123 Odysseus of the Nimble Wits The Spirits of Totalitarianism and the Cultural Cold War’s Entscheidungsproblem* Antonia Majaca In 1895, while investigating apparent similarities between “epochs marked by fervent religious faith” and “great political upheavals,” the reactionary French polymath Gustave Le Bon came to a curious conclusion. Masses, he declared, emerge after a destruction of “general beliefs” and always assume a religious form. Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were thus essentially as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and “their cruel ardor proceeded from the same source.” Le Bon saw the revolutionary crowd as the atavistic return to a primordial state of nature and the seedbed for a monstrous collective psychological entity guided by unconscious instincts and what he referred to as the “unalterable psycho- logical elements of a race.” 1 Unsurprisingly, Le Bon believed that the most dangerous form of secularism at the turn of the twentieth century was socialism, which recruited its adherents from among the new masses of workers in mines and factories. Their demands, he thought, were no less than the inversion of Charles Darwin’s law of evolution. Le Bon—an ardent colonial anthro- pologist and inventor of such sinister devices as the portable cephalometer—observed the workers’ movements with repulsion: Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defned, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalisation of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the beneft of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims. 2 Apocalyptic visions of mass political participation were not unusual at the time, but Le Bon’s Psychologie des Foules (1895) became an immediate bestseller, translated into nineteen languages in less than a year. Most importantly, his counterrevolutionary fear of mass democracy leading to “equal distribution” provided a frm social Darwinist backbone for much of Western liberal political theory in the decades to follow. The mixture of mass psychology, proto- political theology, and the demonization of collective political subjectivation, all found in Le Bon’s thin scripture, resonated across the ideological and politico- epistemic divisions of the cultural Cold War. It was exactly such reactionary prophecies about the masses’ propensity for falling back into pre-civiliza- tional, “communist irrationality” that germinated liberal capitalist catechesis about the propensity of modern humans to become “slaves to ideology,” as the metaphorical parlance of the US “freedom ofensive” would have it. I use this reference to Gustav Le Bon, a relatively obscure nineteenth-century forefather of Cold War intellectual practice—whom Hannah Arendt draws on signifcantly in her book on totalitarianism—as a prelude to my partial and necessarily granular anamnesis of the early and mid-century consolidation of anti-communism as the condition of possibility for racial capitalism’s ideology of post-ideology. 3 In the aftermath of World War II, communism was conveniently declared, in an echo of Le Bon, a monist ideological religion most similar to fanatical Catholicism. The crude vernacular version of anti- communism found its more sophisticated counterpart in the rhetorical couplet of (anti-)totalitarianism and cultural freedom—the backbone of the Cold War cultural hegemony.