George MosseReseñas

2/7/23

1/27/23

Grande studioso delle dittature e dei meccanismi da esse utilizzate per raggiungere e mantenere il potere, Mosse parte dalla fine del XVIII secolo per indagare la nascita e lo sviluppo di manifestazioni e riti di massa con i quali in Germania si sviluppò e prese forza il sogno di un popolo unito in uno stato unito. Analizzando fra l'altro la realizzazione dei monumenti nazionali, il ruolo delle associazioni sportive e di tiratori e l'organizzazione di grandi manifestazioni di massa nella Germania attorno al 1848, poi in quella di Bismarck e infine nella Repubblica di Weimar, Mosse individua tutti quegli elementi su cui il nazionalsocialismo poté contare per sviluppare una propria sistematica strategia di presa del potere. Un grandissimo libro.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2846481.html

I've been digging into the detail of sixteenth-century Irish history so much that I thought it was time to take a step back and think about the wider European context. This is an Open University textbook (probably written to accompany a course) which does what it says on the tin, looking mainly at Western Europe. There is half a chapter on the Ottomans, Russia and the Americas; if Ireland is mentioned, I did not spot it. There are a lot of good set-pieces - Charles V, Henry VIII, the Dutch Revolt, Florence, Luther, Calvin; it was an exciting time in Europe.

I took three main things from it. The first is that the religious situation in the rest of Europe was confused and unsettled for much of the century, so the English flip-flopping between religious regimes in the 1550s and the uncertainty of the Elizabethan settlement has a wider context of which all policy-makers and most international merchants would have been aware. The second is just how marginal Ireland was; the authors go a great deal into the developed economics of the cities, the surrounding countryside and the wider realms, but I suspect that Ireland had never really recovered from the Black Death two centuries before and was only loosely connected to the wider European economy. And the third is that this was an amazing period in the arts and sciences - the authors make the claim that in the sixteenth century, "more of the finest paintings and fresoes of Europe were painted, and in a greater and more contrasting variety of styles, than in any other similar period." I just had a quick look at Wikipedia; it lists over a thousand Italian painters from the sixteenth century. Europe would never look at itself the same way again.½

Una storia del razzismo, delle sue teorie, comportamenti, politiche, eccidi, in una nuova interpretazione, che permette forse per la prima volta di comprendere a fondo un pregiudizio ancora diffuso. Lontano da ogni condanna moralistica, Mosse ricerca le ragioni storiche e culturali per cui milioni di uomini hanno potuto e possono ancor oggi credere nella diversa dignità e nella distinzione delle razze : bianca o gialla o nera ; ariana o ebraica. E conclude che il razzismo non è una aberrazione mentale fondata sul Male, ma una articolata ideologia che ha trovato alimento nelle conquiste scientifiche del XVIII e XIX secolo, e si è venuta variamente intrecciando a tutti i movimenti politici di questi ultimi secoli ... , anche il socialismo, anche il marxismo. La persecuzione e l' olocausto di milioni di ebrei è stato il fenomeno che maggiormente ha scosso la coscienza degli uomini del XX secolo, ma ancor oggi in diverse parti del mondo si uccide e si muore in nome della razza.

In questa sua nuova raccolta di saggi, George L. Mosse esamina quasi con occhio clinico la complessa psicologia degli ebrei tedeschi, costretti a confrontarsi con i vari problemi derivanti dai loro tentativi di assimilarsi nella società in cui vivevano, una società che per accettarli li voleva "meno ebrei" possibile ma che al tempo stesso contribuiva a perpetuare lo stereotipo ebraico.

imperdibile per chi sia interessato a comprendere l'evoluzione del rapporto tra sessualità e nazionalismo, mediati dall'idea borghese di rispettabilità

Bellissimo volume che fornisce idee e materiale di riflessione sulla nascita della "massa nazionale"

