The Totalitarian Disease

Abstract

Louis Dumont is Director of Studies at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and is leading French anthropologist of India. His ethnographic analyses of kinship, marriage and other modes of alliance, reciprocity and exchange, and native representations of society and self are guided straightforwardly enough by precedent of Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and especially Levi-Strauss. But already in Homo Hierarchicus, a study of logic and symbology of Indian caste system and first of a trilogy of critiques of Occidental individualism, Dumont proves to be heir of an even earlier French master. In early 1800s, Alexis de Tocqueville found in a busy United States an object lesson at once in virtues and in dangers, in what could be gained and in what might be lost, in passage from hierarchical to more egalitarian forms of social organization. By early 1960s, Dumont had begun to find in putatively egalitarian regimes of both Old World and New World systematic potential for far more catastrophic evils than de Tocqueville had ever imagined. In Homo Hierarchicus, Dumont argues that collectivism of such apparently unjust systems as caste system could in fact be an effective check on emergence and maintenance of socioeconomic disenfranchisement that egalitarian glorification of the individual has served at once to mask and to encourage. In From Mandeville to Marx: The Triumph of Economic Ideology, he explores connection between ascendance of individualism and ascendance of capitalism. The selection that follows is from Essays on Individualism, last installment in Dumont's critical trilogy. Less conceptual or intellectual than what might more broadly be called cultural history, selection reviews connections that Dumont has pointed out many times: between individualism and racism and between racism and political totalitarianism.