Totalitarianism

11 Key excerpts on "Totalitarianism"

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  The Nation-State and Violence

  • Anthony Giddens(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The concept is usually taken to be above all a political one, referring to a mode of organizing political power, involving its extreme concentration in pursuit of objectives defined by a narrowly circumscribed leadership. Friedrich’s definition is the one perhaps most often quoted in the literature. Totalitarianism, he says, is distinct ‘from other and older autocracies’ and from ‘Western-type democracies’. It has six characteristics: ‘(1) a totalist ideology; (2) a single party committed to this ideology and usually led by one man, the dictator; (3) a fully developed secret police; and three kinds of monopoly or, more precisely, monopolistic control: namely that of (a) mass communications; (b) operational weapons; (c) all organisations, including economic ones.’ 4 The contrast between Totalitarianism and ‘Western-type democracies’ is of key importance in explaining the popularity of the concept in the period since the Second World War. Totalitarian states were regarded by liberal political observers as including those forms of social order that have an advanced industrial base, but do not display the institutional characteristics of liberal democracy. Whereas when referring to Italy or Germany Totalitarianism designated a relatively transitory phase in social development – terminated by war – in the case of the Soviet Union and the East European countries it was used to refer to a definite type of socio-political order separate from the capitalist states, continuing as long as that order remained in existence. Applied as a characteristic of the East European states, ‘totalitarian’ refers to a political system supposedly displaying the characteristics mentioned by Friedrich. The USSR and the state socialist societies are portrayed as monolithic systems of political power, founded upon cultural and social conformity deriving from the suppression of interest divisions

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  Totalitarianism

  The Basics

  • Phillip W. Gray(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  INTRODUCTION

  What Is Totalitarianism?

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003254232-1

  “Totalitarianism” is a difficult word. On the one hand, most people have an intuitive sense of what they think it means, perhaps envisioning certain types of ideas, governments, historical events, traits, or even images of a certain “aesthetic.” But on the other hand, the word becomes rather more obscure when we try to think about what it fundamentally means: one starts seeing possible inconsistencies and contradictions, finds it hard to distinguish traits of Totalitarianism from other types of regimes (like some monarchies or dictatorships), and notices that many totalitarian governments not only held different beliefs, but wanted to utterly destroy one another. Indeed, some scholars have even questioned whether “Totalitarianism” is a useful notion at all,1 or that the concept is often more a reflection of contemporary concerns rather than necessarily a strictly coherent notion.2 But surely, we can find (or create) some means of clarifying what “Totalitarianism” actually means.

  Initially, one way of identifying Totalitarianism that appears rather straightforward is by listing totalitarian systems in history: the usual list would at least include Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union (at least under Joseph Stalin), the People’s Republic of China (at least under Mao Tse-Tung), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), and Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia under the rule of the Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge), among others. The problem with such a list is that it begs the question: if we do not know how to define “totalitarian,” then how can we compile an inventory of totalitarian regimes? If we add Fascist Italy, should we also add the regime of Francisco Franco in Spain? Should we include some periods of rule by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam? Does Imperial Japan around the time of the Second World War count as a totalitarian regime, or as some other type of government? What does – and does not – connect these various regimes, ideologies, and groups together?

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  Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura

  • Saladdin Ahmed(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  The Origins of Totalitarianism brands both communism and fascism totalitarian and perhaps is still the most widely referenced philosophical work on the subject, even she admitted that capitalism has always been totalitarian in its economic manipulation of politics. She states, “The bourgeois class, having made its way through social pressure and, frequently, through an economic blackmail of political institutions, always believed that the public and visible organs of power were directed by their own secret, nonpublic interests and influence” (1975, 336). She goes on to take a Marxian position, adding, “In this sense, the bourgeoisie’s political philosophy was always ‘totalitarian’; it always assumed an identity of politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only as the façade for private interests” (1975, 336). Such a statement not only denounces capitalism as inherently totalitarian, but also makes direct use of historical materialism, according to which the state and other political institutions are the ideological superstructure that protects the dominant relations of production. The Marxian view holds that capitalism as a mode of production determines the function of the state, laws, religion, morality, knowledge, and culture, just as feudalism once did the same. That is to say, political, legal, religious, educational, and cultural institutions for the most part help to normalize, protect, and prolong the capitalist social relations as well as the material conditions that sustain those relations. Thus, any theory of Totalitarianism that relies on historical materialism would argue that a capitalist system is more totalitarian than its predecessors because of its historical, geographical, and technological advancement.

