The intellectual roots of communism and fascism were profoundly intertwined. The foundation of both was rejection of the liberal, Enlightenment belief in the autonomous individual. The individual was instead essentially identified as a part of a larger community or group. This identity was believed to shape one's consciousness and destiny inescapably for better or worse. Finally came the practical assumption that many if not most persons are inextricable parts of oppressed communities. If communities are to overcome oppression, it must be first of all through conscious realization of the group identity and the nature of the oppression.
Thus workers in their common economic plight as laborers with nothing to sell but their labor must first of all assert that identity. Their solidarity with their socioeconomic class, from the Marxist perspective, takes precedence over those of culture or volk or religion or individual personality or anything else.
It is only at this point that Marxist communism and fascism part company significantly. The Marxist identification was with socioeconomic class, emphasizing the oppressed proletariat; the fascist identification was instead with the oppressed nation or race. We have seen how the volkish approach to mythology was interwoven with the latter consciousness.
But although the community identification theme arose in its modern form along with romanticism, it would not be true to say that Hegelianism and Marxism were no more than romanticism. These philosophies and romanticism were both reactions against enlightenment autonomy, but they were not the same thing. Romanticism possessed not only warm feelings about community, especially primordial "organic" communities, but it also bestowed its benediction on a rich individualism that exalted in personal dreams, raptures, and agonies, and which offered much scope for the fulfillment of the hero's
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calling in accordance with one's own vision. Idiosyncratic individual heroic dreams could only be regarded with deep suspicion in the ironclad societies of totalitarian salvation.
The divergence of the merely romantic or volkish mythologist from the fascist/communist use of myth may be illumined by turning to the work of Georges Sorel (1847–
1922). That ambivalent French social thinker, beginning as a Marxist, became very interested in the social uses of myth and of revolutionary violence. He influenced Mussolini and, at least paradigmatically, articulated the mystique of the twentiethcentury cult of revolution as redemptive and purifying.
Sorel added to Marx's sometimes dry analysis the dynamic antirationalism of radical romanticism, holding that heroic myths and violence were wellsprings of social transformation, and so profoundly moral. In this circumstance they, and the doctrines behind them, were not to be judged for their veracity so much as for their use as weapons for struggle. For Sorel myths were "systems of images" that enable people who participate in social combat to conceive of their endeavors as battles that would end in triumph and redemption. Like soundbites and propaganda posters, myths, or mythic images, were less to be considered intellectually or historically than in their relation to feeling and action. Sorel was opposed to discursive thought, and to descriptive or rationalistic kinds of thinking; he was concerned with what drove revolutionary action and change. For Sorel, the fundamental revolution was the oppressed against the oppressor, the Marxist struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist. He made this conflict antirational, mythical, apocalyptic, and so religious in the functional sense of the word.
It is important to realize that, while volkish and other nineteenthcentury recoveries of myth may have had a place in the background of the twentieth century, it was the Sorelian concept of myth that was the dynamic of twentiethcentury revolutionary Marxism and fascism, insofar as they are mythology in action. This is true whether the debt was explicit, as it was to a significant extent in the case of Mussolini, or whether it amounted to a more or less independent discovery of the same principle, as it may well have been for communism and Nazism. For Sorel and the Sorelians, the social function of myth was key to the understanding of the term: its value lay in its religious, indeed apocalyptic, character; in its orientation to world transformation.
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Because its apocalyptic picture of change was total, it was antirational, for it brooked no standard of truth or judgment outside itself. It had to be an incitement to absolute action free of any doubt or qualification. It is sufficient to think of the Nazi and communist myths of racial or class oppression followed by dramatic revolutionary redemption. On the level of concrete mythic symbols, one may recall the swastika flags dipped in the blood of Nazi martyrs paraded at the Nürnberg rallies, or the undecaying body of Lenin preserved and virtually worshiped at Red Square in Moscow. For the role of stimulating total commitment, so comparable to the dynamics of religious conversion, myths and their associated symbols were extraordinarily effective, for they cannot be undercut—since the ground of belief in a mythic reality is transcendent and not subject to mere human critique. 32
However, Sorel's idea of myth differed from that of the three mythologists. Theirs might be called a gnostic view (in the nonVoegelin sense), and Sorel's apocalyptic.
The gnostic concept is Platonic and contemplative; it emphasizes the way myth functions in individuals and society as a means to profound understanding. Far from immediately inciting revolutionary action, it often undercuts actions through its appeal to a wider and more accepting wisdom. Indeed, the work of the three mythologists could be, and has been, accused of offering the oppressed heavy doses of Marx's opiate of the people by carrying their thoughts away to dreamy inwardlooking or escapist mythological worlds. For better or worse Jung, Eliade, and Campbell were essentially Platonic or gnostic in their use of myth. They may have unearthed some of the same root myths, or types of myths, that Sorelian marxists and fascists sought to use in the service of radical social transformation. But the mythologists' apocalypses were inward or intellectual, and so stood in a different relation to the political realm from the Sorelian. The latter is action driven, valuing myths for their propheticreligious value in imaging and inciting absolute change. The mythologists' goal instead was deep wisdom, above all about the self and its symbolic life; if there were political consequences of this knowledge, in the end the three came to realize they would be indirect, and sometimes counsels of restraint rather than of action.
A second but related difference was the question of original goodness versus original sin. A lineage of thinkers from Mencius to Marx
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has taught that human nature is good, peaceable, and sociable in its true and original form. The evil of the world is due to evil structures of society rather than inherent individual evil; most people, apart from a few saints, will be no better than the society in which they find themselves. But make society better and people will become better in their nature, recovering more and more of their original goodness. Understandably, this view has been sympathetic to the "right of revolution" in political thought; when evil social structures are changed, if need be violently, human nature can permanently be changed to good.
The other side, with a lineage from Augustine and Calvin through Freud, Voegelin, and Reinhold Niebuhr, argues that evil, or the mindless selfishness of the id, is inherent in the individual as well as society. This line of thought is compatible with the gnostic view that the world itself was made by a blundering god, the creation and the fall one and the same event. It leads to the more pessimistic view that even if the social order is changed for the better, people will find ways to be as unpleasant as ever. After the revolution, the cadres of the triumphant group or party, themselves no better than they ought to be, will soon enough become "more equal" than others and take over the office of the former exploiters, like the pigs moving into the house in Orwell's Animal Farm.