Homus Novus: The New Man as Allegory

Abstract

This article explores the “New Man” as a politically and philosophically charged ideologeme at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s in Germany and Russia. It argues that approaching the New Man as an allegory in Walter Benjamin's sense of the term is helpful in understanding its status at the crossroads of the political and utopian discourse of modernity. This article analyzes the New Man as utopian allegory to reassess some of the current categories in more recent debates on political utopianism.