Questo libro affronta il problema delle radici più profonde, quelle culturali, del nazionalsocialismo da un punto di vista nuovo ed assai suggestivo per il lettore italiano. Centocinquanta anni di storia tedesca sono ripercorsi alla luce della nuova politica, della progressiva trasformazione delle folle in masse, e, quindi, in movimenti di massa e del loro inserimento nella vita politica tedesca come elemento caratterizzante e via via sempre più autonomo di essa. Da questa analisi è nato un libro che costituirà una tappa importante nel dibattito sul nazionalsocialismo, nelle sue specifiche originalità, sul suo legame con la precedente storia tedesca, sul suo particolare rapporto con la società di massa.

George Mosse sintetizza e sviluppa, nelle risposte a Michael Ledeen, gli originali contributi che egli ha dato al rinnovamento degli schemi interpretativi del fenomeno nazista.

Not for the faint of heart, but essential for those who want a stronger historical mind and spirit. My caveat is simply based on the inevitable density and complexity of intellectial history, though it should be added that Mosse at best could write with a vigor and clarity recalling the best of the Enlightenment. The sub-title of the book is self-explanatory -- and yet wasn't assumed to be that when he was writing this book. The preponderant opinion then, both on the street and in the academy, was that Nazism had no intellectural pedigree, that its practitioners were all either sub-intellectual sadists, or pitiful mis-understanders of high-culture figures like Wagner. Up to this time, the only English-language compettiton Mosse had faced was Peter Viereck's METAPOLITICS: energetic, righteous, entertaining -- and often wildly misleading. Shortly afterward, left-wing hippies were t'rilled and delighted by the appearance of the English-language edition of THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, which suggested, with little scholarshiop and less subtelty, that the Nazis had been right-wing hippies, avant le lettre. Anyway, Mosse's work was pioneering at the time, and has stood the test of time extremely well. After all, his thesis is fairly simple: elitist (and ultimately racist) and authoritarian value were the common intellectual property of many too many people who formed the minds of Germasn youth, in the schools and in the enormous youth-movement.
A few words about the main title, which is far less self-explanatory than the sub-title. Mosse explains it himself in the course of its argument, but it it may be helpful to understand it a little earlier. The crisis was not simply the crumbling of earlier belief-sets but the flooding-in of newly-ascendant irrational systems to replace the old certainties of Christianity, conventional patriotism, the new science, bourgeois accumulation, Marxism, aestheticism and the rest. In this story, the stars are not people like Nietzsche, but obscurities like Langbehn, Lagarde, and Liebenfels.

One of the best books that I read and reviewed last year was George L. Mosse’s “Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World War” (1990) which discusses what he calls the cult of the fallen soldier, the emergent European nationalisms of the nineteenth century, and the impacts these factors had on the cultural experience of war. This book, written three years later, continues his discussion of the different kinds of nationalism in Europe, with a slight focus on Zionism in the last third of the book. While there are continuous concerns that are picked up and examined throughout, this reads more like twelve related essays instead of having a tightly unified thesis.

The first two essays, “National Anthems: The Nation Militant” and “National Representation in the 1930s in Europe and the United States,” discuss the ways in which nationalism chose its political accoutrements, its national anthems, ideological art, its flags; Mosse says that these collectively comprise a “political liturgy.” According to Mosse, “Both Italian fascism and the national socialism with their own flags, anthem, rites, and ceremonies created a civic religion which co-opted nationalist traditions. Here the civil religion of nationalism found expression through the rites and ceremonies of the fascist movements” (p. 58). He is deeply concerned with how these helped constitute a politics of self-representation and re-invention, and how it enabled the nation as the expression of a general will. He asks penetrating questions into why the European nationalisms that are so recognizable turned out to look so different from American nationalism, which Mosse identifies as embodied in the image of “the free-roaming, self-reliant young man,” “the quintessential symbol of the new nation. Cowboy heroes fighting nature and the Indians were young, virile, courageous, but not disciplined. Images of unspoilt nature were joined to individual courage and daring” (p. 38).

