Abstract
How do prior intellectual contexts lead to totalitarianism as a concrete political reality? The question concerns the kind of causal significance that should be assigned to ideational terms of reference. The phrasing is inelegant, though in fact, as will be argued in full shortly, the matter of finding a satisfactory answer to this question is in part a matter of confining obscurantist terminology to a minimum. Quite a sophisticated vocabulary has accrued, in the literature, for making sense of the relationship between totalitarianism and its sources. However, this vocabulary really amounts only to providing many different ways of specifying that what applies is either a relationship of ‘affinity’ or a relationship of ‘influence’. Establishing an economy of these two types of intellectual antecedents in abstraction is important when we come to the next part of the study. In Part II of the book, affinity and influence will serve as the benchmarks for evaluating the detail of the causal significance of three currents of thought: their development over time; the separation of their points of affinity and influence respectively; and their relative weighting in Nazism and Stalinism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jan-Werner Müller, ‘The Triumph of What (If Anything)? Rethinking Political Ideologies and Political Institutions in Twentieth-century Europe’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 14, 2 (2009), 214.
David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 5–6. These two approaches are identified traditionally with political philosophy and social science respectively. Note that Beetham’s account attempts to reconcile aspects from both approaches.
Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).
Roger Griffin, ‘The Palingenetic Political Community: Rethinking the Legitimation of Totalitarian Regimes in Inter-War Europe’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3, 3 (2002), 24–43;
Paul Corner (ed.), Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
There is a good discussion of some of the issues in shorter-term legitimation in Devin O. Pendas, ‘Explaining the Third Reich: Ethics, Beliefs, Interests’, Modern Intellectual History, 5, 3 (2008), 573–96.
E.g., Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), vii.
E.g., Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy; Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. by Janet Lloyd (London: The New Press, 2003).
E.g., Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Penguin, 2005), 18.
E.g., Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1993 [orig. 1961]), 26–7.
In 1934, for example, the German press carried a caption beneath a photograph of Hitler visiting the Nietzsche archives at Weimar, which read: ‘The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilised two great popu-lar movements: the Nationalism Socialism of Germany and the Fascist movement of Italy.’ Cited in Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Use and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1; italics added.
E.g., Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (London: University of California Press, 1992), 2, 3.
E.g., Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, in English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 71.
E.g., Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 237–8.
Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London: Pall Mall, 1972), 72. My argument concerning the central relevance of ‘affinity’ and ‘influence’ as ideational terms of reference is heavily indebted to Schapiro’s earlier discussion. Note that Schapiro is right to add the caveat that ‘of course, there may well be cases where affinity and influence coincide, without the necessity of deducing one from the other’ (73).
See also Richard Shorten, ‘The Ambiguities of Antecedents and Legacies: Political Ideas and Political Extremes in the Twentieth Century’, European History Quarterly, 36, 4 (2006), 574–85.
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 25.
Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 91.
Charles E. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 809.
Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 2; Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 18.
Cf. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), 76–100.
Lisa Disch, ‘More Truth than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt’, Political Theory, 21, 4 (1993), 676.
Eric Voegelin, ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, Review of Politics, 15, 1 (1953), 69, 70; italics added.
Domenico Losurdo, ‘Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism’, Historical Materialism, 12, 2 (2004), 29–30, 36.
Ernst Nolte, ‘The Past that Will Not Pass Away’, in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the ‘Historikerstreit’, ed. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), esp. 22.
See Furet and Nolte, Fascism and Communism; Richard Shorten, ‘Europe’s Twentieth Century in Retrospect? A Cautious Note on the Furet/Nolte Debate’, The European Legacy, 9, 3 (2004), 285–304.
R. H. S. Crossman, Plato Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939);
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge, 1999).
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, c.1943), 432–3, 446–7, 448–9;
Frédéric Rouvillois, ‘Utopia and Totalitarianism’, in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, ed. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York and Oxford: The New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 2000), 330.
Cited in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Hello to All That!’, New York Review of Books, LVIII/11, 23 June 2011, 32.
Plato, The Republic, trans. by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987), 182; Popper, Open Society, Vol. 1, 139.
Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8, 1 (1969), 22–3.
George Kateb, ‘The Adequacy of the Canon’, Political Theory, 30, 4 (2002), 485.
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 6.
E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961), 62–3.
See Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences, 134. Note that there is a case for ordering ‘unique’ and ‘ unprecedented’ differently. Cf. Dan Stone’s comment that ‘in reality the “ unprecedentedness” thesis is only a more sophisticated version of the uniqueness thesis’. Stone, ‘The Historiography of the Holocaust: Beyond “Uniqueness” and Ethnic Competition’, Rethinking History, 8, 1 (2004), 131.
Berel Lang, ‘The Evil in Genocide’, in Genocide and Human Rights, ed. John K. Roth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 8.
Erik van Ree, ‘Stalin as Marxist: The Western Roots of Stalin’s Russification of Marxism’, in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164.
E.g., Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Steven E. Aschheim, ‘Imagining the Absolute: Mapping Western Conceptions of Evil’, in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (London: Routledge, 2004), 75;
Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Looking for Barbarians: The Illusions of Cultural Universalism’, in Modernity on Endless Trial (London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 256.
Cf. Jonathan Rée, Philosophical Tales (London: Methuen & Co., 1987), 42–3.
George Catlin, The Story of the Political Philosophers (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1939), 238;
Robert M. MacIver, Leviathan and the People (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 95;
R. H. S. Crossman, Government and the Governed (London: Christophers, 1940), 69.
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 660, 674.
Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 16.
Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life (London: Vintage, 2010), 90.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 3.
Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post Stalin Change (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), 107.
Keith Baker, ‘On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution’, in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan (London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 205.
Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (London: University of Chicago, 1990), 192.
Cf. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (London: Vintage, 1977); J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
See, for example, Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (London: Macmillan, 1998).
Sarah Davies and James Harris, ‘Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas’, in Stalin: A New History, ed. Davies and Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12.
David Priestland, ‘Stalin as Bolshevik Romantic: Ideology and Mobilisation, 1917–1939’, in Stalin: A New History, ed. Davies and Harris, 181–201. See also Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Interwar Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–57.
Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 105.
Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. by Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980 [orig. 1952]), 84–5.
E.g., T. L. Akehurst, ‘The Nazi Tradition: The Analytic Critique of Continental Philosophy in Mid-century Britain’, History of European Ideas, 34 (2008), 549.
André Glucksmann, The Master Thinkers, trans. by Brian Pearce (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 96.
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 24.
Martin Jay, ‘Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate’, in Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988), 33.
Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), 157.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Richard Shorten
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shorten, R. (2012). The Problem of Intellectual Antecedents. In: Modernism and Totalitarianism. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284372_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284372_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-25207-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-28437-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)