Below are excerpts from Library of Social Science Review Essays. Please click any book title (or photo) to read the complete text. Some of the books we’ve reviewed are recent, some not. We select titles based on the insights they contain—and their capacity to shape the development of thought. We focus on books that illuminate the sources and meanings of political forms of violence.

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Published Review Essays

Click any book title below to read the complete review.

Brown, Norman O.
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
Who created the symbolic order? What is the source of the “power” of society?” Freud observed that the mythological conception of the universe is fundamentally psychology projected into the external world. Brown suggests that not just mythology, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Stephen Spender: “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.”

Fornari, Franco
The Psychoanalysis of War
The spirit of sacrifice is intimately related to an ideology in the name of which one may sacrifice oneself. What is this “absolute and unconditional something” that would somehow justify the “establishment of a masochistic-sacrificial position?” The masochistic-sacrificial position (e.g., the role of a soldier) is idealized—becoming a kind of “supervalue”—because it is put into the service of “that absolute and unconditional something.”

Gentile, Emilio
Politics as Religion
The “fusion of the individual and the masses in the organic union of the nation” is combined with persecution against those outside the community. According to this totalitarian fantasy, there can be no separation between the individual and the state: they must exist in a condition of “perfect union.” Those Others who disrupt the experience of perfect union are branded enemies of the state who must be eliminated or removed.

Griffin, Roger
Modernism and Fascism
Fascist ideology revolves around the vision of a nation being capable of “imminent phoenix like rebirth.” The quest for rebirth gives rise to a revolutionary new political and cultural order that embraces all of the “‘true’ members of the national community.” Fascism constitutes a radical form of nationalism growing out of the perception that one’s country is in imminent danger—seeking resurrection.

Hauerwas, Stanley
War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity
The sacrificial metaphor at the heart of citizenship, and inextricably tied to war, has incredible power, all the more so because most citizens are unconscious of its active impact in our lives. Most citizens are blithely unaware of the contradiction between their assumptions regarding “the separation of church and state”—and the deeply religious sacrificial war-culture that so profoundly shapes their understandings of citizenship and the nation.

Herf, Jeffrey
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust
National Socialism explained why a private war with Poland resulted in Germany fighting a life or death struggle against the combined might of the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. Only Hitler and the Nazis could explain the war: the result of Jewish financial plutocrats in London and New York, and Jewish Communists in Moscow, working together to fulfill the Jewish dream of world domination. Only Germany understood the truth and was fighting to annihilate the Jewish threat.

Jones, James
Blood that Cries Out from the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism
Violent religious actions are linked to a particular image of God, namely that of a “vengeful, punitive and overpowering patriarchal divine being.” The believer who engages in acts of violence is relating to an omnipotent being who “appears to will the believer’s destruction.” This punitive God must be “appeased and placated.” In the face of such a God, the believer must “humiliate and abject himself.”

Kantorowicz, Ernst
The King’s Two Bodies
Nations function—like the Second Body of the King—as a double of one’s self: a larger, “more ample” body with which we identify. Our nation is a Body Politic that seems more powerful than our actual body. We project our bodies into a Body Politic and wage war to defend the fantasy of an omnipotent body that will live forever.

Kramer, Alan
Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
The brutal combination of human and cultural destruction was not some kind of natural disaster, nor the logical extension of human (or masculine) violence. Instead, it “arose from strategic, political, and economic calculation.” This is the book’s most important contribution: awareness that people and cultural artifacts were not destroyed by a “whirlwind” or a “machine,” but by specific decisions of specific commanders, by orders decreed from above and carried out by armed men on the ground.

Lifton, Robert Jay
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The central fantasy uncovered by Lifton was that of the German nation as an organism that could succumb to an illness. Lifton cites Dr. Johann S. who spoke about being “doctor to the Volkskorper” (‘national body’ or ‘people’s body’). National Socialism, Dr. Johann S. said, is a movement rather than a party, constantly growing and changing according to the “health” requirements of the people’s body. “Just as a body may succumb to illness,” the doctor declared, so “the Volkskorper could do the same.”

