Totalitarian Democracy and After

Yehoshua Arieli, Nathan Rotenstreich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135317737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This volume, first published in 1984, contains the principal papers from a distinguished colloquium held in 1982. Its avowed purpose is to investigate further the notion of "totalitarian democracy" and to look at its repercussions in the contemporary world.

PART ONE

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN RELATION TO HISTORICAL REALITY IN TERMS OF TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRACY

Totalitarian Democracy and the Legacy of Modern Revolutions — Explanation or Indictment?

by

JOHN DUNN

Cambridge University, UK

I. Talmon and the Concept of Totalitarian Democracy

ON TUESDAY 15 DECEMBER 1981, in a televised press conference following the declaration of military rule in Poland, the leader of the Italian communist party, Enrico Berlinguer, acknowledged bluntly (and in some respects for the first time) the heavy burden which the political character of the Soviet Union and its satellite powers had long placed on the prospects for socialism in the West.¹ In the subsequent weeks this acknowledgement was extended and amplified (if in some measure hedged), and it has been essentially sustained ever since. In itself, this belated recognition of the catastrophic political character of existing communist regimes is not especially impressive. But the occasion which elicited it, and the stress laid by Berlinguer himself on the profoundly undemocratic character of the Soviet state, do mark an ideological turning-point of a kind. They also perhaps highlight the marked ideological precariousness and instability of the very idea of totalitarian democracy and the continued practical importance of explaining adequately and validly why the Soviet experience has proved politically so repellent.

Both of these preoccupations were plainly of central importance to the late Jacob Talmon. His famous study of the ideological origins and internal dynamics of the tradition of totalitarian democracy — up to the time at which state power was first taken and retained under its aegis — fills three large volumes, and its publication stretches across almost three decades. In its first and briefest volume, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, very much a work of the early 1950s, Talmon offered an influential and pointed diagnosis of the political discontents of the advanced capitalist world in the aftermath of World War II. It is not necessary in this setting to emphasize the striking qualities of the trilogy as a whole, the extraordinary range of learning that it exhibits or the human vitality and sense of drama that shine through every page and, in more personal relations, enabled Talmon to capture and retain the deep affection of scholars whose political sentiments and judgements differed very sharply from his own. But timely and impressive though it certainly was, there have always been major reservations about the validity of the book’s central contentions.

I take these to be essentially two. Firstly, that totalitarian messianic democracy (for current purposes, the political character of a communist regime) is to be disjoined from liberal empirical democracy, not by its institutional forms (and certainly not by its structure of ownership and economic control), but, rather, by its distinctive attitude towards the scope of politics.² And, secondly, that its attitude towards the scope of politics is, in turn, a product of a single metaphysical and dispositional error, an error that unites a simplistic moral absolutism and rationalism with a gratuitous trust in the self-regulating capacity of the historical process. In this sense, the contrast between modern Marxist politics, for example, and the politics of ancient republicanism in the Machiavellian tradition³ would not lie in the former’s preference for community over individual, or in its somewhat evasive union of moralizing asceticism with promises of future largesse, but rather in its striking optimism about the future viability of the well-ordered polity, once this has been well and truly founded. The ancient prudence, as a heroically forceful and ingenious apparatus for postponing an inevitable decay and corruption of the body politic, is now succeeded by a modem prudence — the Marxist—Leninist doctrine of state — for which the possibility of political decomposition from within through the normal workings of natural forces simply cannot arise. (For a communist regime, unlike a classical republic, to succumb to internal decay can, in its own eyes, only occur through great folly or a great crime — though some qualification on this point is probably, or at least was probably, in order in the case of Maoism.⁴) It is worth emphasizing this contrast between ancient and modern prudence because, at least to some degree, it is common to the two traditions of political understanding that Talmon counterposes. For John Adams or James Madison ⁵ the question of the future viability of the American republic was complex and necessarily open. But the presumption of the intrinsic and indefinite internal viability of the American polity is at least as deeply ingrained in the political presumptions of most Americans as the analogous presumption in relation to the USSR appears to be widespread amongst Soviet citizens. Polities today vary very widely in the extent to which their citizens regard them as well ordered; but it is not clear, even at the level of ritual pronouncements, let alone at that of practical reproduction, that rigidity of constitutional form or socio-economic structure is a prerogative of the totalitarian democrats. Total rigidity of either can hardly be sustained for long amidst the intense and turbulent interplay of economic and ideological forces which marks the late twentieth century; and political pronouncements are necessarily a poor index of the scale of change or persistence in any form of society.

It is probably fair to say that the main criticism which has been offered of Talmon’s work (apart from the simple reversal of political preferences between liberal empiricism and Marxism) has centred on the propriety of the method which he followed for understanding the history of ideas. There is certainly some substance to these criticisms. A contrast between The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy itself and, for example, John Lough’s careful, if somewhat pedestrian, study The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France,⁶ or George Taylor’s analysis of the ideological content of the Cahiers de doléances⁷ of early 1789, does bring out a certain methodological airiness and insubstantiality in Talmon’s claims for the coherence of the philosophe programme and for its causal impact upon the revolutionary process. But at some level Talmon would have had every reason to regard such criticisms, whatever their individual cogency and textual foundation, as largely beside the point. Since what he wished to understand was the development of an entire mode of political perception and sentiment, and since he explicitly wished to understand it because he saw it as the causally indispensable imaginative prehistory of a hugely important modern idiom of political practice, the finer points of scepticism as to the causal role of particular authors or particular texts were of comparatively minor interest to him. Even if the actual political role of the ideas of Rousseau, for example, was largely one of radical misunderstanding amplified by hearsay at third or fourth remove,⁸ it might still be appropriate to include their author as prominently as Talmon did in representing the shaping and reshaping of the traditions of belief and sentiment which he wished to depict.

