Ideologies In The Age Of Extremes

Introduces the key ideologies of the twentieth century - liberalism, conservatism, communism and fascism - and analyses how they affected each other.

This book provides a history of political ideologies during the period famously described by Eric Hobsbawn as "The Age of Extremes" -- from the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ideologies in the Age of Extremes introduces the key ideologies of the age; liberalism, conservatism, communism, and fascism.Willie Thompson identifies the political influence of mass movements as a key feature. He uses a powerful approach that considers the different ideologies in relation to each other. This allows him to show that they often emerged from a common root or merged into a common future, stealing each other’s clothes and reinventing themselves as the stark opposite of a competing ideology. This sophisticated yet accessible analysis will be of great interest to students of 20th century history and political theory.

This book provides a history of political ideologies during the period famously described by Eric Hobsbawn as "The Age of Extremes" -- from the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ideologies in the Age of Extremes introduces the key ideologies of the age; liberalism, conservatism, communism, and fascism.Willie Thompson identifies the political influence of mass movements as a key feature. He uses a powerful approach that considers the different ideologies in relation to each other. This allows him to show that they often emerged from a common root or merged into a common future, stealing each other’s clothes and reinventing themselves as the stark opposite of a competing ideology. This sophisticated yet accessible analysis will be of great interest to students of 20th century history and political theory.

The first English-language biography of Dmytro Dontsov, the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de siècle culture and myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation. Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the "free intellectual" and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy. Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.

DIVThis book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age./div

The Western tradition of the constitutional state, with its ancient roots, defines political extremes as the epitome of that what must be absolutely rejected. It highlights tyranny, despotism, despotic rule, non-autonomy, ruthless enforcing of interests as ‘extreme’, contrasting this to a virtuous mean which guarantees moderation. In this volume, the culmination of twenty years of extensive research, Uwe Backes provides a conceptual history of the notions "extreme" and "extremism" from antiquity to the present day. The terminological history of political extremes had been related for more then two millennia with the term mesotês used in the Aristotelian ethics and the theory of mixed constitution. Both doctrines influenced the republicanism of the North Italian city states and later the United States of America as well as British parliamentarism. The positions of moderation and extremes were not joined until the course of the French Revolution with the distinction of right- and left-wing, and this is how it still exists today in the intellectual-political geography. This unique source based study reconstructs these developments from ancient times to the present. Tracing the history of the concept of political extremism from Ancient Greece to the present day, this is an invaluable resource for scholars of democracy, extremism and political sociology.