Download or read book Totalitarianisms The Closed Society and Its Friends A History of Crossed Languages written by Juan Francisco Fuentes and published by Ed. Universidad de Cantabria. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is striking that the main political concept coined by the century of democracy has been totalitarianism. Since its birth in fascist Italy in the 1920s, the term has made a long journey throughout different countries and periods. After representing the fascination for dictatorships during the interwar years, totalitarianism became a key concept of the ‘war of words’ waged between democracy and communism until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was ‘a hot word for a Cold War’, as termed by the author of this book to convey the importance of this contest of crossed languages, which also included images, symbols and other forms of ‘senso-propaganda’. The Closed Society and Its Friendshighlights the role played by language in the building of a dystopian civilization conceived as an alternative to the open society created by liberalism. The book analyses the dimension of totalitarianisms, from fascism and Nazism to communism, as political religions with some common features, such as the cult of personality and the conception of society as a community of believers. This fascinating essay on the dark side of the 20th century ends with a disturbing epilogue: ‘Is totalitarianism back?’
Download or read book European Socialists and the State in the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries written by Mathieu Fulla and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume promotes a comparative and transnational approach to the complex and ambiguous relationship between West European socialism and the contemporary state over the longue durée. It encourages a better understanding of socialism while also casting an original light on the history of the contemporary state in Europe. Socialists have been a prime political force since the late nineteenth century through to the present. Through their strength, their presence at the heart of societies, their dynamism, inventiveness, and influence, they have left their mark on the European physiognomy and helped to forge part of its identity. This is particularly true where the welfare state is concerned, and the role played by the state in constructing, embedding, and extending this social model. Surprisingly, there has been no research aiming to systematically analyse the relationship between socialism and the state. This volume fills a gap in knowledge by rejecting the media simplification and political polemic maintained by opponents of socialism – and sometimes by socialists themselves – which systematically links socialism with “statism”. It focuses on numerous case studies involving France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, and highlights the diversity of organisations within European socialism. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the fate of this political culture depends on the socialist parties themselves but also on any new configurations that states may assume. Conversely, the future of states will also depend partly on the choices made by socialists, if they still exist and still have the means to shape decisions and make their voices heard.
Download or read book The Legacies of Totalitarianism written by Aviezer Tucker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, transitional justice, property rights, privatization, rule of law, centrally planned public institutions, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse. The transition to post-totalitarianism was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interest. Post-totalitarian governments faced severe scarcity in the supply of justice. Rough justice punished the perpetrators and compensated their victims. Historical theories of property rights became radical, and consequentialist theories, conservative. Totalitarianism in Europe disintegrated but did not end. The legacies of totalitarianism in higher education met New Public Management, totalitarian central planning under a new label. Totalitarianism divorced language from reality through the use of dialectics that identified opposites and the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions. This book illustrates these legacies in the writings of Habermas, Derrida, and Žižek about democracy, personal responsibility, dissidence, and totalitarianism.
Download or read book The Future Is History written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.
Download or read book Velvet Totalitarianism written by Claudia Moscovici and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2009-07-29 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces students and the general public to the post-Stalinist phase of totalitarianism, focusing on Romania under the Ceausescu dictatorship, through the dual optic of scholarship and fiction, in a story about a family surviving difficult times under a totalitarian regime due to the strength of their love.
Download or read book Totalitarianism The Concept and the Controversies Underlying It written by Peter Brüstle and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2004-12-17 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Sociology - Politics, Majorities, Minorities, grade: A- (82), University of British Columbia (Dept. of Sociology), course: Seminar 'Political Sociology', language: English, abstract: Since its coinage in the 1920’s the term ‘totalitarianism’ has adopted various connotations and has lead to highly controversial discussions in a multitude of scientific texts. Created by the opposition of Italian fascism, it is soon taken up by Mussolini himself. After the end of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt and Carl J. Friedrich write two standard works, that classify both Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian regimes. In the following cold war period the term develops into an ideological catchword of the Right, which culminates in the equation of the crimes of Communism with the Holocaust in the ‘Historikerstreit’ in 1986. Recently, after the collapse of soviet Communism, the term is rediscovered as a useful tool to classify and compare political systems. In the following pages, I will therefore discuss the general concept of totalitarianism and the socio-historic causes for the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century with the help of the classic theories of Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich and Karl D. Bracher. Further on I will deal with some of the criticism that the theory of totalitarianism was confronted with and show the benefit of the concept for scientific discourse. In view of the flood of theories and criticism, it is not possible for me, to comment on the debate on totalitarianism as a whole. Instead I will concentrate on some of the crucial arguments of the debate, being aware that certain aspects will be left out in my discussion.
