The Enlightenment, Communism and political religion: Reflections on a misleading trajectory

Journal of Political Ideologies

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 13-37

  Shorten, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNISM; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; POLITICS; RELIGION;

EID: 28344443917     PISSN: 13569317     EISSN: 14699613     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13569310306080     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy, translated by K. Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (Manchester: Fontana, 1966).
3. Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 16.
4. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, translated by T. Kilmartin (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
5. Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War (London and New York: University Press of America, 1985 [1954]), p. 116.
6. See also Aron, 'Les Religions Séculières', reprinted in Une Histoire du XXe siècle (Paris, 1996)
7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, translated by T. P. Whitney (London: Book Club Associates, 1974), pp. 173-174.
8. Alain Besançon, Intellectual Origins of Leninism, translated by S. Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 52.
9. For example, Michael Burleigh, 'National socialism as a political religion', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1/2 (Autumn 2000), pp. 1-26;
10. Emilio Gentile, 'The sacralisation of politics: definitions, interpretations and reflections on the question of secular religion and totalitarianism', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1/1 (Summer 2000), pp. 18-55;
11. Philippe Burtin, 'Political religion: The relevance of a concept', History and Memory, 9/1-2 (1997), pp. 321-349;
12. and Uriel Tal, 'on structures of political theology and myth in Germany prior to the holocaust', in Y. Baver and N. Rotenstreich (Eds), The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), pp. 43-74.
13. As Stanley Payne, author of several important works on fascism, has observed, 'the tendency of revolutionary movements and regimes to sacralise politics and create political religions first received comment during the 1920s ... during the past decade, literature on the topic has grown more rapidly than ever': 'Emilio Gentile's historical analysis and taxonomy of political religions', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3/1 (Summer 2002), p. 123.
14. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993 [1957]), pp. 281-288.
15. See Tzvetan Todorov, 'Totalitarianism: between religion and science', translated by B. Brower and M. Likin, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2/1 (Summer 2001), pp. 28-42;
16. George L. Mosse, 'Towards a general theory of fascism', in Masses and Man (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980), pp. 159-197;
17. Jean-Pierre Sironneau, Sécularisation et religions politiques (Meuton: The Hague, 1982), English summary, pp. 567-591;
18. and James Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980).
19. For example, Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952);
20. Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960);
21. and The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarisation in the Twentieth Century (London: Secker & Warburg, 1981).
22. For example, James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (London: Temple Smith, 1980).
23. For example, Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by L. Wirth and E. Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966 [1936]), pp. 190-197;
24. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 22.
25. For example, M. Henningsen (Ed.), The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5, Modernity Without Restraint (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 243-315;
26. and Besançon, Intellectual Origins of Leninism, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 18.
27. E. Gentile, 'Fascism as political religion', Journal of Contemporary History, 25/2-3 (1990), pp. 229-251.
28. M. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 5-6.
29. Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 44.
30. Waldemar Gurian, 'Totalitarianism as political religion', in C. Friedrich (Ed.), Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 119-129;
31. W. Gurian, Hitler and the Christians, translated by E. F. Peeler (London: Sheed and Ward, 1936);
32. Gurian, The Future, of Bolshevism, translated by E. I. Watkin (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936);
33. Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint, op. cit., Ref. 13;
34. Aron, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism op. cit., Refs. 3 and 4;
35. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10;
36. and Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, edited by T. Fuller (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
37. See especially George L. Mosse, The Nationalisation of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through to the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975),
38. and The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).
39. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 31 and 33.
40. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 18.
41. Burrin, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 346, fn. 28, and 322.
42. Perhaps above all, for instance, in the attempt to institutionalize revolution. See especially Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution (New York: Harper, 1942).
43. Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 6.
44. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYREV Inc., 2002), pp. 201-202.
