Оглавление
David D. Roberts. Totalitarianism
Contents
Guide
Pages
Series title. Key Concepts in Political Theory
Totalitarianism
Copyright page
1 Why Should We Care about Totalitarianism? A new political phenomenon
The range of totalitarianism
Grounds for doubt about the category
The scope for learning from experience
Notes
2 The Career of a Concept
As understood by insiders at the time
As a critical and analytical concept
The quest for deep historical roots
George Orwell’s dystopia
The ongoing influence of Hannah Arendt
Friedrich and Brzezinski: the political science approach
Robert Jay Lifton and thought reform in communist China
Herbert Marcuse and the wider use of totalitarianism
The testimony of opponents and victims
Moralism and overuse
Recent defenders and recasters
Notes
3 Totalitarian Trajectories During the Era of the Two World Wars. Recasting the category
Fascist Italy
The communist experiment in the Soviet Union
Nazi Germany
From the earlier to the later cases
Notes
4 Movements and Regimes Since World War II. The waning of communism in the Soviet bloc
Beyond Europe: the Chinese communist experiment
Radical Islam or “Islamism”
The Islamic Republic of Iran
Notes
5 The Future of Totalitarianism
Neo-fascism and populism
Vladimir Putin’s Russia
China under Xi Jinping
The Islamic world
The scope for further totalitarian departures
The totalitarian potential of new technologies
Adjusting the concept in light of new experience
Relating to totalitarians and learning from experience
Notes
Index
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Отрывок из книги
David D. Roberts
The trajectories of the Soviet, German, and Italian experiments profoundly affected not only the shape of our world but also our self-understanding, our sense of what can happen. So images of those regimes still trouble us, perhaps especially because of the violence, terror, and genocidal killing they spawned. But each was also overtly antithetical to liberal procedures and values – individualism, freedom, pluralism, representative democracy, and the distinction between public and private.
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Quite apart from the question of flexibility, a tendency toward careless usage, resulting from overfamiliarity, has threatened to make the category flabby. Even in scholarly discourse, totalitarianism is often used in a largely unexamined way, and in general discussion, usage sometimes veers from dilution to over-the-top sci fi fantasy.
In a television documentary on Evelyn Cameron, a pioneering English-born photographer who settled in remote eastern Montana in the late 1890s, a British photography expert refers to her “almost totalitarian feel for the image.”4 Filmmakers, especially, have sometimes been accused of seeking total control in order to manipulate the audience. But totalitarian? Such casual usage surely waters down the category unduly.
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