Mass Dictatorship and Modernity

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.