Richard Shorten

Richard Shorten is a political theorist and historian of ideas.  The main themes of his work centre on political writing, violence and injury.  His research makes special use of approaches from ideology, rhetoric and literature.  To date his work has had a particular but not exclusive focus on Europe and America in the mid-twentieth century.

His first book, Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), is an intervention in widespread disagreement about the nature of totalitarianism in modern social and political philosophy. 

His second book, The Ideology of Political Reactionaries (Routledge, 2022) is an exercise in the interpretation of right-wing political thought that profiles the writings of an eclectic range of figures from past and present.  The book argues that a continuity of beliefs and styles is too often obscured.  

His current project is to explore the topic of vulnerability as it appears in the political writings of three exemplary exponents of anti-totalitarian, progressive thought: Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and George Orwell.  Specifically, this project asks: what, in the present, might be recoverable from their distinctive experiments in ‘voice’?

Future work is planned which will explore these ongoing themes of political writing, violence and injury in particular relation to the concept of responsibility.

Alongside the books, his own writing has appeared in prominent journals in the fields of both political science and history, and, especially, in the Journal of Political Ideologies, where he has contributed five articles.

In addition to academic writing, he has contributed a number of opinion and think pieces, in such places as PSA Blog, The Cicero Foundation, Ideology Theory Practice, The Conversation, and The Birmingham Perspective.

• Fascism, Marxism and totalitarianism
• Reactionaries and conservatives
• The political thought of Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and George Orwell
• Intellectual politics of the Cold War