An aesthetician and critic, T. E. Hulme is famous for his contribution to Imagism, one of the most important movements within Anglo-American Modernism. This leading figure of Modernism is also notorious as a proto-fascist sympathizer who glorified the work of Charles Maurras and Georges Sorel. In this paper, I try to analyze the relation between Hulme’s aesthetics and the ideology of proto-fascism.

Rejecting the sensibility of romanticism, Hulme insists on the superiority of classicism in his essay, his position strongly influenced by the political and literary views of Maurras, who regarded classicism as hostile to liberalism and democracy. In addition, Hulme’s keen interest in geometric-abstract art reflects his worldview, a reactionary Modernism the core of which is “the religious attitude.” He also supports Sorel’s political theory, identifying in it both classicism and the religious attitude. In this paper, I point out the homogeneity between Hulme’s ideas and the proto-fascistic Weltanschauung by taking an overview of the rise of irrationalism and a vulgarized Lebensphilosophie.

This close relationship between aesthetics and proto-fascism in Hulme’s thought suggests that Modernism and fascism, two concepts that are widely assumed to be incompatible, might have, in part, a profound kinship.