Mosse historically locates many of the precedents of fascism and nationalism in the French Revolution, which he says is one of the first instances in which there was a “concept of the general will, of the people worshipping themselves” (p. 74). The tie that links all of these phenomena is the nationalization and mobilization of the masses. “The creation of a political liturgy based upon the aesthetic of politics was a consequence of the belief in the artificial construct of ‘the people’ they had to be mobilized, shaped, and disciplined, and the way in which this was done was influenced – if not directly determined – by the French Revolution. The Revolution signaled the break between the old politics of dynasty and privilege, and the new democratic politics supposedly based on the will of the people” (p. 75). While most nationalisms harkened back to a volkish past ensconced in an immutable mythology of national or racial purity, Mosse’s essay “The Political Culture of Futurism” looks at how this artistic and literary movement embraced modernity instead of eschewing it. “This nationalism, then, was not weighted down by volkish ideals. It accepted technology and with it a new speed of time, using the forces unleashed by modernity in order to integrate men and nations. The political culture of futurism was expressed through a political style that sought to propel nationalism into modernity, to give it clarity and form without restraining its dynamic drive” (p. 96).

Another essay, “Bookburning and the Betrayal by the Intellectuals,” considers the May 10, 1933 bookburnings that occurred in dozens of German university towns, and asks the question “How did it come to this? Why did the middle-class intellectuals or ‘Bildungsburger’ burn their own books?” “The bookburnings must be understood as a fire of purification, of awakening, as analogies to the generation of 1914 made clear again and again. Successful mass movements cannot be inspired by negative symbols. The bookburnings were to represent a positive symbolic action within the bounds of the Third Reich” (p. 111). For Mosse, the betrayal of the intellectuals resulted from a “turning inward, the ideal of rebirth, of purification, the craving for eternal values, for being at one with the people, the primary importance of respectability, [and] the exclusion and isolation of the outsider” (p. 112).

The last five essays consider the ways in which Jews dealt with European nationalism after the Napoleonic emancipation, and especially the way Jews tried to carve a middle path between what Mosse calls “Bildung and respectability.” Bildung, at least as Humboldt put it in the early nineteenth century, was a philosophical and educational cultivation of the self sustained through cultural maturation, while respectability was almost a foregone conclusion for those Jews who wanted to be assimilated into the European mainstream and middle classes. These two pursuits might not seem necessarily contradictory, but with the rise of bourgeois values, Mosse seems to argue that they grew to be increasing at odds with one another. Even though Jewish culture had much more in common with liberalism (the pursuit of parliamentary government, for example), Mosse looks at how Jews conscripted some of the same ideas such as physical strength, purity, and nobility of spirit into their own nationalist ideas. For Herzl and Buber, for instance, “the civic religion of nationalism was not a call to battle but an educational process for the individual Jew who must recapture his dignity a human being” (p. 125). The last two essays look at the nationalist approaches of two important Zionist thinkers - Max Nordau and Gershom Scholem.

The only problem with this book, if one can call it that, is that this was only twelve essays, whereas Mosse could have easily written twelve books – and I would have read each one with relish. Each chapter is really just the barest tip of an iceberg into the scholarship, but together they serve as a grand introduction to nationalism as a set of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Jews reacted to, adopted, and used those nationalist ideals in various approaches to Zionist thought.

Individuate le radici del razzismo nell'ambiente culturale illuministico, nel naturalismo scientifico come nel pietismo religioso, Mosse ne segue il diramarsi nei vari movimenti letterari, scientifici, politici nell'Europa dell'Ottocento e del Novecento, fino a ricostruire le tappe e i modi in cui i nazisti arrivarono alle esecuzioni in massa degli ebrei. Mosse è stato uno storico del nazismo e del fascismo, di cui ha contribuito a rinnovare l'interpretazione. Ha insegnato nell'Università di Madison (Wisconsin) e nell'Università ebraica di Gerusalemme.

