Political Myths: Authority and Legitimacy

“The good historian resembles the ogre of the fairy tale. Wherever he smells human flesh, he knows there is his prey.” — Marc Bloch.

Author’s Note

This article examines political myth as an object of historical inquiry rather than as an instrument of political advocacy. Its purpose is neither to defend nor to condemn particular political traditions, regimes, or ideologies, but to investigate how myth, ritual, symbolism, and collective imagination have shaped political authority in the modern age.

The analysis proceeds from the assumption that historical understanding requires a careful distinction between empirical evidence and philosophical interpretation.

Throughout the article, primary sources are considered alongside the findings of contemporary scholarship, and competing historical interpretations are presented wherever substantial academic disagreement exists. Comparisons between political systems are employed not to establish moral equivalence or historical identity, but to illuminate broader patterns of political thought, symbolic practice, and the exercise of power.

Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power serves as the principal point of departure for this study. The article does not treat Canetti’s work as a comprehensive historical explanation of twentieth-century politics. Rather, it reassesses his conceptual framework in light of six decades of subsequent historical research, asking which of his insights remain analytically valuable, where they require qualification, and how they contribute to a broader understanding of myth and power in modern political life.

The objective is neither to resolve long-standing historiographical debates nor to advance a single explanatory model of twentieth-century history.

Instead, the article seeks to encourage a dialogue between intellectual history, political theory, and empirical historical scholarship. Its central concern is not with assigning moral judgments to the past, but with understanding the historical conditions under which human beings have imagined, legitimized, and exercised political power.

Introduction

Few centuries have inspired greater confidence in the power of human reason than the twentieth.

Extraordinary advances in science, medicine, engineering, and communications transformed everyday life at a pace unparalleled in previous history.

Modern states expanded their administrative capacities, systems of public education reached unprecedented numbers of citizens, and constitutional government appeared, in many parts of the world, to represent the culmination of a long process of political rationalization.

To many contemporaries, these developments seemed to vindicate one of the central assumptions of the Enlightenment: that scientific knowledge and rational institutions would gradually diminish the influence of myth, superstition, and charismatic authority in public life.

History unfolded differently

The 20th century became not only an age of technological innovation but also an age of political myths.

It witnessed the emergence of mass movements that mobilized millions through powerful narratives of national rebirth, historical destiny, revolutionary redemption, and collective sacrifice.

Political rituals, symbolic ceremonies, charismatic leadership, and quasi-sacred visions of society assumed a central place in regimes that were themselves products of modern industry, bureaucracy, and mass communication. Rather than disappearing under the advance of rationality, myth acquired new institutional forms and unprecedented organizational power.

This apparent contradiction constitutes one of the central paradoxes of modern history. How should we understand the persistence—and, in some cases, the intensification—of myth within societies that were simultaneously becoming more technologically sophisticated, scientifically advanced, and administratively rational?

Why did modern politics continue to rely upon symbolic structures that many nineteenth-century thinkers expected modernization to render obsolete? More fundamentally, what does this suggest about the relationship between reason, mass politics, and political authority in the modern state?

These questions have occupied historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political theorists for decades. Among the many thinkers who sought to address them, Elias Canetti occupies a distinctive position. In Crowds and Power (1960), Canetti proposed neither a conventional political theory nor a historical narrative. Instead, he developed an ambitious philosophical anthropology of power, arguing that political authority cannot be fully understood through institutions, constitutions, or economic interests alone.

Beneath the visible structures of politics, he identified more fundamental patterns rooted in the psychology of crowds, the symbolic meaning of command, the figure of the survivor, and humanity’s enduring relationship with death. In Canetti’s interpretation, myth is not a vestige of a pre-modern world but a persistent dimension of political life itself.

Despite its enduring intellectual influence, Crowds and Power has occupied an unusual position within twentieth-century scholarship.

Since its publication, the work has become a classic of philosophy, literary criticism, political theory, and cultural studies. Yet it has exercised considerably less influence upon mainstream historical writing on fascism, National Socialism, Stalinism, and other forms of twentieth-century authoritarianism.

Historians have generally preferred explanations grounded in archival research, institutional development, political culture, socioeconomic structures, and historical contingency. By comparison, Canetti’s deliberately transhistorical method—moving freely between ancient civilizations, religious traditions, tribal societies, and modern states—has often appeared too speculative to function as a conventional historical explanation.

This disciplinary divide has produced an unexpected consequence. Historians have sometimes overlooked Canetti’s conceptual insights because of his limited engagement with empirical historical methodology, while philosophers and literary scholars have often discussed his work with relatively little reference to the historical contexts in which political power actually operated.

Consequently, Crowds and Power has rarely been examined through sustained dialogue with the extensive historiography on twentieth-century mass politics that has emerged over the past six decades. Such a dialogue, however, offers the possibility of evaluating Canetti’s conceptual framework not as an alternative to historical explanation but as a complementary analytical perspective.

This article does not seek to demonstrate that Canetti “was right,” nor does it propose a comprehensive theory of totalitarianism. Its purpose is more limited, but also, it is hoped, more illuminating. Rather than asking whether Canetti’s work should replace existing historical interpretations, the following pages examine which elements of his conceptual vocabulary continue to illuminate twentieth-century political developments and where the findings of modern historical scholarship require his arguments to be revised, qualified, or supplemented.

The central argument advanced here is that technological modernization did not eliminate political myth. Instead, modernization transformed the conditions under which myth operated. Bureaucratic administration, mass education, industrial production, and new forms of communication enabled political myths to be disseminated, institutionalized, and experienced on a scale previously unimaginable. Modernity, therefore, did not abolish myth; it reorganized its relationship to political power.

This article is not primarily a study of totalitarianism. Rather, it is an inquiry into the persistence of political imagination within modern mass society. Totalitarian regimes constitute the most dramatic historical manifestations of that broader phenomenon, but they do not exhaust it.

By placing Canetti’s ideas into dialogue with historians and political theorists including Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, Emilio Gentile, Ian Kershaw, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stephen Kotkin, Richard J. Evans, and others, this study seeks to reassess both the explanatory power and the limitations of one of the twentieth century’s most original, yet historically underexamined, theories of power.

Methodologically, the article combines intellectual history, comparative historical analysis, and political theory. It distinguishes carefully between historical evidence and philosophical interpretation while recognizing that neither discipline can entirely dispense with the other. Methodologically, the article combines intellectual history, comparative historical analysis, and political theory. It distinguishes carefully between historical evidence and philosophical interpretation while recognizing that neither discipline can entirely dispense with the other. Throughout, the discussion avoids retrospective determinism and ideological polemic. Its objective is neither to establish moral equivalence between different political systems nor to reduce complex historical developments to a single explanatory principle.

Instead, it seeks to understand how myth, symbolism, ritual, and collective imagination continued to shape political authority within societies that increasingly defined themselves through the language of reason, science, and modernity.

The history of the twentieth century suggests that the relationship between rationalization and myth is considerably more complex than classical theories of modernization once assumed.

Reassessing Canetti’s work in light of contemporary historiography provides an opportunity not only to reconsider one influential thinker but also to reflect upon a broader historical question that remains relevant in the twenty-first century: whether political modernity has ever truly escaped the imaginative structures from which it sought to liberate itself.

To be continued…