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See details on Amazon. | Twelve Delusions of Our Time is in one sense an answer to the enigma: How is it possible that governments of the most democratic and prosperous century of all time managed to murder 262 million of their own citizens? The answer according to this book: By their pursuit of delusions, 12 of which it describes in detail. For the late world-renowned scholar Helmut Schoeck, these are not specific historical errors, e.g., the mutual treaties that contributed to starting the First World War, or the failures of the Treaty of Versailles in leading to the Second, but rather are recurring pathologies - all of them rooted in one event new to history: The emergence of the public intellectual, who in the twentieth century has in actuality been the statist intellectual. The list of twelve delusions is in fact a list of the principal means by which the statist intellectuals sold themselves to the state, providing legitimacy in exchange for access to power - providing it to governments that relied on mass support that yet were deracinated from the traditional mass sanctions of the church and of hereditary rule. |