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[[Laure Neumayer]] posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War."<ref>{{cite book |last=Neumayer |first=Laure |author-link=Laure Neumayer |year=2018 |title=The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War |publisher=Routledge |isbn= 9781351141741}}</ref> In the 1990s, [[François Furet]] made a comparative analysis<ref>{{cite journal |last=Schönpflug |first=Daniel |date=2007 |title=Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements |journal=European History Quarterly |volume=37 |issue=2 |pages=265–290 |doi=10.1177/0265691407075595|s2cid=143074271 }}</ref> and used the term ''[[Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism|totalitarian twins]]'' to link Nazism and Stalinism.<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=17 April 1995 |title=The Sound and the Furet |url=http://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |url-status=dead |magazine=[[The Nation]] |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080317075608/https://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |archive-date=17 March 2008 |access-date= 7 August 2020 |quote=Furet, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, describes Bolsheviks and Nazis as totalitarian twins, conflicting yet united.}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=2 November 1999 |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |title=Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir |magazine=[[The Nation]] |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=... the totalitarian nature of Stalin's Russia is undeniable. |archive-date=26 July 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190726020527/https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |title=Nazi Fascism and the Modern Totalitarian State |last=Grobman |first=Gary M. |date=1990 |website=Remember.org |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=The government of [[Nazi Germany]] was a fascist, totalitarian state. |archive-date=2 April 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402073405/http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |url-status=live }}</ref> [[Eric Hobsbawm]] criticised Furet for his temptation to stress the existence of a common ground between two systems with different ideological roots.<ref>{{cite book |last=Hobsbawm |first=Eric |author-link=Eric Hobsbawm |date=2012 |chapter=Revolutionaries |title=History and Illusion |publisher=Abacus |isbn=978-0349120560}}</ref> In ''Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion'', Žižek wrote that "[t]he liberating effect" of General [[Augusto Pinochet]]'s arrest "was exceptional", as "the fear of Pinochet dissipated, the spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself."<ref>{{cite book |last=Žižek |first=Slavoj |author-link=Slavoj Žižek |date=2002 |title=Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion |location=London and New York |publisher=Verso |page=169 |isbn=9781859844250}}</ref> Saladdin Ahmed cited Hannah Arendt as stating that "the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term after [[Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin|Stalin's death]]", writing that "this was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile, yet it would be absurd to exempt it from the class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone." Saladdin posited that while [[Military dictatorship of Chile|Chile under Pinochet]] had no "official ideology", there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than [[Milton Friedman]], the godfather of [[neoliberalism]] and the most influential teacher of the [[Chicago Boys]], was Pinochet's adviser." In this sense, Saladdin criticised the totalitarian concept because it was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism.<ref name="Saladdin 2019"/>
In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten, [[Vladimir Tismăneanu]], and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms in different political systems but all of them focus on [[utopia]]nism, [[scientism]], or [[political violence]]. They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw [[polymath]]y as a thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups.<ref>{{cite book |last=Shorten |first=Richard |date=2012 |title=Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present |publisher=Palgrave |isbn=978-0230252073}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Tismăneanu |first=Vladimir |date=2012 |title=The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century |publisher=University of California Press |isbn=978-0520954175}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Tucker |first=Aviezer |date=2015 |title=The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1316393055}}</ref> Their arguments have been criticised by other scholars due to their partiality and anachronism. [[Juan Francisco Fuentes]] treats totalitarianism as an "[[invented tradition]]" and he believes that the notion of "modern [[despotism]]" is a "reverse anachronism"; for Fuentes, "the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present
Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to [[Shoshana Zuboff]], the economic pressures of modern [[surveillance capitalism]] are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Zuboff|first1=Shoshana|title=The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|publisher=PublicAffairs|year=2019|isbn=978-1610395694|location=New York|oclc=1049577294}}</ref> [[Toby Ord]] believed that George Orwell's fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanent [[technological dystopia]]. Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four]]''. In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently."<ref>{{cite book|last=Ord|first=Toby|year=2020|chapter=Future Risks|title=The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1526600196}}</ref> That same year, [[Bertrand Russell]] wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states."<ref>{{cite journal|last=Clarke|first=R.|year=1988|title=Information Technology and Dataveillance|journal=[[Communications of the ACM]]|volume=31|number=5|pages=498–512|doi=10.1145/42411.42413|s2cid=6826824|doi-access=free}}</ref>
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