  Theoretically, total domination or the unlimited exercise of power is most often viewed as the definitive characteristic of a totalitarian system (Arendt 1975; Curtis 1979; Conquest 2000, 74). It should go without saying, however, that on a practical level, total domination cannot be achieved. Even those regimes that have unhesitatingly been called totalitarian, namely Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, never succeeded in eliminating dissent altogether. Therefore, a crucial indicator of a totalitarian system is the extent of its vision, its aspirations to assume total control, even if, in practice, it cannot completely achieve these aims. Any system, whether strictly political or not, that pursues such unlimited exercise of power, regardless of the methods it uses, is totalitarian.

  If we treat Totalitarianism as a concept rather than an ideological attribution exclusive to Nazism and Stalinism, it becomes a useful scholastic tool to diagnose totalitarian tendencies as well as advanced totalitarian systems that are not necessarily authoritarian, militant, or terroristic. Just as democracy is ascribed to systems of governance in ancient Greece and contemporary states alike, notwithstanding their myriad differences, there is no reason to reserve the term Totalitarianism for labeling a few historical models. In spite of the low voter turnout and overall political apathy of today’s “managed” democracies, we persist in calling them democratic.3 A refusal to entertain similar conceptual flexibility in identifying a system as “totalitarian” is in itself cause for alarm. Aside from Mussolini’s fascist Italy, no regime has self-identified with Totalitarianism. On the level of official discourse, totalitarian states have historically purported themselves to be the true realization of the people’s will. The people, however, while behaving in public “as if” they believed the regime’s narrative, were acutely aware of their unfreedom.4

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  Understanding the Transgenerational Legacy of Totalitarian Regimes

  Paradoxes of Cultural Learning

  • Elena Cherepanov(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5  Totalitarian Regimes in Modern History

  A Totalitarian State

  To examine the psychological reality of living under a totalitarian regime, I start by reconstructing an objective frame of reference specifically focusing on characteristics that most totalitarian regimes have in common.

  On September 19, 2019, the European parliament adopted resolution #10, equating Nazism with communistic regimes (European Parliament, 2019). Encyclopedia Britannica lists notable examples of totalitarian states that include but are not limited to: Italy under Benito Mussolini (1922–1943), the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (1924–53), Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933–1945), the People’s Republic of China under the influence of Mao Zedong (1949–1976), and North Korea under the Kim dynasty (1948-present).

  Totalism is not a recent invention. Dictators that have used religious or political police and mass repressions for thought control and combatting “heresy” have existed throughout history. The Inquisition and the witch trials in Europe in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries; oprichnina by Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Russia in the sixteenth century; and many others have relied on fearmongering and brainwashing to suppress opposing political and cultural expression (Conquest, 1999). But the interest in the psychological reality behind these tragedies has emerged comparatively recently, in the wake of Holocaust and the brutal regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.

  Despite a great diversity of cultural, sociopolitical, and economic factors that have contributed to the rise of totalitarian regimes, they all use ideology and indoctrination to establish total control over virtually all aspects of the life of citizens, including the mind, behaviors, and morality. This distinguishes Totalitarianism from other tyrannies that do not intend to change human nature (Caute, 2010). Sweeping propaganda campaigns are often marked by political repressions, personality cultism, micromanagement of the economy, restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and the institution of secret police.

