Library of Social Science welcomes
Alexander Chirila as Director of our Young Scholars Initiative. |
Library of Social Science publishes significant research by some of the most accomplished and prominent scholars in the world. Recent authors include (see our Essays/Papers website as well as our Review Essay website):
• Nico Carpentier
• Geoffrey Cocks
• Kelly Denton-Borhaug
• George Dunn
• Liah Greenfeld
• Roger Griffin
• Nicoletta Gullace
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• Gerald V. O'Brien
• Murray Schwartz
• Ivan Strenski
• Mikkel Thorup
• Michael Vlahos
• David Weddle |
LSS Publications are promoted through the Library of Social Science Newsletter—that reaches a world-wide audience of over 55,000 educators, professionals, students, and publishing executives.
We also publish and publicize new and emerging scholars. Summaries of several exciting papers that we have published appear below. Please read these summaries, then click through to read the paper, as well as the issue of the LSS Newsletter issue in which the paper was promoted.
We welcome others to join the Library of Social Science community—now focusing on understanding and revealing the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence (please check out our Ideologies of War website). |
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Dr. Chirila will work with new and emerging scholars to disseminate significant research to a global audience. |
"One of the epicenters of change in the arena of scholarship is digital media. Not only must we produce knowledge using the tools of our disciplines— anthropology, sociology, history, and psychology—we must be able to communicate this knowledge to those who stand to benefit from it. Library of Social Science is positioned at the vanguard of this fusion between content and medium. What was once radical can now be considered; what was silent can now be heard."
Dr. Chirila is author of Manifest Individuation: Comparative Symbolism and Archetypal Progressions in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Currently teaching at Webster University in Thailand, Dr. Chirila worked in the United States and Nigeria after receiving his doctorate in 2009. |
Recent Papers by Emerging Scholars
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It has often been acknowledged that nations are born of war. Yet recent scholarship suggests that it is not the sacrifice of the enemy that creates a unified group identity, but the sacrifice of the group’s own. Lockwood’s essay demonstrates the truth of this hypothesis on the basis of two primary case studies: the “sacrifices” made at Gallipoli and Masada. She considers the role of these sacrifices in the formation of Australian and Israeli national identity in ensuring the enduring cohesion of these nations.
The idea that sacredness and power are born from a willingness to die are fundamental to the ideology of sacrifice. Yet even more so is the idea that the sacrificial victim is not representative of itself. The victims of Gallipoli and Masada symbolize the “ideal” citizen, the embodiment of a cultural archetype. The sacrificial victims embody the entire group collective, allowing a belief that a powerful act of self-sacrifice has been committed by the entire nation. |
| What role did music play in the death-throes of the Reich? What did the orchestras of the Reich perform in the latter stages of the war? In the last days of WWII, Albert Speer organized a final series of concerts for the Berlin Philharmonic, attended amidst rubble and falling bombs. The musical programme was poignant and appropriate: Wagner, Brahms, and Strauss were chosen in what became “a funeral march for the entire nation.” Demopoulos suggests that Hitler’s desire for “an army of suicidal faithful” marching to their dutiful death was fused with his Wagnerian fantasy of a burning Valhalla. The role of music in the psychology of Hitler and the German people at the close of the War proves a fascinating and original subject, offering a rare glimpse beyond the merely historical. |
O’Donnell’s fascinating essay series continues with the architecture of the Third Reich, designed by the architect Albert Speers based on his theory of “ruin value.” Even as the decayed monuments of the Western Classical World were able to inspire and command awe even in their ruin, so too did Hitler wish the monuments of Nazi Germany to do the same—long after its implied death.
O’Donnell writes, “Like the Parthenon or the Coliseum, Germany’s dominion over the world…would be a testament to its enduring greatness long after his Third Reich had disappeared through the decayed monuments of his empire.” Incredibly, Hitler envisioned “the construction of miles upon miles of mausoleums…colossal citadels for the dead, or Totenburgen,” a macabre monument to willing blood sacrifice. O’Donnell’s writing makes a stunning and compelling case for the archetypal and symbolic influences that became fused in Hitler’s imagination and projected into the collective psyche of an entire nation. |
Bloom’s paper centers a critical eye on the rhetoric used by liberal democracies—specifically the United States—to justify expansion, intervention, and aggression towards perceived threats to the state. Bloom writes that these non-liberal enemies are central to “the construction and stabilizing of the liberal democratic self.” The strategy of demonizing an enemy was present from the very beginning of the modern democracy, Bloom points out, as the near-eradication of North America’s indigenous peoples had been rhetorically justified in the name of “American Exceptionalism,”—a campaign that Hitler himself reportedly admired.
This is an ongoing narrative, present “across the American political spectrum” from Roosevelt to Obama. Uniting the disparate expressions of this narrative is a commitment to a “‘new kind of imperialism, one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values.’” Necessary to sustain the empire is the non-liberal enemy, in many guises—whether the Native American, the Communist, or the Jihadist. Citing Berman, Cloud, Chandler, and Giroux, Bloom scathingly suggests that the “final solution seemingly remains strong yet unfinished, evoked in the present age by a US superpower in the name of liberal democracy.” |
Harrisville’s intriguing essay challenges the idea that the Nazi Party was unrepentantly amoral and evil. On the contrary, the strongest proponents of the Third Reich were acting on behalf of a particular morality that considered the strengthening and preservation of the superior race—the Aryan Volk—as an ethical imperative, and the eradication of degenerate races—particularly the Jewish people—as a necessary step to realizing that imperative.
In essence, Harrisville suggests, “one cannot separate the Nazi’s belief in their own ‘goodness’ from the evil that their beliefs generated.” Naturally, not everyone would have bought into this dichotomous paradigm of Aryan good vs. Jewish evil. A propaganda machine was created to instill in the German people a steadfast conviction that certain moral qualities—cleanliness, patriotism, etc.—were intrinsically German, and certain antithetical qualities—greed, uncleanliness, insularity—were a threat to the well-being of the nation and its people. Certain undesirable populations were considered to literally embody these negative qualities, posing a threat to the Volk. In this way, genocide and mass murder became justifiable and warranted according to an ideology of distorted morality. |
In both WWI and the Iran-Iraq War, soldiers were sacrificed en masse on the brutal front lines. These deployments, Rahimi suggests, were not due entirely to the rationale of wartime strategy, but were sanctioned in the service of a ritual slaughter meant to reify the “reality of the nation.” The martyr and soldier transcend individuality and mortality. They are immortalized and memorialized, attaining “a sacred quality with his ability to generate an all-too-superhuman vitality, a sacred death of transcendental reality.”
Death becomes regenerative, absorbed into the collective experience of the immortal Nation. These deaths are commemorated and the soldiers “resurrected” as contributors to the perpetuity of the collective body. Rahimi makes a bold comparison here between WWI and the Iran-Iraq War, pinpointing a point of commonality in the myth of transcendence ascribed to the soldier—willing to die in order to both consecrate and regenerate an idealized collective. |
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