Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s US presidential election, there has been frantic speculation about what it is the American Right really wants. The tendency is look to the leadership for clues. Who belongs to the inner circle, really? What do they believe in? Are they globalists, isolationists, neoliberals, fascists? What do these people mean when they talk about ‘freedom’? Are they really obsessed with history, gender, race and IQ? If there is an ideology at work here, how does it relate to the rise of the AfD in Germany, Reform UK, or the Freedom Party of Austria? Or are we just witnessing a naked power grab, to which an odd consortium of Big Tech leaders, ‘race realists’ and others have attached themselves?
But we might be searching for answers in all the wrong places, or even, perhaps on the wrong plane of reality. What if we shift our gaze from the headlines and try to look inward? What is it that makes millions of ordinary people, every day, embrace and celebrate the new order? Why are so many of them men between the ages of 18 and 29? Why is this same pattern being played out in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, etc.? What is the void that propagandists are rushing to fill with symbols, slogans and watchwords that multiply by the day?
Two things are often noted. The first is a crisis of inequality and a sense that the political establishment was never really going to change anything. This is what garners most attention, but it can only be part of the story, since there is no rational explanation in economic terms for why the disadvantaged support alternatives that are least likely to improve their material circumstances. Others draw attention to social factors, an ‘epidemic of loneliness’, and what the developmental psychologist Niobe Way calls a rigid, unforgiving ‘boy culture’ that moulds the isolation, despair and vulnerability of young men into a hard shell of defiance.
An absence of personal security, community and love may find its outlet in the adoration for leaders who demonstrate ‘hardness’ through acts of cruelty, gatekeeping and exclusion. Quite likely this nexus of radical inequality, social atomisation and male victimhood has been exploited in similar ways before. But why now, on such a scale? How are the cultural residues of the past being repurposed in the present? This is much trickier to fathom.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
I come to this problem from the perspective of someone who spends most of their time thinking about humanity’s deeper past, which has always been peculiarly central to what Furio Jesi, the Italian philosopher and archaeologist, called the ‘culture of the Right’. Jesi was one of a handful of modern thinkers who took the analysis of right-wing thought seriously. He was the son of Bruno Jesi (1916–1943), a descendant of rabbinical Jews, who served as a cavalry officer in Mussolini’s Blackshirt division during the colonial invasion of Ethiopia. Jesi Snr fought with such lethal fervour that was granted the rare honour of being ‘Aryanized’. His son, Furio, studied techniques of mythmaking as a key to right-wing culture. By what sort of mental machinery, he asked, are basic human notions such as ‘freedom’, ‘friendship’, and ‘love’ transformed into symbols of violence and domination? What are the political consequences, when this happens?
At one level, these are just words. But given how hung up we are these days on the politics of language, it’s remarkable how rarely most of us stop to think about the meanings of words and their histories. With such questions in mind, I want to recount a story about the origins of political liberty, one that achieved remarkable popularity in the early decades of the twentieth century and is enjoying something of a revival today.
‘Freedom’, this story goes, began at the dawn of western civilisation in a dim and half-forgotten place. Was it somewhere on the grassy steppes of Eurasia, where cavalrymen like Jesi Snr are most at home? Or in northern Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire? It’s hard to say. Wherever it was, for the first time in human history, men formed political associations based on voluntary oaths of fealty to a great leader. At first, these groups were restricted to virile young warriors, before the age of marriage. Out in the wilderness, they forged a type of bond unknown in other civilisations. Casting off the shackles of family, kinship and custom, they gave ‘the West’ its unique identity and destiny. For the first time, people could freely give their loyalty, even their very lives for an extended community of strangers. They could form the seeds of a true nation.
One might assume this story has deep roots. But in fact it is a modern myth, constructed from ancient materials. Some might consider it to be little more than a strange cul-de-sac in the history of European political thought, something that belongs to the intellectual ‘fringe’ – but it would be foolish to deny that forces of almost unimaginable destructiveness have occasionally erupted from such recesses of the mind. What if, for once, we could bring ourselves to look this history of the nation in the eye? Could we discover something about the beginnings of the path we now find ourselves on again, or even how to get off it and learn to speak a different language of human politics, before it’s too late?
