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T he “continuity of interests” in Mosse’s work characterized his writings over more than forty years. However, when he began his analysis of modern European history in the mid-1950s, he had to face a new set of historiographical problems. Mosse was now beginning to specialize in the history of National Socialism, a mass phenomenon typical of the modern age with its di¤usion of mass literacy, the growing involvement of the masses into politics , and the birth of mass movements. Such an attempt required new tools of historical investigation into a phenomenon that sharpened more than ever the problem of the loss of individual liberty in the midst of the crowd. This was true particularly of totalitarian movements with their attempt to create a “new man” 38 2 R Beyond the History of Intellectuals By what right do we introduce phenomena of collective psychology into the study of history? They certainly are most diªcult to grasp with any degree of precision. We have immediate comprehension of the meaning and life of an institution, the causes and e¤ects of a military action or a political treaty. We even can reconstitute the variables that have a¤ected a human mind. But we are much less equipped to enter the vast undefined realm of instincts, or of the beliefs and undercurrents that move not individuals but crowds. Yet how can we ignore this element when we are dealing, for example, with religious faith, or with a revolutionary faith? —henri focillon Before one could advance into the very heart of contemporary nationalism one would be forced to traverse the wide fields and devious paths of anthropology. —carlton hayes through the participation of all citizens into the political machinery of consensus . While most historians at the time tried to interpret totalitarianism in strictly political, social, or economic terms, Mosse chose a completely di¤erent path. While his interpretation of German and Italian fascism will be dealt with in another part of this book, our concern here are two methodological turns that occurred in his work between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, and which constitute the theoretical backbone on which all his subsequent works would be based. The problem posed by the challenge to individuality will come to be dealt with by the historian in totally di¤erent terms on a methodological plane. The two methodological turns divide three moments in Mosse’s work: (1) the moment of the history of ideas, (2) the moment of the history of ideologies , and (3) the moment of the history of political liturgies and symbolism. The first phase, which we analyzed in the previous chapter, was concerned with the study of the ideas of first-rate thinkers in the early modern age. The second phase, inaugurated in the mid-1950s, saw the historian shift his focus to minor figures in history and in popular literature, and culminated in Mosse’s first major book on National Socialism, The Crisis of German Ideology, published in 1964. The last phase was the outcome of a widening in the historian’s perspectives that resulted in an anthropologically and aesthetically oriented kind of cultural history, theoretically supported by the article “History, Anthropology , and Mass Movements,” published in 1969, and crowned by what is considered to be Mosse’s most influential book in this period, The Nationalization of the Masses (1975).1 The Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov has argued that the first methodological turn was not a real watershed, but merely a widening of the scope of history of ideas and “not a complete turnabout.”2 If this was not a complete turnabout, it was surely an important step in the historiography of National Socialism when Mosse applied his new tools of historical investigation first to the study of the origins of German anti-Semitism, and then to those of National Socialist ideology.3 The Crisis of German Ideology, the direct result of Mosse’s new attitude , was without doubt a fundamental turnabout in the historiography on Nazism. The book o¤ered a vast analysis of German völkisch culture from the age of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Mosse also examined the culture through popular literature, paying attention to the thought of minor, often obscure thinkers and novelists. Mosse held that ideas are important only when they become institutionalized—that is, di¤used among people through the educational system, through associations or political parties and organizations. He...

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