The aftermath of World War I ushered in a period of negativity and doubt, the climate in which the relativist critique flourished. The coming of World War II saw American culture turn toward affirmation and the search for certainty. American mobilization, intellectual as well as material, became permanent in what most saw as one continuous struggle of the “Free World” against “totalitarianism”—first in its Nazi, then its Soviet embodiments. “Totalitarianism” as a theoretical and rhetorical construct had been employed occasionally and casually throughout the 1930s. For obvious reasons it succeeded in capturing the imagination of academics and publicists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact. For equally obvious reasons, use of the term dropped off during the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, for a generation after 1945, the construct served both as the principal theoretical underpinning of scholarly studies of Nazism and Communism in the United States, and as the foundation of American counterideology in the cold war.

As a predictive theory, “totalitarianism” ultimately proved of limited value, and was progressively abandoned by historians and political scientists from the 1960s onward. The concept pointed to real, important, and novel shared features of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. In practice, variants of the theory stressed elements from one or the other of the systems; efforts to analyze the behavior of one on the basis of propositions drawn from the other were generally unsatisfactory.