Extreme form of authoritarianism and a theoretical concept
Two versions of theWorld War II U. S. propaganda poster "Your Lot in a Totalitarian State" depicting a process ofcompulsorysham election which took place in the states, flags of which –Nazi Germany,Fascist Italy[a] and theSoviet Union – are presented below. In the version on the right, produced afterOperation Barbarossa, flag of the Soviet Union (Allied member) is replaced with that of theEmpire of Japan[b] (Axis member), which is not regarded as totalitarian by the majority of Western scholars,[1] and in regards to the USSR the label has also received certain criticism.[2][3]
Totalitarianism is apolitical system and aform of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls thepublic sphere and theprivate sphere of society. In the field ofpolitical science, totalitarianism is the extreme form ofauthoritarianism, wherein allpolitical power is held by a dictator. This figure controls the national politics and peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and state-aligned privatemass communications media.[4]
The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as thepolitical economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, sciences, and privatemorality of its citizens.[5] In the exercise of power, the difference between a totalitarianregime of government and an authoritarian regime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features acharismatic dictator and a fixedworldview, authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power. The authoritarian dictator is supported, either jointly or individually, by amilitary junta and by the socio-economic elites who are theruling class of the country.[6]
The wordtotalitarian was first used in the early 1920s to describe the Italian Fascist regime.[7][8] The termtotalitarianism gained wider usage in politics of theinterwar period; in the early years of theCold War, it arose fromcomparison of theSoviet Union underJoseph Stalin andNazi Germany underAdolf Hitler as a theoretical concept of Western political science, achieving hegemony in explaining the nature ofFascist andCommunist states, and later entered the Westernhistoriography of Communism, the Soviet Union and theRussian Revolution; in the 21st century, it became applied toIslamist movements and their governments. The concept of totalitarianism has been challenged and criticized by some historians of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR. When defined as exemplary cases of totalitarianism, on the grounds that the main characteristics of the concept – total control over society, total mobilization of the masses, and a monolithic centralized character of the regime – were never achieved by the dictatorships called totalitarian. To support this claim, the historians argue that the political structures of these states were disorganized and chaotic, and that despite the supposed external similarities between Nazism andStalinism, their internal logic and structure were substantially different. The applicability of the concept to Islamism has also been criticized.[9][10][11]
Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian.[12][13] Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are:political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); acult of personality about The Leader; officialeconomic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); officialmass surveillance-policing of public places; andstate terrorism.[4] In the essay "Democide in Totalitarian States" (1994) the American political scientistRudolph Rummel, while acknowledging that there is "much confusion about what is meant bytotalitarian" up to denial that totalitarian systems have ever existed, defined a totalitarian state as "one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either]constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodicsecret and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships." According to Rummel, such governments act as "agencies of totalitarianism" itself, that is, "the ideology of absolute power", which installs "mortacracy" in states controlled by it. Rummel citedMarxism–Leninism andcommunism in theSoviet Union underJoseph Stalin,China underMao Zedong and inEast Germany,Nazism inGermany underAdolf Hitler andfascism in other states,state socialism (Burmese way to socialism) inBurma underU Ne Win andIslamic fundamentalism (Islamism) inIran as examples of totalitarianism.[14][15] However, not all scholars believe these regimes and ideologies exemplify totalitarianism: some of those who support of the concept of totalitarianism exclude Burma,[16] Iran[17] and evenFascist Italy[18] from this category, while historians who state that the concept can not adequately describeStalinism norNazism criticize the concept of totalitarianism in general (see below).
Degree of control
In exercising the power of government upon society, the application of an officialdominant ideology differentiates theworldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty."[6] Having no ideology to propagate, the politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature",[6] whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens",[5] by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by asecret police, andmonopolistic control of industrialmass society."[6]
Historical background
For influential philosopherKarl Popper, the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product ofModernism, which Popper said originated inhumanist philosophy; in theRepublic (res publica) proposed byPlato inAncient Greece, inHegel's conception ofthe State as a polity of peoples, and in thepolitical economy ofKarl Marx in the 19th century[19]—yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute the historiographic accuracy of Popper's 20th-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because, for example, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent themodern State;[20] his approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causation[21] and as an ahistorical attempt to present totalitarianism and liberalism not as products of historical development, but as eternal and timeless categories of humankind itself.[22]
There were similar "ideocratic"[9] attempts in traditions of theCounter-Enlightenment[23] to trace totalitarianism back to the times preceding the 20th century:Eric Voegelin saw totalitarianism as "the journey's end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology", an epilogue of the process of secularization which began with theReformation which led to a world deprived of any religiosity;Jacob Talmon thought totalitarianism to be a merger of left-wing radical democracy (fromJean-Jacques Rousseau,Maximilien Robespierre andFrançois-Noël Babeuf) and right-wing irrationalism (fromJohann Gottlieb Fichte) as traditions opposed to empirical liberalism;[9] the German philosophersMax Horkheimer andTheodor W. Adorno viewed totalitarianism as an ineluctable destiny of modernity rooted in the origins of the Western civilization and as an ultimate end of the evolution of theEnlightenment from emancipatory reason to instrumental rationality,[22] and as a product ofanthropocentrist proposition that: "Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to Nature, society, and history", which excludes the intervention ofsupernatural beings to earthly politics of government.[24]
Enzo Traverso believes that the idea of "total state", or "totalitarian state" as it would be called later, came from the concept of "total war" which was used to describeWorld War I by its contemporaries: the war "shaped the imagination of anentire generation" by rationalizing nihilism and "methodical destruction of the enemy", introducing "a new warrior ethos in which the old ideals of heroism and chivalry merged with modern technology" and a process of brutalization of politics and such examples of "continentally planned industrial killing" as theArmenian genocide. "Total war" became "total state", and after the war, it was used as a pejorative by theItalian anti-fascists of the 1920s and later by the Italian Fascists themselves.[9]
In the 20th century,Giovanni Gentile classifiedItalian Fascism as a political ideology with a philosophy that is "totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people"; Gentile expressed his ideas in "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), an essay he co-authored withBenito Mussolini.[26] In 1920s Germany, during theWeimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi juristCarl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of theFührerprinzip.