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  Totalitarianism

  Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism

  • Hannah Arendt(Author)
  • 1968(Publication Date)
  • Mariner Books

    (Publisher)

  The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have already seized. Even a single individual can be absolutely and reliably dominated only under global totalitarian conditions. Ascendancy to power therefore means primarily the establishment of official and officially recognized headquarters (or branches in the case of satellite countries) for the movement and the acquisition of a kind of laboratory in which to carry out the experiment with or rather against reality, the experiment in organizing a people for ultimate purposes which disregard individuality as well as nationality, under conditions which are admittedly not perfect but are sufficient for important partial results. Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination.

  I: The So-called Totalitarian State

  HISTORY TEACHES THAT rise to power and responsibility affects deeply the nature of revolutionary parties. Experience and common sense were perfectly justified in expecting that Totalitarianism in power would gradually lose its revolutionary momentum and utopian character, that the everyday business of government and the possession of real power would moderate the prepower claims of the movements and gradually destroy the fictitious world of their organizations. It seems, after all, to be in the very nature of things, personal or public, that extreme demands and goals are checked by objective conditions; and reality, taken as a whole, is only to a very small extent determined by the inclination toward fiction of a mass society of atomized individuals.

  Many of the errors of the nontotalitarian world in its diplomatic dealings with totalitarian governments (the most conspicuous ones being confidence in the Munich pact with Hitler and the Yalta agreements with Stalin) can clearly be traced to an experience and a common sense which suddenly proved to have lost its grasp on reality. Contrary to all expectations, important concessions and greatly heightened international prestige did not help to reintegrate the totalitarian countries into the comity of nations or induce them to abandon their lying complaint that the whole world had solidly lined up against them. And far from preventing this, diplomatic victories clearly precipitated their recourse to the instruments of violence and resulted in all instances in increased hostility against the powers that had shown themselves willing to compromise.

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  Totalitarianism, Globalization, Colonialism

  The Destruction of Civilization Since 1914

  • Harry Redner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 The problem with such a definition is that it cannot account for all the changes that totalitarian regimes undergo in the course of their transformative evolution, for the features that apply to some stages do not apply to others, and if they are invoked in a purely nominal sense to refer to all eventualities, then they become ambiguous, for the changes are too drastic to be covered by the same terms in the same sense. Those who try to overcome such problems inherent in historical transformation in a purely essentialist way insert more and more specifications to cover all possibilities. Following this method, one ends up with something like the definition provided by Emilio Gentile:

  By the term Totalitarianism we mean an experiment in political domination implemented by a revolutionary movement that has been organized by a party with military discipline and an all-absorbing concept of politics aimed at the monopoly of power, which on taking power by legal or illegal means destroys or transforms the previous regime and builds a new state founded on a single-party regime with the principal objective of conquering society, that is, the subjugation, integration and homogenization of the ruled on the basis of the total political nature of existence, whether individual or collective, as interpreted by the categories, myths and values of an institutionalized ideology in the form of a political religion, with the intention of molding individuals and masses through an anthropological revolution, in order to regenerate the essence of humanity and create a new man devoted body and soul to the realization of the revolutionary, and imperialist project of the totalitarian party, and thus a new civilization of a supranational nature.13

  Whether this formula finally does the trick and accounts for everything or whether it still needs to be further expanded is not an issue we will debate, for we are not seeking an essentialist definition. In any case, we shall criticize some of Gentile's specifications in the next chapter.

  In his introduction to the 1965 edition of the book he authored jointly with Brzezinski, Friedrich makes it clear that they are not offering a genetic or developmental definition:

  In thus developing a morphological and operational theory of totalitarian regimes, I should like to make it clear that I still believe that we are as yet unable to offer a genetic one. Some interesting further arguments have been advanced in the intervening years, and ele-ments to such a theory are scattered throughout this book as they are through other writings on Totalitarianism, but no one in my opinion has fully answered the question: why? Unforeseen and still unfolding, Totalitarianism has shaped or, if one prefers, distorted the political and governmental scene of the twentieth century. It promises to continue to do so to the end of the century.14

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  Phoenix

  Fascism in Our Time

  • A. James Gregor(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  29

  In essence, that is what Totalitarianism is taken to mean: the creation of a state, governed by a specific and select ruling elite, animated by a religious conviction in its mission, that seeks hegemony through the mediation of a multiplicity of formal and informal tutelary, censorial, mobilizational, economic, and political institutions.30 Fascism’s intent was explicitly totalitarian. Totalitarianism was a neo-Hegelian conception of governance that sought an unbroken spiritual unity among citizens.

