The article aims at some logical-historical conditions of "left-wing" totalitarianism, or "equalitarist totalitarianism". The first part intends to show that there is a blind spot in marxism - the twentieth-century hegemonic theory on the left - about democracy, and how that same blind spot gave favorable conditions to the rise of totalitarianism and its ideology. The second part traces a genesis of equalitarist totalitarianism. The outstanding reference is bolshevism as pretotalitarian ideology and practice. From that point, the article makes a double logical move: a regressive one, showing how, below marxism, bolshevism rescues the jacobinist politics and how it is going to fuse the jacobinist legacy with the previous traditions blended in marxism itself; and a progressive one, analysing the passage from bolshevik neojacobinism to the ideology and practice of stalinist neodespotism.
Intelectual prehistory of totalitarianism; Left-wing or equalitarist totalitarianism; Bolshevism; Jacobinism; Stalinist neodespotism