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My position, in what follows, is that neither love nor friendship can exist without freedom, and that none of these terms has any real meaning without truth. For me, there can be only one place to begin making my case, which is here on the ground where I am standing. Not just because I am an archaeologist, and like to go below the surface of things, but also because it was here in Vienna that my ancestors lost their freedom, as well as many of their friends and loved ones.
In February 1937 – at the age of seventeen – my mother’s father helped to organise a public demonstration to mark the third anniversary of the February Uprising, where remnants of the Republican Schutzbund – the Social Democrat militia – made their last stand against the dictatorship of Dollfuß. He was arrested on a charge of ‘endangering the Fatherland’ and put on trial. After his release, upon his father’s advice, he left the country for his safety. So, my mother was born a child of Austrian exiles in Jerusalem, then under British rule. Her mother’s father had served in a Hungarian artillery unit during World War I. He was a Social Democrat, a Jew and a critic of the Zionist movement. After World War II, he and my grandparents returned to Vienna, where my mother grew up. In the ’60s, she emigrated to England, where I was born and raised.
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Language was once a primary medium through which scholars sought to reconstruct the earliest forms of human society. Within the same family of languages, correspondences among terms found in ancient literature – the Vedas, Avesta or Old Norse sagas, for example – were taken as evidence of foundational social concepts, which came before the written sources if not the invention of writing itself. Where institutions are concerned, the archaeology of language preceded the archaeology of things.
Questions of this sort have always been more than just matters of intellectual curiosity. For at least the last 150,000 years, language provided a symbolic system through which human beings transmit their internal thoughts to others. The conventional meanings we attach to such symbols, their ‘semantic range’, have a bearing on our collective capacity to imagine new forms of value and social relations. The relationships among words do not come out of thin air, but are constantly evolving, drifting further apart or converging through patterns of use.
As my late co-author, the anthropologist David Graeber, liked to point out, ‘freedom’ and ‘friendship’ are connected. The English word ‘free’ has a Germanic root, meaning ‘friend’. The connection can’t really be understood, however, without also factoring in slavery. Germanic languages are known from early Gothic sources, the oldest of which pre-date the fall of the western Roman Empire in AD 476. As suppliers of captives to that empire, the Germanic tribes of northern Europe were no doubt familiar with Roman slavery and the idea that a human being could be treated as a form of property, a ‘living tool’ to be used in any manner one’s owner saw fit.
In legal terms, to be a slave under the imperium of Rome was to be reduced to a ‘thing’ (Latin: res). For the slave, this meant trying to survive a form of existence in which the body is present but the social person is absent, since all such ties to one’s community were severed at the point of enslavement. An extension of the master’s chattels or belongings, slaves were legally prevented from forming relationships with anyone else. In practice, of course, victims of Roman chattel slavery found ways to transcend their ascribed status, as people in such situations often do. We could see the connection between ‘freedom’ and ‘friendship’ in this light.
What might it mean to conceive of these things as being closely related, not just as historical or linguistic facts, but in practice, in the contemporary world? I want to suggest that these two aspects of the problem – the historical and the political – are more closely intertwined than we tend to think. In fact, the moment you start looking more closely at the connection between ‘freedom’ and ‘friendship’ in European languages, something strange, disturbing even, rears its head.
Book I of the seminal Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, compiled by the French semiotician Émile Benveniste, considers terms for ‘friendship’ under three headings: ‘gift and exchange’, ‘hospitality’ and ‘personal loyalty’. The latter includes a comparison between Old and modern Slavic drugŭ – which signifies ‘friend’ or ‘companion’ – and the Gothic term drauhti, which denotes a ‘soldier’ or member of a ‘warrior troop’. A question immediately arises in connection with ‘freedom’, since in many cultures the term ‘soldier’ is synonymous with slavish obedience and so has just the opposite connotation. A soldier is a person who follows orders.
Before going further, a little background may be useful. In the 1930s, under fascism, the field of Indo-European linguistics became entangled – scientifically and politically – with doctrines of Aryan racial supremacy and the search for an ‘Indo-European homeland’ or Urheimat, from whence this superior race of people had supposedly emerged and then spread across the world through force of arms and conquest. Researchers who pursued such questions were convinced of their objectivity, and of their own capacity to rewrite the story of human antiquity based on hard, scientific data. As the ancient historian Christopher Parmenter notes, similar questions are being asked again today under the guise of ‘genomic history’, with little reflection on the errors of the past, or their consequences.
