Todorov`s contention is that totalitarianism imposed itself because, more than any other political system, it fed on people`s need for the absolute: it promised to endow life with meaning by enabling them to take part in the construction of paradise on earth. As a result, millions of people lost their lives in the name of a higher good. Tzvetan Todorov`s brilliantly incisive book examines the history of the past century by analyzing its spectacular political conflicts & by offering moving profiles of individuals who, at great personal cost, resisted the strictures of the communist & Nazi regimes. Hope & Memory is a profound moral & political history by one of the world`s most original thinkers. It confirms how, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the crimes of the past continue to cast long shadows.