A comprehensive textbook on Europe in the 1500s. whilst not taking a chronological approach to the various topics of governments, politics, religion, society and culture, it is well structured, with each chapter broken into smaller sections/topics.
At the back of the book there is a large collection of maps and family tress, as well as a list of key events in each of the years of the 16th century.

This book, one of the best and most insightful I have read in a long time, rests at a cross-section between art, culture, sociology, and memory. At 225 pages, it is both extremely short, and yet scholarly, well-argued, timely, and convincing.

Does the sudden emergence of trench warfare in any way transmute the ways in which we walk about and experience war? Did the shift from monarchy to burgeoning nation-states during this time period change soldierly ideological motivations in wanting to engage in warfare? Why did separate cemeteries appear for soldiers, completely unheard of before the nineteenth century, suddenly start appearing in France and Germany? These questions form a group of concerns the book discusses, yet Mosse manages to touch on a number of other topics, as well.

About 600,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War, while just two generations later in World War I, almost 9 million perished. Mosse argues that facts like this, along with the horrors of trench warfare, gave rise to a construction of civic religion centered around remembrance and a search for human meaning as a way to cope with heretofore unknown amounts of barbarism. This remembrance, along with the various ways of glorifying and sanctifying battle that would arise, Mosse refers collectively to as the "Myth of the War Experience."

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the constitution of many armies gradually shifted from conscripted poverty-ridden peasants to bourgeois, well-educated professional soldiers, who envisioned themselves fighting for Aufbruch (a nascent national-democratic spirit). Suddenly, going off to war was no cause for angst and concern, but rather a chance to fight for the fatherland, and an opportunity to get to see new and exotic places (see the work of soldier-poets like Lord Byron and Theodor Korner). Aesthetic representations of triumph were built from both classical pagan imagery and Protestant piety, which were used to create "communities of the dead" (military cemeteries) where soldiers could rest pure, away from mere civilians.

Mosse claims that culture and art, too, have a definite place in shaping the ideology of the Myth of the War Experience. The Italian Futurists (like Marinetti) and German Expressionists added to the Myth Experience a sense of camaraderie to war in which a "new man" would be created, forming a society free of hypocrisy and tyranny (highly ironic, as Marinetti is perhaps best remembered for his flirtations with fascism). Youth now symbolized manhood, virility, and pure energy. Death was no long an unfortunate loss, but a sacrifice and a chance for eternal resurrection (again, that Christian imagery) for a glorious cause.

A retroactive Romanticism was also invoked, full of its images of bucolic hills and untainted, rural countryside, and used to symbolize purity away from an ill, noxious city (the literature of the nineteenth century is replete with metaphors of the city as rotten and diseased). Movies touting the moral virtues of mountain climbing as a "manly" conquering of nature filled the screens, effectively masking the dangers of death and destruction while at the same time shoring up ideas that were attractive to far right political elements, like adventure, domination, and conquest.

The Myth's appearance in popular culture was perhaps inevitable, but had a most interesting result: the "process of trivialization." There are several photos in the book depicting the war as a humorous, quaint, distant affair. There is a German postcard of a rabbit laying eggs with the caption "Frohliche Ostern" (Happy Easter), one from Au Bon Marche showing two little girls stomping all over a helpless German toy soldier, and perhaps most disturbingly, a father cradling his baby boy and looking aside admiring another of his boys with the caption "The New Conscripts." Some artists, including the German Rudolf Grossmanns, made a career producing nothing but kitsch showing heroic boys yearning for the joys of the battlefield. Closely related to trivialization is the brutalization of political discourse in which themes and tropes of militarism and aggression gave additional emphasis to notions of manliness, a trend which continued until World War II.

