Abstract
In what ways is totalitarianism modern? Does it ‘belong to’ a particular epoch within the modern? Answering these questions requires prior diagnosis of totalitarianism’s elements and sources respectively. Elements may, in principle, consist variously in anything from institutions and practices, to behaviours and actions, all the way through to beliefs, broader attitudes, or even general outlooks. The important point is that elements must be identified before it becomes plausible to locate their own emergence out of prior, given intellectual contexts, or sources (what this book refers to as totalitarianism’s ‘currents’).1 It is the logical separation of the requirements of identifying elements and locating sources which means that it makes sense to begin with the former, and not the latter. The initial task of the study, then, can be specified, following the image of a Venn diagram, as being that of picking out the significant features of the area of overlap between Nazism and Stalinism, in order to isolate these elements.
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Notes
Note that my intended meaning of ‘elements’ in connection with totalitarianism differs from Arendt’s. Arendt locates elements in the pre-history of totalitarianism (in the age of imperialism, for example). Her elements then ‘crystallise’ at a later point in time to constitute totalitarianism itself (see Hannah Arendt, ‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’, in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–54, ed. Jerome Kohn [New York: Schocken, 2005], 401–8). I work the other way around. ‘Elements’ are observed within the actual experience of totalitarianism; and by working backwards, the strands of thought that shape a general combination of elements are identified and evaluated. Arendt also constructs elements more narrowly than I do because she is specifically concerned with the influence of ‘practices’, as opposed to the influence of ‘ideas’. See Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 23.
For criticisms of the uses of ‘modernity’ in the humanities and social sciences, see Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epoch Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997). As Yack argues, thinking within the limits of pre-specified categories can actually obscure the novelty and specificity of the problem at hand: distinctive developments are obscured by ahistorical generalisations. For a general indictment of ‘medicine’,
see Mario Biogoli, ‘Science, Modernity, and the “Final Solution”’, in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 185–206.
Perhaps the most pronounced example of this tendency for accounts of political religion to focus on violence is Michael Burleigh. See Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005), and Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (London: HarperPress, 2006).
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. by Daphne Hardy (London: Bantam Books, 1968 [orig. 1940]).
David Cesarini, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Vintage, 1999), 174.
Koestler, Arrival and Departure (London: Vintage, 1999 [orig. 1943]).
Uwe Klawitter, The Theme of Totalitarianism in ‘English’ Fiction: Koestler, Orwell, Vonnegut, Kosinski, Burgess, Atwood, Amis (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 56.
The authoritative conceptual history is Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Arrival and Departure can be said to be prescient for the reason that the book contains one character’s eyewitness account of the Holocaust, at a time when public opinion in the Allied countries was weakly informed of the facts, and often incredulous towards them: Klawitter, The Theme of Totalitarianism in ‘English’ Fiction, 37; Cesarini, Arthur Koestler, 202–3.
Arrival and Departure is problematic on a political reading as well. George Orwell criticised it as ‘a tract purporting to show that revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of neurotic impulses’.Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 3: As I Please, 1943–1945, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970), 241–2. At the end of this section of dialogue, for instance, the Nazi agent is revealed to be the patient of a psychoanalyst character in the novel: a psychological problem, the reader is led to suspect, drives his political commitment.
Stanley Payne’s approach to fascism, which is one of the best known, finds ‘the fascist negations’ to be vital to the ideology’s definition. The negations that Payne foregrounds are threefold: anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism. It should be noted that, for Payne, there are positive commitments that define fascism as well. However, the tendency to define Nazism in the terms of what it is against is intended here to be a general diagnosis of a broader cultural response. See Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin, 2001), 58–60, 135, 245–7, 286;
Neil Gregor, How to Read Hitler (London: Granta, 2005), 51.
Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Steigmann-Gall, ‘Nazism and the Revival of Political Religion Theory’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5, 3 (2004), 376–96.
On ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ ideological commitments, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 77–8, 82–4.
Ibid., 142. For a contemporaneous statement of the same point, see George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989 [orig. 1937]), 198–202.
E.g., François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism, trans. by Katherine Golsan (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 4.
Elie Halévy, The Era of Tyrannies, cited in Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Critics of Totalitarianism’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 187.
E.g., Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003 [orig. 1977]).
