As our historical distance from totalitarianism lengthens, we know more but understand less. Opened archives have provided a wealth of new evidence, but it is increasingly difficult to understand not just the psychopathic leaders and their henchmen, who had minds different from most of us, but also the people who willingly took part in establishing and operating totalitarian regimes.

Vladimir Tismaneanu's and Richard Shorten's new books offer diametrically opposed perspectives on totalitarianism. Tismaneanu's The Devil in History is a politically engaged book by a survivor of Romanian Communism who perceives totalitarianism as a living threat that requires continuous vigilance. Shoten's Modernism and Totalitarianism is a detached history of ideas that implies totalitarianism is as contained in Europe as the Black Plague. But both authors agree on the ideological essence of totalitarianism: Both Nazism and Communism “lived off ideology, in ideology, for ideology (Tismaneanu, p. 14).”

The title, The Devil in History symbolizes the difficulty in understanding totalitarianism: When social scientists resort to metaphors of the supernatural to explain the social, they admit the limits of our ability to understand. As a metaphor, the Devil is also overly optimistic for the task. The notion of the Devil underlies the presence of God. But witnessing the camps and the gulags, God remained deafeningly silent while the Devil danced his macabre dance through history. Tismaneanu justifies his title by paraphrasing Hegel in claiming that Communism was not only the Devil incarnate in history, it also wrecked the memory of history. Tismaneanu seeks to fulfill the ancient Jewish commandment of remembering and reminding, zachor, lest we forget and it may return.

Since the totalitarianisms of the left and the right use each other to justify their atrocities, Tismaneanu vows to mention their crimes together and in parallel. He does not accept any moral, anti-Fascist, or universalist excuses for Communist sympathies, nor does he give credence to naïve stupidity as an excuse for supporting totalitarianism, not even in the case of Heidegger. Communist movements have been criminal and genocidal regimes from their inception. He attacks as myths both the potential purity of the Communist utopia and Leninism. Tismaneanu finds in the “incandescent lines of the Communist Manifesto” the genesis of Bolshevism as a matrix for generalized terror, the Stalinist horrors and the concentration camps (p. 100). Yet he agrees with Claude Lefort that despite the authoritarianism intrinsic to Marxism, Leninism was a mutation introducing the infallibility of the Party and the ideological construction of institutions (p. 119). He also concedes that a humanist version of the totalitarianism of the Right was impossible, and that humanist Marxism sowed the seeds of destruction of Communism.

Unlike Shorten, Tismaneanu contends that Communism and Nazism were secular religions with eschatology and demonology. Communism collapsed when it lost its religious legitimacy. Tismaneanu concludes that,

In an American context, Tismaneanu may seem to flog dead ideological horses. But this book reads like an apology to skeptically disillusioned and possibly nostalgic East Europeans for 1989. Tismaneanu argues for the culpability of Marxism of any type against the background of debates about transitional justice, surviving Leninist legacies, and nostalgia for egalitarianism and economic security. Many post-Communist citizens romanticize the imperfect past, as they currently suffer from the combined effects of Europe's stubborn recession and the often corrupt transition from a moribund command economy to an unclear form of economy that combines private property with government patronage, protection, and subsidies to favored tycoons with connections to the previous and current regimes. Tismaneanu's polemic is against East European writers like the acerbic (and entertainingly talented writer and former dissident) Hungarian G.M. Tamas, the popular French Maoist Alain Badiou, the die-hard Leninist Slavoj Žižek, and other lesser-known thinkers sick of bourgeois liberalism.

Tismaneanu does not think he is battling ghosts, but real totalitarian forces on the left and the right, many of which tend to converge on contemporary European xenophobic nationalism. He confronts the arguments that 1989 changed nothing and just provided opportunities for crooks. He emphasizes the achievements, the gradual resurrection of civil society, the end of utopia and the single party, and political pluralism. Defending the dissidents, he acknowledges that dissent as heroism was largely a myth, but contends that it elevated the moral level of society through dignity, truth, and civility. Tismaneanu argues that dissident ideas concerning ethics, authenticity and civil society chipped away at the foundations of the regime just as its own utopian eschatological secular religion was collapsing. Civil society may thus become a self-fulfilling dissident prophecy.

Yet, the struggle continues to overcome anomy and to reconstruct citizenship, civility, decency, and humanity. In what seems to me to be an over-idealization of bureaucracies, Tismaneanu suggests that joining NATO and the EU saved Eastern Europe from colonels, priests, and despots by civilizing them after the shock of post-Yugoslav barbarism. The former head of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, Tismaneanu argues convincingly that a reckoning with the past can be both exorcism and therapy, and insists that there should be no silence or thick line separating the present from the embarrassing past. No reader of this book can accuse its author of ignoring the past.

