theabsoluteother of bourgeois society and folk community.Later chapters will
show in whatways massdiscourse–thatis, the fear of, and fascination with, the
masses–continued in socialist visions of organic community and communist
models of collective militancy.Socialist and communist writings on political
strategy, too, remained beholden to the emotionallycharged distinctions intro-
duced by mass discourse andreproducedinthe distinction betweenrevolution-
ary and reformistgroups.Infact,mass discourse–together with the competing
discourses of folk and nation–can be described as one of the enduringpatterns
of explanation that connect the nineteenth to the twentieth century:attimes in
very explicittones, at others in more hiddenways: but always present asapoint
of reference, and oftenareferencetothat which cannot be named. Asaresult,
just as the first scholarlystudies on socialism attest to the long shadowcastby
theVormärzyears, later contributions to the sociologyand psychologyofthe
massesnever break freeofthe experience of war andrevolution in 1918/19. More-
over,just as conservative mass discourse drawsheavily on explicitand implicit
assumptions about the politics of emotion,the proletarian dream establishes its
own imaginaries throughasimilardynamic of either celebrating or denouncing
emotionsinpolitics and of either cultivatingorcontrolling their elusive powers.
The various ways in which emotions came to occupyacentral, if contested, po-
sition in Marxist definitions of the proletariat will be examined in the next chap-
ter.
48 Chapter 1