E.g., Paul Hollander, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
Peter Baehr, ‘Totalitarianism’, New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6 (2005), 2344.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution: The Total State in a World at War (New York: Praeger, 1965 [orig. 1942]).
Emilio Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1, 1 (2000), 19.
Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticisms of an Interpretation’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5, 3 (2004), 329.
See Jorg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteauffel, ‘The Quest for Order and the Pursuit of Terror: National Socialist Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union as Multiethnic Empires’, in Beyond Totalitarianism, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, 180–227; Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press, 2003); and Synder, Bloodlands. It is indeed appropriate — and overdue — that thinking on totalitarianism should address the topic of ‘empire’. However, exaggeration is only a counterproductive way of making amends for a history of neglect. Certainly, the practices of imperialism are not continuous with the practices of totalitarianism. Nor even is it helpful to isolated ‘empire’ — or ‘imperialist ideology’ — as a current of totalitari-anism in its own right. The ‘crimes of colonialism’ have their source in scientism — in some of the possible implications of Darwinism — so it is more useful to see scientism as the prior intellectual context for both of these political realities.
For Zeev Sternhell, biological racism even exempts Nazism from admission to the broad family of fascism. See Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–6. The adoption of racial laws did not take place until 1938 and is usually viewed, not as the outcome of domestic ideology, but as an artificial effort to imitate Nazi practice. This view has been challenged lately. However, in my opinion, there is not sufficient reason to reject it.
Simon Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 180–1.
My encapsulation of the Enlightenment here is particularly indebted to Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment (London: Atlantic, 2009).
Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (London: Vintage, 2010). On the book’s reception,
see Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Transgression’, New York Review of Books, LVI, 5, 26 March 2009, 18–21.
Mussolini’s credibility as a totalitarian dictator was disparaged in the interwar years and in the decades after; he was denigrated, for example, as either a ‘sawdust Caesar’ or a ‘fraud’: George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Barker, 1936);
A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 85. Since then important studies have characterised the regime of Italian Fascism as ‘imperfect totalitarianism’, ‘failed totalitarianism’, and ‘arrested totalitarianism’: respectively,
Renzo de Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, trans. by B.H. Everett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977);
Alexander de Grand, ‘Cracks in the Façade: The Failure of Fascist Totalitarianism in Italy’, European History Quarterly, 21 (1991), 515–35;
Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 7.
The following accounts all pursue the theory/practice distinction: Karl-Dietrich Bracher, ‘The Disputed Concept of Totalitarianism, Experience and Actuality’, in Totalitarianism Reconsidered, ed. Ernest Menze (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1981), 11–34; W. S. Allen, ‘Totalitarianism: The Concept and the Reality’, in Totalitarianism Reconsidered, 97–107;
Claude Lefort, ‘The Image and the Body of Totalitarianism’, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, and Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 293–306;
and Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Vol. 1: The Contemporary Debate (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), 200. The phrase ‘islands of separateness’ is Friedrich and Brzezinski’s (Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, ch. 6).
A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Benito Mussolini, ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, in, Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Dagger (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 288–97, 290.
Rasse and volk were not interchangeable in Nazi language. Völkisch roughly translates as ‘ethnic’. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 10.
Cited in Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 56.
See Gentile, ‘Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism’, Constellations, 15, 3 (2008), 291–302: ‘Fascism summarized the essential traits of its ideology in the myth of the State and in activism as the ideal of life. Fascist ideology was the most complete rationalisation of the totalitarian state, based on the statement of the supremacy of politics and on the resolution of the private with the public, as subordination of privacy-based values (religion, culture, morality, love, etc.) to the pre-eminent political power’ (297).
Mussolini, conversely, thought there was plenty of shared ground between Fascism and Nazism. At a speech made in Berlin in 1937, at a time after the agreement of the Rome–Berlin Axis (when Mussolini might be thought to have had reason, therefore, to labour this shared ground), Mussolini portrayed Fascism and Nazism as sharing in ‘many conceptions of life and history’ — violence, work, youth, and so on. See Mussolini, ‘The Berlin Speech’, reprinted in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78–9.
