ABSTRACT
The Cold War apologist Georg Kennan once claimed that the concept of totalitarianism, that is the image of a state that exercises total control over its subjects through a massive bureaucratic apparatus and planned economy, a society disciplined through a huge police corps and a vast number of secret informers, is merely a phantasm. Like Lévi-Strauss’s concept of totemism, it signifies a social institution with no actual or even historical existence and marks off ‘certain human phenomena … which scholars preferred to regard as alien to their own moral universe, thus protecting the attachment they felt toward the latter’ (Pietz 1988: 56).
