Mass Movements, the Sacred, and Personhood in Ellul and Bataille: Parallel Sociological Analyses of Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism

Abstract

An instructive comparison can be drawn between Jacques Ellul’s 1936 Esprit article portraying “Fascism as Liberalism’s Child” and Georges Bataille’s 1938 lecture on “The Sacred Sociology of Today’s World”. Both rely on Durkheim’s sociology in assuming modernity’s amorphousness, leaving passive masses of atomized individuals susceptible to mobilization into totalized entities by charismatic leadership. Bataille welcomes the postwar intensification of social aggregates but criticizes their militant, militaristic regimentation as not violent and sacred enough, whereas for Ellul, the resurgent social sacred (whether orgiastic or dictatorial), as the active mass, is the enemy of the free person as the sole meaningful whole.