ABSTRACT

Modern democracies have more consideration for the individuals which make up the mass than practically any other society in history. The aim of a democracy is to end the state of affairs where the mass is a dead thing and not to be considered. To treat it so has been a principle of the ruling class in many past societies, and would become an important principle in the kind of society Wyndham Lewis advocates. The Reactionaries is not only a tract of writing thought pub-lishable in 1967, it's something influential pundits in that year were willing to endorse. Approbation of The Reactionaries springs from a certain relief at seeing the topic—the political orientations of major writers—even ventured on. The principles governed their social criticism as their literary criticism, and led them to support the fascist cause, either directly, as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis did, or indirectly, as Yeats and Eliot did.