Through figures as Jakobson and Bakhtin, Germaine Tillion or Raymond Aron, and essays on Stalin, totalitarianism, the limits of justice or memory as a remedy against evil, Tzvetan Todorov wonders in this book: "Can learn some history of totalitarian regimes the current inhabitants of liberal states, which never have known and not run the risk of knowing? I endeavor to think so. " Today, these regimes are dead or dying, but his story is still relevant today, as it allows better understand the struggles that have shaped our current political identity and hopefully resisting practices reappear within democracies own