One key paradigmatic subtext of Naomi Klein’s argument runs in her The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008) is how the supposed undemocratic, violent character of ‘‘totalitarian’’ Marxist movements serve to justify repressive measures by the neo-liberal state. In inviting such a repressive response from the state, ‘‘undemocratic’’ revolutionary left movements are presented as causing the eros...

I. Intellectuals and Workers It has been but a few short years since the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, but already one finds an orthodoxy in historical interpretation. The standard story goes something like this: the key to understanding 1989 is political mobilization, first of the intellectuals and then of society at large. In the post-Stalin period, East...

In One Dimensional Man (1964) and Repressive Tolerance (1965), German philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse claimed that developing technology institutes new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion, making totalitarian control through terrorisation unnecessary. Rather, ‘advanced industrial society’ creates false needs which integrate individua...

The uses and abuses of history are many. Most of them stem from the search for power rather than the truth. In a post-totalitarian country, the misremembered past may be used both against the previous regime and in its defense. From the perspective of “pure scholarship” both cases are deplorable, but the latter seems more obviously dangerous. Here we examine a few examples of this tendency in c...

Democracy as a political form of social organization offers humanity its best prospect for freedom and peace. Today, it faces deliberate threats from totalitarian movements that rely on terrorist tactics. Democracy also faces threats from its own leaders because of the consequential nature of their judgment and decision making. This article examines how threats to democracy are perceived and ma...