著者

石田 圭子

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美學 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.59, no.2, pp.2-15, 2008-12-31

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T. E. Hulme, an aesthetician and a critic, is famous for his contribution to Imagism, one of the most important movements of Anglo-American Modernism. This leading figure of Modernism is also notorious as a sympathizer of protofascism who celebrates Charles Maurras and Georges Sorel. In this paper, I try to analyze the relation between Hulme's aesthetics and the ideology of protofascism. In his essays, rejecting the sensibility of Romanticism, Hulme insists on the superiority of Classicism, which is, actually, deeply affected by the political and literary view of Maurras who regards Classicism as 'anti' to liberalism and democracy. Moreover his keen interest in geometric-abstract art reflects his worldview - reactionary modernism whose core is 'the religious attitude'. In this view, he supports Sorel's political theory in which he finds Classicism and the religious attitude. Finally I point out the homogeneity between Hulme's idea and protofascistic Weltanschauung by taking an overview on the rise of irrationalism and the vulgarized Lebensphilosophie. This close relationship between aesthetics and protofascism in Hulme's thought suggests that Modernism and fascism, the two concepts that are widely assumed to be antithetical, might partly have an profound kinship.