Uwe Backes Book order

This study guide provides a systematic, comprehensive and historically embedded introduction to the formation, functioning and development conditions of today's non-democratic regimes. It disseminates the results of international autocracy research, familiarises readers with its concepts and methods, provides information about the most important types of autocracy and illuminates the conditions for their stability. System transformations are also examined from the perspective of autocratic regimes. The book integrates approaches, findings and perspectives from different research traditions and aims to encourage an interdisciplinary view. The author works at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the University of Dresden.

"The present work deals not only with the well-organized right extremism in modern Europe as well as with its function in proper political parties, but equally includes two additional, broader approaches: the militant branches and subcultures that exist, including some paramilitary phenomena in Eastern Europe; and the broad realm of their political ideas and cultural trends and the influence they exert on European political culture."--Publisher

The Western tradition of the constitutional state, with its ancient roots, defines political extremes as the epitome of that what must be absolutely rejected. It highlights tyranny, despotism, despotic rule, non-autonomy, ruthless enforcing of interests as ‘extreme’, contrasting this to a virtuous mean which guarantees moderation. In this volume, the culmination of twenty years of extensive research, Uwe Backes provides a conceptual history of the notions "extreme" and "extremism" from antiquity to the present day. The terminological history of political extremes had been related for more then two millennia with the term mesotês used in the Aristotelian ethics and the theory of mixed constitution. Both doctrines influenced the republicanism of the North Italian city states and later the United States of America as well as British parliamentarism. The positions of moderation and extremes were not joined until the course of the French Revolution with the distinction of right- and left-wing, and this is how it still exists today in the intellectual-political geography. This unique source based study reconstructs these developments from ancient times to the present. Tracing the history of the concept of political extremism from Ancient Greece to the present day, this is an invaluable resource for scholars of democracy, extremism and political sociology.

Im Mittelpunkt des Bandes steht die Frage nach Kontinuität und Wandel des parteiförmig organisierten, ehemals an Moskau orientierten Kommunismus nach dem Untergang des »real existierenden Sozialismus«. Dabei werden die europäischen Länder, die von den jeweiligen Kommunistischen Parteien ehemals als monopolistische Staatsparteien beherrscht worden waren, ebenso behandelt wie die Staaten, in denen am Staatssozialismus orientierte Organisationen nolens volens innerhalb einer pluralistischen Parteienlandschaft agierten. Die Berücksichtigung beider Bereiche soll vergleichende Betrachtungen anstoßen und zu einem besseren Verständnis der Rolle der entsprechenden Formationen in den jeweiligen Parteiensystemen beitragen.