45. Leszek Kolakowski, 'Irrationality in polities', in Modernity on Endless Trial (London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 192
46. See, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
47. By 'post-Marxism' I mean primarily the reaction on all levels against various Marxist and Communist traditions in various contexts, but centrally the reaction on the philosophical level against the Hegel/Lukàcs concept of totality. This is particularly the case in the French context. It is the argument, for instance, of the 'new philosophers'. See especially André Glucksmann, The Master Thinkers (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981 [Paris, 1977]),
48. and Bernard-Henri Lévy, Barbarism with a Human Face. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980 [Paris, 1977]).
49. See especially Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, op. cit., Ref. 17, and, for an archetypal conservative account,
50. Roger Scruton, 'The philosopher on Dover Beach', Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1986.
51. Hannah Arendt, 'Religion and politics', originally 1953, reprinted in J. Kohn (Ed.), Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (London: Harcourt and Brace, 1994), pp. 368 and 371.
52. Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 19-75 and 24.
53. Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin ibid., pp. 59-70.
54. E. Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968). The implication that the master thinkers (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger) not only 'knew' how to change the world, but also wanted to be present at or in charge of the transformation of reality, in fact draws Voegelin closer to a tradition that associates the totalitarian phenomena with 'apocalyptic' thinking.
55. See the remarks of Klaus Vondung in 'Eric Voegelin, the crisis of Western civilisation, and the apocalypse', in S. A. McKnight and G. L. Price (Eds), International Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 117-134 (p. 119).
56. Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 189.
57. Robert Wokler, The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of modernity', in N. Geras and R. Wokler (Eds), The Enlightenment and Modernity (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 161.
58. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932);
59. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10;
60. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, op. cit., Ref. 4;
61. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith op. cit., Ref. 11;
62. Oakeshott, Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences op. cit., Ref. 17;
63. and Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989).
64. To the best of my knowledge the only other significant attempt to find precedents for totalitarianism (or strictly speaking, in this case Leninism) in Gnosticism is Alain Besançon's The Intellectual Origins of Leninism, which ventures this route in rejecting the more usual concept of 'secular religion'.
65. Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 53.
66. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers op. cit., Ref. 35, pp. 31, 8, 30, 8 and 63.
67. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10.
68. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 2, 18 and 19.
69. Talmon, ibid., pp.2, 253, 5-6 and 19-20.
70. The case for contextualizing Talmon's work as such runs thus: he in fact later explained that his trilogy from The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy onwards was triggered by personal experience. At the peak of the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, he explained, he happened to be writing an undergraduate paper on the 'ultra-democratic' French constitution of 1793 against the backdrop of Jacobin terroristic dictatorship, and it was there that he first apprehended the Jacobin-Bolshevik connection and, moreover, discovered the law that caused revolutionary salvationist movements to evolve into regimes of terror and dictatorship.
71. See Yehoshua Arieli, 'Jacob Talmon - an intellectual portrait', in Totalitarian Democracy and After: International Colloquium in Memory of Jacob L. Talmon, Jerusalem, 21-24 June 1982 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1984), pp. 5-6.
72. By this I refer primarily to the influential contributions of François Furet and the assessments of his work which now constitute something of a sub-discipline in the historiography of the French Revolution. See especially Isser Woloch, 'On the latent illiberalism of the French Revolution', American Historical Review, 95/5 (December 1990), pp. 1452-1470;
73. and William Scott, 'François Furet and democracy in France', Historical Journal. 34/1 (1992), pp. 147-171.
74. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution op. cit., Ref. 35, pp. 291, 767 and 789.
75. For a general overview of the limitations of Schama's account, see Alan B. Spitzer, 'Narrative's problems: the case of Simon Schama', Journal of Modern History, 65/1 (March 1993), pp. 176-192.
76. Melissa Lane, 'Plato, Popper, Strauss and utopianism', History of Philosophy Quarterly, 16/2 (April 1999), p. 121.
77. Bernard Yack, The Fetishisms of Modernities (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 154, fn. 51.
78. Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. vii.
79. See also Shklar, 'The political theory of utopia: from melancholy to nostalgia', Daedalus, 94/2 (Spring 1965), pp. 367-381.
