¹ Maier, Hans, ed., Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Vol. 1: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, trans. Bruhn, Jodi (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; orig. Ger. edn, 1996)Google Scholar; Maier, Hans and Schäfer, Michael, eds., Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, Vol. 2 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997)Google Scholar; Maier, Hans, ed., Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, Vol. 3: Deutungsgeschichte und Theorie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003)Google Scholar.

² Gentile, Emilio, Politics as Religion, trans. Staunton, George (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, translation of Gentile, Le religioni della politica. Fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001).

³ Burleigh, Michael, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: HarperCollins, 2005)Google Scholar; Burleigh, Michael, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007)Google Scholar. In each book Burleigh considers not only what seem instances of ‘political religion’ but also responses by the established religions to them.

⁴ Kershaw, Ian, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History 39, 2 (2004), 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See Gentile, Politics as Religion, xvii–xviii, 2, 31, 36–8, 40–1, 56–62, for significant indications of usages by both agents like Mussolini and critics, from Antonio Gramsci and Bertrand Russell to Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron. See also Burleigh, Sacred Causes, xiii, 117–22.

⁶ Kohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)Google Scholar; Sironneau, Jean-Pierre, Sécularisation et religions politiques (The Hague: Mouton, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the principal works of the Italian Catholic scholar Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989) are Il problema dell'ateismo: Il concetto di ateismo e la storia della filosofia come problema (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964; 4th edn, 1990) and L'epoca della secolarizzazione (Milan: Giuffrè, 1970).

⁷ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 138–9.

⁸ Rißmann, Michael, Hitlers Gott: Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators (Zurich and Munich: Pendo, 2001), 191–2Google Scholar.

⁹ Griffin, Roger, ‘Introduction: God's Counterfeiters? Investigating the Triad of Fascism, Totalitarianism and (Political) Religion’, in Griffin, Roger, ed., Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 16, 21Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticisms of an Interpretation’, in Griffin, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion, 65–6. In the same vein, Gentile insists that ‘the study of totalitarianism as a political religion does not imply that this aspect provides the only explanation of its nature and historical significance’. Gentile, Politics as Religion, xxii, also 145.

¹¹ Kula, Marcin, ‘Communism as Religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, 3 (2005), 371–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The author comes closest to an explanatory dimension in noting on pp. 380–1 that Stalinism was stamped by un-modern, peasant origins. Those who had risen from such origins needed something to take the place of religion, but the familiar patterns of religious thinking and behaviour were the only ones they knew.

¹² Gentile, Emilio, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Botsford, Keith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 28, 75–9, 132–3Google Scholar; Gentile, Emilio, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995), 148–53Google Scholar, esp. 147–50.

¹³ Payne, Stanley G., A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 494Google Scholar; Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 36.

¹⁴ Morgan, Philip, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003), 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, Roger, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 47Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 4–8, 142–3. Philippe Burrin comparably refers to irrationalism even as he, too, seeks to avoid reductionism and instrumentalism: ‘an appreciation for the religious as a universe of feelings and experience is constantly projected in Hitler's and Mussolini's discourse; it was an integral part of the deep irrationalism of their world view’. Burrin, Philippe, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History and Memory 9, 1 and 2 (1997), 334CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ For indications of this tendency, see Schnapp, Jeffrey T., Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5–7Google Scholar; and Berezin, Mabel, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 29–30Google Scholar, 46–7.

¹⁷ Criticising this approach as applied to Italian fascism, Burleigh explicitly traces it to an apolitical postmodernism. Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 57–8.

¹⁸ See Gentile, Sacralization of Politics, 159–60, on the basis of this difference in approach. Griffin essentially endorses Gentile's charge against the ‘culturalist’ understanding of Italian fascism. See Griffin, Roger, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 203CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 50–1, 63–5, for Gentile's ongoing effort to distinguish the sacralisation of politics from the aesthetics of politics, as explored by Walter Benjamin. In this regard, Gentile also notes his divergence from George L. Mosse, to whom he recognises a significant debt at the same time.

