ABSTRACT
Two concepts emerged more or less simultaneously in the intellectual discourse of the mid-twentieth-century West: totalitarianism and enlightenment. The first of these concepts has been ‘the signal contribution of the twentieth century to the history of political thought’ in the eyes of many.2 Although the term had occasionally been used since the 1920s, it did not become widely used until the earliest years of the Cold War, just as communism was replacing fascism as the liberal democratic West’s principal ideological adversary.3 In this context, totalitarianism proved to be an irresistibly convenient and highly serviceable concept for combining – and anathemising – twentieth-century liberalism’s two great ideological foes, which many came to see as forms of a single new species of regime. Several books published around this time played a decisive part in the scholarly adoption and routinisation of the concept of totalitarianism, most notably Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Vital Center (1948), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind (1951), Jacob Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), and Carl Friedrich’s Totalitarianism (1954).
