ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the developments in the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries that helped create conditions for totalitarianism, including ideological/philosophical changes as well as the “proto-totalitarian” regime. It examines the “Golden Age” of totalitarianism, going from about the end of the First World War until the early 1950s. The chapter notes changes in totalitarianism after the “Golden Age” until the present, noting how ideologies and organizational forms shifted during the remainder of the twentieth century and going into the twenty-first century. Many of the ideational and technical changes that created for totalitarianism to grow arose later, during the eighteenth century. For intellectual historians, this period represents a high point in the Enlightenment, with the initial publication of the Encyclopédie in France in 1751 as a good illustration. Technological and ideational changes of a radical nature were occurring during this period as well.
