Peter Baehr
View on Amazon
Contemporary research into illiberal governments draws much inspiration from the writings of Hannah Arendt. In her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt claimed that Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia were not merely typical authoritarian regimes, but rather were despotisms of a new “totalitarian” sort. Arendt believed “totalitarianism” was entirely unprecedented, and she took the social sciences to task for failing to recognize it as such.
Peter Baehr is sympathetic to Arendt’s concern that social scientists too often put new wine in old bottles. In his latest book, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford UP, 2010), Baehr explores the dialogue between Arendt and her social scientific critics, for example, David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. What emerges is a more nuanced view of totalitarianism as well as an understanding of the difficulties the social sciences face when confronting that which appears to be “new.” Baehr points out that the struggle to comprehend true novelty is hardly over. How, he asks, should social scientists understand Islamic terrorism? Is it another brand of totalitarianism? Or is it–as Arendt said of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s–“unprecedented”?
Subscribe with iTunes
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for these comments, Arturo. Granted, sociology today is still capable of producing work that is creative and dissonant. Overwhelmingly, however, it is characterized by repetitive statements, categories marching in lock step, and by political and moral timidity. If sociology in its current state did not exist, no one would feel bound to invent it.
One correction: When I listened to the podcast I realized that at one point (in the discussion of Syria) I had spoken of the Shia majority. Of course, I meant Sunni.
Thanks for engaging with my work.
This is a very interesting interview and I enjoyed hearing about the dialogue/conversations that Baehr provides between Arendt and her critics on the nature of totalitarianism. By way of this discussion I also think Baeher raises some interesting critiques of sociology itself. Are we overly ideological? Is the discipline hurt by reducing every social phenomenon to an analysis of class-race-gender ? While impossible to respond to this in a comment, I do think it would be a mistake to characterize sociology as overly-ideological simply because it gives priority to these conceptual frames. Like other disciplines that over-emphasize the “rationality” of exchanges, or the cognitive structures of the mind, sociology is but one way of framing and organizing empirical observations of that messy thing we call the social. Race, class and gender are often rendered invisible in many other frameworks, so I think there is something really valuable by bringing these dimensions to the forefront of an analysis. Though this is not to say that social scientists can’t go over-board in this regards, but perhaps this is why it’s important to keep such disciplines in dialogue with each other. A main goal of public sociology, as I understand it, is precisely this.