Browsing by Author "CHAPPEL, JAMES"
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Item Open Access Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany(Contemporary European History, 2017-02) CHAPPEL, JAMESThis essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality of the family was not a retreat from ideology, as is often argued, but was in fact a reinstatement of interwar ideologies in a new key: social Catholicism in the former case, National Socialism in the latter. These divergent trajectories explain why Würmeling and Schelsky, despite being two central defenders of the family in the 1950s, could not work together. The essay follows their careers into the 1960s, suggesting that the fractious state of familialism in the 1950s helps us to understand its collapse in the face of the sexual revolution.Item Open Access THE CATHOLIC ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM THEORY IN INTERWAR EUROPE(Modern Intellectual History, 2011-11) CHAPPEL, JAMESTotalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s, responding to Carl Schmitt's turn to the “total state” in 1931. In this essay I explore the notion's formation and circulation through the Catholic public sphere in both France and Austria, where “antitotalitarianism” was born as a new form of the traditional Catholic animus against the nation state project.