In an article published in September 1939, in the very eye of the storm of twentieth-century Europe's ‘age of extremes’, the British historian Christopher Dawson attempted to get to grips with the temper of his times. Opining on what he saw as the failure of nineteenth-century liberal individualism and its deleterious encroachment on spiritual values, he wrote:
Now the coming of the totalitarian state marks the emergence of a new type of politics which recognises no limits and seeks to subordinate every social and intellectual activity to its own ends. Thus the new politics are in a sense more idealistic than the old; they are political religions based on a Messianic hope of social salvation. But at the same time they are more realist since they actually involve a brutal struggle for life between rival powers which are prepared to use every kind of treachery and violence to gain their ends.
When not researching medieval Christian encounters with the Mongols, Dawson wrote history with a grand narrative sweep such as he admired in the work of the German historian Oswald Spengler. His output has recently sparked a revival of interest, with claims that he was one of most significant Catholic historians of the century. Yet this Augustinian pessimist was only one of a broader band of contemporary intellectuals – not all of them religious apologists – to brandish the label of ‘political religion’ as a descriptor, and as a moral warning. Seventy years on, the same moral seriousness characterises several of the books under review here, especially those addressing the more terrifying consequences of political religion in its various forms. For as A. James Gregor declares when introducing his intellectual history of Totalitarianism and Political Religion, ‘the unnumbered dead of the past century’ are surely owed some posthumous explanation:
Amid all the other factors that contributed to the tragedy, there was a kind of creedal ferocity that made every exchange a matter of existential importance. The twentieth century was host to systems of doctrinal conviction that made unorthodox belief a capital affront, made conflict mortal, and all enterprise sacrificial (Gregor, xi).
Marc Sangnier (1873-1950 was the instigator of a series of International Democratic Peace Congresses in the 1920s and 1930s. A veteran of the First World War, he ardently wished to 'disarm hatred'. Drawing on his pre-war experience as leader of the Christian Democratic youth movement, the Sillon, he launched a non-governmental movement aimed at youth for the advancement of Franco-German understanding. The Ruhr occupation, undertaken due to war reparations disputes, made the Freiburg Congress of August 1923 particularly audacious as Sangnier and a portion of the French left embraced a non-militarist Germany even if political divisions intruded. Sangnier clashed with Prime Minister Poincaré in parliament and withstood the physical violence of the nationalist right on the street for his daring. The advent of Locarno diplomacy and détente from 1925 turned Sangnier's movement from being marginal to an important vehicle for promoting rapprochement, recognized as such by Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, himself the symbol of pacifist hopes.The question of how societies exit from wars is an important preoccupation of historians. Even with the legal and military precision of an armistice or a peace treaty, a 'war culture' often persists in popular perceptions, in people's mentalities, affecting and infecting attitudes to the 'former' enemy well into the post-war era. These questions have arisen with particular insistence in relation to the First World War. Historians have recently used the concept of 'war culture' to explain how
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