The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics

by Roberts; David

• ISBN13: 9780415192781
• ISBN10: 0415192781
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-02-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism, and German Nazism emerged at roughly the same time, in the wake of the First World War, and together they present some of the most perplexing questions in modern history. Each regime was characterized by the rejection of liberal individualsim and parliamentary democracy-and by the mobilization of the masses for grandiose public projects. Indeed, each seemed to galvanize genuine enthusiasm for acting collectively, beyond immediate individual self-interest. At the same time, each engaged in coercion, violence, and sometimes terror or even systematic killing. Whereas the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini came crashing down in overt imperialism and war, the Soviet Communist regime survived the extremes of Stalinism, only to unravel two generations later. However, despite their ultimate failure, these unprecedented regimes have fundamentally altered our sense of the political spectrum, even the range of human and historical possibilities. Book jacket.

Author Biography

David D. Roberts is Albert Berry Saye Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
1 Layers, proportions, and the question of historical specificity	1	(45)
Unforeseen political departures between the wars	1	(5)
Classic totalitarianism, the nominalist reaction, and beyond	6	(11)
Communism and facism, Left and Right	17	(6)
Layers, proportions, and modes of questioning	23	(8)
From modernization to contested modernities	31	(8)
The question of intellectual antecedents	39	(7)
2 Seams, creases, and the emergence of new conditions of possibility in the nineteenth century	46	(47)
Locating nineteenth-century novelty	46	(5)
Tensions in the liberal tradition	51	(11)
The question of systematic alternatives	62	(6)
After developmentalism	68	(11)
The instrument for history-making collective action	79	(12)
Conclusion: novelty within the modern deployment	91	(2)
3 Some diagnoses and prescriptions	93	(73)
Liberal renewal and beyond	93	(12)
Discerning the scope for a new radicalism	105	(11)
Sources and implications of the Leninist departure	116	(14)
Giovanni Gentile and the new Italian historicism	130	(12)
Science, will, and power	142	(8)
The significance of Nietzsche	150	(13)
Intellectual innovation and new possibility	163	(3)
4 Innovative departures in the wake of the Great War	166	(48)
The Great War as crucible	166	(4)
War and the occasion for revolutionary action in Russia	170	(11)
War, crisis, and the birth of fascism in Italy	181	(19)
War, vulnerability, and the quest for an alternative modernity in Germany	200	(11)
The new scope for experiment with great politics	211	(3)
5 The totalitarian dynamics of Leninism—Stalinism	214	(57)
Ongoing questions about the Soviet experience	213	(14)
Rethinking the place of Marxism and Leninism	227	(10)
Rekindling the revolution in the wake of the NEP	237	(5)
The great politics of crash industrialization	242	(8)
The long moment of terror, 1936-39	250	(11)
Narrowing and the dissipation of idealism after the terror	261	(10)
6 Conflicted totalitarianism in Fascist Italy	271	(65)
Questions emerging from the practice of the Fascist regime	271	(8)
Axes of debate in light of some recent studies	279	(17)
The totalitarian aspiration in Italian Fascism	296	(18)
The attempt at totalitarian collective action	314	(20)
The Italian road to totalitarian failure	334	(2)
7 The hollow triumph of the will in Nazi Germany	336	(76)
Nazism as a radical departure	336	(5)
A new mode of action	341	(14)
Engineering the population	355	(12)
From homogeneity to extermination	367	(15)
Totalitarian great politics and the Holocaust	382	(28)
Conclusion: apocalyptic narrowing and myth	410	(2)
8 The epochal commonality of the three regimes	412	(41)
The framework for rethinking totalitarianism	412	(6)
Conceiving a new mode y- action	418	(12)
The attempt at totalitarian collective action	430	(7)
Narrowing, myth making, and failure	437	(12)
Extreme outcomes and varied modes of ending	449	(4)
9 Ending and continuing after the totalitarian moment	453	(34)
Triumphalism, Othering, and deeper doubts	453	(4)
Sonic anti-triumphalist ways of framing the issue	457	(10)
Overreaction and beyond	467	(8)
Experience, learning, and the post-totalitarian alternative	475	(9)
The question of a new radicalism	484	(3)
Notes	487	(80)
Index	567