The Totalitarian Imagination: Religion, Politics and Education

Abstract

‘The Totalitarian Imagination’ presents an outline analysis of the inter-relationships between religion, politics and education in three critical phases of modern history. In ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ (1789–1916), I introduce some commonplace reminders about the nature of eighteenth century revolutions based on citizenship, democracy and human rights, the changing roles of religion and politics which this initiated, including a new relationship between politics and education, so closely as even to presuppose a correlation between politics and pedagogy. Resolutely and increasingly secular in outlook, eighteenth century revolutionary democracy nevertheless retained many of the ‘totalizing’ features of religion, and laid the basis for more systematic philosophical and political attacks on the latter.Under the heading ‘The Totalitarian Imagination’ (1917–1945), I argue that eighteenth century revolutionary democracies (and the philosophies which followed in the nineteenth) therefore provided a militantly anti-religious ground for early twentieth century ‘totalitarian’ politics, which made the State sacred, which attempted to remove any residual acknowledgement of religion, which broke down boundaries between public and private life and which used education as a means of inculcating totalitarian ideology.Under the heading ‘Liberal Autocracy’ (1945–present), I argue that the formation of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War – with the end of Nazi totalitarianism and the start of the Cold War which was the beginning of the end for Soviet Communism – was an attempt to globalize the principles of citizenship, democracy and human rights emergent in the eighteenth century. The post-Cold War period marked a perceived victory of liberal democracy based on equal citizenship and universal human rights which manifested itself in an ‘end-of-history’ hubris. Here, from the avowedly secular inception of the United Nations, education was regarded as of central importance to the inculcation of these political values – and from the post-Cold War period onwards has involved a coordinated international renewal of educational programmes to further citizenship, democracy and human rights. This post-Cold War triumphalism was short-lived, however, coinciding with manifold cultural challenges to the adequacies of liberal democracy, notably with an unexpected resurgence of religion in political life, and as a result, new political interest in religious life. This latter move, I argue, shows that religions are increasingly subject to the dictates of secular democratic politics and that educational systems – however benign in outward appearance – are instrumental in the conscious or unconscious breakdown of public and private life characteristic of totalitarianism. If this might be defined as the emergence of a ‘liberal autocracy’, twenty-first century democracy may have begun to replicate the very totalitarian structures they were intended to combat.KeywordsCitizenshipReligiousEducationPoliticsReligionTotalitarianTotalitarianism