The new inquisitions [[electronic resource] ] : heretic-hunting and the intellectual origins of modern totalitarianism / / Arthur Versluis

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910465273803321
• Autore: Versluis Arthur <1959->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Oxford ; ; New York, : Oxford University Press, 2006
• ISBN: 1-280-84657-7; 0-19-534562-2; 1-4294-3857-6
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (203 p.)
• Disciplina: 321.9
• Soggetti: Totalitarianism; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-186) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction : heresy -- Heresy and the inquisition -- Czeslaw Milosz and the captive mind -- The archetypal inquisition -- Joseph de Maistre and the Inquisition -- Juan Donoso Cortés and the "sickness" of the liberal state -- Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras : the emergence of secular state corporatism -- Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras : the nationalist substitute for Catholicism -- The secularization of heresiophobia -- Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and totalitarianism -- Carl Schmitt and early modern Western esotericism -- Carl Schmitt and gnosticism -- Communism and the heresy of religion -- Eric Voegelin, anti-gnosticism, and the totalitarian emphasis on order -- The rhetoric of anti-gnosticism -- Voegelinian inquisitors -- Norman Cohn and the pursuit of heretics -- The inner demons of Europe once again -- Theodor Adorno and the "occult" -- Another long, strange trip -- That old bugaboo, "gnosticism," yet again -- An epidemic of evil! -- Digital revolution -- High weirdness in the American hinterlands -- The satanic panic of late-twentieth-century America -- Illuminatiphobia -- The Christian illuminati -- The American state of exception -- Rendering to the secular arm -- Berdyaev's insight -- Dostoevsky revisited -- Berdyaev on inquisitional psychopathology -- Totalitarianism of the left and of the right -- The betrayal of humanity -- It can happen here -- Conclusion : disorder as order -- Böhme's ; metaphysics of evil -- Ideocracy's consequences -- Heresy and history -- The ubiquity of ideopathology -- Mysticism and Plato's cave.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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 Inquisitionsbegins with e