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For decades, the failures of the earlier totalitarian experiments bred confidence in the superiority of liberal democracy and a concomitant assumption that totalitarianism could never recur from within the western mainstream. But in the volatile world of the twenty-first century, we are less prone to such complacent liberal triumphalism. There are obviously those today who reject the whole panoply of liberal values and procedures and, on that basis, support movements or regimes we find troubling. Insofar as we seek to prevent any recurrence of totalitarianism in the West, surely we can learn by better engaging the earlier phenomena labeled totalitarian. The question is how we do so most fruitfully. What understanding of totalitarianism might better serve that aim?

Writing in 1967, the noted American intellectual Irving Howe asserted that none of the theorists of totalitarianism could tell us the “ultimate purpose” of the Nazis or Stalinists. Howe doubted that such questions could presently be answered and suggested that perhaps they were not even genuine problems: “A movement in which terror and irrationality play so great a role may finally have no goal beyond terror and irrationality; to search for an ultimate end that can be significantly related to its immediate activity may itself be a rationalist fallacy.”¹⁰ We assume that there had to have been a reason, in other words, and we may be tempted to make one up.

It is useful to be reminded of this possible fallacy, but Howe, in relying so heavily on terror and irrationality, was falling into essentialism and teleological thinking, enduring pitfalls that we will consider in the ensuing chapters. Thus he was too quick to give up on the possibility of historical understanding. The way out is simply to engage our subjects more deeply and to probe more deeply into the history that connects them with us. From within such a framework, we can better understand origins, assess responsibility, honor the victims, and serve the worthy aim of “never again.”