![]() Useful in defining the nature and forms of political regimes, and eventually to establish their typology, “totalitarianism” becomes a problematic, limited, not to say useless concept for analyzing their origins, developments, and fall. The migration of this concept to the field of historical studies, however, was much more controversial. Born in the political struggle, it shifted successfully to political theory in which, beyond their discrepancies, most of its interpreters defined it as a new form of power that exceeds the classical categories of political theory running from Aristotle to Max Weber-despotism, tyranny, dictatorship-and grounded in a combination of ideology and terror. It is an astonishingly plastic, resilient, and inevitably ambiguous concept, insofar as it merges both politics and scholarship, and belongs, with a different meaning, to almost all currents of thought. Born in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, the concept of totalitarianism experienced an uninterrupted succession of metamorphoses and changes throughout the twentieth century, until its last rebirth after September 11, 2001, when it was remobilized in the struggle against Islamic terrorism.
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