"Turned back upon himself, secure within some imaginary inner fortress, he is the plaything of every hallucination, every spontaneous or deliberate ideological illusion."
— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)
Author
Date
1947, 1958
Metaphor
"Turned back upon himself, secure within some imaginary inner fortress, he is the plaything of every hallucination, every spontaneous or deliberate ideological illusion."
Metaphor in Context
Turned back upon himself, secure within some imaginary inner fortress, he is the plaything of every hallucination, every spontaneous or deliberate ideological illusion. The 'thinker', self-taught or not, concocts his own little personal philosophy; the 'non-thinker' interprets what he reads in books (or preferably in newspapers) as best he can; and then one day individualism begins to collapse (and not as a result of a crisis of ideas or 'world views', but because of a material crisis, both economic and political), and these erstwhile individualists rush headlong to form a crowd, a horde, urged on by the most insane, most loathsome, most ferocious 'ideas', leaving the last vestige of human reason behind, caught up in a collective mental fever: and we have Fascism, the Fascist 'masses' and Fascist 'organization'.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (Verso, 1991, 2014). First published as Critique de la vie quotidienne I: Introduction (Grasset, 1947). Second edition with new foreword: L’Arche Editeur, 1958.
Date of Entry
06/03/2022
