Abstract
The intellectual trajectory common to Nazism and Stalinism involves the interaction of three significant currents of thought. In Part I of the book, a conception of totalitarianism was proposed that focused on the shared ideological space between these two political regimes, summarised in the form of a distinct set of elements. This shared ideological space is the combined product of three currents of thought. In the book’s second part, the emphasis shifts to the internal complexion of each current of thought. We begin with utopianism. In the early phase of the debate about totalitarianism, Cold War liberals were tireless in showing again and again just how it was that utopianism came to be the driving force behind the political catastrophes associated with Hitler and Stalin. But Cold War liberalism’s animus towards utopianism was self-serving. Detaching liberalism from utopian conceptions of politics left uncontested the minimal or negative liberalism it desired. Its animus was also misdirected. Cold War liberals often said that the source was really the Enlightenment, with its dangerous overestimation of Reason.
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Notes
See, for instance, Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism”’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7, 1 (2008), 45–64.
Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 7.
Karl Popper, ‘Utopia and Violence’, in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995), 360; Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1, 166.
Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1999), 354.
Malachi Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 353–54, 397, 426.
Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002), 3.
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992), 4.
Steven Lukes, ‘Isaiah Berlin in Conversation’, Salmagundi, 120 (1998), 92.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 169.
Berlin, ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Fontana, 1991), 211–12.
Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 54.
Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 86.
Judith Shklar, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’, in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), 101–59.
As Ernest Tuveson notes, in certain Christian traditions in seventeenth-century Europe, the millennium ‘came to be considered as a true utopia’, according to ‘the method of God’. Karl Mannheim, who thought that utopias were systems of thought proposed by oppressed groups with an interest in transforming society, likewise regarded the ‘chiliasm’ of the Anabaptists to be the first ‘configuration of the utopian mentality’ in the modern era. Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), ix–x.
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 190–7.
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), 48–51.
George Kateb, Utopia and its Enemies (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 5–6.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract’, in The Basic Political Writings, ed. Donald A. Cross (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 223.
Nicole Pohl, ‘Utopianism after More: The Renaissance and Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 74.
Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Rousseau and Totalitarianism — With Hindsight?’, in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 271.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Rousseau’, in Freedom and its Betrayal, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [orig. 1952]), 46.
Berlin, ‘Rousseau’, 41–2. On Rousseau as a counter-Enlightenment thinker, see Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 2006), 17–28.
See Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 8–21.
Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 651.
Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an Introduction and Notes by Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Penguin, 2002), 222.
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 391.
Marx, ‘From the Paris Manuscripts’, in Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 74, 76.
Robert Wokler, ‘Rousseau and Marx’, in The Nature of Political Theory, ed. David Miller and Larry Siedentop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 224;
David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 262–71.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 255. In their mature philosophy, Marx and Engels try even harder to extirpate the traces of the utopian inheritance. See esp. Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, in Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (London: Fontana, 1976), 109–52.
See Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 243; Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Marx, Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 222.
Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 374, 380.
Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Political Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 297.
Joseph Stalin, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) on the Work of the Central Committee’, in The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905–52, ed. Bruce Franklin (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 387; Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 93.
Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 491, 501.
On the change in Talmon’s position, see Yehoshua Arieli, ‘Jacob Talmon — An Intellectual Portrait’, in Totalitarian Democracy and After, ed. Yehoshua Arieli and Nathan Rotenstreich (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 21.
Herder, ‘Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind’, in Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. by Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004), 8.
Ibid., 11–12, 19, 20, 44, 69, 76, 103; Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. by David Maisel (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 88–9.
Cited in George W. Stocking, Volksgeist as Method and Ethic (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 73.
Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000), 220–5.
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London: Vintage, 2000), 247.
Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 88–9. On Fichte and Nazism, see also Bertrand Russell, ‘The Ancestry of Fascism’, in In Praise of Idleness (London: Routledge, 2004 [orig. 1935]), 53–71.
Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 103.
Talmon, Political Messianism, 229–92; David Ohana, ‘J.L. Talmon, Gershom Scholem and the Price of Messianism’, History of European Ideas, 34 (2008), 175.
Efraim Podoksik, ‘Anti-totalitarian Ambiguities: Jacob Talmon and Michael Oakeshott’, History of European Ideas, 34 (2008), 211.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal’, in Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 155–207. In some formulations, Berlin also gave the two conceptions national affiliations, though this is later dropped: romantic liberty was ‘German’, the liberal conception was Anglo-French. Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal, 50–73, esp. 52, 54.
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, for example, depict Nazism as a racialist utopia, not a nationalist utopia: ‘the object was to create a utopian society organised in accordance with the principles of race’. Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3.
For instance, the case of Richard Wagner’s contribution to Nazism is one that straddles the two categories of (utopian) nationalism and (scientific) racialism. Wagner ran together national inauthenticity, redemption and, indeed, anti-Semitism: see esp. Steven E. Aschheim, ‘“The Jew Within”: The Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany’, in Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and other Crises (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 45–68. In his 1850 essay ‘Judaism in Music’, for instance, Wagner associated German ‘Judaization’ — in turn, betokening the undue extension of philistine materialism — with national decay. Furthermore, ‘the Jew’ here took on a status that was more than (merely) symbolic: it was hardly feasible to separate the ‘Jewish spirit’ from flesh-and-blood Jews. However, in arguments like Wagner’s, ‘biological’ discourse so far does not intrude: the point of connection (which might easily be mistaken for equivalence) is perhaps really the theme of contagion. Accordingly, one can surmise that accounts that assimilate Wagner to social Darwinism — or, for that matter, to Gobineau — go too far.
E.g., Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968);
Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner, Race and Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
Cf. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1997).
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin, 2001), 59, 449, 290.
Michael Burleigh, ‘The Legacy of Nazi Medicine in Context’, in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany, ed. Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 119.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), 199–200.
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Shorten, R. (2012). Utopianism. In: Modernism and Totalitarianism. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284372_4
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