On the development of the structural model, see Robert Fine, ‘Totalitarianism’, in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences, ed. N. Smelser and P. Balter (Oxford: Pergamon, 2002), 15788–90; Baehr, ‘Totalitarianism’;
and Shorten, ‘Totalitarianism’, in Encyclopedia of Social Problems, ed. Vincent N. Parrillo (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 946–7.
Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Bzrezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 9; italics added. The third part of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism could potentially also be deemed representative of the structural model. However, the broad sweep of her thesis is more consistent with the genocidal model. Certainly, the Nazi extermination project is central to her reading and, for her, totalitarian government is characterised by ‘shapelessness’, to the point that she refers to ‘the so-called totalitarian state’ (The Origins of Totalitaria nism, 392).
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005 [orig. 1978]), 794.
Karl Deutsch, ‘Cracks in the Monolith: Possibilities and Patterns of Disintegration in Totalitarian Systems’, in Totalitarianism, ed. Carl Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 309.
Archie Brown, ‘The Study of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism’ in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Heywood, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 354.
For a long time the authoritative definition of authoritarianism was that of Juan J. Linz. See Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain’ in Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems, ed. Eric Allard and Yrjo Littunen (Helsinki: Academic, 1964), 255.
See also Paul Brooker, Non-Democratic Regimes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Alfons Söllner, ‘Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in its Original Context’, European Journal of Political Theory, 3, 2 (2004), 230.
See also Vicky Iakovou, ‘Totalitarianism as a Non-State: On Hannah Arendt’s Debt to Franz Neumann’, European Journal of Political Theory, 8 (2009), 429–47.
See especially the debate about the nature of the ‘evil’ embodied in totalitarianism and in the Holocaust in particular. For example, see John Gray, ‘Communists and Nazis: Just as Evil?’, New York Review of Books, LVII, 6, 8 April 2010, 37–9.
See especially Hannah Arendt’s important formulation in 1945: ‘The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.’ Arendt, ‘Nightmare and Flight’, in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 134. Rough approximations to this question shaped the responses of Cold War liberals, critical theorists, and anti-totalitarians in France.
Sigrid Meuschel, ‘Theories of Totalitarianism and Modern Dictatorships: A Tentative Approach’, Thesis Eleven, 61 (2000), 87–98;
Peter Grieder, ‘In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory as a Tool of Historical Scholarship’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8, 3–4 (2007), 563–89;
Norman M. Naimark, ‘Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide’, Telos, 136 (2006), 10–25. Note also the rough typology that Roger Boesche has indicated: there are ancient and early modern tyrannies; there are twentieth-century tyrannies; and then, as an offshoot of twentieth-century tyrannies, there are ‘genocidal tyrannies’.
Boesche, ‘An Omission from Ancient and Early Modern Theories of Tyranny: Genocidal Tyrannies’, in Confronting Tyranny: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, ed. Toivo Koivukoski and David Edward Tabachnik (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 33–42.
Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (London: HarperCollins, 2003).
Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin, 1994), prefers the term ‘administrative massacres’ to ‘genocide’.
‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’, reprinted in W. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 565. For a general discussion of the conceptual issues regarding genocide,
see J. K. Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
and Steven Lee, ‘The Moral Distinctiveness of Genocide’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 18, 3 (2010), 335–56.
Anne Applebaum, ‘The Worst of the Madness’, New York Review of Books, LVII, 17, 11 November 2010, 12.
Stéphane Courtois, ‘Introduction: The Crimes of Communism’, in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth et al., trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 16.
Shorten, ‘The Rhetoric of Moral Equivalence’, in Evil in Contemporary Political Theory, ed. Bruce Haddock, Peri Roberts and Peter Sutch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 177–203.
For the rejection of the term genocide in connection with Stalinist violence, see Nicolas Werth, ‘The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification’, in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 400–19.
Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Werth, ‘The Crimes of the Stalin Regime’, 415. In contrast with Werth’s careful position here, the Ukrainian famine was the subject of the most rhetorically polemical formulation of the moral equivalence between Nazism and communism in The Black Book of Communism: ‘the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin’s regime “is equal to” the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime’ (Courtois, ‘Introduction: The Crimes of Communism’, 15). See Shorten, ‘Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism: Moral Equivalence and Degrees of Evil in Modern Political Violence’, in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 173–90.
Eric Weitz, ‘Racial Politics without the Concept of Race’, Slavic Review, 61, 1 (2002), 18; Werth, ‘The Crimes of the Stalin Regime’, 413.
