23 - History: Fin de siècle era and lead up to World War I (1880–1914). cover art

23 - History: Fin de siècle era and lead up to World War I (1880–1914).

23 - History: Fin de siècle era and lead up to World War I (1880–1914).

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 History: Fin de siècle era and lead up to World War I (1880–1914). The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time. The theme was based on a revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism. They regarded civilization as being in crisis, and as requiring a massive and total solution. Their intellectual school considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as a numerical sum of atomized individuals. They condemned the rationalistic, liberal individualism of society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society. The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinian biology, Gesamtkunstwerk, Arthur de Gobineau's racialism, Gustave Le Bon's psychology, and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henri Bergson. Social Darwinism, which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life, and viewed the human condition as an unceasing struggle to achieve the survival of the fittest. It challenged positivism's claim of deliberate and rational choice as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race, and environment. Its emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered the legitimacy and appeal of nationalism. New theories of social and political psychology rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason. Nietzsche's argument that "God is dead", coinciding with his attack on the "herd mentality" of Christianity, on democracy, and on modern collectivism, his concept of the Übermensch, and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct, were major influences upon many of the fin-de-siècle generation. Bergson's claim of the existence of an élan vital, or vital instinct, centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism; this challenged Marxism. French nationalist and reactionary monarchist Charles Maurras influenced fascism. Maurras promoted what he called integral nationalism, which called for the organic unity of a nation, and insisted that a powerful monarch was an ideal leader of a nation. Maurras distrusted what he considered the democratic mystification of the popular will that created an impersonal collective subject. He claimed that a powerful monarch was a personified sovereign who could exercise authority to unite a nation's people. Fascists idealized Maurras' integral nationalism, but modified into a modernized revolutionary form - devoid of Maurras' monarchism. French revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847-1922) promoted the legitimacy of political violence in his work Reflections on Violence (1908) and in other works in which he advocated radical syndicalist action to achieve a revolution to overthrow capitalism and the bourgeoisie through a general strike. In Reflections on Violence, Sorel emphasized need for a revolutionary political religion. In his book The Illusions of Progress (1908), Sorel denounced democracy as reactionary, stating that "nothing is more aristocratic than democracy". By 1909, after the failure of a syndicalist general strike in France, Sorel and his supporters left the radical left and went to the radical right, where they sought to merge militant Catholicism and French patriotism with their views—advocating anti-republican Christian French patriots as ideal revolutionaries. Initially, Sorel had officially been a revisionist of Marxism, but by 1910 he had announced his abandonment of socialist literature. In 1914, using an aphorism of Benedetto Croce, he claimed that "socialism is dead" because of the "decomposition of Marxism". Sorel began to support reactionary Maurrassian nationalism beginning in 1909, and this influenced his works. Maurras held interest in merging his nationalist ideals with Sorelian syndicalism, known as Sorelianism, as a means to confront democracy. Maurras stated, "A socialism liberated from the democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism well as a well made glove fits a beautiful hand." The fusion of Maurrassian nationalism and Sorelian syndicalism influenced radical Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini (1865-1931). Corradini spoke of the need for a nationalist-syndicalist movement, led by elitist aristocrats and anti-democrats who shared a revolutionary syndicalist commitment to direct action and a willingness to fight. Corradini spoke of Italy as being a "proletarian nation" that needed to pursue imperialism in order to challenge the "plutocratic" French and British. Corradini's views ...
No reviews yet