Michele Battini

Il CISE è lieto di mettere in evidenza le attività che il membro Michele Battini sta svolgendo presso la Columbia University:

Short course (12 hours in 6 sessions):Columbia
University, ICLS, Spring 2015.
This course is offered to Graduate Students of the Departments of
History, Jewish Studies, Political Science, History of Political Thought, Comparative Political Theory, Anthropology, Italian,and
French and German Cultures.

Title and description of the course:
The Dark Core of European Civilization: Fascisms and Anti-Semitism.

This short course is devoted to the study of a crucial aspect of the cultura catastrophe of Europe in the years comprised between World War One and World War Two.
We will analyze this catastrophe as an aspect of the collapse of the XIXth century European order and its foundations: free market, diplomatic relations among nation-states, representative government, and liberal rights. This complex order survived until 1929, when the first of the above foundations (the myth of a self-regulated market) failed and the European elites chose to defend the market and stabilize the economy by resorting to mighty executives and Fascist regimes,and destroying democracy.
Anti-Semitism should be understood within this context: the European nations depicted themselves as victims of the financial plot orchestrated by the Jews and chose the european Jews as scapegoats for the crisis.
This representation was a change of fundamental importance in the history of European cultures,and a crucial morphological transformation of the millenarian anti-Jewish Christian Tradition into a new anti-Semitism, that grew as hostility to the legal emancipation of the Jews, which had started in late XVIIIth century.
Emancipation was really won in 1791 for the first time, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in revolutionary France but, after a few years, the anti-Semitic propaganda opposed emancipation and launched a frontal attack against citizenship rights and their beneficiaries, who were held responsible for the decline of the European civilization. This literature may be held at the far origin of the self-representation of the European nations in the 20th century as victims of the financial power of the emancipated Jews.
This historical and cultural analysis is timely and can help us to
cast some light on the political mutation that the actual financial
crisis is impressing on the democratic order that emerged in Europe after the defeat of the anti-Semitic regimes in World War Two.

Reading.
Students can choose among these basic texts to be discussed in the course and to prepare their papers:

> 1.Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, New York 1944;
> 2.Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism(3rd Part), New York
> 1966;
> 3.Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. by J.Kohn and R.H.Feldman,
> New York 2007;
> 4.George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European
> Racism, New York 1978;
> 5.George L.Mosse, The Nazionalization of the Masses.Political
> Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars
> through the Third Reich, New York 1974;
> 6.Georg L.Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, New York 1964;
> 7.Tsvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres, Paris 1989;
> 8.David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism.The western Tradition, Norton 2013(NEW ENTRY!);
> 9.Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire:1885- 1914.Les origines francaises du fascisme, Paris 1978(NEW ENTRY);
> 10.Michele Battini, The Socialism of the Imbecile.An Interpretation in Interpretation of anti-Jewish anti-capitalism (on translation for Columbia U.P.,New York: this book shall be useful
for offering some seminal and almost forgotten documents of Italian, French and German Anti-Semitism between late 19^th century and early 20th century,and provide their english translation).

Course Requirements and cautionary:
> Students who enroll in this class are required to participate and, if they want, present and finally write a short paper of approximately 2,500 words. The grade for the course will be based on the paper.
The paper may be also written and presented during the course, and discussed -after a short presentation- during the lessons.
Specially in this case, students are encouraged to write to the
teacher or to visit him during office hours, in order to talk about
assignments or choices of the basic texts nd to check the date of the presentation.
An open discussion in a friendly environment is key to the creation of a positive learning, dialogue expierence, true partecipation.

Classes will be held on Mondays and Wednesdays. 6:10pm-8:40pm.
Every class shall be organized in two parts:
A.Teacher’s lecture and discussion;
B.Students’ papers and discussion.

Syllabus:
April 6:
The present cultural and political situation:Europe,terror and the
new(?) anti- Semitism.
April 8:
A new interpretation of anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish anti-Capitalism:the Great Transformation, the legal emancipation of the European Jews between XVIII and XIX centuries,and the birth of social anti-Semitism as a reaction to civil Rights and free market
economy.
April 13:
Anti-Jewish anti-Capitalist literature and propaganda in the XIX
Century and Hannah Arendt’s interpretations.
April 15:
Christian anti-Jewish Tradition through the Ages.
April 20:
Most outstanding interpretations of modern anti-Semitism:G.L. Mosse,T. Todorov, Z. Sternhell.
April 22:
Fascist ideology and Italian social anti-semitism:the case- study of the Fascist politician Paolo Orano.