But around this time, these ideological means started to outgrow their political and historical usefulness. After German defeat in the First World War, it could be effectively argued that the courageous Germans had not actually lost the war, they just hadn't yet won. But after losing another World War, the Myth was too tendentious and suspicious to garner populist support for the political right. Thus the fiery rhetoric of manliness and sacrifice in the name of one's country saw its last days.

For anyone convinced that "ideology" is just a word used in the ivory towers of academia, or that popular culture doesn't drastically affect the way we perceive and experience some of the most fundamental aspects of our world, this book will forever change your mind. It is most highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of war memorials, changing perceptions of war and the soldier, and the politics of the interwar years.

2892 Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, by George L. Mosse (read 31 Jul 1996) This book by a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin concentrates on German ways of commemorating war dead, and is very generalizing and relies on secondary sources a lot. He is deprecatory of the glorification of war dead, whereas I tend to be thoroughly awed by World War I statuary, etc. I find World War One an almost irresistible study.½

Interesting for covering some of the more obscure fascist groups

Mosse analyzed the movement in pre-WWII Germany for a "third force": an alternative to both the greatly failed parliamentary capitalism of Weimar Germany and the heartless Marxism that already was showing a willingness to sacrifice means for ends. Those who considered themselves a "third force" included both left-wing intellectuals and adoptees of National Socialism. Both groups found appeal in the idea of a "Volk" - a metaphysical entity expressing the German national character, or, people who were "genuine" and "spiritual" instead of the alienated, rootless materialistic worker of the interwar period. They romanticized the past, when Germany, they believed, was rooted in the soil, family life was solid and enduring, and there was, therefore, an ethical basis to the community. Youth groups, or Bunds, with a somewhat similar orientation to American youths of the 1960's, captured the imagination of Jews as well as non-Jews in sentiments celebrating the love of nature and the idea that we are God and God is us. The Jews, however, were soon excluded: "Volkish thought moved in stereotypes," Mosse observed, noting that the image of the Jew provided a foil for the Volkish mythos: the Jew was said to be souless, materialistic, rootless, superficial, and immoral. Moreover, attacking the Jews provided governments with an escape valve from serious social and political problems.

Mosse posits a large pent-up store of violence in intrawar society: not only was there a blunting of the reaction to death from the incredible carnage of the first war, but also a vast number of "vertical invaders" (per Ortega y Gasset): (thousands of men and women who were injected into the political scene as a result of the industrial revolution) who longed for stability, traditions, and scapegoats to compensate for their own powerlessness. A heirarchy of race rather than economic success allowed the many losers in society to feel good again, even superior.

Mosse contends that the popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries does not get the attention it deserves for the promulgation and popularization of the image of Jew as the antithesis of the valorized Volk. Over and over in immensely popular novels, Jews were dastardly betrayers who invariably met with their much-deserved violent ends. The influx of Polish Jews from oppressed ghettos just over the border didn't help the image of the Jews. In fact, the Jews of Germany fell all over themselves to join the non-Jews in anathematizing "ghetto Jews." But soon the dualism between Judaism and the Jew lost tenability, especially as 19th century science claimed to find a correlation between external characteristics and inner quality of the soul. (And indeed, Christianity had already established that any Jew who rejected Jesus could have no ethics.)

The faith of intellectuals in "reason" to overcome the excesses of Nazism was, of course, misplaced. Mosse hoped that his discussion of the reasons for failure among the groups advocating a "third force" would help enlighten those in the present and future who also may harbor misguided faith in "human potential" to triumph without any accompanying concrete political plans.

(JAF)

Mosse explores the development of racism in Europe in an attempt to answer the question of how the Holocaust could have happened. His history begins in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment swept Europe with its passion for ancient Greece, inter alia. The "classical beauty" of Greece and Rome became the new aesthetic standard. Combined, however, with a revival of historical consciousness in Germany, it became necessary to associate the Teutonic with the classical. This was accomplished through the valorization of the Aryan roots of the German language. German, Greek and Latin were said to have a common root in Sanskrit. (Later this theory was amended to accommodate the notion that the light-colored Aryans were not Indians at all, but the people who conquered the Indians, took their language, and departed for the north.)

