Intellectuals converted the organized mob into an idealized national force.

Evidence

What was new in all this was not the activity of the mob; for that there were abundant precedents. What was new and surprising at the time—though all too familiar to us—was the organization of the mob and the hero-worship enjoyed by its leaders. The mob became the direct agent of that “concrete” nationalism espoused by Barrés, Maurras, and Daudet, who together formed what was undoubtedly a kind of elite of the younger intellectuals. These men, who despised the people and who had themselves but recently emerged from a ruinous and decadent cult of estheticism, saw in the mob a living expression of virile and primitive “strength.” It was they and their theories which first identified the mob with the people and converted its leaders into national heroes. It was their philosophy of pessimism and their delight in doom that was the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligentsia. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Directly foreshadows the Islamophobia readings’ ‘concrete’ vs ‘abstract’ nationalism distinction and the intellectual’s role in mobilizing the mob; also connects to Gramsci’s hegemony-of-common-sense material in this module’s toolkit.
• DEFINE: Names ‘concrete’ nationalism (Barrès, Maurras, Daudet) as a distinctive concept — the embodied, virile identification of mob with people, opposed to ‘abstract’ justice.