Time & Perspective Quote by Lion Feuchtwanger

Feuchtwanger draws a bleak map of human agency: history isn’t a democratic pageant, it’s a knife fight between the few who decide and the many who drift. Coming from a novelist steeped in the convulsions of early 20th-century Europe, the line reads less like armchair elitism and more like a survival diagnosis. He watched mass politics mutate into mass delirium, where slogans outperformed arguments and “instinct” became a lever pulled by propagandists. The “tiny minority” isn’t automatically virtuous; it’s simply “able and determined” enough to impose judgment, which can mean moral clarity or cold-blooded manipulation.

The subtext is a pointed equivalence: historian and novelist both construct causality. Each selects motives, elevates certain actors, turns chaotic events into a legible struggle. By lumping them together, Feuchtwanger quietly admits that narrative itself is power. The historian’s footnotes and the novelist’s scenes are different tools for the same dangerous act: deciding who counts as an agent in the story.

The rhetoric works because it weaponizes scale. “Vast and densely packed” turns the majority into a physical mass, not a public: bodies compressed into crowds, crowds into force. “Blind” is doing double duty, indicting both ignorance and the comfort of not having to see. Read in the shadow of fascism and exile, it’s a warning about how quickly a populace can be reduced to momentum - and how consequential, for better or worse, the minority willing to judge becomes when everyone else prefers to feel.