II. Non-ideological Determinants of the Character of Communist Regimes

What is less easy to endorse, however, is the intellectual judgement behind the shape of his trilogy as a whole. For the key question raised by his entire enterprise concerns the relation between the imaginative prehistory of communist regimes (seen by Talmon himself as overwhelmingly a European history) and the causal properties of those regimes themselves. What Talmon chose to study was, to quote from the opening page of the Origins, ‘a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of today consists’.⁹ Looked at from thirty years later, however vivid one’s distaste for the Soviet Union, that formula suggests a narrowly self-serving and theoretically inept conception of the causation of the Cold War, identifying its sources firmly in the distressing confrontation of our own rational and well-founded system of beliefs with the deranged, hysterical and menacing political presumptions of our enemies, the Soviet Union and its allies. Now it would be absurd to presume, even outside the context of a world crisis (whatever that may be), that the doctrines of state of the Soviet Union (or of any other state) have no causal implications for the manner in which its state power is intentionally exerted, or even for the ways in which its social, economic and political structures do in fact over time develop. But it would be even more absurd to presume that the predominant determinant of the intentional exercise of state power, or the principal effective controller of the structural development of a polity, economy or society, could be a unitary system of beliefs and sentiments shaped elsewhere and at some other time.

The first question posed by Talmon’s approach is therefore simple enough. What are the exact implications of Marxism or Leninism’s becoming a ruling doctrine of state? Talmon’s answer to this question is a bold one: that its adoption in this guise spells inevitably a nasty fusion of ritualized hypocrisy and practical oppression¹⁰ — precisely because of the absurd metaphysical hubris on which its claims to authority rest. It is clear by now to anyone open-mindedly interested in the question (and anyone of any political decency must be interested in the question and attempt to retain some open-mindedness in the face of it), that there is something in Talmon’s answer. The link, for example, between metaphysical hubris and ritual hypocrisy does appear to be internal and logical and not merely external and contingent. And the link between both of these disfigurements and oppressive political practices has been too constant for it to be regarded as just a sorry chapter of accidents. But there is something drastically misconceived about the character of Talmon’s position, a presumption of a quite unwarrantable degree of determinacy to the question’s answer. One can see this most economically, perhaps, by considering the case of totalitarian democracy’s ghostly, and for the most part also eminently material, enemy, the tradition of liberal empirical democracy. It would not, of course, be accurate to construe the empirical component of this tradition as an explicit feature of the doctrines of state in which it eventuates. And there is some strain (and not merely one generated by constitutional heterogeneity) even in construing either its liberal or its democratic component as necessarily a part of its doctrines of state. There is some real plausibility in lumping together the range of Marxist regimes, however cantankerous their mutual relations may now have become. But there is less felicity — constitutionally, ideologically or substantively — in seeing their political adversaries as united by much more than a common object of their loathing. The political challenge of regimes of Marxist inspiration is domestically rather feeble in France or Britain or Israel, let alone in West Germany or Japan or the United States of America. But it is very considerably less feeble in such countries as Brazil or Argentina, South Africa or Indonesia; and its persisting salience in these settings (however thin on the ground it may at times have been rendered in practice) has prised the liberal and democratic velleities crisply away from the demands of the empirical. This fissure has been established, too, not merely through and for the citizens of these countries but at least as dramatically, for the purposes of the United States government in relation to them. In the face of the menacing seductions of Marxist absolutism, the liberal and democratic, outside its heartlands, has been abandoned wholesale for reasons which in themselves appeared, at least to its deserters, to be both empirical and virtually impossible to deny or elude. These deformations can and should be blamed in part on the opportunistic ruthlessness of the international political demeanour of the Soviet Union and other communist states since their respective inceptions. But it is hard to see how the political protagonist of liberal empirical democracy can hope to avoid sharing the blame, and indeed doing so in respects that blot its own escutcheon very unbecomingly indeed. And even that measure of blame which appropriately falls on the opportunistic ruthlessness of Soviet action must be balanced imaginatively by the realization of a corresponding responsibility on the part of western powers for the nervous sense of menace in the more domestic Soviet purlieus in Eastern Europe, which explains so much of the most grossly obnoxious of Soviet conduct. Some aspects, at least, of the collision which Talmon hoped to understand simply cannot be understood by considering its ideological history but must be grasped, if they are to be grasped at all, in terms of the ideologically disobliging pragmatics of a politically riven but strongly interrelated world. I do not wish to suggest that Talmon himself was in any sense foolish enough to deny this explicitly. But I think it fair to say that the character of his work is less than imaginatively sensitive to the significance of this consideration.

There is every reason to share Talmon’s view of the political character of communist regimes as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Jacob Talmon – An Intellectual Portrait
• Part I: The Historiography and Philosophy of History in Relation to Historical Reality in Terms of Totalitarian Democracy
• Part II: Totalitarian Democracy – Cultural Traditions and Modernization
• Part III: The Varieties and Transformations of Totalitarian Democracy in Different Countries and Under Different Regimes
• Part IV: The Impact of Totalitarian Democracy on the Jewish Situation