As a twentieth century phenomenon, mass dictatorship developed its own modern socio-political engineering system which sought to achieve the self-mobilization of the masses for radical state projects. In this sense, it shares a similar mobilization mechanism with its close cousin, mass democracy. Mass dictatorship requires the modern platform of the public sphere to spread its clarion call for the masses to realize their lofty utopian visions. Far from being a phenomenon that emerged from pre-modern despotic practices, mass dictatorship reflects the global proliferation of quintessential modernist assumptions about the transformability of the individual and society through collective effort. Mass dictatorship therefore utilizes the utmost modern practices to form totalitarian cohesion and to stage public spectacles in the search for extremist solutions to a society's problems. The contributors examine the phenomenon of mass dictatorship along many different lines of inquiry, both theoretical as well as empirical in disparate locations around the globe including Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Interwar Austria, Imperial Japan, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and North Korea.
Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: Mass Dictatorship and the Radical Project for Modernity; M.Kim & M.Schoenhals
PART I: RADICAL PROJECTS FOR MODERNIZATION
2. Mass Dictatorship as a Transnational Formation of Modernity; J.Lim
3. Mass Dictatorship and the 'Modernist State'; R.Griffin
4. Nebulous Nexus: Modernity and Perlustration in Maoist China; M.Schoenhals
5. Staging the Police: Visual Presentation and Everyday Coloniality; H.C.Ts'ai
PART II: THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND MASS DICTATORSHIP
6. Habermas, Fascism and the Public Sphere; P.Corner
7. Total War Mobilization and Transformation of the National Public Sphere in Japan, 1931-1945; K.H.Kim
8. Between Liberalism and National Socialism: The Historical Role of Voluntary Firemen Associations in Austria as a Public Sphere; H.Mizuno
9. Colonial Publicness as Metaphor; H.Yun
10. The Colonial Public Sphere and the Discursive Mechanism of Mindo; M.Kim
PART III: MODERN SUBJECTIFICATION AND AGENCY
11. Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective; C.Chatterjee & K.Petrone
12. The End of the Weimar Republic: Individual Agency, Germany's 'Old Elites' and the 'Crisis of Classical Modernity'; P.Lambert
13. Total, Thus Broken: Chuch'e Sasang and North Korea's Terrain of Subjectivity; C.Kim
Index
Authors:
Micheal Kim is Associate Professor of Korean History at Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, Korea. His research primarily focuses on colonial Korea, and he has published numerous articles and book chapters on urban culture, print culture, Korean collaborators, migration and wartime mobilization.
Michael Schoenhals is Professor of Chinese at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. He has published extensively on the social and political history of modern China, including most recentlySpying for the People: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (2012). He is co-founder of the Forum för literaturens offentligheter (FOLIO), a Swedish interdisciplinary academic forum bringing together researchers interested in exploring how writers and constellations of readers emerge as actors in public settings by attempting to employ literature and literary works for non-literary purposes.
Yong-Woo Kim is Senior Researcher at Ewha University's Institute of World and Global History, Korea. He has published a number of articles on French and Italian Fascism. He is the author ofHomo Fascistus: French Fascism and Cultural Revolution of Counter-Revolutionaries (in Korean) and the co-editor of the 'Mass Dictatorship' Series published in Korean.