Le totalitarisme. Histoire et apories d'un concept

Enzo Traverso, Totalitarianism : History and Contradictions of a Concept The concept of totalitarianism seems both inevitable and unusable because it concerns only a typology of power relations. The problem is that it cannot explicate either the genesis or the history of these structural relationships. If historians and sociologists cannot ignor the notion, they also cannot accept its limitations. Now that the ideological and political connotations of the concept can be disregarded, it is nevertheless probable that it remains insuffisant in explaining the phenomena specific to the twentieth century.Traverso Enzo. Le totalitarisme. Histoire et apories d'un concept. In: L'Homme et la société, N. 129, 1998. Regards sur l'humanitaire. pp. 97-111