80. George Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), p. 2.
81. It should be noted that Shklar's thinking on utopia was not without its critics at the time. For instance, summarizing Shklar's position, George Kateb observed that '[t]he career of the doctrines of the French eighteenth century and the history of the French Revolution have worked together with the history of the Russian Revolution and Dictatorship, and "the revolt of the masses", to produce a profound suspicion of the whole realm of politics, and, concomitantly, a profound reluctance to entertain schemes for significant changes within that realm': Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies ibid., p. 2. As such, Kateb himself thought Shklar's case overstated - that there was a tradition of both utopianism and 'anti-utopianism', and a concurrent inherent conflict between the two, which could be discerned throughout time immemorial. Kateb's argument, however, fails to appreciate the currency that the political religion trajectory wielded at the time and has continued to wield. His argument that 'modern utopianism is made up in large part ... of ideas that would have been formulated even had there been no French Revolution or Russian Revolution', in other words, is blind to the fact that modern anti-utopianism has woven these two events together in a narrative whereby the latter is largely made sense of through an excavation of the former.
82. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith op. cit., Ref. 48, pp. 3, ix, 5, 108, 226 and 25.
83. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith ibid., p. 272. Her later work on the 'liberalism of fear' in fact suggests that her intention is merely to record, but not to judge, the fact of a stark historical choice solely between scepticism and despair.
84. See Shklar, 'The liberalism of fear', in Nancy Rosenblum (Ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 21-38.
85. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith op. cit., Ref. 48, pp. 21, 237 and 236.
86. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith ibid., pp. 238 and 237; italics added.
87. Peter Gay, 'Carl Becker's heavenly city', Political Science Quarterly, 72/2 (June 1957), pp. 186, 187 and 191,
88. and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. 2, The Science of Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 [1969]), p. 198.
89. See also Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959 [1954])
90. Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp.63 and 120; italics added.
91. Adjectives used in various places, according to Mark Lilla, by Berlin: Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 198.
92. Isaiah Berlin, 'The pursuit of the ideal', in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana, 1991), pp. 5-6.
93. Famously, Berlin's 'pursuit of the ideal' rests on three incontestable assumptions: 'In the first place that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path towards these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another ...': ibid.
94. Elsewhere Berlin refers to the three propositions as a 'kind of three-legged stool on which the central tradition of western thought' seems to rest: 'The decline of utopian ideas in the West', ibid., p. 24.
95. Berlin, 'The decline of utopian ideas in the West', The Crooked Timber of Humanity ibid., pp. 24, 34, 33 and 34.
96. In The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYREV Inc., 2002),
97. Mark Lilla suggests that Berlin's account is in conflict with another explanation for intellectual culpability in twentieth-century totalitarianism; namely, the political religion thesis, understood by Lilla as the recurring force of the irrational in human life rather than the 'pretensions of reason'. He contrasts it with Talmon's account which is effectively said to have brought Berlin's thesis closer to the present by arguing that the most significant feature of European political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not its rationalism - which might have led it in a liberal direction - but rather the new religious fervour and messianic expectations with which modern democratic ideas became infused: Lilla, ibid., pp. 200-201.
98. Such an interpretation of Talmon is curious and the attempt to set up the polarity more curious yet still. Excessive rationality, as it were, is Talmon's target. Berlin, for his part, freely concedes that the 'three-legged stool' owes as much to the religious as it does to the secular when he observes that, historically, opinions 'widely differed about the right path to pursue - some found it in churches, some in laboratories; some believed in intuition, others in experiment, or in mystical visions, or in mathematical calculation': Berlin, Main Currents of Sociological Thought op. cit., Ref. 64, p. 6. More importantly, Talmon's distinction between the 'empirical' and the 'totalitarian' modes of democracy, the one proceeding by trial-and-error and the other by the dictates of timeless reason accessible only to the enlightened few, closely mirrors Berlin's own central conceptual differentiation between 'value-pluralism' and 'value-monism'.
