Abstract
David Ohana, The Dawn of Political Nihilism (Volume I of The Nihilist Order), Sussex Academic Press: Brighton, 2009; xiv + 221 pp.; 9781845192891, £49.50 (hbk) David Ohana, Homo Mythicus (Volume II of The Nihilist Order), Sussex Academic Press: Brighton, 2009; viii + 187 pp.; 9781845192907, £44.50 (hbk) David Ohana, The Futurist Syndrome (Volume III of The Nihilist Order), Sussex Academic Press: Brighton, 2009; vii + 206; 9781845192914, £49.50 (hbk)
Ohana’s trilogy on the ‘nihilist order’ is an exercise in intellectual history intended to trace the development – roughly, from 1870 onwards – of a current of thought which ultimately issued in the European totalitarianisms of right and left, in the period after World War I. More accurately, it seeks to expose that current as a specific amalgam of ideas: ‘the nihilist-totalitarian syndrome’. Ohana’s account of totalitarianism as having been constituted in its intellectual form prior to its political expression, alongside his depiction of that form as a particular ‘state of mind’, recalls Jacob Talmon’s distinctive perspective, first introduced in the 1950s; indeed, in a foreword to the trilogy, Yehoshua Arieli places Ohana within an informal ‘Jerusalem school’ of historiography on the theme, effectively founded by Talmon, and whose membership also includes Ze'ev Sternhell. The overall thesis, as Ohana understands it, is complex and paradoxical: nihilism conveys ‘an orderless state of affairs’; totalitarianism entails a ‘strict regimented order’. On the one hand there is a ‘will to destroy’. On the other, there is a ‘strong desire to create imposing structures’ (I, 1). However, in sequential steps, the nihilist mentality – in culture – is driven to embrace a totalitarian project, in politics. These sequential steps are, in the main body of the three volumes, enumerated with sustained discussion of four central philosophical figures or social movements: Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, Italian futurism and Ernst Jünger. The first volume, The Dawn of Political Nihilism, sketches out the main lines of this genealogy (and forms the focus of the discussion below). Volumes II and III, Homo Mythicus and The Futurist Syndrome, variously embellish the detail, pursue digressions, and clarify and defend the overall thesis with reference to significant critics and commentators on aspects of both totalitarianism and nihilism. In broad terms, the treatment of relevant topics is therefore exhaustive. Yet there is a sense in which this manner of organizing the material is puzzling, and the material itself would have benefitted from more succinct exposition.
Nietzsche opens Ohana’s story because Nietzsche invests nihilism with new meaning. Literally denoting the state of ‘not being’ (I, 4), Nietzsche’s importance to nihilism is to wrest the term away from identification with particular approaches to philosophy, political life and literature, and instead to fasten it to an entire civilization, understood to be subject to a deep-rooted historical tendency towards the erosion of its supporting beliefs. ‘Myth’ is needed in the place of those beliefs and the nihilist mentality therefore becomes Janus-faced, because it looks not only back to the loss of order but forward to the creation of the ‘new man’ (I, 16). Saliently, the ‘stress on the present as the dimension of action’ will presage fin-de-siècle philosophical developments (I, 26). Ohana explicitly says his method for the historical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s arguments does not involve making value judgements (I, 52). That granted, however, it is a still a little disappointing that he does not do more to separate the discrete elements of the Nietzsche–Nazi connection which hovers in the background (though, in the general sense, his working through of Nietzsche’s ideas builds towards the centrality of the construction of the Overman as the personification of ‘will to power’; I, 53). Subsequently, Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist successors are left to found ‘myth ex nihilo’ and in Georges Sorel that entails translating the will to power within the context of a leftist frame of reference. One aspect of that translation is (contra Nietzsche) the enunciation of a mythical dimension of experience which will energize the masses: the general strike. For the revision of the philosophy of Marxism, this means the transfiguration of ‘homo economicus’ into ‘homo mythicus’ – man moved by emotion and symbolism (I, 73). Next, the Italian futurists extend the notion loosely intimated already in Sorel’s correction of Marx: that the machine does not ‘alienate’ man but makes man free (I, 71, 85). ‘Homo mechanicus’ therefore comes into view (I, 85). In this move, the revolt against rationalism and the strictures of bourgeois society ultimately morphs into the embrace of modern technology in the pursuit of culture, which generates not only a new myth to serve the ‘politics of violence’, but also the practical means for making order out of chaos. A final figure, Ernst Jünger, cements that vision. Strangely, for the conclusion of a survey in the history of ideas, the nature of this vision meant that the intellectuals who came to be attracted to totalitarianism were drawn not to the new order’s ideological substance but, rather, to its organizational style and technocratic ethos (I, 141).
There can be little disagreement that this quite nuanced line of development can be abstracted persuasively from modern thought. Nor that it had an important resonance in the intellectual cultures that helped to give rise to Nazism, in particular. Jeffrey Herf, in his Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge 1984), offers a similar, convincing story, which Ohana makes reference to, and which he usefully adds to by enriching the account of its sources prior to the Weimar Republic. At the same time, though, more circumspection is perhaps called for with respect to how far the totalitarianisms of the left as well as the right are being illuminated here. The impression one gets is that Nazism and Fascism are the primary subjects being treated (notwithstanding, for instance, the lengthy discussion of the reception of futurism in the Russian context). Furthermore, as important as the intellectual developments that led to the twentieth-century interwar dictatorships undoubtedly are, they equally need to be balanced by some conception of the role played by more prosaic causes – or, at least, by a position that gives the latter due weight, but leaves others to pursue. Even the political thinker Hannah Arendt, for instance, in her seminal text in the field, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), made room for both ideas and ‘practices’, and indeed gave the greater causal significance to the latter. More recently, David Roberts’ excellent book The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (Cambridge 2006), manages to survey causal connections of all kinds. One last comment perhaps worth making is that the attention given to the worldviews of the dictators themselves – their contents, affinities and influences – is slight to say the least; in the first volume, for example, the political thinking of Hitler (such as it was) is not in consideration at all, excepting a few very brief allusions (e.g. I, 159).
University of Birmingham