Benveniste was born in the Syrian city of Aleppo, in 1902, to a family of Sephardic Jews. After their move to Paris, he initially attended a rabbinical college before enrolling to study linguistics at the École pratique des hautes études. He survived the Second World War by fleeing to Switzerland, before returning to Paris and resuming his position as Professor of Comparative Grammar in the Collège de France. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that Benveniste tried to distance his methods from those of his fascist predecessors in the field of Indo-European studies, confining his interests to the ‘formation and organisation of the vocabulary of institutions’ – as opposed to the institutions themselves. Despite these intentions, one often finds his Dictionary straying beyond purely linguistic concerns.
To take an example: discussing the common root of terms for ‘freedom’ and ‘warrior companionship’, Benveniste observed that some such relationship was ‘characteristic of ancient Germanic society’. Young men from different families would attach themselves of their own free will to a charismatic chief, thus forming a retinue. Within such groups, which Tacitus called comites, companions would compete to occupy first place alongside their leader, while leaders competed for the best and most numerous followers. As a supernatural counterpart to these groups, Benveniste – now referencing Norse saga – evoked the companions of the god Wotan (Odin): fallen warriors and vengeful ancestors, who return each year in the Yuletide festivities as a host of masked demons: ‘an eruption of the dead among the living’.
By this point, clearly, we’ve strayed quite a long way from the comparison of phonemes, lexemes, adverbs and the like.
A relation between German frei (‘free’) and Freund (‘friend’) is addressed in Book III of the Dictionary under ‘The Free Man’, where it leads directly back to the topic of warriors and what Benveniste calls ‘a primitive notion of liberty as belonging to a closed group of those who call one another “friends”, thus distinguishing themselves both from strangers and from slaves’. This primitive connection, he observes a bit mysteriously, ‘is still felt’. Originally, he suggests, such free groups formed an exclusive ‘stock’ or class within their respective societies. Working through terms in Greek, Latin, Slavic and Sanskrit, Benveniste comes full circle to evoke an ancient association between freedom, friendship, and ‘closed fraternities’ forged in battle, rather than by ties of kinship.
What is really going on in these passages of the Dictionary? To answer this question, we must delve into some of the murkier ideas about human freedoms that emerged in Europe around the start of the twentieth century.
Perhaps the best way to start is by relating, in a bit more detail, the origin story I began with. Such was the impact of this story, in the early twentieth century, that its effects on the political imagination reverberate to this day. Viewed from one perspective, it’s a fable about what we might call ‘revolutionary love’. From another, it’s quite the opposite. For ease of the reference, let’s simply call it ‘The Story of the Men-Only Warrior Band’.
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Liberty, this story begins, had its first dawn in archaic systems of male bonding. Deep in Europe’s half-forgotten past, and for the first time ever in human history, political associations formed around what German scholars of feudalism termed Gefolgschaft. To begin with, the bonds between leaders and their followers were voluntary. Followers chose to give their loyalty, and if a leader became weak or failed them in battle, they were free to offer fealty to another lord. In the beginning, these competitive forms of association were restricted to unmarried, adolescent boys. Out in the wilderness – outside the domain of the family and the home – the virile young warriors formed bonds of a type that was alien to ‘Oriental’ civilisation, where politics remained embedded in the city, and in domestic relations among men, women and different generations of the same family.
What gave Europe its unique destiny, the story continues, was that historical moment when it broke away from the shackles of family, kinship and custom – which supposedly remained in place for the rest of humanity. Often, this moment was identified with the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of the early Christian Church. The former cleared the way for open competition among local leaders, while also leaving behind tools of rational governance; the latter introduced the monogamous nuclear family, and the separation of kinship from politics.
Only after these things had happened, the story tells us, could people freely give their loyalty and even their lives in combat for an extended community of strangers, thus forming a ‘nation’. Only then, it goes on, could true political freedoms become established: everything from democratic assemblies and free cities to competitive markets, craft guilds and universities. Again, supposedly, this marked a fundamental break with everything that had happened before in human history, laying the basis for modern science and civilisation. It all began, however, with the creation of a ritual and political space that was exclusively male: in German, the Männerbund (‘male band’).
Certain elements of this narrative have never really gone away. But where, exactly does it come from? The answers turn out to be surprising, not least because they begin in Africa.
