As the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, especially when containment of the Soviet threat turned into the military intervention in Vietnam, the Soviet Union itself was evolving away from Stalinism. Nikita Khrushchev ended the indiscriminate mass terror, loosened the state’s hold on the population, and opened small windows to the West. Increasingly, the regime attempted to govern through material satisfaction of popular needs and encouraged popular initiative. Persuasion and delivering material goods replaced the punishing terror of Stalinism. The monolithic Soviet empire in Eastern Europe showed signs of what was called “polycentrism,” a variety of “roads to socialism,” with somewhat increased autonomy, if not real independence, from the Kremlin. And, after nearly two decades of T-model dominance, the first serious critiques of totalitarianism appeared, first from political scientists and later from historians.
In 1965, Princeton political scientist and former diplomat Robert C. Tucker attempted to refine the concept of totalitarianism by analyzing the personalities of the dictators. He concluded that the system of totalitarianism was not the cause of the massive violence of the late 1930s, rather, terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin.78 In a more radical vein, Herbert J. Spiro and Benjamin R. Barber claimed that the concept of totalitarianism was the foundation of “American Counter-Ideology” in the Cold War years. Totalitarianism theory had played an important role in the reorientation of American foreign policy by helping “to explain away German and Japanese behavior under the wartime regimes and thereby to justify the radical reversal of alliances after the war.” A purported “logic of totalitarianism” provided an all-encompassing explanation of Communist behavior, which led to suspicion of liberation movements in Third World, a sense that international law and organizations were insufficiently strong to thwart totalitarian movements, and a justification of “the consequent necessity of considering the use of force—even thermonuclear force—in the settlement of world issues.”79 Totalitarian theory was a deployed ideological construction of the world that denied its own ideological nature, at a time when leading American thinkers proclaimed “the end of ideology.”80
Scholars had to shift their views or jigger with the model. For Merle Fainsod in 1953, terror had been the “linchpin of modern totalitarianism,” but ten years after Stalin’s death he revised that sentence to read: “Every totalitarian regime makes some place for terror in its system of controls.” In 1956, Brzezinski wrote that terror is “the most universal characteristic of totalitarianism.”81 But, in 1962, he reconsidered: terror is no longer essential; the USSR is now a “voluntarist totalitarian system” in which “persuasion, indoctrination, and social control can work more effectively.”82 Yet, in that same year, Harvard political scientist Adam B. Ulam insisted that “the essence of the Soviet political system” lies not in “transient aberrations arising out of willful and illegal acts of individuals,” but is, rather, “imposed by the logic of totalitarianism.” Given the immutable laws that follow from that logic, “in a totalitarian state terror can never be abolished entirely.”83 When the evidence of the waning of terror appeared to undermine that argument, Ulam spoke of a “sane pattern of totalitarianism, in contrast to the extreme of Stalin’s despotism” and “claimed that terror was “interfering with the objectives of totalitarianism itself.”84 But since Stalinism itself had earlier been seen as the archetype of totalitarianism, and terror its essence, Ulam inadvertently laid bare the fundamental confusion and contradictions of the concept.
From the mid-1960s, a younger generation of historians, many of them excited by the possibilities of a “social history” that looked beyond the state to examine society, were traveling to the Soviet Union through expanded academic exchange programs. The luckiest among them were privileged to work in heavily restricted archives, but all of them saw firsthand the intricacies, complexities, and contradictions of everyday Soviet life that fit poorly with the totalitarian image of ubiquitous fear and rigid conformity. Stimulated by the idea of a “history from below,” social historians pointed out that by concentrating on the political elite and the repressive apparatus, the totalitarian approach neglected to note that in the actual experience of these societies the regime was unable to achieve the full expectation of the totalitarian model, that is, the absolute and total control over the whole of society and the atomization of the population. What was truly totalitarian in Stalinism or Nazism were the intentions and aspirations of rulers like Hitler or Stalin, who may have had ambitions to create a society in which the party and the people were one, and in which the interests of all were harmonized and all dissent destroyed. But the control of so-called totalitarian states was never so total as to turn the people into “little screws” (vintiki, Stalin’s word) to do the bidding of the state. Despite all the limitations of the model, scholars writing in this tradition illuminated anomalous aspects of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes that contradicted the fundaments of the totalitarianism paradigm. At the same time, though less widely regarded, critics of liberalism and market society, from the Marxists of the Frankfurt School to post-modernist cultural theorists, took note of the “totalitarian” effects of modernity more generally—of technology, industrialism, commercialism, and capitalism—which were excluded from the original model.85
The Modernization Paradigm
The Cold War American academy celebrated the achievements of American society and politics, which had reached an unprecedented level of stability and prosperity. Historians of the “consensus school” held that Americans were united by their shared fundamental values; political scientists compared the pluralistic, democratic norm of the United States to other societies, usually unfavorably. America was “the good society itself in operation,” “with the most developed set of political and class relations,” “the image of the European future,” a model for the rest of the globe.86 Western social science worked from an assumed Western master narrative brought to bear on non-Western societies: they too were expected to evolve as had Western Europe from theocratic to secular values, from status to contract, from more restricted to freer capitalist economies, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, in a word, from tradition to modernity.
Elaborating ideas from the classical social theorists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernization theory proposed that societies would progressively assume greater control over nature and human suffering through developments in science, technology, mass education, economic growth, and urbanization. While Marxism may also be understood as a theory of modernization, complete with its own theory of history that reached beyond capitalism to socialism, what might be called “liberal modernization theory” was elaborated in opposition to Marxism and claimed that the best road to modernity lay through capitalism (though not necessarily through democracy as well), with no necessary transcendence to a post-capitalist socialism.87 Since the modern was usually construed to be American liberal capitalist democracy, this powerful, evolving discourse of development and democracy legitimized a new post-colonial role for the developed world vis-à-vis the underdeveloped. The West would lead the less fortunate into prosperity and modernity, stability and progress, and the South (and later the East) would follow.
Modernizationists divided between optimists, who held that all people had the capacity to reach Western norms if they had the will or managed the transition properly, and pessimists, who believed that not all non-Western cultures were able to modernize and reach democracy. For an optimist like Gabriel Almond (1911–2002), one of the most prominent comparative politics scholars of his generation, human history was generally seen to be progressive, leading upward, inevitably, to something that looked like the developed West.88 Classic works such as Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) and Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) considered a democratic political culture with civic values of trust and tolerance, crucial prerequisites for democracy that would somehow have to be instilled in modernizing societies. Democracy, development, and anti-communism were values that went together. As in the years following World War I, so during the Cold War, poverty was