Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

theory of unitotalitarianism, the idea that the Fascist, Nazi, and Bolshevik
regimes shared a common set of characteristics as an expression
of a new political genus, totalitarianism. 6
Since its elaboration in the 1930s, the “totalitarian thesis” served
as an analytical as well as a political tool, its history being interwoven
with global geopolitical changes. In political propaganda,
the theory was used as a symbolic antithesis of liberal regimes, who
defined themselves in counter-distinction to totalitarianism. It has
been widely used in the Allied anti-Nazi campaign during World
War II, and later became a central anti-Communist slogan during
the Cold War. To this end, in the 1950s and 60s, the totalitarian
thesis was further developed into more elaborated theoretical models
and gained a position of hegemony as an explanatory paradigm
of fascist and communist regimes. Dominated mostly by political
scientists, the “totalitarian thesis” focused on the exclusivist nature
of the reigning official ideology and the repressive character of the
political regimes characterized as totalitarian.
One can identify, by and large, three major comparative approaches
applied to the study of fascism and communism: 1) Structural approaches
to fascism and communism as “generic” totalitarian
regimes; 2) Comparative approaches focusing on the similarities
and differences among historical case studies of totalitarian
regimes; and 3) The historical-genetic theory of totalitarianism focusing
on the common intellectual origins of fascist and communist
ideologies. In the following, I will discuss these major forms of comparison,
in an effort to evaluate their political implications.
The Totalitarian Model: Structural Approaches
to Fascism and Communism
Structural approaches to fascism and communism advance a
common theoretical framework for the analysis of totalitarian political
systems of the twentieth century, notwithstanding the obvious
fact that these regimes were otherwise very different in their other
social, economic, or cultural aspects.
6 On a critical evaluation of this theory and its limitations, see Alexander J.
Groth, “The ‘isms’ in Totalitarianism,” The American Political Science Review,
58 (1964), 888-901.
131 Constantin Iordachi