Abstract
As a twentieth-century phenomenon, mass dictatorship developed its own modern socio-political engineering system, which sought to achieve the self-mobilisation of the masses for radical state projects. In this sense, it shares a similar mobilisation mechanism with its close cousin, mass democracy. Mass dictatorship requires the modern platform of the public sphere to spread its clarion call for the masses to overcome their collective crisis. Far from being a phenomenon that emerged from pre-modern despotic practices, mass dictatorship reflects the global proliferation of quintessential modernist assumptions about the transformability of the individual. Mass dictatorship therefore utilises the utmost modern practices to form totalitarian cohesion and to stage public spectacles in the search for extremist solutions to perceived social problems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Note
Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Mapping Mass Dictatorship: Towards a Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Dictatorship’, in Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone, eds, Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–4.
Copyright information
© 2013 Michael Kim, Michael Schoenhals and Yong-Woo Kim
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kim, M., Schoenhals, M. (2013). Introduction: Mass Dictatorship and the Radical Project for Modernity. In: Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45446-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30433-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)