Marvin, Carolyn & David Ingle
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag
What is really true in any community is “what its members can agree is worth killing for,” or what they can be compelled to sacrifice their lives for. What is “sacred” within a given society is that set of beliefs “for which we ought to shed our own blood.” Warfare constitutes the central ritual allowing societies to enact or demonstrate faith in the nation.

Miller, Steven E.
Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War
The ideology of the offensive at all costs grew out of the desire to demonstrate the moral courage and will of one’s troops, and therefore the greatness of one’s nation. Such a strategy rarely resulted in breakthroughs. By virtue of attacking—even when slaughter was the result—soldiers exemplified the will to national self-sacrifice for the sake of one’s nation.

Mineau, André
SS Thinking and the Holocaust
Total war is total health, and the Nazi party portrayed Germany as a patient in danger of racial infection. The SS translated its biological worldview into dispassionate practice. War was a matter of self-defense, a prophylactic, and therefore ethical. In SS thinking, Mineau claims, Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust combined to act as one “gigantic sanitary operation,” representing the “politics of antibiotics par excellence.”

Scarry, Elaine
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
The desire to resolve disputes through waging war revolves around the fact that the maiming and destruction of human bodies is necessary—a requirement. War seeks to establish the validity—the truth—of a sacred ideal. Warfare is characterized or constituted by a unique, radical form of verification: the maiming and destruction of human bodies.

Schantz, Mark S.
Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death
The political system of U.S. society in the Civil War era demanded that its citizens sacrifice their lives and commit violence against their fellow countrymen so the nation as a whole could survive. The dominant religious ideology of the time required citizens to voluntarily exchange the mundane world for the heavenly rewards of the afterlife. The individual could achieve the eternal life in heaven and could be commemorated as a hero if he was ready to sacrifice himself.

Skya, Walter. A
Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism
To achieve the state of “one heart, same body,” the individual had to discard or annihilate the self. Any consideration of one’s own personal needs was wrong: one had to totally submerge the self into the collectivity. When Kakehi spoke of the bad aspects of Western culture that had entered Japan, he was referring to the evils of Western secularism and individualism. The Western focus on the value of the individual was the “greatest threat to the Japanese nation.”

Stein, Ruth
For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism
Collective forms of violence are perpetuated in the name of an ideal that binds the group together and functions to “sanctify the actions of a (collective) perpetrator on a (collective) victim.” Large scale forms of violence are undertaken in the name of an ideal object that can move groups to decree the liquidation of anything that “challenges its validity and superiority.” Forms of behavior deemed criminal on the individual level may be “condoned and encouraged when perpetrated collectively.”

Strenski, Ivan
Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France
Nationalists attacked the deplorable state of French morale. Intellectuals were derided for “egoism” and “lazy melancholy;” workers for lack of enthusiasm for collective causes. War represented a spiritual force that would “bind citizens into common service for the nation,” incubating a spirit of national unity. Just as Jesus’ death cleansed the sins of humanity, so common soldiers’ self-sacrifices were seen as expiation for France’s sins.

Weitz, Eric
A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation
The key term is “individual.” It is individuality that must be eliminated in the genocidal process, the individuality of perpetrators as well as victims. Although the rituals enforcing mass compliance that Weitz studies help account for the passive and active participation of people in dominating groups, it is the abandonment of self-reflective thought that lies at the heart of “the banality of evil.”

Wittman, Laura
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body
The tombs give aesthetic expression to the need of modern man for redemptive myths despite, or maybe because of, the “death of God”. They marked yet another point where the modern West collectively expressed existential dissatisfaction and intimations of nihilism—and hence the concomitant longing to return to the ancestral state of mythic consciousness that had given rise to the first burial ceremonies.

Dear Colleague,

As the Twentieth Century drew to a close, it seemed we had reached the end of history and that John Lennon’s prophecy of “nothing to kill and die for” was coming true. September 11, 2001, reminded us that some groups continue to embrace dying and killing in the name of a political idea.

