Muhammad Iqbal, South Asia’s most important Muslim writer and thinker in the early twentieth century, returned from his studies in Europe with a Nietzschean vision of Islam revivified by strong self-creating Muslims (Iqbal surely took heart from Nietzsche’s own Islamophilic view that the ‘Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before’). Lu Xun was convinced that the Chinese nation had to consist of the kind of self-aware individuals with indomitable will exemplified by Zarathustra. Once a sufficient number of Nietzschean self-overcoming individuals come into being, the Chinese ‘will become capable of mighty and unprecedented achievement, elevating us to a unique position of dignity and respect in the world’.
Muhammad Abduh, the Arab world’s foremost scholar and jurist, who paid a fan’s ultimate tribute to Herbert Spencer – a visit to the philosopher’s home – presented his reformist Islam as a bulwark against the degeneracy apparently caused by both extreme traditionalists and hyper-Westernized Muslims. Swimming in the same intellectual currents of fin de siècle Europe, the Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda, another earnest student of Spencer, called for Hindus to eat beef, develop ‘muscles of iron’ and pray, ‘O Thou Mother of Strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and make me a Man!’
The Hindu, Jewish, Chinese and Islamic modernists who helped establish major nation-building ideologies were in tune with the main trends of the European fin de siècle, which redefined freedom beyond bourgeois self-seeking to a will to forge dynamic new societies and reshape history. It is impossible to understand them, and the eventual product of their efforts (Islamism, Hindu nationalism, Zionism, Chinese nationalism), without grasping their European intellectual background of cultural decay and pessimism: the anxiety in the unconscious that Freud was hardly alone in sensing, or the idea of glorious rebirth after decline and decadence, borrowed from the Christian idea of resurrection, that Mazzini had done so much to introduce into the political sphere.
Like the European thinkers who influenced them, Nordau and Iqbal were not arguing specifically against capitalist or imperialist exploitation. They could seem completely indifferent to the criteria of the left and the right: private property, inequality or alienating modes of production. The key problem for them was a decadent or degenerate modern culture that fostered egotism, cynicism and passivity; they saw a solution in radical renewal, achieved through a strong will and commitment to superhuman action.
*
A more extreme version of such Prometheanism was the belief, already articulated by Italian nationalists and taken up by the demagogues of the twentieth century, that bloodshed was necessary in the creation of the New Man. Such was the extraordinary conjuncture of the fin de siècle that Georges Sorel, a retired engineer and autodidact in Paris, could say independently at the conclusion that conflict, combat and the élan vital embodied by heroic individuals are necessary for the world to move forward.
Sorel wanted to see ‘before descending into the grave’ the ‘humbling of the proud bourgeois democracies, today so cynically triumphant’. Indulging this desire in his writings, Sorel came to enjoy an elastic appeal, like Mazzini, whom he greatly admired. Mentor to Catholic nationalists in France, Sorel saluted Lenin in 1919 and Mussolini was one of his devotees when the latter was still a socialist. ‘What I am,’ the Duce said, ‘I owe to Sorel.’
Sorel’s writings came out of, and reflected, a largely traumatic experience of France after its embourgeoisement: the country seemed lost in what Tocqueville in 1851 called a ‘labyrinth of petty incidents, petty ideas, petty passions, personal viewpoints and contradictory projects’, and appeared redeemable only through virile empire-building in North Africa. Born in 1847, Sorel grew up as the country went through the humiliation of German invasion in 1870 and the trauma of the Paris Commune.
In Zola’s The Debacle (1892), which documents both ordeals, the novel’s sickly protagonist grapples with ‘the degeneration of his race, which explained how France, virtuous with the grandfathers, could be beaten in the time of their grandsons’. Sorel himself frequently invoked Ernest Renan’s angst-ridden question, ‘On what will the future generations live?’ His own answers were as uncompromisingly tough as Tocqueville’s, composed in a language reminiscent of Nietzsche, in which the alternative to bourgeois vices was not a particular economic system but a whole new – and epic – mode of being in the world.
Sorel scorned the promise of liberalism and socialism, and the simple utilitarian saw of maximizing happiness. Pain and suffering, he asserted, was life. Life acquired meaning and grandeur from the struggle against decay and destruction, and striving for liberation – to be achieved by a self-chosen heroic morality. Sorel prophesized a revolt against the bourgeois, which has ‘used force since the beginning of modern times’. ‘The proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the state with violence.’ As he wrote, ‘All our effort should aim at preventing bourgeois ideas from poisoning the class which is arising.’
Sorel borrowed his terms of reference from religious movements: war, honour, glory, heroism, vitality, virility and sublimity. He was interested in the Mazzini-style myth that could stir the soul, and bring to power the elite of strong men who could rule. And so he offered prophecy rather than blueprint. It did not matter who fulfilled it – big industrialists, trade unions, American frontiersmen, or Catholic monarchists – though he tended to speak more of the proletariat, recognizing it as the angel of history in the age of the masses. For him, the love of conquest and the will to power resolved all apparent contradictions of political theory.
In that sense, Wyndham Lewis, one of England’s rare fascist thinkers, was right to say that Sorel ‘is the key to all contemporary political thought’. For his work consummated the nineteenth century’s steady transformation of politics: from the Enlightenment’s liberal notion emphasizing rational self-interest and deliberation to Napoleon’s total war, heroism and grandeur, aestheticization and, finally, an existential politics where survival is at stake, and the choices are life or death.
*