Editing Totalitarianism (section)

=== Further debates ===
==== 1980s - 1990s ====
[[File:G-Antitota.jpg|thumb|An 'anti-totalitarian' graffiti in Bucharest, Romania, in 2013, equating Communism with Nazism and [[Iron Guard|Legionarism]]]]
Writing in 1987, [[Walter Laqueur]] dismissed the arguments of revisionists as "reappraisals of Stalin and Stalinism" and compared them with [[Historikerstreit|German 'revisionist' historians]] of Nazism, particularly [[Ernst Nolte]], whom he did not distinguish from functionalist historians of Nazism ("weak dictator" thesis), and called their analysis "Marxist", for which Stalin was "not promising material".<ref name="Laqueur, Walter p. 228">{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=224, 228|isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref> As Laqueur wrote, the historians who disagreed with the revisionists "still ha[d] very strong feelings" towards Stalinism and found concepts such as modernisation inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history, unlike the concept of totalitarianism; citing [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] using the term "totalitarianism", Laqueur wrote that the efforts of the revisionists to abolish the totalitarian model "ha[d] become difficult."<ref>{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=233 |isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref>

[[Laure Neumayer]] posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War".<ref>{{cite book |last=Neumayer |first=Laure |author-link=Laure Neumayer |year=2018 |title=The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War |publisher=Routledge |isbn= 9781351141741}}</ref> In 1978, the term was 'revived' in Western Europe: such historians as [[François Furet]] produced 'revisionist' critical re-evaluations of the [[French Revolution]] which, according to them, led to the emergence of totalitarianism, while in Italy, "anti-anti-Fascist" historians, notably [[Renzo De Felice]] and after him [[Emilio Gentile]], challenged the 'myth' produced by the hegemonic role of the Communists in the Italian resistance, stated that the choice between Fascism and Communism was equal for Italy, and implied that the latter could be even worse, what led to the resurgence of the concept of totalitarianism as a new dimension of studies of Fascism, while the ones who doubted their theories were "swept away" with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991. The 'revival' of the concept which started in the 1970s in Europe took some time to re-appear in English-language literature, as the 'revisionists' achieved hegemony in the academy, while the 'totalitarians' retained control over public discourse; the European debates were transferred to English-language historiography by [[Martin Malia]]. In 1995,<ref name="tot2013">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gcFEAQAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-135-04397-1 | title=Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories | date=8 October 2013 | publisher=Routledge }}</ref> Furet made a comparative analysis<ref>{{cite journal |last=Schönpflug |first=Daniel |date=2007 |title=Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements |journal=European History Quarterly |volume=37 |issue=2 |pages=265–290 |doi=10.1177/0265691407075595|s2cid=143074271 }}</ref> and used the term ''[[Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism|totalitarian twins]]'' to link Nazism and Stalinism.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=17 April 1995 |title=The Sound and the Furet |url=http://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |url-status=dead |magazine=[[The Nation]] |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080317075608/https://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |archive-date=17 March 2008 |access-date= 7 August 2020 |quote=Furet, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, describes Bolsheviks and Nazis as totalitarian twins, conflicting yet united.}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=2 November 1999 |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |title=Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir |magazine=[[The Nation]] |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=... the totalitarian nature of Stalin's Russia is undeniable. |archive-date=26 July 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190726020527/https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |title=Nazi Fascism and the Modern Totalitarian State |last=Grobman |first=Gary M. |date=1990 |website=Remember.org |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=The government of [[Nazi Germany]] was a fascist, totalitarian state. |archive-date=2 April 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402073405/http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |url-status=live }}</ref> Pipes and Malia continued depicting ideological developments as the grounds of communism, and thus, totalitarianism, drawing a line from utopianism and the French Revolution, which Pipes compared to a "virus", to Lenin, and to describe the nature of totalitarianism, they used the concept of [[ideocracy]]. Furet and [[Ernst Nolte]], a historian praised by Furet, also identified [[anti-Fascism]] as Communist totalitarianism; Nolte presented a conflict between totalitarianisms as [[European Civil War]], stating that it was begun by Bolshevism and produced Nazism, an "inverted Bolshevism", thus assessing the latter as only a response to the threat of Bolshevism and the Holocaust and [[Operation Barbarossa]] as "both a retaliation and a preventive measure" against Bolshevism. Another major work belonging to the same period was ''[[The Black Book of Communism]]'' (1997), the editor of which, [[Stephane Courtois]], stressed structural homology of totalitarian systems embodied in identity of "class genocide" of Communism and "race genocide" of Nazism, and concluded that Communism was more murderous than Nazism<ref name="trav2"/><ref>Traverso, Enzo. "The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century" // History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike aynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007), 138–155.,</ref> or any other ideology from counting and summing the number of victims that can be attributed to '[[Communist state]]s' and thus communism in general, what triggered an emotional debate in France on whether Communism should be treated as a single unified phenomena and whether "a blanket condemnation" of Communism as an ideology makes sense.<ref name="dbt"/> While Nolte and the historians supporting him were not victorious in the ''Historikerstreit'', but his influence on Furet and the historians outside Germany legitimized his ideas, and they returned to Germany in other forms, what thus led to the resurgence of the concept in Germany. The concept entered historiography in Eastern Europe, in former countries of the Eastern Bloc, describing not only Stalinism, but the whole Communist project in general<ref name="tot2013"/> along with the "[[Double genocide theory]]", which summarized Nazi and Stalinist violence into a single metanarrative and became an influential framework of interpretation.<ref name="dbt">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u29KEAAAQBAJ | title=European Memory and Conflicting Visions of the Past | isbn=978-3-030-79843-7 | last1=Toth | first1=Mano | date=25 October 2021 | publisher=Springer }}</ref>