Many reacted to the suicide bombings with shock and amazement—as if such happenings were unique in the annals of human history. Mark S. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country reminds us that sacrificial dying and killing is not foreign to American culture.

Schantz seeks to understand the Civil War, a momentous struggle that took the lives of 623,026 human beings and resulted in 1,084,453 casualties. Battles often took the form of organized massacre—men advancing to their deaths through close rifle fire. “Suicidal charges,” Schantz says, “punctuated the war from start to finish.” Men slaughtered each other with a zeal we “still grope to comprehend.”

The focus of Awaiting the Heavenly Country is Schantz’s hypothesis that it was religious values—Americans’ idea of heaven—that allowed the carnage to continue for four years (1861-1865). Americans who came to fight the Civil War, Schantz says, believed that a “heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the grave.”

This idea of heaven, according to Schantz, was not an “ethereal, dreamy state of the soul or a billowy universe of specified dimensions.” Rather, Americans conceived of paradise as a material place—a land in which the dead would be resurrected: “Individual bodies and souls would be perfected and the relations of family friendship restored.”

Schantz cites an 1857 book by Sarah Gould, The Guardian Angels, or Friends in Heaven. “We believe paradise to be our fatherland,” Gould wrote. “Why should we not haste and fly to see our home and greet our parents.” In heaven, she insisted, the departed would find “the glorious choir of the Apostles” and the “innumerable company of the martyrs, crowned on account of their victories in the conflict of suffering.”

If this sounds familiar, it is not because we are conversant with 19th Century Christian culture. Rather, the vision of heaven that Schantz conveys bears a striking similarity to the idea of paradise that allows Jihadists to kill and to sacrifice their lives:

Qur’an (9:111) – “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth.”

Qur’an (3:169-170) – “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord; They rejoice in the bounty provided by Allah: And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them (in their bliss), the (Martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they (cause to) grieve.”

Those who fight for the cause of Allah—who slay and are slain—are not dead. Rather, martyrs find sustenance and bliss in the garden of Paradise.

Schantz comments briefly on the relationship between Civil War soldiers and Islamic jihadists, asking us to think about how ideas of a heavenly paradise “fold into the political behavior of suicide bombers in various parts of the world.” This contemporary example illuminates Schantz’s study of the Civil War, showing how “ethereal assumptions about the nature of eternity can influence the nitty-gritty world of politics.”

Michael Vlahos develops this idea more deeply in Fighting Identity. Citing a paper by Samuel Watson, Vlahos discusses the battle motivation and behavior of Southern soldiers:

At Fredericksburg some felt that they were “almost in heaven, and could hardly suppress their exultant religious shouts amid the loudest roar and din of the conflict…and the palpable peril of their own lives.” Upon receiving a wound, one man was virtually blinded by faith: “I was not only unafraid to die, but death seemed to me a welcome messenger. Immediately there came over my soul such a burst of the glories of heaven, such a foretaste of its joys, as I have never before experienced. The New Jerusalem seemed to rise before me. I was totally unconscious of any tie that bound me to earth.”

Vlahos poses a question about the relationship between these Civil War soldiers and Islamic radicals: “Was their sacrifice so different from Taliban who ambush American soldiers? Are they not armed as well with the sure foreknowledge of their death?” He concludes that the nonstate actors we face—the terrorists, insurgents and radicals—”fight and die like those men in blue and gray at Fredericksburg.”

Writing about suicide terrorism in the New York Review of Books, Christian Caryl observes that the “ethos of wartime heroism is perhaps not all that different from the forces that drive the suicide bomber.” In the Western World, the greatest hero is the soldier who has “died for his country.”

One can say “dying for Allah” or “dying for one’s country.” The object or entity in the name of which the individual sacrifices his or her life differs, but perhaps the dynamic is the same.

