“The Great Pioneer of National Socialist Philosophy”?: Carlyle and Twentieth-Century Totalitarianism

Abstract

Thomas Carlyle occupies a highly unusual place in any discussion of twentieth-century totalitarian political religions. He was first historian in nineteenth century to recognize and to re-create French Revolution as a spiritual as well as a political phenomenon. Well before Alexis de Tocqueville and Jules Michelet, Carlyle understood that most salient aspect of Sansculottes' Gospel according to Jean-Jacques was its absolute repudiation of past and its messianic embrace of a purified future, worshipped and sanctified in popular public rituals, symbols, and liturgies (Works 2: 54). (1) In The French Revolution, he unfolded with an equal mixture of scorn and pity tragic consequences of Jacobins' brutal attempts to harness inchoate religious sentiments of le peuple towards creation of a new Political Evangel (Works 2: 128). Yet, by conclusion of twentieth century, Carlyle--the first and most prescient prophet of the totalitarian temptation (2)--was himself bracketed with those heroic vitalists who had inspired Nazi and Bolshevik projectors to realize their respective versions of an earthly paradise through unprecedented mass indoctrination and violence. (3) His name became associated with worst excesses of mechanistic social engineering that he had so memorably denounced in his greatest history. In immediate aftermath of World War II, those who still believed in Carlyle's message were at an obvious disadvantage in their bids to defend him. His notorious views on slavery, democracy, Negroes, Jews, and Irish Catholics inevitably linked him to diabolical forces that had ravaged Europe. At best, he could be defended as a misanthropic opponent of Benthamite liberalism who thrived on paradox and Swiftian satire, and who deliberately used inflammatory language to stimulate his opponents and to generate debate. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, (4) one of his subtlest advocates, pointed out in his posthumously published The Myth of State that to into Carlyle's work ... a definite philosophical construction of historical process ... or a definite political program is precarious and illusive (191). Others tried to isolate Carlyle from what Michael Burleigh has called dystopian stain of twentieth-century political religions by confining him in a Victorian context (xi). According to this thesis, he could not have foreseen how widespread longing for political harmony in his own century would later be exploited and perverted by those who misused science and technology to cleanse history of human-perceived imperfection. Like Nietzsche, with whom he has often been compared, Carlyle could not be blamed for how his writings were interpreted in either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Of Nietzsche, Karl Lowith has asserted that attempt to unburden [him] of ... intellectual guilt, or even to claim his support against what he brought about is just as unfounded as reverse effort to make him advocate of a matter over which he sits in judgment. Both [arguments] before historical insight that forerunners have ever prepared roads for others which they themselves did not travel. (200) In twenty-first century, such arguments themselves tend to crumble under weight of accumulated barbarism, particularly when they are employed in relation to Carlyle. Responding to example of Nietzsche, Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has shrewdly observed, The Nazis told their supermen to read The Will to Power , and it is no good saying that this was a mere chance.... It is not a question of establishing guilt of Nietzsche, who as an individual was not responsible for use made of his writings; nevertheless, fact that they were so used is bound to cause alarm and cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to understanding of what was in his mind. (7-8)(5) The Nazis also instructed their followers to read Carlyle, whom American-born Anglophone fascist William Joyce called the great pioneer of National-Socialist philosophy (36). …