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Reviews a wide range of evidence to demonstrate three things. First, election campaigns have become more candidate-centered, with parties offering leaders greater prominence in their election campaigns and the media devoting greater attention to them. This development seems to have taken place since 1960, which coincides with the spread of mass access to television in Britain, and the erosion of class politics. Second, today’s major-party leaders are in significant ways more strongly placed to exert intra-party power than they were in 1980, much as we might expect of electoral-professional organizations. Third, and perhaps most important, it seems likely that the potential for prime ministerial power within the state’s political executive has been enhanced because of structural changes that have generated a larger and more integrated ‘executive office’ under his or her control since 1970.

Of course, these developments have occurred in the context of a highly partified form of parliamentarism. Thus, it is not contended simply that Prime Ministers have become completely indistinguishable from Presidents, but rather, that a number of changes have occurred that are mutually consistent with the working logic of presidentialism.

This chapter takes nine dialogues published in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, and determines the extent of their influence on the Elizabethan publications. We meet Hans Sachs, William Turner, and John Bale. The chapter concludes that while certain literary topoi die out over time, the basic cast of a foolish, bible‐phobic cleric and a biblically enlightened layman, and its concomitant satire — inspired by Anthony Scoloker's translation of Hans Sachs — was still very much alive in the Elizabethan publications. If the Mass and its central rite the Eucharist were concerns particular to the Edwardian dialogues, dismay at the unenlightened populace and a call for a fully reformed ministry, first voiced in the Henrician pieces, would be reiterated time and again throughout Elizabeth's reign.

This chapter argues that an understanding of Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse and the historical influences that shaped it is indispensable if we want to know what was meant by “the masses” in the interwar era. Freud deviated from the dominant German sociologists of the 1920s, who held on to the widespread idea that “the masses” was a bad and dangerous phenomenon or, in any case, a cause for worry and alarm. His explanation of crowd behavior transforms “the masses” so that it comes to signify a far more global, productive, and dynamic agency that cannot be confined within the narrow definitions and functions that the science of sociology or the ideology of national socialism had ascribed to it. Freud attempted to posit the mass as a fundamental epistemological category that serves to explain what holds societies together and what causes them to fall apart. This theory reaches far beyond the sociological discourse and the nationalist ideology of the era and takes moves into unmapped social terrain.

This chapter examines interwar discourse on the masses as expressed through various art forms, literary genres, and performing arts. It considers works such as Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy's photoplastic images, which illustrate the idea of the masses underpinning the disciplines of mass psychology and mass sociology; Weimar artist Marianne Brandt's montages, which invites viewers to see the world through the eyes of a personification of the new woman; and Walter Benjamin's major writings from the late 1920s and through the 1930s, which explore how contemporary modes of aesthetic representation and visual perception referred to “the collective,” just like the culture of an earlier era expressed a social life organized around “the individual”.

This chapter describes an incident that occurred on July 15, 1927 in Vienna, Austria, to set the stage for a discussion of the concept of “the mass”. On this day, a protest march organized by workers escalated into violence when demonstrators were struck down by the police. When calm was restored, eighty-five civilians and four police officers had been killed, and more than one thousand people were injured. The fifteenth of July 1927 saw the breakdown of the democratic forms that had until then contained the political passions of Austria's postimperial society. From then on, the upper classes would associate the workers' idea of a good society with the raging masses or the Bolshevik revolution, and these masses would see, in the burghers' idea of a good society, the flashing muzzle of a gun.

This chapter discusses the concept of non-cooperation, which was the subject of one of Gandhi’s main programmes. It first conveys the astonishment of British officials with regard to the non-cooperation programme, which inevitably led to a decrease in the status of government and government agents. It then looks at Gandhi’s claim that resolutions in Bardoli did not revert to the non-cooperation programme that was approved by the Nagpur Congress, and that only mass civil disobedience had been removed. It reveals Gandhi’s primary aim as the politicization of the masses, and his programme was highly dependent on the response of the middle class. The discussion also looks at the effects of the decline of non-cooperation in India. In conclusion, the chapter says that one of Mahatma Gandhi’s real achievements was his discovery of the truth that no government could completely rule a country without its people’s cooperation.

