1st Edition

Political Extremes A conceptual history from antiquity to the present

By Uwe Backes Copyright 2010
312 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

312 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

312 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Western tradition of the constitutional state, with its ancient roots, defines political extremes as the epitome of that what must be absolutely rejected. It highlights tyranny, despotism, despotic rule, non-autonomy, ruthless enforcing of interests as ‘extreme’, contrasting this to a virtuous mean which guarantees moderation. In this volume, the culmination of twenty years of extensive... Read more

1. Introduction  2. Extremes, Mean, Moderation and Constitutional Mixture in Antiquity and the Middle Ages  3. Extremes and the tradition of the Mixed Constitution from Early Humanism to the Age of Democratic Revolutions  4. Extreme Ideologies in the Political Laboratory of the Nineteenth Century  5.Extremism in the beginning of the "age of extremes"  6. Extreme terms in the political language of German ideocracies  7. Extremism as an element of the official/semi-official language of the Federal Republic of Germany  8. Lines of development of the extremism concept in the Twentieth Century  9. Political Extremism: Final Results, classification of terms and outlook  10. Appendix

Biography

Uwe Backes is a deputy director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism and teaches political science at the Technical University of Dresden, Saxony.