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A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2017

Abstract

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

Type
Book Symposium: The Legacies of Totalitarianism
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2017 

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References

Notes

1 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.181.

2 Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 1–24.

3 Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

4 Leszek Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 189.

5 Pierre Hassner, “Beyond History and Memory,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henri Rousso, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 283–85.

6 Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

7 Felix Patrikeeff, “Stalinism, Totalitarian Society and the Politics of ‘Perfect Control,’” Totalitarian Movements and Poitical Religions 4, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 40.

8 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 27–54.