Rethinking the Historiography of the Soviet Bloc: The Totalitarianism Paradigm and Institutional Practices Under Communism

• Brings together Historians and philosophers to analyse the totalitarian idea and its broader application.
• Highlights the reasons why totalitarianism is still an attractive model in political science born out of the cold war.
• Revisits ideas about totalitarianism and knowledge production under communism.

Manuela Ungureanu is associate professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She has published on Donald Davidson’s interpretation theory and has examined issues in the philosophy of language following Chomsky’s universal grammar. Her work, which is at the interface between cognitive psychology and social epistemology, has appeared in journals such as Dialogue and AVANT as well as edited volumes including Romanian Studies in the Philosophy of Science (2015) and From an Analytical Point of View (2025).