Mass Dictatorship and Modernity

As a twentieth century phenomenon, mass dictatorship developed its own modern socio-political engineering system which sought to achieve the self-mobilization of the masses for radical state projects. In this sense, it shares a similar mobilization mechanism with its close cousin, mass democracy. Mass dictatorship requires the modern platform of the public sphere to spread its clarion call for the masses to realize their lofty utopian visions. Far from being a phenomenon that emerged from pre-modern despotic practices, mass dictatorship reflects the global proliferation of quintessential modernist assumptions about the transformability of the individual and society through collective effort. Mass dictatorship therefore utilizes the utmost modern practices to form totalitarian cohesion and to stage public spectacles in the search for extremist solutions to a society's problems. The contributors examine the phenomenon of mass dictatorship along many different lines of inquiry, both theoretical as well as empirical in disparate locations around the globe including Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Interwar Austria, Imperial Japan, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and North Korea.

Michael Kim is Associate Professor of Korean History at Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, Korea. His research primarily focuses on colonial Korea, and he has published numerous articles and book chapters on urban culture, print culture, Korean collaborators, migration and wartime mobilization.

Michael Schoenhals is Professor of Chinese at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. He has published extensively on the social and political history of modern China, including most recently Spying for the People: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (2012). He is co-founder of the Forum for literaturens offentligheter (FOLIO), a Swedish interdisciplinary academic forum bringing together researchers interested in exploring how writers and constellations of readers emerge as actors in public settings by attempting to employ literature and literary works for non-literary purposes.

Yong-Woo Kim is Senior Researcher at Ewha University's Institute of World and Global History, Korea. He has published a number of articles on French and Italian Fascism. He is the author of Homo Fascistus: French Fascism and Cultural Revolution of Counter-Revolutionaries (in Korean) and the co-editor of the 'Mass Dictatorship' Series published in Korean.