The idea of German superiority required an "other" - for as Mosse explains, culture clashes are essential to the success of racial myths. The Jews, long the subject of Christian enmity anyway, easily filled this role with their different language, dress, and appearance. In an ironic role reversal, the Germans, or Volk, became the [real] Chosen People, who were deemed to have custody of the Holy Grail, and thus, by metaphorical extension, were the vessel of salvation. (Jesus was extracted from his semitic past by virtue of his timelessness and divinity; he became blond and blue-eyed not only to demonstrate this separation, but also to establish his association with the "Aryan" race.)

Darwinian theories such as "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" were "eagerly adopted by racial theoreticians" to bestow a scientific imprimatur on the already religiously-tinged notions of favored and degenerate races. As the pace of urbanism and population growth accelerated, "racial biology" (i.e., eugenics, racial heredity and racial "hygiene") took on new urgency. Other purportedly scientific theories, such as physiognomy (Johann Lavater) (kinky hair or a hooked nose portended an evil disposition), phrenology (Carl Gustav Carus) (skull proportions as well as coloring - the closer to classical Greek the better - indicated superior and inferior races), and criminology (Cesare Lombroso) (in which a degenerated state of mind was evinced by physical characteristics) contributed to the development and spread of racist ideas. As Mosse observes, "The importance of the emphasis upon the visual for racial thought cannot be overestimated." He suggests that because racial biology had always been a myth, it was particularly open to irrationalism of all kinds.

His tour of influential pseudo-intellectual thought also includes Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, who stressed the superiority of the German blood strain, the Wagnerian disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who called for a race war, and the self-hating Jew Otto Weininger, who annexed racism to sexual fears (and then killed himself).

As Mosse argues, in the political and economic upheavals at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jews were used as a foil by any number of interest groups seeking to rally support. They were accused of all manner of conspiracies, the most popular being promulgated in "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a polemic forged in France during the time of the Dreyfus Affair to link Dreyfus to a Jewish plot to take over the world. (The Protocols, it should be noted, is experiencing a renaissance in popularity in the Arab world today and has even been made into a television series.) Like the situation in the post-Civil War period in which southern whites endeavored mightily to convince northerners that blacks resembled their stereotypes (and thus whites were justified in enslaving them), Jews were isolated into crowded ghettos and impoverished until they too resembled the worst images conjured up by Europeans.

Mosse also contends that both Catholic and Protestant clergy, fearing "a rising tide of atheism, liberalism, and science" attempted to recapture their congregations by promulgating doctrines conveying an increase in hostility toward the Jews. The two world wars allowed theory to be transformed into practice. (As Tony Judt wrote in "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945," "After 1918... the violence of war did not abate. It metamorphosed instead into domestic affairs...") The massive casualties of World War I resulted in, according to Mosse, "a certain brutalization of conscience." Moreover, the Germans then experienced a devastating cycle of defeat, revolution, counter-revolution, and inflation that made them ripe for the communitarian appeal of mass movements, a longing for a return to the mythical halcyon Aryan past, the welcome relief of scapegoating, and the release of violence. As leftist parties became bogged down in internecine quarreling, the right, with its noncomplex black-and-white worldview and promises of a restoration to middle class morality was able to step into the breach.

