George Mosse - Scholarship

Scholarship

According to Mosse his first published work was a 1947 paper in the Economic History Review describing the Anti-Corn Law League. He claimed that this was the first time the landed gentry had tried to organize a mass movement in order to counter their opponents. In The Holy Pretence (1957) he suggests that a thin line divides truth and falsehood in Puritan casuistry. Mosse declares that he approaches history not as narrative, but as a series of questions and possible answers. The narrative provides the framework within which the problem of interest can be addressed. A constant theme in his work is the fate of liberalism. Critics pointed out that he had made Lord Chief Justice George Coke, the chief character of his book The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950), into a liberal long before liberalism had came into existence. In his book The Culture of Western Europe (1961) reviewers noted that his sub-text was the triumph of totalitarianism over liberalism.

His most well known book The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1965) analyses the origins of the nationalist belief system. Mosse claims however that it was not until his book The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), which dealt with the sacralization of politics, that he began to put his own stamp upon the analysis of cultural history. He started to write it in the Jerusalem apartment of the historian Jacob Talmon surrounded by the works of Rousseau. Mosse sought to draw attention to the role which myth, symbol, and political liturgy, played in the French Revolution. Rousseau he noted went from believing that "the people" could govern themselves in town meetings, to urging that the government of Poland invent public ceremonies and festivals in order to imbue the people with allegiance to the nation. Mosse argued that there was a continuity between his work on the Reformation and his work on more recent history. He claimed that it was not a big step from Christian belief systems to modern civic religions such as nationalism.

In the Crisis of German Ideology he traced how the "German Revolution" became anti-Jewish, and in Towards the Final Solution (1979) he wrote a general history of racism in Europe. He argued that although racism was originally directed towards blacks, it was subsequently applied to Jews. In Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectable and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe he claimed that there was a link between male eros, the German youth movement, and völkish thought. Because of the dominance of the male image in so much nationalism he decided to write the history of that stereotype in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1996).

Mosse sees nationalism, which often includes racism, as the chief menace of modern times. As a Jew the rejection of the Enlightenment in Europe took on a personal character, as it was the Enlightenment spirit which liberated the Jews. He noted that European nationalism at the beginning tried to combine patriotism, human rights, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance. It was only later that France and then Germany came to believe that they had a monopoly of virtue. This claim was influenced by the work of the historian Rudolf Vierhaus, who argued that it was Gottlieb Fichte and others made the turn towards aggressive nationalism. Mosse traced the origins of Nazism in völkisch ideology back to a 19th-century organicist worldview that fused pseudo-scientific nature philosophy with mystical notions of German soul. The Nazis made völkisch thinking accessible to broader public via potent rhetoric, powerful symbols, and mass rituals. Mosse demonstrated that antisemitism drew on stereotypes that depicted the Jew as the enemy of the German Volk; an embodiment of the urban, materialistic, scientific culture that was supposedly responsible for the corruption of the German spirit.

In Toward the Final Solution he claimed that racial stereotypes were rooted in the European tendency to classify human beings according to their closeness or distance from Greek ideals of beauty. Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe extended these insight to encompass other excluded or persecuted groups — Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies (or Roma), and the mentally ill. Many 19th century thinkers relied upon stereotypes in which human beings were either "healthy" or "degenerate," "normal" or "abnormal," "insiders" or "outsiders." In The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity Mosse argues that middle-class male respectability evoked "counter-type" images of men whose weakness, nervousness, and effeminacy threatened to undermine an ideal of manhood.

His upbringing attuned him to both the advantages and the dangers of an humanistic education. His book German Jews Beyond Judaism (1985) he describes how the German-Jewish dedication to Bildung, or cultivation, helped Jews to transcend their group identity. But it also exposed how, during the Weimar Republic, it contributed to a blindness toward the illiberal political realities which later engulfed Jewish families. His liberalism also informed his supportive but critical judgment on Zionism and the State of Israel. In an essay written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Zionism, he wrote that the early Zionists envisioned a liberal commonwealth based on individualism and solidarity, but a "more aggressive, exclusionary and normative nationalism eventually came to the fore."