¹⁹ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 142–3.

²⁰ Ibid., 45–6.

²¹ Ibid., 62–4.

²² Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 326. For the German side, see Maier, Hans, Politische Religionen: Die totalitären Regime und das Christentum (Freiburg: Herder, 1995)Google Scholar. Michael Rißmann is part of the same universe of questioning, but he concludes in his Hitlers Gott that although Hitler operated in terms of an underlying religious sense of the world, he did not try to impose it on the German people. Nor was it translated into his mode of governing or the structure of his regime. Thus for Rißmann ‘political religion’ is an inappropriate category.

²³ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 3–4; Griffin, ‘God's Counterfeiters?’, 14. Griffin notes that experts in comparative religion and cultural anthropology do not limit the ‘sacred’ to transcendent, other-worldly dimensions. And thus, he insists, we must encompass immanentist belief systems not relying on the ‘metaphysical dualism’ between this world and some other.

²⁴ Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 70.

²⁵ Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 325–6.

²⁶ Voegelin's key work on the topic is ‘The Political Religions’, translated by Schildhauer, Virginia Ann, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity without Restraint (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 19–73Google Scholar. This work was first published as Die politischen Religionen in Vienna in April 1938, just after the Anschluss, and it was republished with a new preface by Bermann-Fsicher in Stockholm in 1939, shortly after Voegelin had emigrated from Austria to the United States. For Voegelin's later doubts, see especially his ‘Autobiographical Reflections’, revised edition, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 34 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 77–9.

²⁷ Griffin, ‘God's Counterfeiters?’, 17. For Eatwell's charge, see Eatwell, Roger, ‘Reflections on Fascism and Religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 4, 3 (2003), 146CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 45–6. Here Gentile is citing one of his own earlier articles, where the point is especially clear and explicit. The negative emphasis has remained in Gentile's thinking, even as his frame of reference has expanded well beyond Italian fascism.

²⁹ Payne, Stanley G., ‘On the Heuristic Value of the Concept of Political Religion and its Application’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, 2 (2005), 165, 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Hans Buchheim, ‘Despotism, Ersatz Religion, Religious Ersatz’, in Maier, Totalitarianism and Political Religions, 226.

³¹ Payne, ‘On the Heuristic Value’, 163.

³² Ibid., 172. Gentile makes much the same argument; see, e.g., Gentile, Politics as Religion, 138–9.

³³ Vondung, Klaus, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and Limits of an Analytical concept’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, 1 (2005), 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 329–31.

³⁵ Ibid., 332–3.

³⁶ Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, 247. In accenting ‘the quest for national rebirth’, Kershaw explicitly embraces one of Griffin's key earlier notions. Kershaw also relies on ‘pseudo-religion’ in addressing the Nazi genocide in a wider comparative context. See Kershaw, Ian, ‘Afterthought: Some Reflections on Genocide, Religion, and Modernity’, in Bartov, Omer and Mack, Phyllis, eds., In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 381–2Google Scholar.

³⁷ Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, 250.

³⁸ As we shall see below, Burrin ends up making an argument for the singularity of Nazism and, up to point, on the same terms as Kershaw's. But whereas Kershaw insists on ‘pseudo-religious’, Burrin starts with what he takes to be the most fruitful heuristic question, concerning what each regime took from its country's particular religious culture and how it incorporated those residues within its overall project. The fact that Burrin and Kershaw end up converging to the extent they do suggests that for certain key questions it makes little difference whether we portray the phenomena at issue as ‘pseudo’ or as reflecting some deep connection with particular religious traditions. See Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 332, 334.

³⁹ Griffin, ‘God's Counterfeiters?’, 15–16. The place of Benjamin and Voegelin is relatively clear. Barbara Spackman had criticised some alleged defects in Gentile's understanding of religion in her Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 127–9. For rebuttals, see Griffin here, 14, and Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 79 n. 46.

⁴⁰ Griffin, ‘God's Counterfeiters?’ 15.

⁴¹ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 12–13.

