...a semi-hysterical use of the terminological bludgeon “totalitarianism.” This analytically shapeless and elastic term was willfully confused in their analysis with the theoretical category of “totality,” a concept with a rich philosophical past. For Lukacs, for example, “totality” meant simply that there is a framework of contemporary reality provided by the commodity economy that cannot be relativized, even if it isn’t always experienced in exactly the same way by every individual group or individual at all times. Sartre used the philosophical term of “totality” to refer to the way in which “perceptions, instruments and raw materials were linked up and set in relation to each other by the unifying perspective of a project.” By conflating “totality” with “totalitarianism,” the New Philosophers were able to assert than any “totalizing” or systemic analysis, or even any vaguely Utopian thought, carries within it congenitally the seeds of the Gulag. And since any tentative social change produces the Gulag, there is nothing better that can possibly be imagined than the way we are right now.
—May ’68 and its Afterlives, Kristin Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002) 170