Authoritarian Temptations and Right-Wing Threat Alliance (eBook)

This book, by noted German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, analyses capitalist development in Western Europe, with a focus on Germany, since the 1990s and its consequences for open society and liberal democracy. Following Heitmeyer's long-term interest in extremism, this book highlights two main threads of discussion: the causes and distribution of authoritarian tendencies, and the processes and steps of escalation of these tendencies through right-wing alliances. It critically views capitalism and capitalist governance in times of crises against problems of political representation and the devaluation of certain groups. It looks at a broad spectrum of attitudes in the population on the bases of a representative longitudinal study called 'group-focused enmity'. Using the model of a 'concentric escalation continuum', this book also analyses the steps of differentiation and dynamization of the right-wing spectrum in the process of development of successful right-wing alliances. Heitmeyer meticulously studies how violent processes escalate and increases as a danger for the open society and liberal democracy, especially in times of crisis and unsecured future. The book has important gleanings for anyone seeking to understand and address extremism and political alienation in societies today.

Wilhelm Heitmeyer is a noted German sociologist, educationalist, and professor of socialization at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) at Bielefeld University, Germany. He founded the institute in 1996 and was founding director till 2013. Since then he has held a research professorship there. Professor Heitmeyer's long-term research interest is on right-wing extremism, violence, xenophobia, ethnic-cultural conflicts, social disintegration, and group-focused enmity. To this end, he has implemented numerous projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He has also been interested in violence in the Global South for several years. He advocates the theory of social disintegration, which he developed with collaborators in the 1990s to explain violence, right-wing extremism, and ethnic-cultural conflicts. This theory is also known as the 'Bielefeld disintegration approach' in the social sciences. In 2003 he was, together with John Hagan,the editor of the International Handbook of Violence Research. In 2008, he founded the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, which he edited until 2014 together with Douglas Massey (Princeton), Steven Messner (Albany), James Sidanius (Harvard) and Michel Wieviorka (EHSS Paris) and edited a series of books in German which examined the state of discrimination against Jews, Muslims, non-whites, homosexuals, the homeless and other groups in 10 volumes from 2002 to 2011 (with Suhrkamp Verlag).