Since theCold War, the so-called 'traditionalist', or 'totalitarian', historians (see below) argued[27][28] thatVladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the 1917October Revolution in Russia, was the first politician to establish a totalitarian state;[29][30][31][32][33] such description of Lenin is opposed by the so-called 'revisionist' historians of Communism and the Soviet Union[27] as well as by a broad range of authors includingHannah Arendt.[34][28]
As theDuce leading the Italian people to the future,Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government madeFascist Italy (1922–1943) the representativeTotalitarian State: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."[35] Likewise, inThe Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the termder Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish thelegitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by asupreme leader;[36] laterJoseph Goebbels would call a totalitarian state the goal of the Nazi Party,[37] although the concept became downplayed in Nazi discourse.[9]
After theSecond World War (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) and the termstotalitarian,totalitarianism, andtotalitarian model. In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit theanti-fascism of the Second World War as misguidedforeign policy and at the same time direct anti-fascists against Communism,McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism was an existential threat toWestern civilisation, and so facilitated the creation of the Americannational security state to execute theanti-communist Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought byclient-state proxies of the US and the USSR.[38][39][40][41][42]
While the concept of totalitarianism became dominant in Anglo-American political discourse after World War II, it remained neglected in continental Europe except forWest Germany: in such countries as Italy and France, where the Communist parties played a hegemonic role in theanti-fascist resistance, the pioneering works of the theory of totalitarianism by such authors asHannah Arendt,Zbigniew Brzezinski andCarl Friedrich were often ignored or not even translated; the political theory of totalitarianism in these countries was promoted byCongress for Cultural Freedom supported by theCIA.[9]
Historiography
"Totalitarians" and "Revisionists"
The Westernhistoriography of the USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history and is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography;[43] the traditionalists and neo-traditionalists, or anti-revisionists, are also known as 'totalitarian school' or 'totalitarian approach' and 'Cold War' historians,[27][28] for relying on concepts and interpretations rooted in the early years of the Cold War and even in the sphere RussianWhite émigrés of the 1920s.[27]
Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism allegedly inherent toMarxism, toCommunism, and to the political nature ofCommunist states, such as the USSR, while the Cold War revisionists criticized the politically liberal and anti-communist bias they perceived in the predominance of the traditionalists and describe their approach as emotional and oversimplifying.[43] Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history which they say leads it to[failed verification] anti-communist interpretation of history biased towards a right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts. The revisionists also oppose the equation of Nazism and Communism and Stalinism and stress such their ideological differences as the humanist and egalitarian origins of Communist ideology.[43] In the 1960s, revisionists studying the Cold War and the Communist movement in the U.S. criticized the dominant ideas that American Communists were an actual threat to the United States[43] and that the Cold War was the fault of Stalin's territorial and political ambitions and that Soviet expansionism and its alleged strife to conquer the world forced the U.S. to turn from isolationism to a global containment policy.[28]
The difference between these two historiographic directions is not only political, but also as methodological: the 'traditionalists' focus on politics, ideology and personalities of the Bolshevik and Communist leaders, putting the latter in the centre of history while largely ignoring social processes,[28] and traditionalists present "history from above", directed by the leaders, while the revisionists put emphasis on "history from below"[27] and social history of the Soviet regime,[28] and they describe the traditionalists as '(right-wing)romantics.'[43] In their turn, the traditionalists defend their approach and methodology, dismiss focus on social history and accuse their opponents of Marxism and of rationalizing the actions of the Bolsheviks and failing to recognize the primary role of "one man" leading a movement (Vladimir Lenin orAdolf Hitler). Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist approaches became largely accepted in academic circles, and the term "revisionism" migrated to characterize a group of social historians focusing on the working class and the upheavals of the Stalin years. At the same time, traditionalist historians retained popularity and influence outside academic circles, especially in politics and public spheres of the United States, where they supported harder policies towards the USSR: for example,Zbigniew Brzezinski served as National Security Advisor to PresidentJimmy Carter, whileRichard Pipes, a prominent historian of 'totalitarian school', headed the CIA groupTeam B; after 1991, their views have found popularity not only in the West, but also in the former USSR.[28]
1920 Soviet propaganda poster with a complimentary cartoon ofVladimir Lenin byViktor Deni. According to 'traditionalist' historians, Lenin was the first politician to establish a totalitarian regime; such description have been opposed by the 'revisionists' and other authors.
