Written almost twenty years after the beginning of the dismantling of the last version of totalitarianism in Europe, Kristina Stoeckl’s topic has lost none of its timeliness. In the author’s view, this period of recent European history, as well as fascism and Nazism earlier on, has eventuated in the paradoxical situation of “simultaneous absolute communization of society and absolute atomization of individuals.” Reflections on this paradox are responsible for the current status of the three major political discourses in contemporary Western thought - liberalism, communitarianism, and postmodernism - each offering a different interpretation of the individual-community relationship. This book presents as an alternative and, at the same time, a complement, the Eastern Orthodox theological and philosophical thought represented mainly by post-1917 Russian and Greek Orthodox scholars. For Stoeckl, the October Revolution plays the role of a watershed in the development of Orthodox thinking, making it modern. This justifies her comparison of the political offspring of the Enlightenment with the teachings (and sometimes deviations) of the Eastern Church. Orthodox ideas do not fit under the umbrella of Western philosophical discourse because they approach totalitarianism from the perspective of the Orthodox version of Christianity. Their origins are to be sought centuries before the Enlightenment; their development has taken place outside of what usually is believed to be the space of Western Philosophy.