National Socialism and the End of Modernity

Nazism provides an interesting test case with which to evaluate modernity's utility as concept and historical lens. More than most other recent historical phenomena and issues, the Third Reich has provoked intense scrutiny of its relationship to the modern world.1 Since the 1930s, analysts have wondered whether Nazism represented a throwback to a barbaric past or rather exemplified the worst of modernity, reflections that have continued up to the present, including a series of debates conducted since the 1980s in the wake of the loss of faith in modernization theory.2 A well-established narrative, in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, of Nazism as the product of uneven development and of its exponents as searchers for a mythical past gave way to a recognition that in its roots and impulses Nazism drew on and expressed recognizable and...