European University Institute Library

Modernism and totalitarianism, rethinking the intellectual sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the present, Richard Shorten

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-311) and index

index present

non fiction

Modernism and totalitarianism

bibliography

798615423

Richard Shorten

rethinking the intellectual sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the present

Modernism and Totalitarianism evaluates a broad range of post-1945 scholarship. Totalitarianism, as the common ideological trajectory of Nazism and Stalinism, is dissected as a synthesis of three modernist intellectual currents which determine its particular, inherited character., What is totalitarianism? In what ways was it modern? Modernism and Totalitarianism argues that conventional theories of totalitarianism are too focused on the state and fail to take note of its ideological trajectory. The book analyses this trajectory, shared by Nazism and Stalinism, the two instances of totalitarianism in its 'classical' form. The ideological trajectory was formed in the interaction of three currents of modernist thought: utopianism, scientism, and revolutionary violence. Developing first of all in the nineteenth century, and in reaction to the Enlightenment mainstream, each of these three currents contributed to the idea of the totalitarian New Man. The book considers a broad range of theoretical positions, including those associated with Cold War liberalism, critical theory, and recent anti-totalitarian thought in France, in order to develop these arguments

Part One. Totalitarianism : What, When, How? -- 1. The Problem of the Modern. -- Unpacking totalitarian modernism. -- Two models of totalitarianism : genocide versus control. -- The conceptual limits of political religion theory. -- 2. The Problem of Intellectual Antecedents. -- Antecedents as affinities. -- Antecedents as influences. -- Part Two. Three Totalitarian Currents. -- 3. Utopianism. -- The view from Cold War liberalism. -- Communist utopianism. -- Nazism and utopianism. -- 4. Scientism -- Critical theory and the pathologies of reason. -- Nazi science? -- Marxism, Stalinism and scientism. -- 5. Revolutionary Violence. -- The revolutionary passion in French anti-totalitarian thought. -- The leftist orientation -- The rightist orientation