Elite avant-garde rejection of liberal hypocrisy enabled attraction to totalitarian movements

Evidence

Since Rousseau and Kant, there have been two schools of Liberalism, which may be distinguished as the hard-headed and the soft-hearted. The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo, and Marx, by logical stages into Stalin; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, into Hitler. That statement, of course, is too schematic to be quite true, but it may serve as a map and a mnemonic. The stages in the evolution of ideas have had almost the quality of the Hegelian dialectic: doctrines have developed, by steps that each seem natural, into their opposites. But the developments have not been due solely to the inherent movement of ideas; they have been governed, throughout, by external circumstances and the reflection of these circumstances in human emotions. … That this is the case may be made evident by one outstanding fact: that the ideas of liberalism have undergone no part of this development in America, where they remain to this day as in Locke. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2337 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pan-Slav anti-Western aestheticism helped prepare Europe’s ground for totalitarianism; The front generation turned to cruelty as a virtue purely to defy liberal hypocrisy; Liberal ideas evolved into totalitarianism through logical stages governed by external circumstances and emotions. — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2337 (+9 more)

Related

• Liberal ideas evolved into totalitarianism through logical stages governed by external circumstances and emotions. (similarity 0.89)
• Immanentist philosophies fail by remaining confined to elite circles (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Dominant ideology recruits the dominated by neutralizing rival ideologies’ antagonism #complicates (0.72)
• Liberal ideas evolved into totalitarianism through logical stages governed by external circumstances and emotions. #contradicts (0.70) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2337