Citation

Traverso E. History and Theory 2017; 56(4): 97-118.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/hith.12040

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Born in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, the concept of totalitarianism experienced an uninterrupted succession of metamorphoses and changes throughout the twentieth century, until its last rebirth after September 11, 2001, when it was remobilized in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. It is an astonishingly plastic, resilient, and inevitably ambiguous concept, insofar as it merges both politics and scholarship, and belongs, with a different meaning, to almost all currents of thought. Born in the political struggle, it shifted successfully to political theory in which, beyond their discrepancies, most of its interpreters defined it as a new form of power that exceeds the classical categories of political theory running from Aristotle to Max Weber--despotism, tyranny, dictatorship--and grounded in a combination of ideology and terror. The migration of this concept to the field of historical studies, however, was much more controversial. Useful in defining the nature and forms of political regimes, and eventually to establish their typology, "totalitarianism" becomes a problematic, limited, not to say useless concept for analyzing their origins, developments, and fall. On the one hand, it favors a selective historical comparison between different political regimes; on the other hand, it simply juxtaposes them, stressing some analogies but neglecting other fundamental dimensions of historical investigation (origins, duration, ideologies, and social basis). This article is a plea for critical use of this category, which implies both a rejection of its recurrent ideological uses and its integration with the achievements of social and cultural history.

Language: en

Keywords

communism; fascism; historical comparison; Holocaust; Islamic terrorism; National Socialism; totalitarianism