Masse
Arendt's term for the previously disengaged, unorganized majority, too numerous or indifferent for any interest-based body, later drawn into politics by the mob.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Shore links the herd that Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer all invoke to Heidegger's conformist das Man, and sees Arendt pulling that single herd apart into two categories, mob and masses.
Put simply Shore: Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer all speak of "the herd," which Shore links to Heidegger's conforming "they" ("das Man"). Arendt splits that one herd into two groups: the mob and the masses.
What the Dreyfus affair means for Arendt is neither the framed officer nor the birth of Zionism, but crowds in Paris streets demanding Jewish deaths: mob and masses entering history.
Put simply Arendt: what matters about the Dreyfus affair is not the officer who was framed, nor the start of Zionism, but crowds in Paris shouting for Jewish deaths. That is when the "mob" and the "masses" enter history.
Arendt describes Nazism as the bourgeoisie allied with the mob, an alliance that managed to draw in the masses, recruiting from the politically indifferent rather than from any elite.
Put simply Arendt: Nazism was an alliance of the middle class and the mob that managed to pull in the masses. It recruited from people who had never cared about politics, not from any elite.
In the text In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Three, ch. 10, section II, Arendt writes of "the temporary alliance between the mob and the elite."
By the masses Arendt means the hitherto unengaged majority: people too numerous, too indifferent, or both, for any party, union or other interest-based body ever to have organized them.
In Arendt's analysis, victims are not the only ones made superfluous: the perpetrators, recruited from an atomized, lonely mass, trade isolation for collective organization and lose their selves.
Put simply Arendt: the victims are not the only ones made "superfluous", unneeded. The perpetrators come from lonely, isolated people who trade their isolation for belonging to a movement, and lose their selves in it.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
AdornoOnce nature is an object, people become objects too: mastery over nature slides into mastery over other humans, then over oneself, producing the herd a fascist leader commands. L14 · 47:44
ArendtBy the masses Arendt means the hitherto unengaged majority: people too numerous, too indifferent, or both, for any party, union or other interest-based body ever to have organized them. L15 · 27:59
Splits the Frankfurt "herd" into mob and masses
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.