<i>Fascination with the Persecutor: George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man</i>. Emilio Gentile
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I never had the pleasure of meeting George Mosse, and yet, Emilio Gentile’s fascinating exploration of his incredibly productive academic career produces an overwhelming feeling of familiarity. It is the great contribution of Gentile’s book to reveal just how much Mosse’s interpretations of National Socialism shifted the discussion in the late twentieth century, turning our attention away from an exclusive focus on terror and political organization to a much more expansive description of the ideological motivations of the perpetrator. Mosse insisted on a definition of ideology that was not confined to the political sphere, and he called on historians to explain not only how the Nazis instrumentalized fear, but also how they promised Germans new forms of political participation and integration into a system of belonging that relied on the strategies of a secular religion to justify its racial policies. While underplaying broader trends in the social sciences and humanities in the United States—such as the influence of anthropological and gender theory on historical practice—Gentile convincingly demonstrates that Mosse’s insistence on the importance of myth, symbols, and emotion in both dictatorship and democracy was an initially courageous and ultimately consequential intervention into debates about totalitarianism and fascism. As Gentile notes, Mosse’s status as “a victim of Nazism who … wanted to know his persecutor” (p. 4) likely saved him from charges of being labeled an apologist for fascism during a time, particularly in the 1960s, when historians were unlikely to accept that words like “culture” or “democracy” could be applied to fascism (p. 185).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".