than the
             communist left. As negative propaganda this proved a remarkable success, as successive
             Western socialist and communist parties were divided over the issue, discredited in the popular
             imagination, and forced to rethink their programmes to meet the new mood of libertarianism, or
             risk being driven further to the margins of politics.
             The most important post-1945 leftist theorist of totalitarianism was the German-born German
             émigré to the US (in 1934), Herbert Marcuse. During the 1930s he had suggested that for all the
             marked differences between the political styles of liberalism and fascism, both were ultimately
             based on the freedom of the economic subject to the full use of private property. After the defeat
             of German and Italian fascism in 1945 Marcuse began to develop his 'one dimensional society'
             model to explain the similarities between liberal democracy and fascism, but also Stalinism.
             In a series of work beginning with Revolution and Reason (1941), Eros and Civilization (1955)
             ...