François Furet and Totalitarianism: A Recent Intervention in the Misuse of a Notion

Abstract

In his much-acclaimed Le Passé d'une illusion: Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siècle, the late and renowned French historian François Furet, best known for his work on the French Revolution, turned his attention to the ideological passions that animated the twentieth century. Subsequently translated into English, Furet's essay continued to receive much critical attention, particularly concerning his discussion of the role of 'anti-fascism' in communist propaganda, his emphasis on the history of intellectuals, and his apparent failure to distance himself sufficiently from the position of the German historian Ernst Nolte. The intention of this article, however, is to explore one dimension of Furet's broader thesis which has generally been overlooked. This concerns the manner in which the author invokes the 'totalitarian thesis' which, albeit self-consciously circumscribed on Furet's account, in fact entertains difficulties in various aspects which have notably dogged the history of the idea since its original inception in inter-war Europe. The article therefore takes the opportunity afforded by the wider reception of Furet's argument regarding the correlative dimensions of communism and fascism as an occasion on which to work through the problems ostensibly endemic to the idea of totalitarianism. These problems are conceptualised as fundamentally threefold: regarding totalitarianism's explanatory power, its ethical weight and its political implications. Notwithstanding, importantly, the moral weight attached to the notion, the conclusion reached is that only by retaining the idea in an avowedly residual, 'thin' or 'minimal' form does it become anything other than problematic in an analytical sense.