Since the 1980s, there has been a debate over the nature of theOctober Revolution between the traditionalists and the revisionists as well as a debate about the nature of the government ofVladimir Lenin. Traditionalist scholars believe that the government of Vladimir Lenin was a totalitarian dictatorship but revisionist scholars do not; the core argument of the traditionalists was based on their belief that the Revolution was a violent act which was carried out "from above" by a small group of intellectuals with brute force.[27] Such traditionalist historians asRichard Pipes claimed thatSoviet Russia of 1917–1924 was as totalitarian as theSoviet Union under Stalin was, and they also claim thatStalinist totalitarianism was a mere continuation of Lenin's policies because Stalinism was prefigured byLenin's ideology,[34][44] that Lenin was the "inventor" (Riley) of totalitarianism, and that further totalitarian regimes just implemented the policies already invented:[30] for example, Pipes compared Lenin to Hitler and stated that "The Stalinist and Naziholocausts" stemmed from Lenin'sRed Terror and had "much greater decorum" than the latter.[28] The revisionists, on the contrary, stressed the genuinely 'popular' nature of the 1917 Revolution, and tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism;[27] a revisionist historianRonald Suny cites Hannah Arendt who distinguished Lenin's terror of theRussian Civil War, "a means to exterminate and frighten opponents", from totalitarian terror aimed not at specific enemies but at fulfilling ideological goals, solving the problem of inequality and poverty, "an instrument to rule masses who are perfectly obedient."[28] It was also noted that Stalin became an uncontested dictator after a period of "authoritarian pluralism",[10] while the one-party dictatorship and mass violence (the Red Terror) were interpreted not as a result of Lenin's totalitarian "blueprint", but rather of reactions (yet justified by the ideology) to current events and external factors, including wartime conditions and the struggle for survival,[44][28] some historians highlighted the initial attempts of the Bolsheviks to form a coalition government.[45]
Martin Malia noted that the debates on history were politically significant: if the 'traditionalists' were right, "Communism" "must be abolished", but if they were not, it could be reformed.[28] Understanding of relationship of Lenin and Stalin as a continuity of the totalitarian regime was consensual for a major period; the first revisionists of the 1960s, social historians, also believed it to be a continuity, but as a continuity of policies of modernisation, not as a continuity of totalitarianism; starting from the end of the 1960s, availability of new Soviet materials allowed to dispute the continuity for such historians asMoshe Lewin and break the consensus.[46] According toEvan Mawdsley, "the 'revisionist' school had been dominant from the 1970s", and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists.[27]
The death of Stalin in 1953 voided the simplistictotalitarian model of the police-state USSR as the epitome ofthe totalitarian state.[47] Starting from the 1970s, the 'revisionist' historians,[48] described as those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong" and focused not on typology of power, but social history,[49][9] such asSheila Fitzpatrick began challenging the totalitarian paradigm; without denying the state violence by the regime, these scholars argued that the Stalinist system could not and did not rule only through coercion and terror, and pointed to support within the population for many of Stalin's policies and argued that the party and state were often responsive to people's desires and values.[48] More to it, they examined the substantial differences of Stalinist and Nazi violence that inevitably put into question the attempt to gather Stalin's and Hitler's regimes into a single category which was presented by the concept of totalitarianism.[9] In 1999 the sociologistsRandall Collins andDavid Waller grouped the concept of totalitarianism among the "theories that were completely wrong"; inBeyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (2008), Fitzpatrick andMichael Geyer critically examined the concept of totalitarianism and made a very detailed comparison of similarities and substantial differences between Hitler and Stalin and made conclusion in agreement with the point of Collins and Waller.[50]
Some historians who did not align themselves with the 'revisionist school' later openly stated that Stalinist system cannot be regarded as totalitarian. For example, the historianRobert Service in his biography of Stalin wrote that "this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes."[51]Eric Hobsbawm wrote that although Stalin indeed wanted to achieve total control of the population, he did not establish an actual totalitarian system, what, as he said, "throws considerable doubt on the usefulness of the term."[52]
According to Fitzpatrick, "totalitarian-model scholarship" - the USSR as a "top-down entity," a monolithic party grounded on ideology and ruling by terror over a passive society – "was in effect a mirror image of the Soviet self-representation, but with the moral signs reversed (instead of the party being always right, it was always wrong)."[9] A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of thereign of Stalin (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and thatstate terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government:[47] to critics of totalitarian model state terror was a mark of a weak regime, andJ. Arch Getty wrote of a "technically weak and politically divided party whose organisational relationships seem more primitive than totalitarian", commenting theSmolensk Archive, and so, the criticism of accepted model began with labelling Stalinism as "inefficient totalitarianism", where the dictator had to rely on "shock methods" to counter the resistance of local autonomies and administrations and political factionalism within the apparatus (including its highest levels);[10] the citizens of the USSR were not devoid ofpersonal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizenspsychologically atomised by the totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union[53]—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, thatinstitutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on anad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose",[54] and many purges and forced collectivisations were local or even "popular initiatives which Stalin and his henchmen' could not control", while the people collectively resisted by such methods as refusing to work efficiently and migrating by the millions.[10] That thelegitimacy of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of the Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upwardsocial mobility for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before theRussian Revolution (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering becameStalinists loyal to the USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism.[53]