99. J. A. Leith, 'Peter Gay's Enlightenment'. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5/1 (Autumn 1971), pp. 161 and 171.
100. See in particular Talmon's remark that 'totalitarian democracy has its roots in the common stock of eighteenth-century ideas': The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10. p. 249.
101. Talmon, Political Messianism, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 323.
102. In the nineteenth century Tocqueville, of course, had taken as his own question why France - ostensibly democratic - had so much difficulty being a politically free society, while in the case of America political liberty persisted because, or in spite of, the democratic character of its society. Talmon concludes by intimating that it was in France in the eighteenth century that totalitarian democracy matured in three critical stages: the postulate of the natural order represented most persuasively in Rousseau's conception of the General Will: a Jacobin approximation which still balanced precariously the opposed principles of individualism and collectivism; and a final crystallization in Babeuf, the original scheme for an egalitarian communist society: The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 18 and 249.
103. Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 42 and 43.
104. R. Aron, Main Currents of Sociological Thought. Vol. 1, translated by R. Howard and H. Weaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 208.
105. Wokler, The Enlightenment and Modernity op. cit., Ref. 34, pp. 162 and 172.
106. The origins of the religious analogy, for Tocqueville certainly, reside in the opposition to Jacobinism. Notably, in the accounts this heritage has spawned it is Rousseau who almost invariably becomes the progenitor of a specifically messianic doctrine which both aspires to the regeneration of individuals by society and whose consequences in practice are supposedly illustrated in state-imposed terror. Rousseau, on this view, is guilty of putting society in the place of God, conceiving of the individual as becoming a proper moral being only when he agrees to participate in a society whose collective well-being becomes the sole determinant of civic and moral duty. Though Rousseau writes about the General Will in terms of liberty, on this view, it is an essentially authoritarian instrument. Laws made under the General Will, that is, must by definition have moral authority; 'the people making laws for itself cannot be unjust', 'the General Will is always righteous', and so on: Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by D. Cress (Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), especially Book II, chapter VI.
107. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 23.
108. Methodological problems obviously abound in this regard. See, for instance, the remarks of Keith Baker. 'On the problem of the ideological origins of the French Revolution', in D. LaCapra and S. Kaplan (Eds), Modern European Intellectual History (London: Cornell University Press, 1982). p. 205;
109. Norman Hampson. 'The heavenly city of the French Revolutionaries', in C. Lucas (Ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) p. 49;
110. François Furet, 'The Revolution is over', in Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981), pp. 31-32.
111. For an overview of the recent literature, see Jean Starobinski, 'Rousseau and revolution', New York Review of Books. 25 April 2002, p. 56.
112. 'Happily, virtue is natural to the people, despite aristocratic prejudice': Robespierre, Oeuvres, Vol. 10. p. 355,
113. cited in B. Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 83.
114. This may be the early Rousseau of the Discourse of the Arts and Sciences
115. captive to the romantic image of the noble savage, but not the Rousseau of The Social Contract whose civic and moral virtue was contingent on the passage out of the state of nature.
116. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10. p. 254.
117. Richard Pipes, Communism: A Brief History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001);
118. Paul Johnson, 'A terrible failure', Times Literary Supplement, 18 January 2002, p. 11;
119. Martin Malia, 'Communism, Karl Marx and Fritz Gerlich', Times Literary Supplement, 1 March 2002, p. 17;
120. Johnson, 'Marx and Gladstone', Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 2002, p. 17.
121. M. Malia, 'The roots of Communist ideology', Times Literary Supplement, 15 February 2002, p. 17.
122. Malia, Times Literary Supplement, op. cit., Ref. 71, p. 17.
123. Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, et al., Le livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, et répression (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995).
124. L. Kolakowki, The Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3, The Breakdown, translated by P. S. Falla (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 523.