Office hours:
Monday and wednesday:5.10- 6.
Michele Battini,University of Pisa.
Full Professor Modern History and History of Politics-Former Chair of the Interdepartmental Center of Jewish Studies.
APRIL 1st
Columbia University, Common Room of The Heyman Center for the Humanities

8:30 – 9:15 COFFEE & PASTRIES

9:15 – 9:30 OPENING REMARKS

Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University, Department of Political Science

9:30 – 11:15 PANEL I, Past and Present of Fascism
Chair: Federico Finchelstein (The New School for Social Research)

Enzo Traverso (Cornell University)
Post-fascism: the Politics of Xenophobia and the Legacy of the Twentieth Century
Seraphim Seferiades (Panteion University, Athens)
Fascism As a Mass Phenomenon: Should We Be Calling It a “Movement?”

Discussant: Turkuler Isiksel (Columbia University)
11:15 – 11:30 COFFEE BREAK

11:30 – 1:15 PANEL II, Old and New Ideological Borders

Chair: Jean Cohen (Columbia University)

Kostis Karpozilos (Princeton University)
Contemporary Fascisms and the Limits of Historical Analogies
Michele Battini (University of Pisa)
Time Borders and Space Borders: The Italian Intellectuals and Fascist Anti-Semitism

Discussant: Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University)
1:30 – 2:30 BREAK
2:30 – 4:15 PANEL III, Within the Fortress of Europe 1

Chair: Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University)

Dimitris Kousouris (University of Konstanz)
Fascism(s) in Europe’s Center and Periphery Through the Crises of the 1970s and the 2010s
Hubertus Buchstein (University of Greifswald)
The Neo-Nazi Restructuring After 1989

Discussant: Jose Moya (Columbia University)
4:15 – 4:30 COFFEE BREAK
4:30 – 6:15 PANEL IV, Within the Fortress of Europe 2

Chair: Andrew Arato (The New School for Social Research)

Kriss Ravetto (University of California Davis)
Fascist Branding: Constructing the Spectacle of Ethnos in the Balkans
Giulia Albanese (University of Padova)
The Crisis of Liberal Institutions in Mediterranean Europe

Discussant: Jeremy Varon (The New School for Social Research)

6:15 – 7:30 RECEPTION

APRIL 2nd
The New School for Social Research, Wolff Conference Room
8:30 – 9:00 COFFEE & PASTRIES
9:00 – 11:15 PANEL V, The Evolution of Populism in Latin America
Chair: Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University)
Carlos de LaTorre (University of Kentucky)
Populism and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Latin America
Juan F Gonzalez Bertomeu (ITAM School of Law, Mexico) and Maria Paula Saffon (Columbia University)
Populism and Redistribution in Latin America: Conceptualizing a Threshold of Acceptance
Carlos Forment (The New School for Social Research)
Is There Still Fascism in Latin America?

Discussant: Pablo A. Piccato (Columbia University)

11:15 – 11:30 COFFEE BREAK

11:30 – 1:15 PANEL VI, Challenges in the Age of New Media Technology
Chair: Neni Panourgiá (The New School for Social Research)
Geoff Eley (University of Michigan)
Violence, Breakdown, Consent: Fascism and the Technologies of Crisis
Eleni Varikas (University Paris 8 and Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris (CRESPPA/ CNRS)
Repressed Genealogies of “Race” and Empire in the Critical Responses to the new European Fascisms
Discussant: Silvana Patriarca (Fordham University)
1:15 – 2:30 BREAK

2:30 – 4:30 Round Table

Fascism and Beyond
Chair: Andreas Kalyvas (The New School for Social Research)

Panelists: Andreas Kalyvas (The New School for Social Research); Victoria De Grazia (Columbia University); Federico Finchelstein (The New School); Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University); Neni Panourgiá (The New School for Social Research); Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University).

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