Totalitarianism - The Concept and the Controversies Underlying It

Abstract or Introduction

Since its coinage in the 1920’s the term ‘totalitarianism’ has adopted various connotations and has
lead to highly controversial discussions in a multitude of scientific texts. Created by the opposition of
Italian fascism, it is soon taken up by Mussolini himself. After the end of the Second World War,
Hannah Arendt and Carl J. Friedrich write two standard works, that classify both Nazism and
Stalinism as totalitarian regimes. In the following cold war period the term develops into an
ideological catchword of the Right, which culminates in the equation of the crimes of Communism
with the Holocaust in the ‘Historikerstreit’ in 1986. Recently, after the collapse of soviet
Communism, the term is rediscovered as a useful tool to classify and compare political systems.
In the following pages, I will therefore discuss the general concept of totalitarianism and the
socio-historic causes for the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century with the help of the classic
theories of Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich and Karl D. Bracher. Further on I will deal with some
of the criticism that the theory of totalitarianism was confronted with and show the benefit of the
concept for scientific discourse. In view of the flood of theories and criticism, it is not possible for
me, to comment on the debate on totalitarianism as a whole. Instead I will concentrate on some of
the crucial arguments of the debate, being aware that certain aspects will be left out in my
discussion.