  Sergio Panunzio and the Fascist Interpretation of Totalitarianism

  If Gentile provided Totalitarianism its metaphysical rationale, it was left to other Fascist thinkers to follow the concept into the empirical world of politics. The best of the ideologues of Fascism, Sergio Panunzio principal among them,31 attempted a comparative analysis of the concept “Totalitarianism,” to relate it to past and extant political systems in a manner that would illuminate something of its specific character.

  For Panunzio, like other Fascist intellectuals, Totalitarianism, as a complex contemporary reality, was identified as a uniquely modern phenomenon. It was the culmination of a process that commenced with the armed insurrection of an ideologically based revolutionary party that, almost immediately upon accession to power, gave rise to a revolutionary dictatorship, which once consolidated, matured into an “integral” or “totalitarian” one-party state.32 Panunzio sought to provide an account of the dynamics of what was, for most, a static, descriptive, category.

  Panunzio did not pretend to be describing a unique, peculiarly Fascist system. He understood the process he described as having not a single referent, but a class reference: all totalitarian systems.

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  Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume 1

  Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships

  • Hans Maier(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is remarkable that those who were forced to live under such regimes continually apply the concept of Totalitarianism to articulate their experiences (specifically, their experiences until shortly before 1989 and by no means only those of the Stalin era). They do so, moreover, with complete awareness. Whoever emphasized earlier how important it is to begin with the regime’s official self-understanding and to measure it in terms of its own goals should, in his assessment today, at least incorporate the self-understanding of those who had to suffer under these regimes; he should not decide the question concerning the relevance of the Totalitarianism approach before he has examined the degree of reflected experience that is expressed in the essays and speeches of someone like Vaclav Havel. The Totalitarianism concept, then, is used by former dissidents—but by no means only by them. And it is not used in order to take sides in a dispute among political scientists, but in order to bring to light the historically new and unique element of some dictatorships of the twentieth century. The claim and instruments of power in these dictatorships were apparently unlimited and excluded no sphere of life. Over and again, they stressed how comprehensive and penetrating—how totalitarian—these systems were. Of this, we find two examples. ‘Totalitarianism’, Karl Jaspers writes, still under the immediate impression of Nazi rule,

  is neither Communism, nor Fascism, nor National Socialism, but has emerged in all these forms… To see through it is not easy. It is like an apparatus that sets itself in motion, in that the actors themselves often do not know it even as they are realizing it… Totalitarianism is like a ghoul that drinks the blood of the living and becomes real through it, while the victims continue their existence as a mass of living corpses.2

  Less dramatic is Vaclav Havel, who, as president of Czechoslovakia, made a New Year’s Address in 1990 in which he identified a ‘depraved moral atmosphere’ as the worst inheritance of Totalitarianism. He excepted no one from it:

  I speak of all of us. All of us have grown accustomed to the totalitarian system, have accepted it as an inalterable fact and thus have actually retained it in life. In other words: we are all—even if each in a different measure, of course—responsible for the course of the totalitarian machinery; no one is solely its victim; we are all at once its co-creators.3

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  Hannah Arendt

  Politics, History and Citizenship

  • Phillip Hansen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The Origins of Totalitarianism is best read as an ontologically informed account of a distinctive and frightening political reality which threatens in a powerful and unprecedented way our human status as political beings. This account uses historical evidence in a manner which strives to respect the balance between, on the one hand, taking historical facts as ‘the results of some necessary development about which [people] can therefore do nothing’, and on the other, ‘trying to manipulate them out of the world’. The concepts used to understand Totalitarianism are drawn from Arendt’s own unique arsenal and relate to her perspective on the political nature of genuine human capacities. Thus, although she deploys notions commonly used to analyse the phenomenon, such as ‘state’, ‘power’, ‘violence’, ‘class’, even ‘capitalism’, and although she relates it, as do others, to racism, imperialism and bureaucracy, Arendt in the final analysis seeks to account for Totalitarianism in terms of worldlessness. Totalitarianism is rooted in and reinforces two critical developments: the attack on plurality and the increasing pervasiveness of atomism and loneliness. In Arendt’s view, this radically new political form builds upon a human sense of desperation whose character has not been sufficiently understood.

