The Reshaping of Man and the Birth of Totalitarian Power

Abstract

This chapter analyses totalitarian power, whose origins are traced back to Plato’s political project. Plato did not merely take inspiration from the Spartan model. He intended to create a “New Sparta”, namely a polity where social conflict could be finally eliminated from the human condition. Karl R. Popper wrote that “those who […] exalt Plato’s reputation as a teacher of morals and announce to the world that his ethics is the nearest approach to Christianity before Christ, are preparing the way for totalitarianism and especially for a totalitarian […] interpretation of Christianity”. Since Augustine of Hippo largely took inspiration from Plato, the book compares Plato’s polity project to that of Augustine and, in so doing, shed significant light on commonalities. The most significant of these points is the idea that there is a privileged source of knowledge and that, through it, we can reach “human salvation”.

The totalitarian project is Machiavellian. It searches for consensus through the promise of recasting man and, since such recasting is impossible, imposes the most extreme form of repression: if on earth there is possible the realisation of God’s Kingdom or of “God’s Kingdom without God,” it is necessary to persecute all who disagree, for they are the ones permanently conspiring again the “salvation” of man. The naïve actor then becomes the classic victim of institutionalised hypocrisy. To avoid the possibility that those who dissent organise, there is a continuous plan to mobilise against subjects and groups considered to be enemies (internal and external): totalitarian regimes need to systematically employ social conspiracy theory and to continually find scape goats. Moreover, private property must be suppressed or placed under severe control of public power.

Throughout history, totalitarianism has had a long gestation. Besides considering Plato and Augustine, the chapter considers aspects of the Puritan Revolution and episodes of Jacobin Terror. This chapter also develops ideas hinted to by Hannah Arendt and Dolf Sternberger. Regarding the planned economy, it employs the analyses of the Austrian School of Economics.

Appendix: The “prophet of doom”

The monopolistic paradigm, on which every kind of closed society has based itself, prevents the control of the rulers by the ruled. The rulers live in a condition of permanent self-referentiality. Any change or turnover of people is an extraordinary event. They are not the consequence of an institutionalised mechanism for the scrutiny of the government activity and they “are not based upon a rational attempt to improve social conditions”.²⁴⁹

In reference to ancient Judaism, Weber pointed out the following: “Elijah received his commands from Yahwe in solitude and announced them personally as the emissary of his God […]. His incomparable prestige rested on this and upon his hitherto unheard of lack of discretion in standing up to the political power holders. Historically he is important as the first fairly ascertainable prophet of doom. In this is the forerunner of a series of grand figures which for our present day literary sources begin with Amos and end with Ezekiel”.²⁵⁰ As Weber also observed, “the sociological reason for the prophets’ solitude was, in first place, the fact that the prophecy of doom could not be taught professionally like that of good fortune. Further, it could not be exploited for profit”²⁵¹; and this is easily understandable: first of all, because “no one would buy an evil omen”²⁵²; and also for the reason that the “the question of Temple construction, succession to the throne, the private sins of the monarchs, worship, and the most varied political and personal decisions became topics of their [of the prophets of doom] oracles and their mostly undesired and extremely sharp criticism”²⁵³; and spoke out against the “social injustice of the king” and the “whole bureaucratic apparatus”, seen as an “Egyptian abomination”.²⁵⁴

Ortega aptly pointed out that God forced Amos to prophesy against his people, that is, against the course into which public life had been channelled.²⁵⁵ Consequently, one can say that the “prophet of doom” stood up against the phenomena which we can concisely encapsulate in the term of “Machiavellianism”.

It follows that prophetism was to some extent the instrument through which the decisions of rulers were subjected to scrutiny. In other words, an attempt was made to prevent the actions of public power from being carried out in total self-referentiality. The prophet was “the herald, the speaker of Yahweh. […. In] that society established on a theocratic foundation, all of a sudden a special envoy of Yahweh appeared; all therefore felt, or at least should have felt, reverence towards him […]. The prophet, in the performance of his mission, came before the king and before the priests: he shouted out a rebuke in a sanctuary or in the Temple in Jerusalem, and then moved on to enunciate a threat on the threshold of the royal palace; he railed against political alliances, and turning elsewhere, he uttered his disapproval of syncretistic cults; he made public the scandals of the court and he cursed entire dynasties, as he exposed to the people’s contempt the greedy ministers of the sanctuary and he scolded the astonished crowd who listened to him for the corruption of their ways. And all recognised him this right, since he came from Yahweh”.²⁵⁶

The threats the prophet uttered on behalf of God were terrifying. Through Amos, Yahweh says: “it shall come to pass that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day: and I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day”.²⁵⁷ It is no surprise therefore that the “prophet of doom”, despite being recognised as the envoy of God, could be unwelcome to rulers: he challenged them and obviously had to be ready to suffer the consequences of his preaching. This is why “being killed was the normal and ordinary prospect for a prophet”: if this did not happen it was “an exception”.²⁵⁸

For the purposes considered here, the most relevant point is in any case another one. It refers to the identification of the conditions which made the “prophet of doom” possible. As Weber pointed out, Yahwe was, “since Moses, […] the god of the covenant of the Israelite confederacy, and, corresponding to the purpose of the confederacy, he was primarily its war god. He played this role in a very special manner. He became war god by virtue of a treaty of confederation. This contract had to be concluded, not only among confederates, but also with him, for he was no god residing in the midst of the people, a familiar god, but rather a god hitherto strange. He continued to be a god from afar. This was the decisive element in the relationship”.²⁵⁹ In other words: “Yahwe was an elective god. The confederate people had chosen him through berith with him, just as, later, it established its king by berith. Yahwe, in turn, had chosen this people before all others by free resolve”.²⁶⁰

Weber further specified: “In this manner Yahwe became not only the war god of the confederacy but also the contractual partner of its law established by berith above all of the socio-legal orders. Since the confederacy was at first a stateless association of tribes, new statutes, whether cultic or legal in nature, could in principle originate only by way of agreement (berith) based on oracle like the original covenant”.²⁶¹ And, “as guardian of confederate orders, Yahwe protects the customs and mores. That which is ‘unheard of’ in Israel is an abomination to him. In agreement with his original nature, however, and unlike Varuna and similar deities, he was not the guardian of the confederate law and mores in the sense of sanctifying an already existing immutable order of law or a ‘righteousness’ measurable in terms of fixed norms. On the contrary, this positive law for Israel was created through berith with him. It had not always been in existence and it was possible that by new revelation and a new berith with god it could be changed again”.²⁶²

There was therefore no one single “revelation” of the will of Yahweh. And there was no definitive monopoly over it. Public power and “charismatic bureaucracy” could at any time undergo “disintermediation” through the action of another envoy of God. The work of delegitimation performed by the “prophet of doom” is precisely an action of “disintermediation” made possible by the fact that Yahweh sent continual “messages” and kept them outside the monopoly of those who held public power. And this, even inside a theocracy, allowed an irregular and uncertain scrutiny over government activity. As if to say that possible control is only performed through the delegitimation of rulers. Accordingly, it was an extraordinary occurrence, which materialised through the initiative of men who in turn were devoid of any certain legitimation and who, for this reason, were often destined to fail. A genuine action of scrutiny requires a context where the formula of authority moves in an upward direction, hinging on the consent of the ruled and is not a “gift” from the divinity; and where the limitation of power is institutionalised.²⁶³