This chapter compares two 1915 issues of The Crisis and The Masses that focused on women’s suffrage as a way of identifying similarities, differences, and cross-periodical dialogues between black and white justice-seeking communities, both of which deemed advocating women’s suffrage important to their projects and audiences. The Crisis and The Masses spoke to gender-integrated audiences, included women as editors and contributors, and created public spaces for protest, outrage, and affirmation that countered dominant culture beliefs. Focusing on their words, images, argumentation, and advertisements, this study situates these two special issues in the contexts of debates about women’s suffrage, women’s rights, and feminism, as well as within the fraught conflicts between the nineteenth-century abolitionist and Black freedom movements and the women’s rights movement. Comparing the contents of both issues makes clear that considering race in gendered radicalism and gender in race radicalism are essential when examining suffrage media rhetoric.

This chapter considers Wyndham Lewis's position against fashion. It notes that in Lewis's cultural critique, fashion is used as a mass discourse that means the end of mind and its common-sense grasp of the object world. Woolf, on the other hand, views fashion as a phenomenon of the mass, and is connected to the culture of advertisement and market operations. The chapter shows fashion and clothes as important in the subtle analyses of the relations between the individual and the structures of experience that are defined by the culture of the commodity.

After cultivating their moral selves in the Mutual Aid Society, Yun and his circle now founded an organization that aimed to embody their ideals and help propagate them in society. The Benefit the Masses Book Society (Liqun shushe) was a bookstore that dealt in radical literature and published its own periodical and whose member-workers lived together in an egalitarian commune that combined work and study. The chapter highlights the tensions Yun Daiying faced as he attempted to run an organization dedicated to advancing and embodying egalitarian ideals while keeping the organization economically viable. The chapter argues that Yun’s leadership made the Society more successful than other attempts that took place at this time across China. The chapter illuminates the dissemination, consumption, and production of radical literature in the heartland, and the web of interactions the society created both regionally and nationally, with the urban centers of Beijing and Shanghai.

This Coda summarizes the book's main themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has engaged critically with the idea and image of the masses in interwar European culture, focusing on Germany and Austria. It argues that “the masses” was an organizing term for so many cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic endeavors of the period. The term may be seen as a secret code helping us to link seemingly unrelated social, political, ideological, artistic, scholarly, and cultural discourses, thus allowing us to diagnose the common fracture within them—the fracture of breakdown and defeat that generated restless searches for new forms and concepts, as well as reactionary reactivations of old ones, in the hope of reconstituting society under conditions of modernity.

This chapter summarizes Blitzstein’s writings from the 1930s, which form the bulk of his criticism, and which increasingly tend toward Marxist perspectives. He wrote many of these articles for Modern Music, edited by Minna Lederman, but also The New Masses and other publications.

Max Eastman secretly marries the brilliant activist and artist Ida Rauh (1877–1970), who introduces him to socialism. A honeymoon trip takes the couple to Europe, where an annoying flea Max picks up in Tangier serves as a metaphor for his continuing sexual frustrations. He is asked to assume editorship of The Masses, which he reinvents as a cutting-edge forum for politically motivated art and writing. His son Daniel is born in 1912, to his father’s surprise and mystification. Max publishes Enjoyment of Poetry, his most enduringly successful book, as well as his first volume of poetry, Child of the Amazons. Max’s marital problems engender his interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. Dissatisfied with his analyst, Dr. Jelliffe, Max embarks on a course of self-analysis, diagnosing himself with “unsublimated heterosexual lust.” He acquires a small house in Croton-on Hudson, where he becomes the unofficial leader of a flourishing socialist commune. His increasing skepticism of Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to peace helps radicalize his writing. After meeting the beautiful actress Florence Deshon at a fund-raiser for The Masses, he leaves Ida Rauh, relinquishing his parental rights.