125. Malia, Times Literary Supplement, op. cit., Ref. 71, p. 17.
126. The consequence of autobiographical involvement is that the construction of a political religion narrative is frequently a case of bringing particular sensibilities acutely into focus rather than engaging in a rigorous analysis of concepts. Symptomatic of this tendency is the case of François Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), the author of which broke with Marxism in 1956. The title of the third chapter of The Passing of an Illusion - 'The universal spell of October' - indicates much of Furet's charge that those charmed by Bolshevism were captive to powerful, if not entirely primitive, religious impulses.
127. Richard Crossman (Ed.), The God that Failed (London: Harper and Row, 1972 [1949]). The volume eventually comprised contributions from Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Richard Wright, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender.
128. Crossman, ibid., pp. 15-76, 26, 29 and 74;
129. and David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 342.
130. Crossman, ibid., p. 2.
131. See, for instance, Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (London: Hutchinson, 1969), especially p. 297.
132. Cesarani, The God that Failed op. cit., Ref. 79, p. 72.
133. In methodological terms, it is telling that Talmon concludes both that 'it is time for historical thinking to acquire a new dimension, that of psychology' and that psychological dispositions are 'all-embracing attitudes' which, 'once crystallised, are the real substance of history': Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 11;
134. and Political. Messianism, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 518; italics added.
135. In the existing literature these approaches are contrasted, respectively, as 'phenomenological' and 'functional', or historical and social science. The approach of the social sciences ('functional') 'treats ideology and religion as the same thing because Communism (or nationalism, imperialism, etc.) fulfils for its adherents the same "function" that religious denominations fulfil in a free society': Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 op. cit., Ref. 29, pp. 372.
136. The historical ('phenomenological') approach addresses the articulation, in the political sphere, of attitudes and behaviours considered as characteristic of religious experience. On the distinction, see also Gentile, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 18-55,
137. and Burrin, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 321-349.
138. For a different perspective, see Sironnneau, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 589-591, who discerns four approaches: the typological, the genetic and historical, the functional, and the comparative.
139. In general terms, secularization arguments rest on the premise that the fundamental categories of modern historical consciousness are merely secularized versions of theological positions. (Its principal exposition is to be found in Karl Löwith, Meaning and History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1945].)
140. Typically, the theological position accentuated is the telos of redemption intrinsic to the foundational narratives of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the eschatology that replaced the cyclical view of history embraced by classical antiquity. On this view, the trend of turning-away-from-God reaches its apex in something like Marx's veneration of the proletariat. The conception of progress underlying various modern philosophies of history is cast as derivative of (and thereby, on some accounts, a corruption of) a Christian original. Criticisms of it in its application to totalitarianism are suggested in both Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by R. M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 3-120,
141. and Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent op. cit., Ref. 69, pp. 10-18.
142. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 279 and 286.
143. See also Aron, 'Marx's messianism and its misadventures', in In Defence of Decadent Europe, translated by Stephen Cox (South Bend, IN: Regenery/Gateway, 1979), pp. 3-27.
144. Gentile, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 18-19, 24 and 25.
145. Gentile, ibid. pp. 33, 39, 40, 42 and 51.
146. Roger Eatwell, 'On defining the "fascist minimum": The centrality of ideology', Journal of Political Ideologies, 1/3 (October 1996), p. 304.
147. Roger Griffin, The primacy of culture: the current growth (or manufacture) of consensus within fascist studies', Journal of Contemporary History, 37/1 (January 2002), pp. 21-43 and 34.
148. Griffin quotes the important, and much earlier, contribution of George Mosse to the effect that it was not economics or even politics which provided the focal point of fascism's revolutionary mission - rather 'cultural expressions of the true community moved to the forefront as symbols of the new society': Mosse, 'The genesis of fascism', Journal of Contemporary History, 1/1 (January 1966), pp. 19-20.
149. Gentile, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, op cit., Ref. 8, p. 19. This 'anthropological revolution' is in fact proximous to Griffin's own term 'palingenesis'.
150. Gentile, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions ibid., pp. 19 and 24; italics added.