Totalitarianism, History of the debate

The book Totalitarianism, The History of the Debate by Enzo Travers was published by Založba Sophia. The book was translated by Maja Breznik, and together with Rastek Močnik, they also wrote the foreword.

“A problematic study of the history, contexts, debates, and interpretations of totalitarianism, a marker that has become one of the most powerful controversies of intellectual history of the 20th century. The author wrote the study with two central motivations: the first was to demystify the powerful media campaign and show its apologetic purposes – the critique of totalitarianism is fundamentally instrumental and legitimizes the neoliberal order – and the second motivation was to dissect the complexity of the philosophical and theoretical debate, which cannot be reduce to the ideological goals of liberalism. Historically, it covers the study of the interpretation of totalitarianism from the formulation of the total state by Mussolini, Gentille and Schmitt, through the theory of totalitarianism, which before the 2nd World War was formed by intellectuals in exile with explanations of Nazism (Marcuse, Tillich, Kohn) and criticism of Stalinism (Serge, Aron, Trotsky, Hilferding) – the concept of totalitarianism was ambivalent at the time, the influence of communism as an anti-fascist force did not waver despite the helplessness of liberal institutions to resist fascism – to an apologia that began with the Cold War and aimed to discredit communist ideas and liberation movements, by distorting key historical contexts, including the thinking of Hannah Arendt, and by equating communism and Nazism in order to make the neoliberal order appear to be the best choice and even as a carrier of anti-fascism.