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

the world war and to exculpate the Nazis of responsibility for their
atrocities.
Furet acknowledged the common intellectual “matrix” of communism
and fascism and argued that “the only serious way to approach
these two original ideologies and political movements is to
take them together as the two faces of an acute crisis of liberal
democracy.” 34 Yet he rejected “simplistic interpretations through
linear causality,” 35 contending instead that fascism and communism
were in a dialectical relationship, marked by “mutual endangering
and reinforcing.” Furet also objected against the relegation of fascism
to a secondary role, as a “purely reactive, anti-Bolshevik”
movement. 36 Fascism was not a counterrevolutionary but a genuinely
revolutionary movement which proved potent enough to take
the European Right out of its political impasse. 37 Both ideologies,
fascist and communist, were related yet distinct attempts to solve
“the political deficit” of modern democracy by integrating the
masses in novel political regimes.
Beyond Totalitarianism? Critical Perspectives
on the Totalitarian Approach
During the time, the application of the totalitarian model to the
analysis of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe came under
concerted attacks in social sciences and humanities, being successively
challenged by new social, cultural, and anthropological
approaches. The first critical perspectives against the totalitarian
approach were put forward after the death of Stalin, the political
changes set in motion in the communist block since 1953 questioning
the validity of the concept of totalitarianism as an overarching
label to designate what appeared to be an increasingly diverse
set of political regimes. Criticism mounted in the 1960s and 70s,
when more and more North American and Western European
scholars undertook research visits to the USSR and various other
socialist countries; faced with the complexities of communist
societies, they began to question cliché views on totalitarian
34 François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The idea of communism in the
twentieth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
35 Furet, Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 2.
36 Furet, Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 35.
37 Furet, Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 62
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