For Shorten it is genocidal elimination, not total control, that defines totalitarianism. He thus identifies totalitarianism proper exclusively with Stalin and Hitler, excluding Mussolini. Unlike Tismaneanu, Shorten absolves Lenin of running a totalitarian regime and denies that totalitarianism was a secular political religion.

The most important part of his book is the methodological second chapter where Shorten discusses the often overlooked, obscured, and vague historiographic use of origins. He distinguishes affinity between ideas from the influence of ideas in history. Affinity is insufficient for inferring causal influence. Totalitarian ideas have been invented multiple times in history without necessarily influencing each other. The epistemic challenge for historians of ideas is to distinguish mere similarities from causal influences that affect the contents of ideas. Shorten's awareness of epistemic and methodological issues is sorely missing in other discussions of the origins of totalitarianism that equate similarity with culpability. Shorten distinguishes three types of affinities: beginnings, analogies, and retrospectively representative thinkers; and five types of influence: indirect, through intellectual intermediaries; unconscious, when the subjects do not know the origin of their ideas; adoptive, when they do; deliberately distorted; and cumulative, when layers of influence generate a hybrid position.

Shorten's own theory of totalitarianism views it as a composite of three modernist ideas: utopianism, scientism, and political violence. Shorten writes two historiographies, one of the three modernist ideas themselves, and one of the historiographic and political studies of these ideas since the Second World War. My criticism of this theory is that the first two ideas are shared by some of the most ardent intellectual adversaries of totalitarianism, while violent mass terror characterizes only revolutionary totalitarianism, Stalin and not Brezhenev.

Liberal political philosophers like Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper emphasized the utopian nature of totalitarianism, which sought to create an authentic society based on the concept of a “new man”. Authentic utopia is not a defining characteristic of totalitarianism. Nationalism idealized a utopian concept of national authenticity. The religious concepts of conversion, rebirth, and salvation exist in the same ideal universe. Most interestingly, the anti-Communist dissidents reversed the Marxian charge of alienation and inauthenticity to criticize totalitarianism from the vantage point of civic authenticity. Havel's existential revolution may even be interpreted as utopian.

From Horkheimer and Adorno, through Foucault to Zygmunt Bauman, critical theory associated scientism with totalitarianism. Shorten emphasized the significance of Darwin for Nazi race theory and Marx and Engels's historical inevitability. However, the most scientistic philosophical school of the twentieth century, positivism, also has probably the cleanest bill of political health of all philosophical schools. It is hardly surprising given the successes of science before the gas chambers and the atom bomb that almost all political ideologies in the modern world appeal to the authority of science. But the associations with Science of a ridiculous misinterpretation of Darwin, racism, and an equally ridiculous claim for being the Newton of the social sciences, as Engels described Marx, do not make totalitarian ideologies scientific.

French discussions of totalitarianism were viewed through the lenses of historians of the Jacobin terror. Lenin and Trotsky referred explicitly to the Jacobin's vanguard's use of violence as they initiated the red terror and the camps. This genocidal political violence is indeed uniquely totalitarian, but it is too narrow as a characterization because it ended with the death of Stalin while totalitarianism continued until the resignation of Gorbachev.

The contemporary political relevance of Shorten's book is limited since utopianism and scientism (in its Marxist or racist interpretations) are no longer viable politically and mass political violence and terror ceased in the fifties. But unlike Tismaneanu, Shorten did not set out to write a politically relevant treatise. Still, his theory implies that there are no post-totalitarian continuities. This would seem counterintuitive to people who work on the region. The ideological focus of both books limits even Tismaneanu's ability to explain institutional legacies and even more continuities on the unreflective level of mentalities and everyday behaviors. As social historians explain, ordinary people who were neither party members nor dissidents adapted to a way of life, a method for negotiating with each other and with institutions. New forms of totalitarianism in Europe have a new scientistic ideology, managerialism—the belief that civil society can be replaced by more efficient state technocracies. The current economic crisis has given the state the excuse to invade the civil realm that separates the state from the family, in both former halves of Europe, from the confiscation of private pensions in Hungary to the abolition of self-government of universities and the replacement of academics with technocratic managers, tasked with meeting production targets, in the United Kingdom. Neither book addresses this new threat to civil society.

Still, these books are to be recommended: Shorten for the explicit methodological discussion and Tismaneanu because, as Vaclav Havel said in one of his New Year's speeches, it is good to be reminded of the slogan from the 1989 demonstrations that truth and love will overcome lies and hate.