Abstract
The intellectual background of this book is three years of research into the cultural origins of fascist ideology, which I conducted at the Faculty of Political Science at Bologna University. This area of research is perhaps the object of one the longest ongoing scholarly debates in the field of modern history and political studies. I understood the complex phenomenon of fascism as a form of ‘political religion’, drawing on the groundbreaking work of Emilio Gentile.
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Notes
See especially the afterword, ‘Totalitarian Modernity’, in Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology 1918–1925, Enigma, 2005, pp. 363–402.
See Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism, Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 14.
See George Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perception of Reality, Wayne University Press, 1987;
Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich, Routledge, 2004;
Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, Princeton University Press, 1994;
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995; and
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
See Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the 20th Century, University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. From the Italian Risorgere, ‘to rise again’, the Italian Risorgimento was the historical period of and the political movement for the liberation and national unification of Italy (1750–1870).
On this subject, see Emilio Gentile, Against Caesar: Christianity and Totalitarianism in the Epoch of Fascisms, Feltrinelli, 2010 (in Italian).
Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture, Yale University Press, 1981, p. 288.
Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 36.
Ernest B. Koenker, Secular Salvations: The Rites and Symbols of Political Religions, Fortress Press, 1965, p. vii.
Quoted in John Horgan, The Psychology of Terrorism, Routledge, 2005, p. xii.
See Stanley G. Payne, ‘On the Heuristic Value of the Concept of Political Religion and its Application’, in Roger Griffin, Robert Mallett and John Tortorice (eds), The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 31–2.
See Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, Hurst and Co., 2005.
See Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism, Praeger, 2003, pp. 1–8.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 131.
See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 6–7.
See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, Routledge, 1993, pp. 38–40.
See Emilio Gentile, Apocalypse of Modernity: The Great War for the New Man, Feltrinelli, 2008 (in Italian).
See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, Grosset and Dunlap, 1964, quoted in
Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 211.
See Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 35–53.
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© 2014 Carlo Aldrovandi
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Aldrovandi, C. (2014). Introduction. In: Apocalyptic Movements in Contemporary Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316844_1
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