Totaliatiarianism, Its Intellectual and Social Roots

10 Apr 2009 17:40

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See also: Counter-Enlightenment; Empires and Imperialism; the Left; the Right; Revolution; Romanticism; Socialism; the Soviet Union

Recommended:
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [Except that, as writers like Popper, Sternhell, Mazower, etc., etc., show, she was wrong in writing as though totalitarianism was something that crawled out from under the floorboards of European thought; it has a long and respectable pedigree, which included Arendt's own philosophy teachers.]
• Ian Kershaw
  • The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich
  • Hitler [Biography in 2 vols.]
• Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism
• Kanan Makiya (as Samir al-Khalil), Republic of Fear
• Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century
• George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
• Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism
• Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914--1945
• Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies [It's somewhat surprising that the three best books on this are all by philosophers, and very different ones at that.]
• Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology [micro-review]
• Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France [Badly written but important]
• Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler
• Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism
• Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

To read:
• Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter
• Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922--1945 [Blurb]
• Wolfgang Benz, A Concise History of the Third Reich [Blurb]
• Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams
• Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Too Close for Comfort: Right-Wing Populism, Scapegoating, and Fascist Potentials in US Political Traditions
• Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner, "The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry", The Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 390--416
• Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age
• Isaac Deutcher, Stalin
• Andrew Donson, "Why did German youth become fascists? Nationalist males born 1900 to 1908 in war and revolution", Social History 31 (2006): 337--358
• Michael Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule
• Emilio Gentile
  • Politics as Religion [Blurb, ch. 1]
  • The Italian Road to Totalitarianism: The Party and the State in the Fascist Regime [forthcoming]
• Glaser, Cultural Roots of National Socialism
• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity
• A. James Gregor, Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought
• Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics
• Eli Halevy, The Age of Tyranny
• Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
• Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison
• Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience [Blurb]
• Michael Mann, Fascists [Blurb]
• Thomas Mann's essays on the roots of Nazism in German culture
• G. L. Morse
  • The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism
  • The Nationalization of the Masses
• Jan-Werner Mueller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought
• Franz Neumann, Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933--1944
• Ernst Nolte, Fascism in Its Epoch
• Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History [Blurb]
• Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism ["reads like a thriller"]
• christian Stögbauer and John Komlos, "Averting the Nazi seizure of power: A Counterfactual thought experiment", European Review of Economic History 8 (2004): 173--1999
• J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
• Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism [Blurb]
• Weiss, The Fascist Tradition
• E. Spencer Wellhoffer, "Democracy and Fascism: Class, Civil Society, and Rational Choice in Italy", American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 91--106
• Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children