Abstract
Eric Voegelin, the Austrian philosopher who fled the Third Reich in the wake of the Anschluss in 1938, argued that the ideological fanaticism of the Nazis was not only a moral and political mistake, but also a spiritual perversion. More precisely, so far as the political religions of the twentieth century, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism and Islamism are concerned, the meaning or substance of religious phenomena moved from a spiritual concern with transcending the mundane world towards the realization of imaginary fantasies of immanent apocalypse and the fashioning of this worldly utopias. These fantasies, as Barry Cooper observes, are not “always recognized for what they are because the image of an earthly condition of perfected humanity” was, in Europe before 1990, expressed in scientific, or more accurately, “scientistic” language.1
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Notes
Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 4s.
Ernest Sternberg, “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands for,” Orbis (Winter 2010), p. 64.
Emilio Gentile, “The Sacralization of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1(1) (2000), pp. 18–19.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Houghton: Mifflin Harcourt, 1951), pp. 472–479.
See Eric Voegelin, Political Religions and The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 in Order and History, 5 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1974), p. 268
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Palladin, 1969).
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), p. 32.
Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 1–5.
Andrew Macdonald (a.k.a. William Luther Pierce), The Turner Diaries (Hillsboro, West Virginia: National Vanguard Books, 1978)
Louis Beam, “tLeaderless Resistance,” The Seditionist, 12 (January 1992), p. 1. Beam first promulgated the notion in 1983 to the Ku Klux Klan. See also Southern Poverty Law Center, “Louis Beam,” at spl.org and George Michael Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), pp. 5–15.
See Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Hans Brun, A Neo-Nationalist Network: The English Defence League and the European Counter Jihad Movement (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, 2013), p. 3.
Ye’or Bat (a.k.a. Litman, Giselle), Eurabia the Euro-Arab Axis (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005)
Bernard-Henri Levy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2008).
John Fonte, “Liberal Democracy versus Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War Within the West,” Orbis (Summer 2002), pp. 1–14.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony and Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (London: Penguin, 2004)
Alexander Del Valle, I Rossi Neri, Verdi: la convergenza degli Estremi opposti. Islamismo, comunismo, neona-zismo (Torino: Lindau, 2010).
Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How the Left Lost Its Way (London: Harper, 2007), pp. 4–14.
Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), p. 11.
Kenneth R. Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. vii.
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (1962) (London: Continuum, 2005)
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962)
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1954) (London: Penguin, 1993)
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Random House, 2005)
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy (1963) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).
Aristotle, The Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946)
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London: Penguin, 2011), p. xxvi
See J.H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (New York, Basic Books, 1973), p. 168. Harro Hopfl also explores the ambiguities of reason of state thinking and its relationship to Jesuit and politique political thinking. See Harro Hopfl, Jesuit Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 106–112.
Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party,” Party Politics, 1(1) (1995), pp. 5–31.
Peter Oborne, The Triumph of the Political Class (London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. xviii.
Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing out of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013), p. 1.
David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 265.
Hew Strachan, The Direction of War Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 3.
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© 2014 David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith
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Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (2014). Conclusion: Terror, the Polis and political religion. In: Sacred Violence. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328069_9
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