Beyond Hitler's Grasp


Book Description




Desolation and Enlightenment


Book Description

During and especially after the Second World War, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war's devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate Western liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of western desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing. In light of their epoch's calamities these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.




The Nazi Menace


Book Description

A panoramic narrative of the years leading up to the Second World War—a tale of democratic crisis, racial conflict, and a belated recognition of evil, with profound resonance for our own time. Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage. As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light.




Hitler


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Originally published: Germany: S. Fischer Verlag.




Holocaust a History


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Unrivaled in scope, "Holocaust" is a story of all Europe, of the vast sweep of events in which this great atrocity was rooted, from the Middle Ages to the modern era.




Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age


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A fundamental overhaul of modern Arab intellectual history, reassessing cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship.




Beyond Auschwitz


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To this day Jewish thinkers struggle to articulate the appropriate response to the unprecedented catastrophe of the Holocaust. Here, Morgan offers the first comprehensive overview of Post-Holocaust Jewish theology, quoting extensively from and interpreting all of the significant American writings of the movement. Morgan's lucid analysis clarifies the background of the movement in the postwar period, its origins, its character, and its legacy for subsequent thinking, theological and otherwise. Ultimately, Morgan's primary purpose is to tell the story of the movement, to illuminate its real, deep point, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance today.




Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust


Book Description

Provides the reader with the facts of the Holocaust with an emphasis on the central role Jews played in the Nazi genocide. Intended for the non-specialist with some background in history, it will also be of use as an accessible reference tool for more advanced research. Extensive introduction, comprehensive bibliography, and a chronology further supplement the usefulness of this volume.




Beyond Olympus


Book Description

What if, in the not-too-distant future, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful man learned that civilization was virtually certain to collapse within the next 20 years? And what if that man built a great new city called Olympus as part of a mighty effort to change the course of history? Yet what if the best efforts by the people of Olympus proved futile in the end? What if civilization indeed fell, leaving only the remnants of Olympus’s own society to carry the flickering torch of a once proud civilization? What then? Beyond Olympus imagines the answers to those questions in a cautionary tale that is thoughtful, exciting and epic in scale. It is a story that might have seemed farfetched just a few years ago, yet perhaps might seem uncomfortably plausible today...




Florence and Beyond


Book Description

This volume celebrates John M. Najemy and his contributions to the study of Florentine and Italian Renaissance history. Over the last three decades, his books and articles on Florentine politics and political thought have substantially revised the narratives and contours of these fields. They have also provided a framework into which he has woven innovative new threads that have emerged in Renaissance social and cultural history. Presented by his many students and friends, the essays aim to highlight his varied interests and to suggest where they may point for future studies of Florence and, indeed, beyond. -- Amazon.com.