Editing Totalitarianism (section)

====After the 1990s====
After 1990s, criticisms of totalitarianism as a historical concept and a tool of analysis continued; however, while these critics called for expulsion of the concept from academic field, they stated that its legitimate outside it.<ref name="trav2"/> [[Hans Mommsen]] criticized it as "a descriptive concept, not a theory" with "little or no explanatory power": "But the basis of comparison is a shallow one, largely confined to the apparatus of rule." However, he wrote that "the totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself", and that it is legitimate in "non-scholarly usage".<ref name="san"/> [[Enzo Traverso]] in his essay "Totalitarianism Between History and Theory" (2017) dismisses the term as "both useless and irreplaceable" for political science and academic history and cites [[Franz Leopold Neumann]] who called it a Weberian "ideal type", an abstraction that does not exist in reality as opposed to concrete totality of history, and believes it to be a term of abuse in Western political science and propaganda, he writes about its legitimacy for storing traumatic collective experience of the 20th century state violence:
<blockquote>Thus, if the concept of totalitarianism continues to be criticized for its ambiguities, weaknesses, and abuses, it probably will not be abandoned. Beyond being a Western banner, it stores the memory of a century that experienced Auschwitz and Kolyma, the death camps of Nazism, the Stalinist Gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields. There lies its legitimacy, which does not need any academic recognition.<ref name="trav2"/></blockquote>

In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010), the historian [[John Connelly (historian)|John Connelly]] said that ''totalitarianism'' is a useful word, but that the old 1950s ''theory'' about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tell [[Vaclav Havel|Václav Havel]] or [[Adam Michnik]] that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word] ''totalita'' to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s."<ref name="Connelly 2010">{{cite journal |last=Connelly |first=John |date=2010 |title=Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word |journal=Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History |volume=11 |issue=4 |pages=819–835 |doi=10.1353/kri.2010.0001|s2cid=143510612 }}</ref>