Download or read book Totalitarianism in Perspective Three Views written by Carl Joachim Friedrich and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Totalitarian Rule written by Hans Buchheim and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy written by Jacob Laib Talmon and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Totalitarianism written by Abbott Gleason and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description: Providing a fascinating account of totalitarianism, historian Abott Gleason offers a penetrating chronicle of the central concept of our era--an era shaped first by our conflict with fascism and then by our conflict with communism. Interweaving the story of intellectual debates with the international history of the twentieth century, Gleason traces the birth of the term to Italy in the first years of Mussolini's rule. He follows the growth and expansion of the concept as it was picked up in the West and applied to Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union. Gleason's account takes us through the debates of the early postwar years, as academics adopted the term, notably Hannah Arendt. The concept fully entered the public consciousness with the opening of the Cold War, as Truman used the rhetoric of totalitarianism to sell the Truman Doctrine to Congress. As he takes his account through to the 1990s, Gleason offers an inner history of the Cold War, revealing the political charge the term carried for writers on both the left and the right. He also explores the intellectual struggles that swirled around the idea in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. When the Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s, Gleason writes, the concept lost much of its importance in the West even as it flourished in Russia, where writers began to describe their own collapsing state as totalitarian.
Download or read book Marxism Fascism and Totalitarianism written by A. James Gregor and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-08 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work traces the changes in classical Marxism (the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) that took place after the death of its founders. It outlines the variants that appeared around the turn of the twentieth century—one of which was to be of influence among the followers of Adolf Hitler, another of which was to shape the ideology of Benito Mussolini, and still another of which provided the doctrinal rationale for V. I. Lenin's Bolshevism and Joseph Stalin's communism. This account differs from many others by rejecting a traditional left/right distinction—a distinction that makes it difficult to understand how totalitarian political institutions could arise out of presumably diametrically opposed political ideologies. Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism thus helps to explain the common features of "left-wing" and "right-wing" regimes in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Twilight of Democracy written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
Download or read book Totalitarianism written by Hannah Arendt and published by Paw Prints. This book was released on 2009-04-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Bolshevic government of 1930 and the Nazi government of 1938, and shows how totalitarian regimes use terror and propaganda to dominate their citizens
Download or read book Open Society and Its Enemies Volume 2 written by Karl Raimund Popper and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper had written mainly about the philosophy of science, but from 1938 until the end of the Second World War he focused his energies on political philosophy, seeking to diagnose the intellectual origins of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies was the result. In the book, Popper condemned Plato, Marx, and Hegel as "holists" and "historicists"--a holist, according to Popper, believes that individuals are formed entirely by their social groups; historicists believe that social groups evolve according to internal principles that it is the intellectual's task to uncover. Popper, by contrast, held that social affairs are unpredictable, and argued vehemently against social engineering. He also sought to shift the focus of political philosophy away from questions about who ought to rule toward questions about how to minimize the damage done by the powerful. The book was an immediate sensation, and--though it has long been criticized for its portrayals of Plato, Marx, and Hegel--it has remained a landmark on the left and right alike for its defense of freedom and the spirit of critical inquiry.
Download or read book The Prevention of Literature written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In The Prevention of Literature, the third in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell considers the freedom of thought and expression. He discusses the effect of the ownership of the press on the accuracy of reports of events, and takes aim at political language, which ‘consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together.’ The Prevention of Literature is a stirring cry for freedom from censorship, which Orwell says must start with the writer themselves: ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly.’ 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
Download or read book Gender and the Authority of Inspiration written by Miriam Beth Garber and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Surviving Autocracy written by Masha Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.
