ABSTRACT
With justification, the name of Waldemar Gurian has been connected with the ‘first of the critical theses of totalitarianism’.1 Nonetheless, his part in the early formation of a terminology that attempted to capture the uniqueness of the new despotic regimes of the twentieth century arose, not from an intention to develop scientific concepts, but from an attempt to describe empirically. In Gurian’s early, German years, this attempt did not yet have the political as its actual and exclusive object at all. Publicist that he was by talent and inclination, he sought to hear the ‘music of the time’, as he said, in the diversity of its voices,2 not to promote the discourse of a political science that was still young. That he nonetheless succeeded-even if his success was originally only a by-product of investigations that lay elsewhere-lay with his peculiar capacity to link penetrating analysis to an eidetic reduction of phenomena to their essential, typical, form-endowing state. Not without reason did he revere Max Scheler as his teacher.3
