How Words Reshape the Past: The ‘Old, Old Story’ of Totalitarianism

Abstract

Modernising the past and archaising the present is a kind of unwritten rule with respect to anachronisms. Although the words ‘totalitarian’ and ‘totalitarianism' were created in the 1920s in Fascist Italy, their application henceforth to earlier, even remote, historical periods was quite commonplace. Whereas the totalitarian experience par excellence corresponds to the interwar period, the word as a key element of modern political language reaches its climax during the first Cold War (1945–62), partly due to an increase in anachronistic uses of the term. Thus, the academic debate on totalitarianism and democracy in Ancient Greece, identified with Sparta and Athens, lent a historical basis to the geopolitical division of the world after 1945. Conversely, some ‘reverse anachronisms’, such as the notion of ‘oriental despotism’, instead of totalitarianism, applied to the USSR, were used to undermine the prestige of the enemy, degraded to the condition of a mere archaism embedded in modern times. Based on an exhaustive – and surprising – inventory of cases, the article highlights the importance of language as a virtual arena in a major historical conflict like the Cold War.