The revisionists also conducted new comparative studies of the Third Reich and the USSR, but stressed substantial differences between them. Thus, fascisms lasted much shorter, but experienced cumulative radicalization until their collapse, while Stalinism arose in stabilized and pacified country and fell apart due to an internal crisis after a post-totalitarian period; fascism maintained traditional elites, while Stalinism was a result of revolution and radical social transformation; their ideologies were antipodal; totalitarian model likened "charismatic authorities" of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but they were different: Hitler and Mussolini were popular figures of "providential men" who needed an almost physical contact with the followers and exemplified the totalitarian "New Man" with their bodies and behaviour, while Stalin's cult is described as "afar", purely artificial and much more distant, and Stalin never merged with the people, always staying "hidden from his followers". Mass state violence was also different: Soviet violence was primarily internal, while that of the Nazis primarily external; the former was an ineffective and irrational means of a rational goal, modernization, while Nazis sought extremely irrational goals with rational industrial means; the efficiency of Sovietforced labour camps (Gulags) was measured by the authorities by practical results, like building train tracks, which would eventually lay a basis of modernity, while Nazism mobilized industry for extermination, and the efficiency ofextermination camps was measured by the number of deaths. Thus, the revisionists have argued, both regimes committed inhumane mass violence, but their internal logic was fundamentally different.[9]
In the case ofEast Germany, Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens.[55]
Enzo Traverso and Andrew Vincent point out that the "totalitarian approach" or the theoretical concept of totalitarianism, which presented the idea of a monolithic party, no separation between state and society, and total mobilization of the atomized masses and total control over the state, society and economy, is not applicable not only to the USSR, but also to Nazi Germany and Fascist states as well, since it also did not present a monolithic structure exercising total control over society, but on the contrary, that Nazi bureaucracy was highly "chaotic", anomic and disorganized and disunited, and that Adolf Hitler was a "weak dictator" and "laissez-faire leader", as said by such historians asHans Mommsen andIan Kershaw;[9][10] this description of Nazi Germany was first introduced in 1942 byFranz Leopold Neumann in the workBehemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, where he provocatively presented Hitlerism "a Behemoth, a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy", and later entered historiography of Nazism. In the 1970s, the German historians offunctionalist school presented Nazism as a "polycratic" system grounded on different centers of power – the Nazi party, the army, the economic elites, and the state bureaucracy; to such historians, totalitarian monolithic state and party were just a facade (similarly to Fitzpatrick's assessment of Stalinism).[9][11] Historians like Mommsen andIan Kershaw were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. Michael Mann wrote that these descriptions doubted theories of totalitarianism, since "anything less like the rigid top-down bureaucracy of totalitarian theory is hard to imagine", but that Stalinism and Nazism "belong together", and that "it is only a question of finding the right family name". According to Mann, "totalitarian theorists depicted an unreal level of coherence for any state. Modern states are a long way short of Hegelian or Weberian rational bureaucracy and they rarely act as singular, coherent actors. Normally regimes are factionalised; in an unpredictable world they stumble along with many foul-ups. Second, we should remember Weber's essential point about bureaucracy: it kept politics out of administration. Political and moral values ('value rationality') were settled outside of bureaucratic administration, which then limited itself to finding efficient means of implementing those values ('formal rationality'). Contrary to totalitarian theory, the twentieth-century states most capable of such formally rational bureaucracy were not the dictatorships but the democracies."[10]
The concept of totalitarianism appeared in the debates among German historians and public intellectuals known asHistorikerstreit, in which one of the parties defended the idea of exceptionalism of Nazism, while their conservative opponents believed that the Third Reich may be explained through comparison with the USSR; at the same time, such conservative historians asKarl-Dietrich Bracher andKlaus Hildebrand rejected the notion of Nazism as a branch of generic fascism, on the grounds that the uniqueness of Nazism lay in the person and ideology of Hitler and that Nazism was defined primarily by Hitler's personality and personal beliefs rather than by any external factors.[56]
Stanley Payne wrote that indeed, both Mussolini and Hitler failed to achieve full totalitarianism, and of Mussolini it was said that his regime was not totalitarian (excluding "merely fascist" Italy from totalitarian regimes, started byHannah Arendt who also thought that Nazism became totalitarian only in 1938–1942, is a not unpopular but contested position in contemporary historiography[18]), so Payne concludes that "only a socialist or Communist system can achieve full totalitarianism, since total control requires total institutional revolution that can only be effected by state socialism" (according to Payne, both Lenin and Stalin were totalitarian). Payne writes that "it is easy to argue either that many different kinds of regimes are totalitarian or conversely that none were perfectly total", yet, he writes that the concept "totalitarianism is both valid and useful if defined in the precise and literal sense of a state system that attempts to exercise direct control over all significant aspects of all major national institutions."[57]
Further debates
1980s - 1990s
An 'anti-totalitarian' graffiti in Bucharest, Romania, in 2013, equating Communism with Nazism andIron Guard
Writing in 1987,Walter Laqueur dismissed the arguments of revisionists as "reappraisals of Stalin and Stalinism" and compared them withGerman 'revisionist' historians of Nazism, particularlyErnst Nolte, whom he did not distinguish from functionalist historians of Nazism ("weak dictator" thesis), and called their analysis "Marxist", for which Stalin was "not promising material".[58] As Laqueur wrote, the historians who disagreed with the revisionists "still ha[d] very strong feelings" towards Stalinism and found concepts such as modernisation inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history, unlike the concept of totalitarianism; citingMikhail Gorbachev using the term "totalitarianism", Laqueur wrote that the efforts of the revisionists to abolish the totalitarian model "ha[d] become difficult."[59]
