This article examines the implications of richard Steigmann-gall's recent revisionist representation of Nazism as a christian (Protestant) movement for the increasingly fashionable accounts of Nazism as a secular or political religion. contrary to Steigmanngall's contention that Protestant Nazism undermines these accounts, I suggest that his portrayal of Nazism as a variant of Protestant millennialism is not necessarily inconsistent with the secular religion approach. a closer look at the so-called löwith-Blumenberg debate on secularization indeed reveals that modern utopianisms containing elements of Protestant millennialism are the best candidates for the label of secularized eschatology. That Steigmann-gall has reached exactly the opposite conclusion is primarily because his conceptual understanding of secular religion is uninformed by the secularization debate. Insofar as Steigmann-gall extracts his model of secular religion from contemporary political religion historiography on Nazism, this article points to a larger problem: a disjunction between historians utilizing the concept, on the one hand, and philosophers and social theorists who have shaped it, on the other.
This essay bridges the standard divide between traditional realist and critical IR theory by demonstrating their unity in the international thought of E. H. Carr. In recent times, numerous scholars have challenged Carr's mainstream disciplinary image as a traditional realist, seeking to dissociate him from realism and narrate him as a proto-critical theorist instead. However, this has implicitly reinforced the divide between the two perspectives and obscured their fusion in Carr's thought. In contrast, this essay does not deny Carr's realism, but rather reveals how it expressed a distinctly critical theoretical consciousness. Focusing primarily on his attacks on liberal statecraft and liberal historiography in, respectively, The Twenty Years' Crisis and What Is History? it demonstrates that his analyses manifested key critical theory elements, including anti-positivist epistemology, counter-hegemonic tendencies, Western Marxist ideology critique and sociology of knowledge, and a commitment to progressive human emancipation from self-imposed constraints.
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