Dr Iain Stewart (UCL)

The boundaries between heuristic and polemical functions of totalitarianism has often been notoriously fuzzy, and the concept has been much abused in support of some questionable political causes, from Vietnam to the 2003 Iraq war. From the 1920s to the 1980s political and social theorists from across the political spectrum used the concept of totalitarianism both as a lens through which to study the new forms of dictatorship that emerged after 1917 and as a tool for rethinking the past, present and future of democratic modernity. We study the changing uses of the concept over time by, among others, Christians, Marxists, cold war liberals and intellectual ‘dissidents’ in Central-Eastern Europe.