The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism

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Oxford University Press, Jul 27, 2006 - Political Science - 208 pages
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 Inquisitions begins 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

Heresy
3
2 The Archetypal Inquisition
13
3 Joseph de Maistre and the Inquisition
19
4 Juan Donoso Cortés and the Sickness of the Liberal State
27
The Emergence of Secular State Corporatism
35
6 Carl Schmitt the Inquisition and Totalitarianism
49
7 Communism and the Heresy of Religion
61
8 Eric Voegelin AntiGnosticism and the Totalitarian Emphasis on Order
69
11 Another Long Strange Trip
105
12 High Weirdness in the American Hinterlands
111
13 The American State of Exception
127
14 Berdyaevs Insight
135
Disorder as Order
147
Notes
157
Selected Bibliography
179
Index
187

9 Norman Cohn and the Pursuit of Heretics
85
10 Theodor Adorno and the Occult
95

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