Summary - At the end of the Second World War, the division of the world into two opposed blocks and the descent of the iron curtain had important repercussion for cultural and political debate. In Soviet-block countries, under the oppressive mantle of the official ideology and propagandistic consensus, an intensification of critical dissident activity that was to lead not only to a significant degree of migration to the western world, but also to the growth of a vast clandestine literature which the repressions and Gulags were unable to silence. In the western liberal democracies, socialist parties increasingly distanced themselves, in both theoretical and practical terms, from the orthodoxy and the leading role of the Soviet Communist Party. Among Anglosaxon writers, reflections on totalitarianism were taken up and amplified on in order to understand their internal mechanisms, the instruments of power and their terrible consequences. In France, these themes were to find less of a foothold. And in Italy the debate was even more late and problematic as a result of the cultural hegemony of the Italian Communist Party.