Fascism appeared as a governing force in a particular period – the interwar one – and in a particular set of places – some countries, but not others. What many historical sociologists approaching the period agree on is that assembling a broad left-liberal coalition was the necessary condition for defeating it. But what was required… Continue reading “Potential Lessons From Interwar Europe To Combat Fascism”
A key under-studied area for analysis is how contemporary extreme right movements can also be seen as totalitarian. Indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of such. According to an old joke, while in a liberal democracy everything that is not forbidden is allowed, in a totalitarian system everything that has not been banned… Continue reading “Totalitarianism in the twentieth century and beyond”
The political momentum and social appeal of the current populist backlash illustrates the persistence of dark collective layers that the postwar transition was meant to have banished. In academia, we seem to have a fondness for the trope of the “wave” and “wave theory.” Samuel Huntington gave us the waves of democratization — a process of… Continue reading “Is the World Undergoing a Deep Populist Transition?”
The current wave of populism calls to mind the mood of the early 20th century when liberal values in England saw a “strange death.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent designation of liberal values as “obsolete” may sound familiar. This is not the first time the death of liberalism has been announced. As George Dangerfield’s classic… Continue reading “The Death of Liberalism Has Been Proclaimed Before”
Orban’s critics say that since coming to power in 2010, he has tightened control over key institutions in Hungary [File: Julien Warnard/Reuters] In the same week that Russia’s Vladimir Putin declared Western Liberalism was “obsolete”, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has consolidated his control over the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The end of a drawn-out struggle for… Continue reading “The Death of Liberalism, Academic Freedom, and Authoritarian Politics”
GUILD SOCIALISM AND ‘POST-LIBERALISM’ Eliot and Pound of course have been attacked for their bad politics; both were close to Hulme, and Hulme and Pound were deeply involved in the New Age journal, the radical socialist paper that provided a platform for many early modernists. This venue seems to have been a seed-bed for a… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part Two”
As Ronald Bush has pointed out, accounts of the ‘ideological alignment between the oppositional practices of imagism, “anti-democratic” forms of “individualism,” and anarchism’, may ‘[miss] a beat… by not considering the similarly “anti-democratic” features of John Stuart Mill’s antecedent liberalism.’[1] Treatments of modernist ideology may indeed underplay this inheritance, not only from Mill’s On Liberty… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part One”
