ALEXANDER RUSTOW

Heidelberg University

ORGANIC POLICY
(VITALPOLITIK) VERSUS MASS REGIMENTATION

Mass regimentation, the most prevalent and the worst social evil
of our times, has attacked the peoples of both the west and the east,
both on this side of the iron curtain and the other. But it has made
its appearance in east and west in very different forms. In the west
it has been more chronic in nature and has run its course with slow
and dragging footsteps, while in the east it has appeared in a vigorous,
acute and violent form. Bodily illnesses, we know, are more inform-
ative to doctors when they occur in acute and virulent forms, and
the same, I think, applies here.
In the east, where we meet this malady in statu nascendi, in acute
form and in the throes of its first onslaught, the causes of it are
quite clearly apparent. It is totalitarian dictatorship, the brutal
despotism of those in power there, that has deliberately and with
intent created this condition of mass regimentation by smashing
and demolishing the traditional forms of integration. Its objects are
equally clear - to sweep, as the sole power, over this limitless mass
of pulverised humanity, this vast desert of individual particles of
sand, and then to impose upon them, as a substitute for the insti-
tutions it has destroyed, a specific type of pseudo-integration and
thus artificially to integrate these pulverised individuals under its
orders and in its service; to reduce them, by ideological and dema-
gogic propaganda appropriate to its own despotic interests, to a
frenzied state of mass hysteria, and in this way artificially to weld
this vast conglomeration of sand into one monolithic, concrete
mass.
When we try and trace the origins of the much milder form which
this malady has assumed in the west - a task rendered, admittedly,
very much more difficult by the very fact that it is in so mild a form -
we find, if we have the patience to go back far enough, that here,

17 1

A. Hunold (ed.), Freedom and Serfdom

© D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland 1961
 ALEXANDER RUSTOW

too, rule by force, whether direct or indirect, is the fundamental

cause of its incidence.
Before the process of acquisition by conquest, which started less
than ten thousand years ago, before the formation of great vassal
empires under the domination of the ruling power, there existed in
the world no such thing as mass regimentation or anything remotely
like it 1 - and for a very simple reason. Until then, men, as we know
from the case of our own peoples in their primitive state, lived to-
gether in small, compact groups of not much more than a hundred
souls, bound together and integrated by the closest and most intimate
ties, and the social conditions that obtained in this world of small,
living communities is the absolute antithesis of mass regimentation.
It is only by the destruction, dissolution or disintegration - i.e. by
mass regimentation - of these communal ties that communities are
transformed into society, in the accepted sense that Toennies has
attributed to the term. And as a result, this mass-society suffers
structurally from a dearth of living ties and a lack of adequate inte-
gration.
When we look back into history, we find, of course, that conquerors
differed considerably in the attitude they adopted towards the natural
social growths of the peoples they had conquered. It is true that
they always reserved to themselves the right to decide which of
these structures they would, of their mercy, spare, and which they
would not, and thanks to their superior strength they were, of course,
always able to destroy those which did not find favour in their eyes.
But as a general rule, the conquering State has throughout the course
of history shown a tendency to retain and, in certain circumstances,
even to strengthen those structures which were ready to surrender
to it and to enter into the service of their conquerors, and to destroy
only those which stood in their way, which they found irksome
or which had the temerity to resist them. The opinions of conquer-
ors regarding which of the existing structures they would be wise
to spare and which it would be more expedient to destroy have
varied very considerably in the course of history and from place to
place and age to age. But absolutism - the form, that is, which
1Cf. My 'Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. I: Ursprung der Herrschaft.'
Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1950.