Voices from the Past: “The Personality Cult of the Present” by Israel Rubin (1928)
Anarchists and other antiauthoritarian figures have left a rich legacy of ideas in numerous newspapers and magazines, many of which have fallen off our radars. By translating, annotating, and publishing these original—often obscure—pieces, I aim to resurrect their insights and bring their wisdom to bear on contemporary debates. I will continue to write my own essays on anarchist history, but “Voices from the Past” will be an additional way to connect with my audience.
We'll start by exploring the 1920s and 1930s, a period that resonates with our current era's slide toward authoritarianism. During those turbulent decades, anarchists, though small in numbers, provided a unique voice. You may not agree with all aspects of modern anarchism, but their observations and analyses during the rise of fascism are strikingly relevant. Antiauthoritarian radicals and liberals have received far too little credit for their prescient warnings about the growing threat of dictatorship from fascists, Communists, and religious conservatives. Anarchists advocated for a philosophy of freedom that transcended the Left-Right binary. They were on the right side of history, and their ideas can inspire us once again.
Take, for example, Israel Rubin (1890-1954), a Russian-born Jewish academic and anarchist who immigrated to Germany in 1926 after teaching in Russia and Poland.1 In November 1928, he published an article on the cult of personality in Fanal, a Berlin-based anarchist monthly edited by Erich Mühsam. This was six years after Mussolini’s March on Rome and one year before the stock market crash that led to a global depression. Rubin's insights have relevance for dealing with the GOP-Trump-MAGA ecosystem, and provide a valuable perspective on the fight against authoritarianism—a fight that is as crucial now as it was then.
And now, I give you Israel Rubin:
The Personality Cult of the Present (1928)
The personality cult of the present is a significant indicator of the decline of modern humanity. This modern personality cult has nothing to do with the ancient debate over the significance of personality in history. Adherents of the materialistic worldview have always assigned minimal importance to the “personality” in history, even in the best of circumstances. However, even the followers of the idealistic worldview, who sometimes grant individual personalities a dominant influence on world history, must admit that today’s personality cult is not their concern and that there is an unbridgeable gap between the great personalities of world history and modern dictators.
The domineering figures of world history were generally forced to combat and overcome the natural resistance of the masses when seizing power; in contrast, power falls into the hands of our modern dictators all too easily without any serious resistance. The designation “by the grace of God,” meaning predestined by fate itself to rule, seems never to have been as justified as it is now. The words of the old Russian legend about the invitation to the Varangians: “Our land is vast and rich, but there is no order here; come and rule over us” seem to have regained contemporary relevance. In their apathy, marked indifference, and lack of resistance, the masses seem to call out to those striving for absolute rule: “Come, govern us, rule over us.”
That state power is seized by a single personality, who manipulates the masses like puppets, imposing their will and whims on them, is no longer anything special; there seem to be infectious germs that have caused these phenomena to grow into an epidemic.
The name Mussolini has already become a collective term: Pilsudski in Poland, Bratianu in Romania, Voldemaras in Lithuania, Primo in Spain, and more recently, Venizelos in Greece—they are all nothing more than different editions of Mussolini.2 The list could easily be expanded using a political world atlas. Although they do not agree in all details, in the main they are all the same: they have all taken over the dictatorship almost without resistance.
However, Mussolinis appear not only as mass phenomena in large communities such as state territories; we find them in all kinds of communities. Almost everywhere, a single personality seizes power without being hindered by the collective. In the present day, that likes to think of itself as democratic and “ready for collectivism,” this phenomenon is of high psychological interest.
We want to examine three aspects of this phenomenon more closely.
1. The Napoleonic nature of all modern dictators' emergence in the public eye, this sudden dazzling of their “genius” with the claim to power.
Who recognized Mussolini's qualities and abilities before his rise? Who could have predicted in the modest provincial teacher and the wavering socialist the future “Duce”? Which of Pilsudski's closest friends and comrades could have recognized during the revolutionary work in Tsarist Russia, when he organized secret printing presses and helped escape political prisoners, the future founder of the Polish state and military specialist?
Let's go even further. Let’s turn to Lenin, though not placing him on the same level as Mussolini and Pilsudski. Who could have seen in the verbose Russian theorist of socialism, before the October Revolution, the future meticulous and practical builder of a new state, unprecedented in its uniqueness?
The nature of all modern dictators is characterized by their sudden rise, which even surprises them.
2. The extraordinary ease with which modern dictators eliminate any resistance and the speed with which they seize power.
3. Most peculiar, psychologically speaking, is the epidemic-like rapidity with which the masses transition from pre-dictatorial apathy and indifference, that is, from a state of passivity to activity, which manifests in the glorification of the dictator to the point of near deification.
The greatest injustice is committed by those who place the blame for the subjugation of the masses solely on the dictators. It is the masses themselves who, with morbid delight, submit and are ready to humiliate themselves ever more deeply, and elevate the dictator to immeasurable heights.
Which great historical personality could have ever boasted of such popularity and blind loyalty while completely disenfranchising the people and stripping them of their freedom as Mussolini in Italy or Pilsudski in Poland?
The Bible tells of the slave who did not want to be free, who nailed his ear to the doorpost and cried: “I do not want to be free!” The masses behave just like that, voluntarily submitting to the dictator. The joy in humiliation leads first to the wildest abuses of dictatorship and thereby to the imputation of a non-existent greatness to the dictator; the existing spark of a certain talent is blown up into a giant flame. This phenomenon already seems pathological. Typically, the “mania grandiosa” (megalomania) manifests in the sick only concerning their own person, but “mania grandiosa” regarding another person, and as a mass psychosis, seems to be a new and worse kind of affliction.
Is glorifying such an undoubtedly significant personality as Lenin by the Communists not exaggerated? Is the constant citation of Lenin on every suitable and unsuitable occasion with the same religious fanaticism as the missionaries cite the Old and New Testament not a form of humiliation? There's no need to elaborate on Mussolini or Pilsudski in this context. All too often, we see how ordinary arrogance is stamped as the highest wisdom, as genius, by a slavish following devoid of any consideration.
What conclusions can be drawn from this? It must be openly stated that this rampant personality cult, which appears both on the “Left” and the “Right,” is convincing proof of decline, a testimony of unparalleled poverty in the psychological judgment of the present. From a psychological perspective, any belief in authority is a sign of inferiority of those bowing before that authority.
Every plus on one side means a minus on the other. This particularly applies to the idolatry of dictators by the masses. The masses strive to transfer the responsibility for their fate, in the awareness of their own inadequacy, to a “hero,” even if this “lordship” is purely illusory. It is as if a beggar were proud of the wealth of a Croesus, even overestimating that wealth, or as if a weak child, in the awareness of its weakness, took delight in the omnipotence of its father.
If a second Spengler were to seek new proof of the decline of the West, he could find no more fitting example than the modern personality cult.3
— Dr. Israel Rubin
Original source: Rubin, “Personenkultus der Gegenwart,” Fanal Vol. 3, No. 2 (November 1928): 36-9.
Joseph Cohen, The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America. Edited by Kenyon Zimmer, translated by Esther Dolgoff (Ak Press, 2024) p.452n2.
Editor’s note: Józef Klemens Piłsudski (1867-1935); Ion Ionel Constantin Brătianu (1864-1927); Augustinas Voldemaras (1883-1942); Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870-1930); Eleftherios Kyriakou Venizelos (1864-1936).
Editor’s note: Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of the influential, two-volume work The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922.