5 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
George Orwell's 1949 novel — set in a totalitarian future where Big Brother surveils everything, language is controlled through Newspeak, and history is constantly rewritten — the most influential political novel in English and the primary reference point for totalitarianism.
Austrian-born German dictator — leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor/Führer of Germany 1933–1945 — whose regime prosecuted World War II, the Holocaust, and the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others.
German-American political philosopher — author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem — who created the concept of the banality of evil and provided the most philosophically sophisticated analysis of totalitarianism.
General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (1922–1953) — who industrialized the USSR at the cost of millions of lives (collectivization, Gulag, Terror), defeated Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front, and extended Soviet power to Eastern Europe — the most successful political survivor in modern history.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 account of the Soviet prison camp system — reconstructed from hundreds of survivor testimonies and his own experience — the most comprehensive document of the gulag and the text that more than any other delegitimized Soviet communism in the Western left.