Introduction As noted in the last blog, Hegel’s ideas, before their denunciation as features of a militarist culture, were welcomed among Liberals in Britain. This can be understood in light of the well-chronicled shift in Hegel’s thought, from an enthusiasm for French revolutionary zeal through to his employment as a university professor on the commission… Continue reading “Part Two: Hegel and Fascism”
Introduction In his 1945 work The Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper famously attacked what he saw as the intellectual roots of fascism. Tracing a lineage from Plato to its modern progenitors, he asserted that “Hegel’s hysterical historicism was the fertiliser from which totalitarianism was grown.” (Popper 1945: 270). Popper’s chapter on “Hegel and… Continue reading “Part One: Hegel and 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”
Where left-leaning observers warn of a return of totalitarian nationalism, the far right warns of the return of socialist and communist totalitarian politics. With the rise of populist and far-right politics in Europe and beyond, the fear of the return of totalitarian politics has equally intensified. Comparisons with the rise of fascism in the 1920s… Continue reading “The Far Right Imagines a Totalitarian Other”
