Liberalismens fiender : En historiografisk studie om begreppen totalitarism och politisk religion

Sammanfattning: Today it is common to describe fascism and communism as totalitarian and/or political religions. Conceptual history, often associated with the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, is together with the historiographical perspective, defining for this study. This thesis investigates the scientific use of the concepts totalitarianism and political religion by studying the works of important scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries to explain how the concepts have been described and understood. This paper also seeks to explain why the concepts have been so influential over such a long time and with a renewed focus during the 1990s. The thesis pays particular focus to the 1990s when political religion as a concept grew inpopularity among scholars who had to determine the relation between political religion and totalitarianism. The works of leading scholars of political religion, Emilio Gentile, Hans Maier and Michael Burleigh have been studied to show how a renewed discourse of political religion has been created during the 1990s. The results show that there are many interpretations of totalitarianism and political religion, but the leading scholars of political religion also present a high degree of consensus on how the relation between the concepts should be defined and what their relation to each other are. The results also show that the influence of the concepts can be linked to their role as liberal, ideological concepts and the struggle of Western liberalism during the 20th and 21st centuries to define a common core between fascism and communism and to clarify these dystopian alternatives to a liberal democracy.