within ourselves and our institutions.”
John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939)
Cited in Chapter 1 of Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom (1941)
“…Empire calls for discipline, coordination of forces, duty and sacrifice; this explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime and the direction of many of the forces of the State and the necessary severity shown to those who would wish to oppose this spontaneous and destined impulse of the Italy of the twentieth century, to oppose it in the name of the superseded ideologies of the nineteenth, repudiated wherever great experiments of political and social transformation have been courageously attempted: especially where, as now, peoples thirst for authority, for leadership, for order.”
Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
from Carl Cohen, Communism, Fascism, and Democracy.
“The Fhrer Reich of the [German] people is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Fhrer.”
Ernst R. Huber, Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich (1939)
from Carl Cohen, Communism, Fascism, and Democracy
the essence of a group lies in the libidinal ties existing in it, is also to be found in the phenomenon of panic. A panic arises if a group becomes disintegrated. The mutual ties have ceased to exist, and a gigantic and senseless dread [Angst] is set free [in discussion of a military group].
Sigmund Freud, Two Artificial Groups: the Church and the Army in Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (originally published in German in 1921)
“…there is no greater mistake and no graver danger than not to see that in our own society we are faced with the same phenomenon that is fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere: the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual.” Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (Chapter VII)
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