page_title: George Mosse
section_title: Scholarship
hierarchical_section_title: George Mosse / Scholarship
caption_attribution_description: Wisconsin State Capitol taken from atop Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
context_page_description: George Lachmann Mosse was an emigre from Nazi Germany, first to Great Britain and then to the United States, who taught history as a professor at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Hebrew University. Best known for his studies of Nazism, he authored more than 25 books on topics as diverse as constitutional history, Protestant theology, and the history of masculinity. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary History, which they co-edited.
context_section_description: Mosse's 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 suggested that a thin line divides truth and falsehood in Puritan casuistry. Mosse declared that he approached 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 Sir Edward Coke, the chief character of his book The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950), into a liberal long before liberalism had come into existence. Reviewers noted that the sub-text in his The Culture of Western Europe (1961) was the triumph of totalitarianism over liberalism.
  His most well-known book, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), analyses the origins of the nationalist belief system. Mosse claimed, 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 played by myth, symbol, and political liturgy 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 (1985), he claimed that there was a link between male eros, the German youth movement, and völkisch 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 saw nationalism, which often includes racism, as the chief menace of modern times. As a Jew, he regarded the rejection of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe as a personal threat, as it was the Enlightenment spirit which had liberated the Jews. He noted that European nationalism had initially 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 on virtue. In developing this view Mosse was influenced by Peter Viereck, who argued that the turn towards aggressive nationalism first arose in the era of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ernst Moritz Arndt. 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 the 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 
caption: The George L. Mosse Humanities Building (right), University of Wisconsin
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