Laure Neumayer posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War".[60] In 1978, the term was 'revived' in Western Europe: such historians asFrançois Furet produced 'revisionist' critical re-evaluations of theFrench Revolution which, according to them, led to the emergence of totalitarianism, while in Italy, "anti-anti-Fascist" historians, notablyRenzo De Felice and after himEmilio Gentile, challenged the 'myth' produced by the hegemonic role of the Communists in the Italian resistance, stated that the choice between Fascism and Communism was equal for Italy, and implied that the latter could be even worse, what led to the resurgence of the concept of totalitarianism as a new dimension of studies of Fascism, while the ones who doubted their theories were "swept away" with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991. The 'revival' of the concept which started in the 1970s in Europe took some time to re-appear in English-language literature, as the 'revisionists' achieved hegemony in the academy, while the 'totalitarians' retained control over public discourse; the European debates were transferred to English-language historiography byMartin Malia. In 1995,[61] Furet made a comparative analysis[62] and used the termtotalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism.[63][64][65] Pipes and Malia continued depicting ideological developments as the grounds of communism, and thus, totalitarianism, drawing a line from utopianism and the French Revolution, which Pipes compared to a "virus", to Lenin, and to describe the nature of totalitarianism, they used the concept ofideocracy. Furet andErnst Nolte, a historian praised by Furet, also identifiedanti-Fascism as Communist totalitarianism; Nolte presented a conflict between totalitarianisms asEuropean Civil War, stating that it was begun by Bolshevism and produced Nazism, an "inverted Bolshevism", thus assessing the latter as only a response to the threat of Bolshevism and the Holocaust andOperation Barbarossa as "both a retaliation and a preventive measure" against Bolshevism. Another major work belonging to the same period wasThe Black Book of Communism (1997), the editor of which,Stephane Courtois, stressed structural homology of totalitarian systems embodied in identity of "class genocide" of Communism and "race genocide" of Nazism, and concluded that Communism was more murderous than Nazism[9][66] or any other ideology from counting and summing the number of victims that can be attributed to 'Communist states' and thus communism in general, what triggered an emotional debate in France on whether Communism should be treated as a single unified phenomena and whether "a blanket condemnation" of Communism as an ideology makes sense.[67] While Nolte and the historians supporting him were not victorious in theHistorikerstreit, but his influence on Furet and the historians outside Germany legitimized his ideas, and they returned to Germany in other forms, what thus led to the resurgence of the concept in Germany. The concept entered historiography in Eastern Europe, in former countries of the Eastern Bloc, describing not only Stalinism, but the whole Communist project in general[61] along with the "Double genocide theory", which summarized Nazi and Stalinist violence into a single metanarrative and became an influential framework of interpretation.[67]
Furet's totalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution, directed against the classic "Marxist" or "Jacobin" interpretation, triggered debates with such historians asMichel Vovelle, who led new studies on it; asEric Hobsbawm concluded in 2007, "the Furet Revolution" was "now over".[68] In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that "[Nazism and Stalinism] were functionally and not ideologically derived [...] Furet, as a distinguished historian of ideas, knows that they belonged to different if structurally convergent taxonomic families"; contrary to conception of anti-Fascism as a mask of Stalinism, Hobsbawm attributed the "alliance" between liberalism and communism, which had enabled capitalism to overcome its crisis, and wrote that Furet's work "reads like a belated product of the Cold War era".[69][70] HistoriansEnzo Traverso andArno J. Mayer and the authorDomenico Losurdo accepted Nolte's concept of the "European Civil War", although set its beginning to 1914 and differently interpreted it, not in terms of struggle between two totalitarianisms.[71]
Michael Parenti (1997) andJames Petras (1999) have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[72] For Petras, theCIA funded theCongress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism."[73]
According to some scholars and authors, such asDomenico Losurdo calling Joseph Stalintotalitarian instead ofauthoritarian has been asserted to be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Losurdo, totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins inChristian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.[74]
After the 1990s
After 1990s, criticisms of totalitarianism as a historical concept and a tool of analysis continued; however, while these critics called for expulsion of the concept from academic field, they stated that its legitimate outside it.[9]Hans Mommsen criticized it as "a descriptive concept, not a theory" with "little or no explanatory power": "But the basis of comparison is a shallow one, largely confined to the apparatus of rule." However, he wrote that "the totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself", and that it is legitimate in "non-scholarly usage".[10]Enzo Traverso in his essay "Totalitarianism Between History and Theory" (2017) dismisses the term as "both useless and irreplaceable" for political science and academic history and citesFranz Leopold Neumann who called it a Weberian "ideal type", an abstraction that does not exist in reality as opposed to concrete totality of history, and believes it to be a term of abuse in Western political science and propaganda, he writes about its legitimacy for storing traumatic collective experience of the 20th century state violence:
Thus, if the concept of totalitarianism continues to be criticized for its ambiguities, weaknesses, and abuses, it probably will not be abandoned. Beyond being a Western banner, it stores the memory of a century that experienced Auschwitz and Kolyma, the death camps of Nazism, the Stalinist Gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields. There lies its legitimacy, which does not need any academic recognition.[9]
In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010), the historianJohn Connelly said thattotalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950stheory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tellVáclav Havel orAdam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word]totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s."[75]
Politics
Early usages
Self-description of autocracies
