• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Big Site of History

History of Civilization

Elitism | The Industrial Society

June 12, 2008 by Marge Anderson

The German philosopher Nietzsche was representative of the elitist view. The central line of his thinking led to the concept of a new aristocracy—the “higher man” or Ubermensch.

Nietzsche’s followers insisted that he meant a spiritual aristocracy; the superman would be above the petty materialism and national patriotism of the middle classes. Nietzsche’s opponents held that he was a preacher of Nordic superiority. Whichever, Nietzsche was clearly an enemy of democracy, which he held to be second only to its child, socialism, as a system in which the weak unjustly and unnaturally ruled the strong.

By 1914 the broad lines of the social attitudes of the present time were laid out. One line of argument favored some kind of revolutionary elitism, the seizure of power by a minority that believes itself to have the formula whereby the gifted few can bring order to a society threatened with chaos.

As Lenin developed Marxian socialism (see p. 443-441), its elitist implications came out clearly. The enlightened minority would seize power and rule dictatorially in the name of, and in the true interest of, the masses. Others dreamed of a new elite, such as Nietzche’s superman, to be created by a kind of new religion. Still others looked to eugenics to make possible the breeding of the new elite.

A second line of argument favored a more flexible form of elitism, one that tried to conserve democratic values. The leaders of such movements believed in gradualness. But all of them had doubts about the political capacity of the average man and woman. They hoped they could persuade the millions to listen to the wise planners, who had studied the social sciences and could devise the new institutions that would make human life better.

A third line sought to preserve and protect an existing elite from democratic drives toward equality, especially in the form of state intervention in economic and social life to promote security for all. Followers of this line believed in progress, and most of them prized material plenty, peace, the industrial society. They feared planners and planning, at least in political positions.

They distrusted the state, for they believed that the evolutionary process depended on the struggle for life among competing individuals, fettered as little as possible by government attempts to influence the struggle.

Related Posts

  • Stages of Industrial Growth | The Industrial Society
  • Literature And The Arts In Industrial Societies | The Industrial Society
  • Literature in Industrial Societies | The Industrial Society
  • Painting in Industrial Societies | The Industrial Society
  • The Other Arts in Industrial Societies | The Industrial Society

Filed Under: The Industrial Society

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Between The World Wars
  • Byzantium and Islam
  • Church and Society in the Medieval West
  • European Exploration and Expansion
  • Judaism and Christianity
  • Modern Empires and Imperialism
  • Romanticism, Reaction, and Revolution
  • The Beginnings of the Secular State
  • The Democracies
  • The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
  • The Enlightenment
  • The First Civilizations
  • The First World War
  • The French Revolution
  • The Great Powers in Conflict
  • The Greeks
  • The Industrial Society
  • The Late Middle Ages in Eastern Europe
  • The Late Twentieth Century
  • The Modernization of Nations
  • The Non-Western World
  • The Old Regimes
  • The Problem of Divine-Right Monarchy
  • The Protestant Reformation
  • The Renaissance
  • The Rise of the Nation
  • The Romans
  • The Russian Revolution of 1917
  • The Second World War
  • The Written Record
  • Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

About · Privacy · Contact
Copyright © 2021 Big Site of History