Abstract
Demonstrating that Richard Wright anticipates the theory of totalitarianism famously outlined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this article argues that, for both thinkers, fascism offers a compensatory “binding” mechanism by which the lonely, worldless moderns can locate the principle that since Aristotle has been called “the common good” (to koinon agathon). In his later work, including Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954) and unpublished writings, Wright expands his account of fascism’s lure onto the decolonizing world. For him, decolonization offers at once an opportunity for unforeseen creation and fascism’s resurgence in the newly recognized nations. The urgency in his political philosophy—an urgency shared with our contemporary world—concerns the need to guarantee that the new world put together from modernity’s “shattered remains” not be the fiend of fascism but a monster of a different constitution. As such, Wright can be understood as a thinker of creation.
