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Schivelbusch finds parallels in the ideas, styles, and programs among the disparate regimes based in Washington D.C, Berlin, Rome, and Moscow. He introduces neoclassical monumentalism as a commonality among the systems. According to Schivelbusch, monumentality consists of the eternal need for the people to create symbols that reveal their inner life, their actions, and their social conceptions. He believes the conflation of the monumental which he describes as "backward looking" as reflecting the political ideologies of the Third Reich and other totalitarian regimes, as well as the association of modern architecture with liberal democracy and the social welfare state as being too simplistic. Historian of modern architecture, Siegfried Giedion said: .
"The people want buildings representing their social, ceremonial, and community life. They want their buildings to be more than a functional fulfillment. They seek expression of their aspiration for joy, for luxury, and for excitement.The demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed." .
The fact that neoclassical buildings had been constructed in Washington, Paris, London and Geneva during the 1930s, just as they had in Berlin, Moscow, and Rome led them to acknowledge that there had been traditionally modern fascists and architecturally traditional liberals. During the nineteen thirties neoclassical monumentalism had been just as prevalent as the International style. Therefore neoclassicism could no longer be reduced to being a side effect of totalitarian regimes. Franco Borsi asserted that monumental architecture could signify equally the strength of the institution in the democracies and the aggressive power of the state in the dictatorship. Schivelbusch expresses that both the revolutionary states of Bolshevism and fascism as well as the reformist ones of the capitalist democracies, needed an architecture that would tower on behalf of, but also above, the people like a temple, inspiring trust, respect, and a quasi-religious sense of deeper meaning and community while at the same time showing the rest of the world who it was dealing with.
