Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Sociology - Political Sociology, Majorities, Minorities, grade: A- (82), University of British Columbia (Dept. of Sociology), course: Seminar 'Political Sociology', language: English, abstract: Since its coinage in the 1920s the term totalitarianism has adopted various connotations and haslead to highly controversial discussions in a multitude of scientific texts. Created by the opposition ofItalian fascism, it is soon taken up by Mussolini himself. After the end of the Second World War,Hannah Arendt and Carl J. Friedrich write two standard works, that classify both Nazism andStalinism as totalitarian regimes. In the following cold war period the term develops into anideological catchword of the Right, which culminates in the equation of the crimes of Communismwith the Holocaust in the Historikerstreit in 1986. Recently, after the collapse of sovietCommunism, the term is rediscovered as a useful tool to classify and compare political systems.In the following pages, I will therefore discuss the general concept of totalitarianism and thesocio-historic causes for the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century with the help of the classictheories of Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich and Karl D. Bracher. Further on I will deal with someof the criticism that the theory of totalitarianism was confronted with and show the benefit of theconcept for scientific discourse. In view of the flood of theories and criticism, it is not possible forme, to comment on the debate on totalitarianism as a whole. Instead I will concentrate on some ofthe crucial arguments of the debate, being aware that certain aspects will be left out in mydiscussion.