Furet's totalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution, directed against the classic "Marxist" or "Jacobin" interpretation, triggered debates with such historians as [[Michel Vovelle]], who led new studies on it; as [[Eric Hobsbawm]] concluded in 2007, "the Furet Revolution" was "now over".<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9bstBgAAQBAJ | title=A Companion to the French Revolution | isbn=978-1-118-97752-1 | last1=McPhee | first1=Peter | date=15 December 2014 | publisher=John Wiley & Sons }}</ref> In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that "[Nazism and Stalinism] were functionally and not ideologically derived [...] Furet, as a distinguished historian of ideas, knows that they belonged to different if structurally convergent taxonomic families"; contrary to conception of anti-Fascism as a mask of Stalinism, Hobsbawm attributed the "alliance" between liberalism and communism, which had enabled capitalism to overcome its crisis, and wrote that Furet's work "reads like a belated product of the Cold War era".<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i220/articles/eric-hobsbawm-history-and-illusion | title=History and Illusion | journal=New Left Review | date=December 1996 | issue=I/220 | pages=116–125 | last1=Hobsbawm | first1=Eric }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8YvXEAAAQBAJ | title=Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe | isbn=978-1-80429-227-3 | last1=Bresciani | first1=Marco | date=18 June 2024 | publisher=Verso Books }}</ref> Historians [[Enzo Traverso]] and [[Arno J. Mayer]] and the author [[Domenico Losurdo]] accepted Nolte's concept of the "European Civil War", although set its beginning to 1914 and differently interpreted it, not in terms of struggle between two totalitarianisms.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MeKzEAAAQBAJ | title=Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union | isbn=978-1-6669-3090-0 | last1=Greene | first1=Douglas | date=20 March 2023 | publisher=Rowman & Littlefield }}</ref>

[[Michael Parenti]] (1997) and [[James Petras]] (1999) have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War.<ref>{{cite book |last=Parenti |first=Michael |author-link=Michael Parenti |date=1997 |title=Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism |location=San Francisco |publisher=City Lights Books |pages=41–58 |isbn=978-0872863293}}</ref> For Petras, the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] funded the [[Congress for Cultural Freedom]] to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Petras |first=James |author-link=James Petras |date=November 1, 1999 |title=The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited |url=https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/ |url-status=live |journal=[[Monthly Review]] |volume=51 |issue=6 |page=47 |doi=10.14452/MR-051-06-1999-10_4 |access-date=June 19, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210516153420/https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/ |archive-date=May 16, 2021}}</ref>

According to some scholars and authors, such as [[Domenico Losurdo]] calling Joseph Stalin ''totalitarian'' instead of ''authoritarian'' has been asserted to be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Losurdo, totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in [[Christian theology]] and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Losurdo |first=Domenico |author-link=Domenico Losurdo |date=January 2004 |title=Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism |journal=Historical Materialism |volume=12 |issue=2 |pages=25–55 |doi=10.1163/1569206041551663}}</ref>

====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>