The term "totalitarian" was used by leaders and senior officials of right-wing and far-right dictatorships and autocracies established during theinterwar period andWorld War II to describe their regimes, most notably byBenito Mussolini ofFascist Italy. While in the triade of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in the latter it became an official self-description, in the second it was also used but to a less extent, and in the first it was not used it all, this pattern of self-description was reversed by later theories of totalitarianism which regarded the USSR as an epitome of totalitarianism, projected this understanding on Nazi Germany and to a less extent on Fascist Italy. Thus, the meaning of the term used in self-descriptions of the Fascists and the one used after World War II were different.[76]
In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government (1922–1943), the anti-fascist academicGiovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as arégime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power (political, military, economic, social) asIl Duce of The State. ThatItalian fascism is a political system with an ideological, utopianworldview unlike therealistic politics of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power.[5] The term "totalitarian" became used by the Fascists themselves: later, the theoretician of Italian FascismGiovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to the ideological termstotalitarianism andtotalitarian in defence ofDuce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the termtotalitario to identify and describe the ideological nature of the societal structures (government, social, economic, political) and the practical goals (economic, geopolitical, social) of the newFascist Italy (1922–1943), which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals."[77] In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian Fascism, Gentile defined and described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (subservience to the state) determined thepublic sphere and theprivate sphere of the lives of the Italian people.[26] That to achieve the Fascistutopia in the imperial future, Italian totalitarianism must politicise human existence into subservience to the state, which Mussolini summarised with the epigram: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."[5][78]
Hannah Arendt, in her bookThe Origins of Totalitarianism, contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938.[79] Arguing that one of the key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garnermass mobilization, Arendt wrote:
"While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations.... [E]ven Mussolini, who was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship andone-party rule."[80]
A 1937 propaganda image featuringFrancisco Franco and his mottoUna patria! Un estado! Un caudillo! resembling the Nazi mottoEin Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. During theSpanish Civil War, Franco proclaimed that hisSpanish State would be modelled after "other countries of totalitarian regime", these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
As the Nazis rose to power in 1933, they began using the concept of totalitarian state propagated by Mussolini and Schmitt to characterize their regime.Joseph Goebbels stated in his 1933 speech: "Our party has always aspired to the totalitarian state. […] the goal of the revolution [National Socialist] has to be a totalitarian state that penetrates into all spheres of public life."[37] However, the concept of totalitarianism was downplayed among the Nazis who preferred the termVolksstaat ("people's state" or "racial state") to describe their regime.[9]
José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones, the leader of the historic Spanishreactionary party called theSpanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA),[81] declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity" and went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, eitherparliament submits or we will eliminate it."[82] GeneralFrancisco Franco was determined not to have competing right-wing parties in Spain and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into exile.[83]
General Franco began using the term 'totalitarian' towards his regime during theSpanish Civil War (1936–1939). On 1 October 1936, he announced his intention to organize Spain "within a broad totalitarian concept of unity and continuity", and practical realization of this intention began with the forced unification of all parties of the Nationalist zone intoFET y de las JONS, the sole ruling party of the new regime; after that, he and his ideologues stressed the "missionary and totalitarian" nature of the new state that was under construction "as in other countries of totalitarian regime", these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and totalitarianism was described as an essentially Spanish way of government. In December 1942, asWorld War II progressed, Franco stopped using the term, and it received a negative connotation as Franco called for a struggle with "Bolshevist totalitarianism."[37][84]
Ioannis Metaxas, the leader of the4th of August Regime in Greece which took some inspiration from Fascism, wrote in his diary that he established "an anti-communist, anti-parliamentary state, a totalitarian state, a state based on agriculture and labour, and therefore anti-plutocratic"; after the Italian and German invasions of Greece, he wrote that "by beating Greece, they were beating what their flag stood for."[85] Although Metaxas did not create the governing single party, he believed that "the whole of the Greek people, the nation, constituted if any, such a political party, excluding of course the Communists and reactionary old political parties or factions.[86]
Ion Antonescu, theAxis-aligned dictator of theKingdom of Romania duringWorld War II, described his regime as "ethnocratic", "ethnic Christian" and as "the national-totalitarian regime, the regime ofnational and social restoration", devoted to the ideology of extreme Romanian nationalism, springing from the Romanian heritage. It enacted antisemitic and racial legislation and was active in perpetrating theHolocaust; however, in 1941, Antonescu dissolved the ruling party, theIron Guard, denounced its terrorist methods, and continued his rule without the single-party system; the regime also spared half of the Jews during its existence.[87][88]
In 1940, the foreign minister of theEmpire of JapanMatsuoka Yosuke expressed in an interview the ideological assumptions prevailing within theShōwa statist government of Japan: "In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt... Fascism will develop in Japan through the people's will. It will come out of love for the Emperor."[89] A document produced by the government's cabinet planning board pointed out that "since the founding of our country, Japan has had an unparalleled totalitarianism... an ideal totalitarianism is manifest in our national polity... Germany's totalitarianism has existed for only eight years, but Japanese [totalitarianism] has shone through 3,000 years of ageless tradition".[90]
Criticism and analysis
Leon Trotsky formulated a concept of totalitarianism in his analysis of the USSR in the 1930s.
