Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to "traditional values," in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how "freedom" has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth-and twentieth-century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day.

This book presents two systems of censorship and literary promotion, revealing how literature can be molded to support authoritarian regimes. The issue is complex in that at a descriptive level the strategies and methods "new states" use to control communication through the written word can be judged by how and when formal decrees were issued, and how publishing media, whether in the form of publishing companies or at the individual level, engaged with political overseers. But equally, literature was a means of resistance against an authoritarian regime, not only for writers but for readers as well. From the point of view of historical memory and intellectual history, stories of "people without history" and the production of their texts through the literary "underground" can be constructed from subsequent testimony: from books sold in secret, to the writings of women in jail, to books that were written but never published or distributed in any way, and to myriad compelling circumstances resulting from living under fascist authority. A parallel study on two fascist movements provides a unique viewpoint at literary, social and political levels. Comparative analysis of literary censorship/literary reward allows an understanding of the balance between dictatorship, official policy, and what literary acts were deemed acceptable. The regime need to control its population is revealed in the ways that a particular type of literature was encouraged; in the engagement of propoganda promotion; and in the setting up of institutions to gain international acceptance of the regime. The work is an important contribution to the history of twentieth-century authoritarianism and the development fascist ideas.

On a winter's day in 1943, 21-year-old Latvian Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight - a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. In order to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS - the authors of such atrocities - Mischka volunteered to go on a student exchange to Germany. He did not then know that he was part Jewish. Whilst in Germany, he narrowly escaped death in the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Surviving Hitler's Reich, he became a displaced person in occupied Germany, where in 1951 he earned a PhD at the exceptional Heidelberg Physics Institute. In the 1950s Mischka was sponsored as an immigrant to the US by a Jewish survivor whom his mother, Olga, had saved during Riga's worst period of Jewish arrests. As refugee experiences go, Mischka was among the lucky ones - but even luck leaves scars. The author Sheila Fitzpatrick, who met and married Mischka forty years after these events, turns her skills as a historian and wry eye as a memoirist to telling the remarkable story of Mischka's odyssey and survival.

Fleming is the only scholar given access to the interrogations of the German civilian crematoria engineers lying inaccessible, until a few months ago, in Moscow. This historically important information finally places the last stone in the mosaic of Auschwitz-Berkenau.

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon.

Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilizations, and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste. Weaving in stories of real people, she shows how its insidious undertow emerges every day; she documents its surprising health costs; and she explores its effects on culture and politics. Finally, Wilkerson points forward to the ways we can - and must - move beyond its artificial divisions, towards our common humanity.

Beautifully written and deeply original, Caste is an eye-opening examination of what lies beneath the surface of ordinary lives. No one can afford to ignore the moral clarity of its insights, or its urgent call for a freer, fairer world.