Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
The Great Courses (2003), 12 hours, 24 lectures, 175 pages
Description
Examines the fundamental question of our times: why was the 20th century so violent? It looks at the ideologies that promised utopias and total solutions to social problems and relates the terrible human toll of attempts to realize these ideas.
User reviews
LibraryThing member aulsmith
I almost bailed on this Great Course. Professor Liulevicius's thesis is that utopian visions and totalitarianism are related. He then proceeds to go through many of the totalitarian disasters of the 20th century, outlining their initial utopianism and then showing how things went wrong. It got
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tiresome, especially since he never discussed utopian movements that somehow failed to become totalitarian. However, the last lecture made the rest of the course worthwhile. He asks some very interesting questions about utopianism and about totalitarianism and muses about what we might do to keep Final Solutions from happening again. Show Less
LibraryThing member A.Godhelm
Good overview of fascism and communism that turns into very thin overviews of totalitarian states outside that scope.
Language
Physical description
175 p.; 6 inches
ISBN
1565856740 / 9781565856745