On the case for continuity between Leninism and Stalinism, see Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 766–70, 792; and Werth, ‘A State Against its People’, in The Black Book of Communism, 33–268. For a more mixed assessment of the issue, see Stephen Cohen, ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’, in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. R.C. Tucker (New York: Transaction, 1999), 3–29.
Michael Scammell observes that ‘Gulag’ has come to ‘stand beside the word “Holocaust” as the name of one of the two great aberrations of twentieth-century civilization’. Scammell, ‘Circles of Hell’, New York Review of Books, VIII, 7, 28 April 2011, 46.
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), 3.
Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Yale University Press, 2011), 89.
Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘Mao’s China: The Worst Non-Genocidal Regime’ in Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, 438–67; Peter Baehr, ‘China the Anomaly: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Maoist Regime’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9, 3 (2010), 276–86.
E.g., Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 171: the camp is the ‘nomos of the modern’.
Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Cosmopolitan Books, 1996), 27–8. Primo Levi expressed the same thought more laconically: ‘there’s no gas chambers at Fiat’ (cited in ibid., 29).
Cf. Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982): there is an ‘essential nexus between genocide and statecraft’, and ‘most acts of genocide are highly organised activities of the state’ (xi–xiv).
See also Mark Levene, ‘The Changing Face of Mass Murder: Massacre, Genocide, and Post-Genocide’, International Social Science Journal, 54, 174 (2002), 443–52: genocide, as a type of mass extermination, is ‘in some way bound up with state-led develop mental programmes and aspirations’ (448).
Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics’; Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. by George Staunton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
John Gray, Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber, 2003);
Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and other Illusions (London: Granta, 2004);
Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Totalitarianism: Between Religion and Science’, trans. by Brady Bower and Max Likin, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2, 1 (2001), 28–42.
Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 96, 74; Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (London: Doubleday, 1967), 4.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 211–44; Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 96.
Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 140; George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964);
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961).
E.g., Raymond Aron, ‘The Future of the Secular Religions’, in The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 177–202.
For the distinction, see Philippe Burrin, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History & Memory, 9, 1–2 (1997), 321–49.
Eric Voegelin, ‘The Political Religions’, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5, ed. Max Henningsen (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
Martin Blinkhorn, ‘Afterthoughts. Route Maps and Landscapes: Historians, “Fascist Studies” and the Study of Fascism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5, 3 (2004), 516.
The dependence of political religion theory on particular psychological dispositions is earliest evident in Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952), 11, 254;
and Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960), 518.
David D. Roberts, ‘“Political Religion” and the Totalitarian Departures of Inter-war Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category’, Contemporary European History, 18, 4 (2009), 392.
Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment, 51; Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 14–20.
E.g., Jeffrey K. Hadden, ‘Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory’, Social Forces, 65, 3 (1987), 587–611;
Rodney Stark, ‘Secularization, R.I.P.’, Sociology of Religion, 60, 3 (1999), 249–273;
Callum G. Brown, ‘The Secularisation Debate: What the 1960s Have Done to the Study of Religious History’, in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: The Orthodox Model’, in Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, ed. Bruce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 8.
Richard Shorten, ‘The Status of Ideology in the Return of Political Religion Theory’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 12, 2 (2007), 171.
Richard Shorten, ‘Political Theology, Political Religion, and Secularisation’, Political Studies Review, 8, 2 (2010), 186.
Richard Shorten, ‘The Enlightenment, Communism and Political Religion: Reflections on a Misleading Trajectory’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 8, 1 (2003), 16. Totalitarianism is certainly portrayed as an ‘inevitable’ outcome of the decline of Christianity in the more nostalgic, anti-modernist renditions of political religion theory, principally Eric Voegelin’s.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983 [orig. 1966]);
Milan Babík, ‘Nazism as a Secular Religion’, History and Theory, 45, 3 (2006), 383–94.
David D. Roberts, ‘Fascism, Modernism and the Quest for an Alternative Modernity’, Patterns of Prejudice, 43, 1 (2009), 94.
Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932).
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993), 281–8.
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2007), 28;
Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 61.
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Shorten, R. (2012). The Problem of the Modern. In: Modernism and Totalitarianism. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284372_2
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