⁴² Burleigh, Sacred Causes, xii–xiii; see also 119–20. We might note also Chip Berlet's way of identifying with those who, as he sees it, are adopting a ‘psychological approach’ to the phenomena at issue. Their accounts have prompted him to link certain contemporary American religious movements with earlier fascism and totalitarianism. See Chip Berlet, ‘Christian Identity: The Apocalyptic Style, Political Religion, Palingenesis and Neo-Fascism’, in Griffin, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion, 175–212, esp. 198.

⁴³ Voegelin even came to find some of Hannah Arendt's categories more appropriate than ‘political religion’. Manfred Henningsen offers a nice summary of Voegelin's trajectory in his ‘Editor's Introduction’ to The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5: Modernity without Restraint (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 1–17; see esp. 6–9, 15. Eliot's, T. S. ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’ (1939) is one prominent example of the wider tendency. It is now available in T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ See, e.g., Mosse, George L., The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars to the Third Reich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 4Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Carl E. Schorske's treatment of Hofmannsthal in his noted Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Random House [Vintage], 1981) remains fundamental. See esp. 15–22, 134.

⁴⁶ Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 327–8.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 326.

⁴⁸ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 141–2.

⁴⁹ Ibid., xiii–xvi, 1, 139–40. Of course in practice, as Gentile notes, there can be, and have been, grey areas in between. Also note Burrin's comparable point in ‘Political Religion’, 327.

⁵⁰ See Gentile, Sacralization of Politics, 1–18, 153–61, for his way of placing Fascist sacralisation on the wider Italian and European levels.

⁵¹ Yack, Bernard, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx to Nietzsche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 14–20Google Scholar, 75, 282, for particularly explicit expressions of this theme, which is the premise of the entire book. In discussing Yack here, I adapt the account in my book The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 50–1.

⁵² Riegel, Klaus-Georg, ‘Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, 1 (2005), 97–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Ibid., 99–110, 114–15.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 114, 116–17.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 110, 112–18.

⁵⁶ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 111. See also Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 79 n. 46.

⁵⁷ Croce portrayed it as the task of his generation to replace the old religion, with its mythological underpinnings. See especially Croce, Benedetto, ‘Frammenti di etica’, in Etica e politica (Bari: Laterza, 1967), 167–8Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Croce, Benedetto, ‘L'obiezione contro le “storie dei proprî tempi”’, in Terze pagine sparse, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1955), I, 108–16Google Scholar, esp. 115–16.

⁵⁹ I sought to specify what such a broadly Crocean understanding might entail in a paper presented in Italy in 2002, subsequently published in Italian, and now available in English as ‘Croce, Crocean Historicism, and Contemporary History after Fascism’, in my Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 201–10.

⁶⁰ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 38. See xviii, 38–44, for his overall way of reading Bolshevism as political religion.

⁶¹ See Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 38–54, on the early communist regime, and 71–94 on Stalinism.

⁶² Gentile, for example, usefully distinguishes the messianic from the millenarian as he links palingenetic myth to ‘a strong and markedly modern messianic (but not necessarily millenarian) component, because it derives, not from the revival of pre-modern traditions, but from an apocalyptic interpretation of modernity assigning the mission of regeneration to politics’. See Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 62.

⁶³ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 44. Burleigh's accents are similar; see especially Sacred Causes, xii–xiii (note the reference to ‘establishing heaven on earth’), 119–20.

⁶⁴ Meyer, Alfred G., Leninism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 276–7, 279, 288, 290–2Google Scholar. Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 202, 258–9, also 205, 291–2Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ See especially the 1919 appendix to the fourth edition of Sorel's Réflexions sur la violence, published in the English edition cited above as ‘In Defense of Lenin’, 277–86. See also Sorel, Georges, ‘Chiaramenti su Lenin’ (1919), in Georges Sorel, ‘Da Proudhon a Lenin’ e ‘L'Europa sotto la tormenta’, ed. de Rosa, Gabriele (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1973), 122–6Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Sorel, ‘Chiaramenti su Lenin’, 124–5. My discussion in this paragraph is adapted from my Totalitarian Experiment, 128–9.