In the interwar periodtotalitarianism emerged as a term used in criticism and analysis of dictatorships of the time. In this critical period, the term began to be used to describe fascism and later became a ground of comparison of fascist states and the Soviet Union, but was not understood as an element of a single liberal-totalitarian dychotomy and as something opposite to liberal democracy.[9]
In the 1930s, left-wing critics of Stalinism began applying the term to the Soviet state and use it to compare it to fascist states.Leon Trotsky was one of the first[91] to do so, thus producing perhaps most famous example of such usage of the term by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident.[92] It seems that the first to use the term towards the USSR was the writer and left-wing activistVictor Serge, who did it shortly before his arrest in the USSR in a letter published in France. The same year, Trotsky compared fascist and Soviet bureaucracies, describing both as parasitic, and later stated that "in the last period theSoviet bureaucracy has familiarised itself with many traits of victorious fascism, first of all by getting rid of the control of the party and establishing the cult of the leader." InThe Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky began using the term "totalitarian" to analyse the USSR and compare it with Fascism, attributing to totalitarianism, rooted in "the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history", such features as concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, the abolition of popular control over the leadership, the use of extreme repression, and the elimination of contending loci of power; later he included "the suppression of all freedom to criticize; the subjection of the accused to the military; examining magistrates, a prosecutor and judge in one; a monolithic press whose howlings terrorize the accused and hypnotize public opinion"; Trotsky wrote that the USSR "had become "totalitarian" in character several years before this word arrived from Germany." However, his concept was much less defined than those of the Cold War theorists, and he would have disagreed with their core points: that 'central control and direction of the entire economy' was applicable to fascism, and would have rejected their tendency to depict 'totalitarian' societies as politically monolithic and inherently static, as well as their anti-communist perspective and their description of Lenin as a totalitarian dictator;[93] scholars even argued that for him it was a pejorative, not a sociologal concept based on equating Fascism and socialism, like it was for Cold War theorists.[94]
1938 satirical illustration "Carriers of the New Black Plague" byWilliam Cotton; the caption mentions "Totalitarian Eclipse" threatening democracy.
One of the first people to use the termtotalitarianism in the English language was Austrian writerFranz Borkenau in his 1938 bookThe Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them.[95] The labeltotalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany duringWinston Churchill's speech of 5 October 1938 before theHouse of Commons, in opposition to theMunich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of theSudetenland.[96] Churchill was then abackbencher MP representing theEpping constituency. In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to "a Communist or a Nazi tyranny."[97]
The concept gained legitimacy in 1939 with theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact, after which it became accepted, at least until 1941, to present Stalin and Hitler as "twin dictators" and call Nazism "brown Bolshevism" and Stalinism "red Fascism". The same year, scholars of various disciplines held the first international symposium on totalitarianism in Philadelphia.[98][22] The concept was abandoned in 1941, as the Third Reichinvaded the USSR, and the latter became depicted in Western propaganda as "valiant freedom-loving" ally in the war;[23] among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the filmMission to Moscow (1943), based on the 1941 book of the same name.[28]
In the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–1945), in the lecture series (1945) and book (1946) titledThe Soviet Impact on the Western World, the British historianE. H. Carr said that "the trend away fromindividualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable" in thedecolonising countries ofEurasia. Thatrevolutionary Marxism–Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR'srapid industrialisation (1929–1941) and theGreat Patriotic War (1941–1945) that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of theCommunist bloc only the "blind and incurable" ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies.[99]
Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War, in the essay "Why I Write" (1946), the socialist George Orwell said, "the Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and fordemocratic socialism, as I understand it." That future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use the mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."[100]
Cold War
Anti-totalitarian: Hannah Arendt thwarted thetotalitarian model Kremlinologists who sought to co-opt the thesis ofThe Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) as American anti–Communist propaganda that claimed that everyCommunist state was of the totalitarian model.
InThe Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the political scientistHannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporateNazism andsoviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the oldtyrannies of a military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort ofpolitical certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarianworldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history ofethnic conflict, of the survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history ofclass conflict, of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of theuniversal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal tohistoricism (Law of History) or by anappeal to nature, as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus.[101]
True belief
InThe True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951),Eric Hoffer said that political mass movements, such asItalian Fascism (1922–1943), GermanNazism (1933–1945), and RussianStalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society asculturally superior to themorally decadent societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That suchmass psychology indicates that participating in and then joining a political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both thepublic sphere and in theprivate sphere. In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from the official texts of the totalitarian ideology.[102]
Collaborationism
In "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" (2018) the historian Paul Hanebrink said that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism, because for European Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, the new postwar 'culture war' crystallized as a struggle against Communism. Throughout theEuropean interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians to demonize the Communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis ofsecular materialism and [as] a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order".[103] That throughout Europe, the Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived Communism and communist régimes of government as an existential threat to the moral order of their respective societies; andcollaborated with Fascists and Nazis in the idealistic hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to their root Christian culture.[104]
Totalitarian model
In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the termstotalitarianism,totalitarian, andtotalitarian model, presented inTotalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in the foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, thetotalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm forKremlinology, the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of thepolitburo crafting policy (national and foreign) yieldedstrategic intelligence for dealing with the USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of abanana republic country.[105] As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:
The American political scientistZbigniew Brzezinski popularised 'combating left-wing totalitarianism' in U.S. foreign policy[75] and served as National Security Advisor to the United States PresidentJimmy Carter.[28]
As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that the totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government ofWeimar Germany (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper.[107] Revisionist historians noted the historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into thenomenklatura, the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of the USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy.[108]
The historian of Nazi Germany,Karl Dietrich Bracher said that thetotalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including therevolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state.[109] That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State.[109] Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and the Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that a totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way ofcollective leadership. The American historianWalter Laqueur agreed that Bracher's totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski.[110]
InDemocracy and Totalitarianism (1968) the political scientistRaymond Aron said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:
A one-party state where the ruling party has a monopoly on all political activity.
