Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word (Review Forum: Totalitarianism--the Comparative Dimension) (Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared) (Book Review‪)‬

Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. 536 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN-13 978-0521897969, $90.00 (cloth); 978-0521723978, $27.99 (paper). Despite our best efforts, we never get beyond totalitarianism. The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. As Michael Geyer notes in his thought-provoking introduction, it was the word preferred by dissidents. Who are we to tell Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent.