A Symbol for the Masses: Sergei Chakhotin and the Modern Crisis of Propaganda
This dissertation is an intellectual biography of Sergei Chakhotin, a Russian biologist whose most famous work, The Rape of the Masses (1939), represented an insightful, pioneering analysis of modern propaganda as it arose during Europe’s “Age of Catastrophe” (1914-1945). In this work and others, Chakhotin used the psychological theories of Ivan Pavlov to develop a system of thought that emphasized the scientific possibilities and political inevitability of mass conditioning through propaganda. In addition to Pavlov’s theory, Chakhotin also used other intellectual frameworks, such as Taylorism and microbiology, to buttress his own firsthand experience during World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis, the French Popular Front, World War II, and the Cold War, to declare the centrality of psychologically based propaganda as a fundamental, epoch-shifting characteristic of the modern age. Thus, my main argument throughout this study is that the centrality ascribed to propaganda as the modern crisis helps to distinguish Chakhotin’s intellectual works and explain both the appeal it had to political allies he engaged with and the influence it had on subsequent thinkers. Coming at nearly two decades before concerns emerged about “brainwashing” in the 1950s, and even more ahead of present-day concerns about “post-truth” information society, Chakhotin’s worries about the erosion of truth and rational arguments as methods of political persuasion and the rise of emotional, irrational appeals based in symbols and slogans places him at the forefront of a crucial problem confronted by intellectuals in Europe and beyond after the rise of totalitarianism and the advent of wartime propaganda. However, because of his utmost belief in the promise of science as the instrument for building a more just society, Chakhotin did not call for an end to propaganda or psychological conditioning as a method of political transformation but rather advocated for its use as a sort of wonder weapon in the creation of socialism and peace, in short, total human harmony, domestically and internationally. This was the cause for his vibrant political activism throughout his life, first in antifascist street campaigning in mainly Germany and France in the early 1930s under his famous symbol, the Three Arrows, and second in his adherence to technocratic organizations in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. Each of these endeavors aimed at putting the laws of science he studied in the laboratory to the service of a revolutionary reorganization of global society led by humanitarian scientists. Ultimately, however, this project was increasingly problematized by the more negative prospects of manipulative, authoritarian technocracies that arose simultaneously to his benevolent vision, which I argue throws into question the much-debated relationship of science and politics in the modern world, further justifying the study of this figure’s political thought and activism.
European History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Intellectual History, Sergei Chakhotin, propaganda, psychology, mass media, antifascism, biography
City University of New York - Graduate Center
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