A phenomenology of political apathy: Scheler on the origins of mass violence

In his criticisms of the German youth movement and the emergence of fascism across Europe during the early 1920s, Max Scheler draws a distinction between the different senses of political apathy that give rise to mass political movements. Recent studies of mass apathy have tended to treat all forms of apathy as the same and as a consequence reduced the diverse expressions of mass violence to the same, stripping mass movements of any critical function. I show in this paper that Scheler’s distinction provides the means by which to locate the various origins of mass violence and the practical means by which to address this violence that preserves the liberating potential of collective political movements.