Cultural Despair?

It’s 60 years since Fritz Stern - whose family had had to move in 1938 to escape Nazi Germany - published his first book The Politics of Cultural Despair – a study in the rise of Germanic ideology, a quotation from which opens Anne Applebaum’s recent book about the authoritarian mood which has spread globally in the new millennium. There is a nice tribute here to Fritz Stern on his 70^th birthday which places the book in context 

The “Politics of Cultural Despair” charted the genesis and diffusion of the antiliberal, antiurban, anti-Semitic, and anticapitalist animus that lay at the heart of thinking about das Volk, and suggested that it was the penetration of these themes into German culture that made National Socialism plausible to many educated, middle-class Germans.

Stern's book was not the first to do so. But it did so with far greater subtlety, methodological sophistication, and plausibility than its predecessors. While Stern sought to demonstrate the link between trends in German culture and the rise of National Socialism, he did not mean to suggest that the sort of "cultural despair" he had traced was unique to German culture. Indeed, he insisted that the phenomenon of "cultural despair" was not confined to Germany, and that it had not ended with the defeat of Nazism.

Nor did he claim that the success of Nazism could be explained primarily by the cultural developments he had traced; only that its success could not be understood without taking those cultural developments into account. To put the book into context, it is worth recalling, however briefly, the sorts of treatment that the issue had already received when Stern's book came on the scene.

- Perhaps the most influential work on National Socialism to appear during the decade of the 1950s was Hannah Arendt's “Origins of Totalitarianism”, first published in 1951. Among its many peculiarities was its studious refusal to draw any connection between National Socialism and the peculiarities of German culture or German national development.

Curiously, however, Applebaum neither defines nor develops Stern’s concept of “cultural despair” which – with the pessimism of the past few years - would normally have been the subject of intensive dissection. But, to my knowledge, only Chris Hedges has published a major article on the subject. Could it be that the subject of Western decline has suddenly become of minor importance compared with that of global extinction?

Or is it simply that the subject is too gloomy to arouse interest? The French gadfly Eric Zemmour certainly doesn’t think so – he’s just published another outrageous book “French Melancoly” whose opening pages actually claim that France IS Europe!

I am therefore a bit diffident about imposing a post on the subject of declinism – which gets a good entry in Wikipedia – and will keep it brief

Each of us is unique but, somehow, in collectivities – with a common language – we develop common, distinctive traits…The sense of nationhood came slowly – kings, barons, armies and sailors in the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain acquired (and lost) empires without it apparently giving its present-day descendants a sense of grievance or inferiority…But what Fritz Stern called, in 1961, “cultural despair” has deeply affected other countries as they have confronted economic decline.

The UK is, of course, the prime example – with the 1960s in particular being fixated on the issue of the need to modernize and the 1970s on a sense of collapse

Andrew Gamble is a British political scientist who has not only followed closely the debate on economic decline but wrote a famous book about it “Britain in Decline” (1981) which went through four editions before succumbing to a 2000 critique “Rethinking British Decline”. Interestingly, one of the authors of this last book, Michael Kenny, went on in 2014 to produce “The Politics of English Nationhood” which anticipated the outcome of the 2016 Brexit Referendum.

It took France another decade before it was afflicted with the same condition with Eric Zemmour’s "La Suicide Francaise" being the first of a cascade of books which have deluged the French in the past few decades – as analysed in Melancholy Politics – loss, Mourning an memory in late modern France (2011)

Is economic decline the first stage of “cultural despair”?

What does it take for a collective sense of despair to reach the point of no return?