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A. James Gregor , Totalitarianism and Political Religion. An Intellectual History (Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2012), 320 pp., $65, ISBN 0-80-478130-5 .
Michael Burleigh , Sacred Causes. The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York : Harper Collins , 2007), 557 pp., ISBN 0-06-058095-7 .
Lars Bruun , Karl Christian Lammers & Gert Sørensen (eds.), European Self-Reflection between Politics and Religion. The Crisis of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013), 247 pp., ISBN 1-137-30828-3 .
Alessandro Orsini , Anatomy of the Red Brigades. The Religious Mindset of Modern Terrorists (Ithaca & London : Cornell University Press 2011), 317 pp., ISBN 0-8014-4986-4 .
Emily Greble , Sarajevo, 1941-45. Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler's Europe (Ithaca & London : Cornell University Press , 2011), 276 pp., ISBN 0-8014-4924-5 .
Yvonne Maria Werner (ed.), Christian Masculinity. Men and Religion in Northern Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries (Leuven : Leuven University Press , 2011), 322 pp., ISBN 9-0586-7873-7 .
In an article published in September 1939, in the very eye of the storm of twentieth-century Europe's 'age of extremes', the British historian Christopher Dawson attempted to get to grips with the temper of his times. Opining on what he saw as the failure of nineteenth-century liberal individualism and its deleterious encroachment on spiritual values, he wrote:
Now the coming of the totalitarian state marks the emergence of a new type of politics which recognises no limits and seeks to subordinate every social and intellectual activity to its own ends. Thus the new politics are in a sense more idealistic than the old; they are political religions based on a Messianic hope of social salvation. But at the same time they are more realist since they actually involve a brutal struggle for life between rival powers which are prepared to use every kind of treachery and violence to gain their ends. 1
When not researching medieval Christian encounters with the Mongols, Dawson wrote history with a grand narrative sweep such as he admired in the work of the German historian Oswald Spengler. His output has recently sparked a revival of...