rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_a50a4f1c-4a7e-5fa9-ac27-f920c2e4001d">10
There was then a neo-Hegelian lineage leading into the new ideological category of “Fascism”; not just for Gentile, but for various intellectuals of Mussolini’s Italy, adaptations of Hegel provided a logic for the reconciliation of the individual, the industrial communities, and the state under Fascist rule. As Gregor goes on, ‘the community—as the state—that served as the grounds of individuation for the individual was not a construction that was inter homines, between members of the community, but an immanent reality that arose out of members themselves. It was interiore homine…The community was understood to be at the core of the individual’.11 Italian fascism thus provided a practicable model for a totalitarian regime based on a Hegelian tradition as the Nazi movement reached its maturity in the 1930s.
And yet between his death and the present day, with a notable peak among the British Idealists the late 19th century, Hegel’s works have been cited frequently by progressive thinkers in Britain and across Europe.12 Benedetto Croce, who developed his neo-Hegelianism in collaboration with Gentile, rejected his friend’s fascist ideology in the 1920s. Then, of course, there was the burgeoning Marxist movement, in which Hegel’s legacy took a radically different form.
The Germanophobic reaction to Idealism were clearly of its time: the French generation that attended Alexandre Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s led the shift to a new existential reading; and Walter Kaufmann’s comprehensive defence of Hegel against Popper’s charges in The Hegel Myth and its Method (1959) marked the changing tide of opinion.13 In Britain, Charles Taylor, Berlin’s student, presented a major study that would shape post-war readings of Hegel and dispel the cruder charges of earlier writers; and by 1989 Francis Fukuyama had made Kojeve’s account the basis of his pronouncement of a post-Cold War “End of History”. Despite these developments, necessarily foreshortened here, the earlier suspicions of Anglophone readers remain noteworthy. The tensions and overlaps between forms of liberal, socialist, and fascist teleology are clear in the legacy of Hegelianism up to the present day.
Dr Henry Mead is a Senior Fellow at CARR and research fellow at the University of Tallinn. Research for this chapter was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant (TAU17149) “Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe”.
1 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol II. The High Tide of Prophecy, Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1945), 270.
2 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen, 1946), 735.
3 See Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” (1953), in Liberty, the Collected Essays of Isaiah Berlin, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
4 Kirk Willis, “The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830-1900”, Victorian Studies 32 no. 1 (1988): 87-111, 103-4.
5 Willis, “Introduction,” 104.
6 Andrew Vincent, “German Philosophy and British Public Policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in Theory and Practice”, Journal of the History of Ideas 68 no. 1 (2007): 157-179.
7 Willis, “Introduction”, 8.
8 Willis, “Introduction”, 7.
9 Leonard Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London: George Allen, 1918).
10 A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 86.
11 Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals, 114.
12 See Lisa Herzog, ed., Hegel’s Thought in Europe: Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
13 Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 88-119.
The ‘Silent Majority’: Populist Cliché or Warning?
Aristotle Kallis
In the run-up to the EU referendum in Britain in June 2016, at a time when the Remain vote was apparently enjoying a modest but clear advantage, one of the numerous opinion polls focused on public attitudes to immigration and on how this might affect the popular vote.1 When asked to assess immigrants’ contribution to British economy, responses were split evenly between those acknowledging immigrants’ contribution to the economy and those questioning it. Yet very strong affirmative majorities were recorded by the same poll in response to questions about Britain being “overcrowded”, about the need to “significantly” restrict immigration through tighter border controls, to limit migrants’ access to public services, and so on. When interviewees were asked to identify the one issue that could sway their vote in the referendum, respondents singled out immigration by a spectacular margin. Unfortunately, we know too well how this played out.
As the history of opinion polling shows, such social majorities can however be mercurial and hard to gauge. Societies typically host a wide spectrum of views on any given issue and, while it may be relatively easier to talk of “extremes”, the mainstream-as-majority view is often very hard to ascertain or deduce.2 Opinion polls go some way towards capturing the mood of society in a more focused, issue-specific format but they can also be misleading: their results hinge on the way the question is framed, the moment when or the medium through which it is asked, and the group that is sampled. Such parameters may all skew the findings,3 in some cases deliberately or as in most cases unintentionally. Thus, to talk of “social majorities”—or the general will of a population—is very often a wishful projection or and educated guess with a very limited shelf life indeed.
Part of the problem is that social majorities do not always have a voice or a desire to speak loudly enough to be captured by the radar of public mood. Noisy minorities4 can easily skew impressions as much as boisterous leaders claiming that they bespeak the “real” majority view.
Meanwhile,