We find it difficult to understand sacrificial death in the name of an ideal that we do not embrace (e.g., “Allah”), but do not find it difficult to understand sacrificial dying in the name of our own ideal (e.g., “preserving the union”). The behavior of suicide bombers is sometimes described as incomprehensible. Yet we embrace and valorize the Civil War with its suicidal attacks (even though the magnitude of slaughter was far, far greater).

One may posit a “law of sacrifice”: an ideal becomes real to the extent that the members of a society are willking to kill and die for it. Sacrificial death functions to validate or verify an idea: that for which we die and kill is true.

We invite reviewers to begin with Schantz’s text—and then to interrogate the theme of the relationship between collective forms of violence and devotion to a sacred ideal.

Please join us in our project investigating the psychic and cultural roots of societal violence.

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

Dear Colleague,

Library of Social Science Book Reviews is up and running.

Please take a moment to read our Mission Statement that appears below and on our website.

Library of Social Science Book Reviews identifies outstanding scholarly books and publishes thoughtful review essays that engage the author’s arguments and articulate the implications of the book’s ideas, placing them in the context of contemporary thought.

Review essays are published on our website—and distributed by the Library of Social Science Newsletter, which reaches over 65,000 scholars around the world.

We invite you to write a review essay on Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War.

Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction is significant—not only for the richness of its historical account—but because the book allows us to understand the First World War in a new way. Many studies provide step-by-step accounts of events leading up to the war and details of what happened. However, the large questions remain: Why did the same battle strategies persist in spite of their futility? Why did the slaughter go on and on?

Kramer suggests that First World War combatants embraced a “culture of destruction and self-destruction.” It was not simply the obtuseness of the Generals—the weakness of their strategies and tactics—that generated mass killing. Rather, a genuine dynamic of destruction evolved—defining the war. What does it mean to say that a nation or society embraces destruction and self-destruction?

Parameters of a Library of Social Science Book Review Essay

• Essays will be written in the spirit of the LSS Mission Statement that appears here.
• Essays should be between 1300 and 3000 words in length (for a sample essay, click here.)
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Library of Social Science Book Reviews

Mission Statement

Library of Social Science Book Reviews has been initiated in order to identify outstanding scholarly books and bring them to the attention of scholars, students and thinking people everywhere. We aspire to provide a space of freedom for the presentation and development of significant ideas. We will publish substantial review essays that critically engage and develop the author’s arguments and their implications.

Books will be selected based on their quality and ability to generate change both in the scholarly community and wider society. We will engage in scholarship across a range of disciplines including: political psychology, social theory, anthropology, political science, and twentieth century history. We especially wish to review books that address the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence that take the form of warfare, genocide and terrorism.

The rise of postmodern relativism brought the assumption that each author produces a work that is valid only within a particular discursive community. In our view, scholars should not be circumscribed by their discursive context. We believe that the pursuit of truth is still a primary objective of intellectual activity—and that one individual’s insights can build upon those of others in a collaborative and cumulative process. We seek to develop a community of people who see the possibility of moving towards a degree of consensus on core issues—through collegiality and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

The Library of Social Science is positioning itself as a challenge to entrenched ideologies—widening a field of vision that has been obstructed by a penchant for insular specialization. Our reviewers seek to develop new perspectives and theories on the relationship between history, culture, ideology and psychology—that may yield startling insights.

Guided by the academic interests of its founder, Dr. Richard Koenigsberg, Library of Social Science has been contributing to its community by sharing knowledge and advancing human understanding of the social world for several decades. We have helped numerous scholars share their views with the world by promoting their writings through our Ideologies of War website and the Library of Social Science Newsletter, which reaches 65,000 scholars in the United States and around the world.

For the past 40 years, Dr. Koenigsberg has been researching the psychological sources of war and genocide. He is the author of highly acclaimed books such as Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology and Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War, and has lectured extensively throughout the United States.

We have invited a group of dynamic scholars to join us in this endeavor. Some are established authorities in their fields. Others are young scholars seeking a space to convey their insights. We hope that Our Reviewers will have the drive and courage to pursue new ideas—wherever they may lead.