The new inquisitions : heretic-hunting and the intellectual origins of modern totalitarianism / Arthur Versluis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Versluis, Arthur, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Totalitarianism.

Physical Description:

xii, 190 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Summary:

The only book of its kind, The New Inquisitions is an exhilarating investigation into the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. Arthur Versluis unveils the connections between heretic hunting in early and medieval Christianity, and the emergence of totalitarianism in the twentieth century.He shows how secular political thinkers in the nineteenth century inaugurated a tradition of defending the Inquisition, and how Inquisition-style heretic-hunting later manifested across the spectrum of twentieth-century totalitarianism. An exceptionally wide-ranging work, The New Inquisitionsbegins with early Christianity, and traces heretic-hunting as a phenomenon through the middle ages and right into the twentieth century, showing how the same inquisitional modes of thought recur both on the political Left and on the political Right.

Contents:

Introduction : heresy

Heresy and the inquisition

Czeslaw Milosz and the captive mind

The archetypal inquisition

Joseph de Maistre and the Inquisition

Juan Donoso Cortes and the "sickness" of the liberal state

Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras : the emergence of secular state corporatism

Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras : the nationalist substitute for Catholicism

The secularization of heresiophobia

Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and totalitarianism

Carl Schmitt and early modern Western esotericism

Carl Schmitt and gnosticism

Communism and the heresy of religion

Eric Voegelin, anti-gnosticism, and the totalitarian emphasis on order

The rhetoric of anti-gnosticism

Voegelinian inquisitors

Norman Cohn and the pursuit of heretics

The inner demons of Europe once again

Theodor Adorno and the "occult"

Another long, strange trip

That old bugaboo, "gnosticism," yet again

An epidemic of evil!

Digital revolution

High weirdness in the American hinterlands

The satanic panic of late-twentieth-century America

Illuminatiphobia

The Christian illuminati

The American state of exception

Rendering to the secular arm

Berdyaev's insight

Dostoevsky revisited

Berdyaev on inquisitional psychopathology

Totalitarianism of the left and of the right

The betrayal of humanity

It can happen here

Conclusion : disorder as order

Bohme's metaphysics of evil

Ideocracy's consequences

Heresy and history

The ubiquity of ideopathology

Mysticism and Plato's cave.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-186) and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780195345629

0195345622

OCLC:

79825654