⁶⁷ Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 339. Burrin refers to Vondung, Klaus, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988)Google Scholar, which is now available in English as The Apocalypse in Germany, trans. Stephen D. Ricks (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). Vondung had been Eric Voegelin's student.

⁶⁸ Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 339–40.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 340.

⁷⁰ Burleigh's constructions betray comparable tensions and ambiguities. Although he nicely characterises Hitler's notion, bound up with the possibility of failure, that the earth could orbit in a dark void, Burleigh does not do justice to Hitler's wider sense of openness, contingency and risk. In Burleigh's account, it is as if Hitler, as providential prophet, was bound to succeed. But even the passages Burleigh quotes manifest Hitler's sense that everything rests on the capacity to act to make history. Success indicates the blessing of providence, but there is no assurance up front. See Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 102–3, 107.

⁷¹ Hans Mommsen, ‘Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion’, in Maier and Schäfer, eds., Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen, II, 181.

⁷² Vondung, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion’, 92–93; the quotation is from 93.

⁷³ Eatwell, ‘Reflections on Fascism and Religion’, 160. Compare Burleigh, who notes that Italian fascism entailed ‘a species of economic corporativism, which in superficial respects chimed with Social Catholicism’. See Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 58. The point of this linkage is anything but clear. Is it a putdown of fascist corporativism? Does the corporativist direction suggest ‘political religion’ or not? Was the resemblance to Social Catholicism, even as superficial, substantial enough to lend the appearance of continuity, and thus respectability, to that direction – and to fascism more generally? Or was the key precisely the superficiality of the resemblance, so that what must be understood is the novelty of fascist corporativism, its sources in something entirely different from Catholic tradition and teaching? Burleigh's use of ‘political religion’ enables him simply to glide over such lurking questions.

⁷⁴ Eatwell, ‘Reflections on Fascism and Religion’, 147, 160–1, 163.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 160.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 159–60. The contemporary historian Emilio Gentile is not related to the earlier philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944).

⁷⁷ Gentile, Emilio, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall'antigiolittismo al fascismo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Pellizzi, Camillo, Problemi e realtà del fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1924), 157–65Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 71.

⁸⁰ Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 62, referring to Benito Mussolini, ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, written in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile, in Lyttelton, Adrian, ed., Italian Fascisms from Pareto to Gentile (New York, Harper & Row [Torchbooks], 1975), 39–57Google Scholar.

⁸¹ In my Totalitarian Experiment, 130–42, 299–305, I offer an account Gentile's intellectual development as well as references to significant works on Gentile in English by H. S. Harris, A. James Gregor and M. E. Moss.

⁸² Eatwell, ‘Reflections on Fascism and Religion’, 162.

⁸³ Friedländer, Saul, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 109–11Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ I made this point in my review of Emilio Gentile's Sacralization of Politics; see American Historical Review, 102, 5 (1997), 1523–4.

⁸⁵ Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, 241–2.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 249–50, 253.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 247.

⁸⁸ Gentile, Politics as Religion, 143–4.

⁸⁹ Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, 251–2. See also 246–7 on Hitler's role.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 244.

⁹¹ Ibid., 248.

⁹² Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, 244.

⁹³ Malia, Martin, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 219–20Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ Buchheim's basis for distinguishing fascist Italy from the other two regimes is, if anything, even more wayward, another example of the tendency of those starting with Nazism to turn too quickly from elements of commonality. See Buchheim, ‘Despotism, Ersatz Religion’, 226–7.

⁹⁵ See Burrin, ‘Political Religion’, 334–42, for this overall theme.

⁹⁶ See especially Burleigh, Sacred Causes, 76, 86, 88–91.

⁹⁷ Gentile suggests that totalitarianism was the wider frame, ‘a new form of political domination that required the establishment of a political religion as an essential and fundamental component’. As we noted above, political religion was to serve the creation of a new man devoted to realising the revolutionary and imperialist projects of the totalitarian party. Gentile, Politics as Religion, 45–46; the quotation is from 45. See also Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion’, 34.