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To begin with, the identification of the ‘male warrior band’ as a primitive political institution had very little to do with Indo-European studies. It originates with the ethnographic studies undertaken in Germany’s colonial ‘Southwest’ (today’s Namibia) and in ‘German East Africa’ (Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda). In 1902, an ethnologist called Heinrich Schurtz published a book based on data collected in those countries, drawing comparisons with other ‘primitive’ groups in Australia and the Americas. It was called Altersklassen und Männerbünde (‘Age-Classes and Male Bands’). Its first English translation appeared only recently, in 2023.
Schurtz’s book quickly became a talking point in anthropological circles, discussed and critiqued by luminaries such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Robert Lowie not least for its proposed alternative to ‘primitive matriarchy’ as the original political condition of human societies. Among these so-called ‘natural societies’, its author claimed to have discovered nothing less than the ‘fundamental forms’ of human political association. They lay in ritual coalitions of male youths, of a similar age, but drawn together from different clans and lineages. Such groups formed secret initiation societies: fraternities or ‘men’s houses’, set apart from ordinary living quarters.
Members of the fraternity spent their time hunting, feasting, reciting heroic tales or training for combat. On festive occasions, they donned the skins of wild animals and launched raids on nearby settlements, bursting in to loot, murder and rape. It was considered legitimate for them to do so, Schurtz noted, since at such times they were neither fully within nor fully outside the bounds of society, but operating in an entirely separate moral field. In such collective rites of passage, masculine values were given free rein away from the influence of ‘innate’ female tendencies – among which, Schurtz counted a preference for staying at home, indulging in flights of fancy, and a constitutional aversion to logic (apparently contradicting his argument that male initiation rites comprised irrational acts of violence, undertaken in an ecstatic state of frenzy).
As Durkheim pointed out at the time, there were many other logical and empirical problems with Schurtz’s account, which we needn’t rehearse. To begin with, his contemporaries tended to discuss the matter in terms of modern-day ‘survivals’ of primitive practices buried deep in Europe’s past. Schurtz himself, however, had bolder ideas. He began to draw comparisons with secret societies from Germany’s own recent history, invoking their police functions as guardians of a sacred death cult (Totenkult). At times, his book even encourages the reader to embrace such values as an antidote to what he viewed as the growing threat of women’s suffrage and a ‘feminisation’ of national politics. It is not the family, Schurtz wrote, but ‘the free association of male bands that constitute the progressive and culture-forming foundations of society and are the vehicle of almost all higher cultural developments’.
As discussed by the historian of religion and gender relations Ulrike Brunotte, what happened next had at least as much to do with the crisis of contemporary German society as with the ancient past. After military defeat in 1918 came the humiliation of Versailles and the confiscation of Germany’s overseas colonies, as well as the rise of feminism and the gay rights movement, along with growing demands for women’s full participation in political life. All this unfolded amid mass poverty, fears over the ‘corruption’ of Germany’s unique social fabric by mass migration, and a scandal involving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s alleged involvement with a ‘homosexual circle’ of friends.
Berlin in the 1920s was considered a haven of sexual permissiveness and gender emancipation. This was in stark contrast with London, where the trials of Oscar Wilde cast a long shadow. From this heady mix arose a masculinist backlash. Its proponents sought to cast Jews as effeminate interlopers, whose presence infected a healthy Aryan nation. Some of them, like the sexologist Hans Blüher, tried to co-opt the gay rights movement in Germany for an anti-feminist, antisemitic agenda. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this movement came to focus on a new model of national unity: the Männerbund, infused with values of heroism and revolutionary love for a charismatic leader. The architects of this new vision hoped that, by reviving the ethos of the male warrior band, they would create a counterforce to bourgeois politics, which they saw as increasingly wedded to feminine values and impersonal state bureaucracy, for which Jews were also blamed.
In the year that Schurtz’s book was published, the fourteen-year-old Blüher was inducted into the Wandervogel youth movement and at once began to write its history. The result, published ten years later – by which time Blüher had absorbed the works of Sigmund Freud and corresponded with the master himself – was a national best-seller. Entitled The German Wandervogel as an Erotic Phenomenon, its central argument was that a healthy nation should be based both on the rejection of parental authority and city-life, which meant a return to unspoiled nature, as well as on a revolutionary new concept – the ‘love between friends’. What Blüher meant by this was homoerotic companionship, fostered in same-sex groups. Alongside his writing, he campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, at the same time advocating for the expulsion of women and Jews from German political life.