  Underlying the attack on plurality and the consequent destruction of a body politic with at least some measure of solidarity was the decay and decline of the modern nation-state, the severing of people from the worldly ties that characterized the nation-state as a distinctive political form. This decay was the product of what Arendt calls ‘the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie’: the achievement of political as well as economic power by the bourgeois classes of European states.7

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  Redefining Stalinism

  • Harold Shukman(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The unfolding of local politics remains peculiar to local conditions, making a direct relationship between the local power nexus and the ‘all-encompassing personality’ at best notional, and at worst a whimsical idealisation. ‘Authority’ must be regarded as an abstraction and its actualisation very much dependent on its perception in situ. 27 The Stalinist period gave full body to such a formulation, and Stalin its intentionally vague prescription: ‘Don’t spare individuals, no matter what position they occupy; spare only the cause, the interests of the cause’. 28 It might be argued, as indeed Friedrich and Brzezinski did, that totalitarian rule is distinct from autocracy and simple dictatorship, in that Totalitarianism is a technologically based near-complete control of the individual. 29 This, however, would be a very difficult position to hold, because for most of Stalin’s period in power the chief preoccupation was with the primitive accumulation needed to launch and sustain massive industrialisation; an environment in which the sophisticated forms of control suggested by Friedrich and Brzezinski would have been impossible, the conditions being chaotic. Pethybridge, not surprisingly, chooses to account for his version of Totalitarianism in a different way: Rural culture was overrun by the towns with scant regard for indigenous traditions of long standing. The fact that town workers had to play the major role in the task of enforcing collectivization illustrates in social terms the complete failure of smychka in NEP. 30 Discarding the technical sophistication of Orwell’s 1984 (with its Big Brother), strongly resonating in Friedrich and Brzezinski’s work, Pethybridge prefers instead to confer the grand title of ‘Totalitarianism’ on a Soviet Union characterised by the savagery of that writer’s Animal Farm

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  What Is To Be Done?

  A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy

  • Alain Badiou, Marcel Gauchet, Susan Spitzer(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Of course, those involved didn’t have a clear awareness of the true nature of their enterprise. It was historical analysis that brought to light the unthought elements, the conditions of possibility of totalitarian regimes – the background from which they can emerge. On the basis of relatedness, however, the methods of achieving the objectives were reversed. In the case of fascism or Nazism, the project of restoring heteronomy (complete domination over society) was achieved by using the “means” of autonomy (via the nation-state forms and the plebiscitary leader, Mussolini or Hitler). In the Soviet case, the project of bringing about autonomy (the project of a self-organizing society) was achieved by using the “means” of heteronomy (through the state’s total domination over society). It was this surreptitious reintroduction of heteronomy that we witnessed starting with Lenin, but this aspect wasn’t identified and conceived of as such at the time it was occurring. As they arise from an unnatural alliance between autonomy and heteronomy, Totalitarianisms are monstrous, inevitably doomed to self-destruction. These phenomena are almost like political schizophrenia. Such regimes are plagued with a madness that can nevertheless be rationally explained once they’re put back in the context of a broader historical experience. Alain Badiou, to what extent does the similarity between totalitarian regimes seem relevant to you? And what do you think about Marcel Gauchet’s concept of secular religion? A.B.: I certainly won’t deny that there are common elements between them. The similar features are patently obvious: in each case, the despotism of a single party, the crucial role of the political police, the pervasiveness of the military imaginary (all the political officials in communist states wore military uniforms in those years), the systematic use of terror against opponents, or even against some supporters, and so on

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