In other words, the norm of as-sociability which the term civil society was originally used to deploy in critiquing 'barbaric societies' is now used in contrast to the atomization of society under total state control. For theorists such as Arendt, totalitarian regimes obliterated the groups and associations which were all that stood between the power of the modern state and the weak, isolated individual. This understanding of civil society, as a bulwark in the face of the state leviathan, is now the commonly accepted one in accounts of the 'third wave' of democratization. It turns the civil society 'solution' away from problems posed to society arising from 'below' (i.e. untrammeled individualism) and exclusively towards threats from 'above'.