In the 1920s, Blüher popularised Schurtz’s concept of the male warrior band, but now as a ‘unique gift’ of Nordic-Germanic culture. Brunotte refers to this as a case of ‘colonial transfer’. Blüher himself was considered more of a popular agitator than a serious scholar, but such ideas also influenced the work of prominent researchers in the burgeoning field of Indo-European linguistics, among them Otto Höfler in Germany, Stig Wikander in Sweden, and Jan de Vries in Holland.
Höfler, a German philologist, became a member of the Nazi Ahnenerbe in 1937. Initially banned from teaching after 1945, he was reintegrated into academia a decade later, taking up a professorial position at the University of Vienna, which he retained until 1971. Both Höfler and Wikander wrote extensively on the institution of the ‘Aryan Männerbund’ and its symbolism of the wolf pack, whose members enter a state of ecstatic fury in battle, like the ‘berserkers’ of Old Norse legend. When Benveniste then wrote, a generation later, about closed fraternities forged in blood and combat, he wasn’t working on a blank slate.
Given its origins in a rather confused episode of German colonial history, and the catastrophic development under Hitler, which included the violent purging, imprisonment and persecution of gay men, it’s remarkable how tenacious this set of ideas has since turned out to be. One of its striking features is a morbid fascination with male forms of companionship, love, violence and death as an exclusive basis for political association, or even as core symbols of personal liberty. The persistence, within this ideology, of clichés and formulas such as the ‘wolf pack’ is often taken to indicate something slightly mysterious, and it seems an unavoidable human trait to associate mystery with power, when in fact, we could just as well be dealing with a stunning lack of originality or political creativity on the part of fascists.
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Why, then, do such ideas keep coming back?
Since we’re dealing with a phenomenon that originated in the early twentieth century, it may be useful to turn to a thinker from the same era. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti reflected on the strange alchemy that causes a disorganised mass of human beings to become an obedient herd, whether a victorious mob or lambs to the slaughter. To achieve this, Canetti suggests, what you really need is discipline at the centre: a group, usually small in scale, whose individual members are poised to act and absolutely committed to their task. To an outsider they appear as one, unified in their actions, like members of a wolf pack.
He called such groups ‘crowd crystals’, and speculated about their origins in seasonal hunting parties, male initiation sets, or mourners who gather around the tomb of a fallen war-leader. The ‘clarity, isolation, and constancy of the crystal,’ Canetti wrote, forms an ‘uncanny contrast with the excited flux of the surrounding crowd’. Was this purely a phenomenon of late-industrial, mass society? Or the eruption of something primordial into the heart of modern civilisation? Despite his allusions to ‘tribal’ societies in Africa, Australia and Amazonia, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that what Canetti really had in mind were the youth-brigades who formed the vanguard of fascist parties on the streets of Vienna, where he lived until 1938.
Canetti also noted the strange persistence of these social units in history: once in place, they never seem to go away. Even when their political projects fail, the costumed band of warriors shrinks back into spaces of make-believe, gaming and play, awaiting a comeback. But is this too just another illusion of eternity, a mask, or game of political make-believe? Perhaps the reality is more mundane, and tragic. Surely what’s most damaging about stories of the kind I’ve been telling is how they invert the very meaning of words like ‘freedom’, ‘friendship,’ and ‘love,’ and turn them into violence against others. They speak to the politics of a broken society – a crisis of hopelessness, apathy and isolation – which is why they are being told again now for political gain.
The task of undoing this damage is urgent. One way to begin may be to look with fresh eyes at the meanings and functions we attach to such basic terms. Benveniste himself shows the way. In the Dictionary, you can also find another story of ‘freedom’ and ‘friendship’, which begins with the Greek term xenia and its correspondents in Latin, Gothic, Slavic, Persian and Sanskrit. These are the terms hostis, gasts, gospodĭ, ērmān and atithi. All refer to bonds of friendship, which echo through generations, and begin with acts of hospitality to those who are otherwise considered strangers or enemies with no rights, protection or means of existence. ‘Aryaman’ is the Indo-Iranian god of hospitality who presides over the process of granting asylum and ensures that the one who receives does not become the master of the guest.
Let the guest, then, be a god, since any stranger may turn out to be a god in disguise. In such small acts of refuge and welcome lie the seeds of another world.
#Seeds #world #Eurozine
