"The Déclassés of All Classes"

• In Event: Conceptions of Collectivity

Abstract

This paper seeks to untangle two strands of discourse about the political problem represented by the "masses" in European politics, one of which centers on the accession of the "many" to political power through the expansion of the franchise and the consequent development of the "mass party," and the other of which centers on the disintegrative effects of a capitalism that does not (merely) simplify and sharpen but (also) disorganizes class antagonisms. In doing this, the paper also seeks to reorganize our understanding of the relations among Marx, Schmitt, and Arendt, using Marx's (and Marxist) treatments of the Lumpen, Schmitt's diagnoses of the paralysis of parliamentary government in Weimar, and Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and related publications as its primary texts. While a conventional mapping would group Arendt and Schmitt together as defenders of the autonomy of the political—the differences between their understandings of "the political" notwithstanding—against the economism of Marx and Marxism, the paper identifies surprising affinities between Schmitt and Marx around the problem of the political representation of the masses, understood in the traditional sense as the "many"; at the same time, it identifies an equally surprising affinity between Arendt and Marx, and especially a dissident Marxist analysis of the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in the 1920s and early 1930s, which focused on the politically disintegrative and disarticulating power of capitalism. The paper argues that the conflation of these two strands of discourse in the postwar wave of theorizing about "mass society," and the consequent elision of the historical settings in which these analyses had initially been framed, has not only contributed to the distorted representations of these writers within political theory; it has also helped entrench a forced (and false) choice between the critique of capitalism and the recovery of "the political" as fundamental theoretical orientations.

Author

• Patchen Markell, Cornell University