This chapter follows Yun Daiying as he experimented with different organizations, including his own version of a pro-Bolshevik organization called the Mutual Preservation Society (Gongcun she), and eventually joined the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike most activists who joined the party in Beijing or in Shanghai, Yun joined it while teaching in the provinces. The chapter argues that the cultural-political societies that flourished during the May Fourth Movement prepared the way for the rise of mass political parties, because for activists like Yun the transition from membership in local societies loosely affiliated with similar societies elsewhere to joining a party cell affiliated with similar cells across the country did not constitute a dramatic change in form of activity. Yet the new parties were guided by a centralized organization and by a teleological ideology. Together, these elements changed the way in which politics were practiced.

This book explores the political economies of Western cultural memory in relation to the apostle Paul, imagined founder of Christianity. Focusing on the “afterlives” of Saint Paul in relation to more recent genealogies of a new materialism, it examines how Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with the former calling the religion a “Platonism for the masses” and faulting Paul for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. It also considers why Jacques Derrida deconstructs—or reads in what he calls a “materialist” mode—Platonic assumptions about intentionality in craft production or authorship in text production while rejecting and lampooning what he perceives to be the retrograde dualistic metaphysics of Paul. It suggests that Plato's dualistic metaphysic is worked into a model of complex material immanence, whereas Paul is simply expelled as a purveyor of a Platonism for the masses, a thinker of “the veil.” Finally, it analyzes the New Testament book of Acts' narrative appropriation of Paulinism and the eventual apparatus of a Platonism for the masses.

In Chapter 13, we introduce conventions concerning local coordinates on the mass shell. Moreover, we express the natural measure on the mass shell in terms of local coordinates. Finally, we discuss the matter quantities induced on a spatial hypersurface.

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.

Economic redistribution, and social equality required an interconnected, regional and global trading order. After 1989, it was easy to believe that a liberal democratic model, supported by US-sponsored international rules, would spread across the globe. However, over two decades, unmoveable progressive values proved internally and externally unsustainable. After 2008, the US subprime and Eurozone financial crises eroded the economic preconditions supporting these values and undermined the already fragile relationship between the nation state, the market, the media, and a cosmopolitan faith in a liberal democratic end of history. Ironically, liberal progressive values, committed to the idea that all social ills were amenable to technocratic remedy and that the state was a suitable instrument for making such change, rationally engineered inegalitarian outcomes. This chapter examines how the financial crisis destroyed the meliorist assumption linking capitalism, globalization, and democracy rendering the pursuit of universal emancipation and social justice increasingly redundant. One consequence of this evolution was an artificial intelligence and new technology driven intangible economic order. The new economy incubated a paranoid populist style of identity politics that emerged after 2016. Instead of convergence, the new intangible capitalist structure erected a burgeoning divide between a cosmopolitan elite and a disenfranchised, nation based, precariat class.

This chapter is devoted to Max Eastman’s tempestuous relationship with the radical actress Florence Deshon (Florence Danks, 1893–1922). On behalf of the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Terms of Peace, Max lectures at great personal risk to large audiences across the nation against American involvement in World War I. Along with fellow contributors to The Masses, he survives two trials for obstructing the military recruitment effort and founds The Liberator, with Crystal as co-editor. He pays tribute to Deshon in a second volume of poetry, Colors of Life (1918), lives with her in Croton, and, after her move to Hollywood, bombards her with love letters. During a visit he introduces her to Charlie Chaplin as well as to Margrethe Mather, who takes significant photographs of Deshon and Max. Florence has an affair with Chaplin, while Max takes up with the dancer Lisa Duncan. Frustrated with Hollywood and Max, Deshon returns to New York, where she dies, likely by her own hand, on February 4, 1922. Max’s book on The Sense of Humor is dedicated to Deshon and evokes her memorable smile.