Liberal totalitarianism

Islamism and Totalitarianism

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and even more so since the spectacular attacks by Qa‘idat al-Jihad against the U.S. on 9/11, there has been an ever-growing flood of academic and journalistic publications devoted to radical Islam. Unfortunately, much of that literature has embodied problematic conceptual perspectives that can best be characterized as ‘Islam bashing’, ‘Islam apologism’, o...

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences

Global Totalitarianism and the Crisis of Neo-Lib Movement

During the past decades there are growing concerns on the escalation and massive deprivation of the public life’s quality, which some researchers attribute these as effects of the so-called ‘Globalization’. To cite a few books, Prof. J. Stiglitz’s book “Globalization and its Discontent” has sparked debate all over the world. A somewhat less known book which is worth to mention here is N. Hertz’...

Utopias of Totalitarianism: a Text of Hope and Despair

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We is one of the most important “UtopianDystopian” novels of the first half of the 20th century and was originally considered a criticism of the Communism established in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, during the so-called War Communism, with the loss of revolutionary thrust and new stifling social rules . As a result, critics have seen We as a dystopian novel, i...

East European Studies, Neo-totalitarianism and Social Science Theory

The relevance of sociological theory for explaining the recent dramatic changes in Eastern Europe is at hand. The impact of the downfall of communism has been compared with those "Great Transformations" along which sociology evolved as a "science of crisis par excellence" (Habermas). The actual elaboration of a sociological theory of post-communist transformation and its relation to East Europe...