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T here is no doubt that George Mosse’s fame as a historian is due to his major works on fascism, National Socialism, racism, nationalism, and sexuality. His e¤orts in early modern history, despite some success, have certainly had a less momentous impact on the history of historiography, and therefore have often been neglected by his critics.1 In the late 1940s and early 1950s Mosse was an exile at the beginning of his career, had just been naturalized as an American citizen, and was still struggling to be fully accepted in his new environment. This is the reason, as he pointed out in his autobiography , he focused on issues that seemed so far from his personal experience of exile: he was in search of respectability within the academic establishment.2 He apparently did so to the point that a colleague at the University of Iowa once asked him how he could be so interesting while his books were so dull.3 However , such a view of his work would be profoundly misleading. Despite their apparent detachment, his early works originate from his life experiences in a remarkable way, though the themes he dealt with were far removed from the events that had shaped his own destiny. 19 1 R From Machiavellism to Totalitarianism From Machiavellism to Nationalism—this could be described as the theme of the whole sinister development of which we have tried to clarify the earlier stages. —friedrich meinecke My work in early modern history set forth some themes which were followed up later in my work on fascism and National Socialism and which have influenced most of my writings on a wide variety of subjects. —george l. mosse Mosse’s life as a refugee from totalitarianism, his involvement in the antifascist movement in the 1930s, and his belief in liberalism informed his constant struggle “against the encroachments of absolute power upon the liberties of the subject” that characterizes the indissoluble link between his life and his work.4 Strongly influenced by Benedetto Croce’s belief that all history is contemporary history in that it necessarily pertains to the historian’s interest in the life of the present, Mosse came to the view that in early modern European history , and particularly in the birth of the nation-state and in the development of the idea of reason of state, were the origins of the twentieth-century totalitarianism he would soon begin to analyze directly. It can be said that the issues he dealt with throughout his career remained, in a sense, the same, and this explains what he meant when he spoke of a “continuity of interests” informing his writings over the decades.5 Indeed, two guiding concerns run through the whole of his work: the relationship between the liberty of the individual and the power of the state, and a related question of the relationship between ethics and politics. The crucial methodological changes that occurred in Mosse’s historiography in the 1950s and 1960s never a¤ected this continuity, which can be regarded as the central tenet of his work. The Holy Pretence (1957), one of Mosse’s most neglected books and yet a milestone in his intellectual biography, dealt with the assimilation of the idea of reason of state (in Machiavelli’s formulation) within the Christian framework of ethics, and represented the flowering of many years of reflection over what Mosse called “the most modern of problems,” the question of religion and political morality, which he regarded as “a central one in our Civilization.”6 Moreover, the idea of reason of state implies the problem of power and the state, and is therefore directly connected to the relationship between the individual and the state, and thus acts as a common denominator for both thematic guidelines of Mosse’s continuity of interests. This continuity, epitomized by the idea of reason of state, was expressed in its most revealing connotations by Mosse himself in 1963, when he defined totalitarianism as the “stretching of the old idea of raison d’état.”7 Here lies the connection between Machiavellism and totalitarianism.8 From this perspective, his work appears as a whole, as an organic body whose backbone is represented by the concern with the liberty of the individual when confronted by the state. If Croce with his belief in the contemporaneity of all history had been an important influence on a methodological level, the German historian Friedrich Meinecke was equally important as a...

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