Hitler, described by Mosse as "a superb politician," announced even before World War II that another war would mean the destruction of Jewry rather than of Europe, and under the cover of war proceeded to implement his "final solution of the Jewish question." However, as Mosse suggests, as much Hitler is now associated with the worst excesses of racism, it was not confined only to his thoughts and actions, nor, unfortunately, did it end with him. He holds: "We have seen the stereotypes of beauty or ugliness formed at the very beginning of the history of European racism. ... From the eighteenth century to its use by the Nazis in the holocaust, this stereotype never changed. The virile, Hellenistic type juxtaposed with the dark and misshapen villain, the Aryan of Greek proportions versus the ill-proporitoned Jew, made racism a visually centered ideology. And this stress on the visual, in turn, made it easy for people to understand the thrust of the ideology." He continues, "The holocaust has passed. ... But racism itself has survived. As many people as ever before think in racial categories. ... And if, under the shock of the holocaust, the postwar world proclaimed a temporary moratorium on anti-Semitism, the black on the whole remained locked into a racial posture which never varied much from the eighteenth century to our time." He contends that "The first step toward victory over this scourge of mankind is to understand what brought it about...." Mosse's book makes a valiant effort to accomplish just that. Well worth reading. (JAF)

Nota Bene:
According to "Ulysses Annotated" by Don Gifford, the terms "anti-Semitic" and anti-Semite" were first coined in Germany in 1879-80 by a pamphleteer of a screed against the Jews. His pamphlet, Gifford says, was a symptom rather than a cause of "the stridency and cruelty of anti-Jewish hysteria in late-nineteenth-century Germany and Europe." His analysis is significant:

"The shift in the 1880s from the term 'anti-Jewish' to the term 'anti-Semitic' was a foretaste of just how sinister this new wave of persecution was to become. The term 'Jewish' means a people with a specifically religious identity, if dispersed among many nations. The idea of religious commitment and belief thus implies the possibility of change and reform, including renewal of faith and new idealism. 'Semitic' (which refers to the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians as well as Arabs and Jews) suggest instead a racial identity - complete with the nineteenth-century assumption that each race had biologically innate characteristics that dictated a predetermined racial superiority, mediocrity, or inferiority. The biology of race held that individuals could behave variously, but only in very limited ways because racial characteristics (what we would call stereotypes), while they could be controlled or held in check, could never be eradicated."½

Olika manligheter och hur männens historia har förändrats under de senaste 300 åren är temat för denna bok. Bra som introduktion till djupare studier i ämnet.

Tra resistenze del Medioevo e incursioni della modernità, l’Europa si affaccia sul mondo proprio mentre comincia un lungo processo di trasformazione.
Un volume di ampia sintesi, che affronta il XVI secolo da molti punti di vista.
L’economia: il contributo della spinta demografica; l’importazione di oro e argento dall’America e la loro influenza sul processo inflazionistico; le conseguenze sociali dell’aumento dei prezzi, la campagna e la città, il rapporto tra banchieri e sovrani. La società: la famiglia e la sessualità; la diffusione del libro a stampa e la Riforma e il ruolo che ebbero nel processo di alfabetizzazione.
La religione: il rapporto tra cristianesimo e Umanesimo, la Riforma luterana, con i suoi sviluppi, e quella cattolica. La politica: Carlo V e Francesco I; l’impero ottomano e quello russo; l’Inghilterra di Enrico VIII, la Spagna di Filippo II e la Francia di Caterina de’ Medici; le guerre di religione; gli assetti politici dopo la pace di Cateau-Cambrésis (1559). Ma anche letteratura, arte, musica e scienza tra Rinascimento e Barocco.
Tra grandi protagonisti della politica e del pensiero, imperi su cui il sole non sembrava poter tramontare, nuove monarchie che si affermavano e Stati regionali prigionieri di uno scacchiere politico sempre più universale, questo volume offre il ritratto puntuale del Vecchio Continente che andava affermando la sua leadership mondiale.

George Mosse explores contemporary western culture’s concept of Masculinity or Manliness in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Mosse argues that masculinity, as an established and widespread notion, is relatively new in western society, solidifying around the time of the French Revolution. He presents his material chronologically, beginning with the origins of manliness as a desirable ideal; he traces its applications and dissemination, examines the counterexamples, which he stresses are essential to reinforce the ideal, demonstrates how the ideal culminated in the era of the fascist dictators and finally, offers a brief overview of the current state of the concept.½

1/27/23