Totalitarianism was, in the words of George Kennan, the authoritative "nightmare" of liberal democracy. Kennan's formulation betrayed considerable skepticism about the empirical validity of the concept he helped to author, one in which the primary divisions of the post - World War II world were understood in ethico-political terms and predicated upon a transvaluation of the wartime opposition between fascism and democracy. Yet Kennan, as William Peitz suggests in "The Post-Colonialism of Cold 

War Discourse," a prescient and underappreciated essay in ST 19/20 (1988), was merely one participant in a much wider and more profoundly dishonest historical conversation. As the "theoretical anchor" of cold-war political culture, the theory of totalitarianism enacted a displacement of fascism outside the main historical currents of Western moral, political, and intellectual life. In the hands of its most important intellectual architect, Hannah Arendt, it short-circuited her prior recognition of Nazism 

within the family of Western imperialisms and as the exemplary modern instance of rationalized, technology-driven state terror.