Gesammelte Werke

Leadership itself, frequently severed from the people, became increasingly rigid and autonomous. Concomitantly, the impact of leadership upon the masses ceased to be entirely rational and plainly revealed some authoritarian traits which are always latent where power is wielded by a few over many. Hollow and inflated leader figures such as Hitler and Mussolini, invested with a phony »charisma,« are the ultimate beneficiaries of these societal changes within the structure of leadership. These changes profoundly affect the masses themselves. When the people feel that they are unable actually to determine their own fate, as happened in Europe, when they are disillusioned about the authenticity and effectiveness of democratic political processes, they are tempted to surrender the substance of democratic self-determination and to cast their lot with those whom they consider at least powerful: their leaders. The mechanisms of authoritarian identification and introjection which have been described by Freud 2 in regard to hierarchical organizations, e.g., churches and armies, may gain a hold over large numbers of people, even within groups whose essence is antiauthoritarian, such as, above all, the political parties. This danger, though apparently remote for the time being, is counterpart of the self-perpetuating entrenchment of leadership. The often-made observation that, today, democracy breeds antidemocratic forces and movements, denotes the most obvious manifestation of this danger.
    Hence, the ideas of democracy and leadership have to be given a more concrete meaning so as to prevent them from becoming mere phrases which may finally cover the very opposite of their intrinsic meaning. It has been known throughout the ages – long before Ibsen made it the thesis of his
Enemy of the People,
and in fact ever since the problem of ochlocracy first arose in ancient Greece – that the majority of the people frequently act blindly in accordance with the will of powerful institutions or demagogic figures, and in opposition both to the basic concepts of democratism and their own rational interest. To apply the idea of democracy in a merely formalistic way, to accept the will of the majority
per se,
without consideration for the
content
of democratic decisions, may lead to complete perversion of democracy itself and, ultimately, to its abolition. Today perhaps more than ever, it is the function of democratic leadership to make the subjects of democracy, the people,
conscious of their own wants and needs as against the ideologies which are hammered into their heads by the innumerable communications of vested interests.
They must come to understand those tenets of democracy which, if violated, logically impede the exercise of their own rights and reduce them from self-determining subjects to objects of opaque political maneuvers. In an era like ours, when the spell of a thought-controlling mass culture has become almost universal, such a postulate, plain common sense though it may be, seems rather utopian. It would be naïvely idealistic to assume that it could be achieved through intellectual means alone. The consciousness, as well as the unconscious, of the masses has been conditioned by the powers that be to such an extent that it will not suffice simply to »give them the facts.« At the same time, however, technological progress has made the people so »rational,« alert, skeptical, and resistant against make-believes of all kinds-frequently they remain indifferent even to the highest pressure of propaganda, if important issues are at stake – that there can be no doubt about the existence of strong countertendencies against the all-pervasive ideological patterns of our cultural climate. Democratic enlightenment has to lean on these countertendencies which, in turn, should draw on all the resources of scientific knowledge available to us.
    Attempts in this direction, however, have a profound bearing on the idea of leadership itself. They would require a fearless debunking of the kind of leadership, promoted in modern mass society everywhere, which enhances an irrational transference or identification irreconcilable with intellectual autonomy, the very core of the democratic ideal. Simultaneously, democratic enlightenment imposes very definite demands upon democratic leadership. If such leadership has to take up certain objective, progressive tendencies within the mind of the masses,
this cannot mean, by any stretch of the