A state ideology upheld by the ruling party that is given official status as the only authority.
A state monopoly on information; control of the mass communications media to broadcast the official truth.
A state-controlled economy featuring major economic entities under state control.
An ideological police-state terror; criminalisation of political, economic, and professional activities.[115]
In 1980, in a book review ofHow the Soviet Union is Governed (1979), by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of the USSR]."[116] In a book review ofTotalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), byAhmed Saladdin,Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR afterStalin was her attempt tointellectually distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]" as anti-Communist propaganda.[117][citation needed]
Kremlinology
During the Russo–American Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field ofKremlinology (analysing politburo policy politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by thetotalitarian model of the USSR as apolice state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leaderStalin, who heads a monolithic, centralised hierarchy of government.[118] The study of the internal politics of thepolitburo crafting policy at the Kremlin produced two schools of historiographic interpretation of Cold War history: (i) traditionalist Kremlinology and (ii) revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for thetotalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state version ofCommunist Russia. The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of politburo policies upon Soviet society, civil and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography,revisionist Kremlinologists said that the old image of theStalinist USSR of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent upon world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, because the death of Stalin changed Soviet society.[119] After the Cold War and the dissolution of theWarsaw Pact, most revisionist Kremlinologists worked the national archives of ex–Communist states, especially theState Archive of the Russian Federation about Soviet-period Russia.[120][121]
Totalitarian model as an official policy
In the 1950s, the political scientistCarl Joachim Friedrich said thatCommunist states, such asSoviet Russia andRed China, were countries which were systematically controlled by a supreme leader who used the five features of thetotalitarian model of government: (i) an officialdominant ideology that includes acult of personality about the leader, (ii) control of all civil and military weapons, (iii) control of the public and the privatemass communications media, (iv) the use ofstate terrorism to police the populace, and (v) a political party of mass membership who perpetually re-elect The Leader.[122]
In the 1960s, the revisionist Kremlinologists researched the organisations and they also studied the policies of the relatively autonomousbureaucracies that influenced the crafting of high-level policy for governing Soviet society in the USSR.[120] Revisionist Kremlinologists, such asJ. Arch Getty andLynne Viola, transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model byrecognising andreporting that the Soviet government, the communist party, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. The revisionistsocial history indicated that thesocial forces of Soviet society had compelled the Government of the USSR to adjustpublic policy to the actualpolitical economy of a Soviet society composed of pre–War and post–War generations of people with different perceptions of the utility ofCommunist economics for all the Russias.[123] Hence, Russian modern history had outdated thetotalitarian model that was the post–Stalinist perception of the police-state USSR of the 1950s.[116]
InDid Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion,Slavoj Žižek ironically described the concept of totalitarianism as an "ideological antioxidant" similar to the "Celestial Seasonings" green tea that, according to its advertisement, "neutralizes harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals" and wrote that "[t]he notion of 'totalitarianism', far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking".[125]
Saladdin Ahmed criticizes the concept of totalitarianism as formulated by Brzezinski and Friedrich, and to less extent, Arendt, inTotalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019) and notes that their definition of totalitarianism can be invalidated by questioning whether the term 'totalitarian' is applicable to a regime which lacks "any one" of criterion formulated by them: "this was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile", yet it would be absurd to exempt it from the class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone", since while Pinochet did not adopt an "official" ideology, but "ideological hegemony, whereby the dominant ideology becomes internalized and normalized, is far more effective than imposing an official ideology." Saladdin posited that whileChile under Pinochet had no "official" ideology, there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other thanMilton Friedman, the godfather ofneoliberalism and the most influential teacher of theChicago Boys, was Pinochet's adviser". To Saladdin, such hegemonic yet not "official" ideology is much a more effective means of "totalitarian" control of society than an "official" ideology openly imposed by the state, what is exemplified by comparing Chile toNicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, which collapsed within a short period: "No one defended them; no masses poured onto the streets to mourn their deaths. Ceausescu's Romania, as an exemplary Stalinist state, met all of Friedrich and Brzezinski's criteria of a totalitarian state, but it was nowhere close to achieving total domination." In this sense, Saladdin criticised the concept of totalitarianism because it was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism. He also criticized the other criterion of totalitarianism formulated by Brzezinski, Friedrich and Arendt. "In sum, a regime that does not meet all of Friedrich and Brzezinski's criteria would not necessarily be nontotalitarian or even less totalitarian, if we agree that totalitarianism ultimately amounts to total domination. If anything, realizing a greater degree of domination would necessarily require going beyond each of Friedrich and Brzezinski's criteria. Even without empirical cases which can always be dismissed to spare the proposed criteria – we could, with little difficulty, imagine a system that demonstrates none of the six criteria but is nonetheless more efficient as a totalitarian system. This will become clearer over the course of the rest of this chapter, but it should already be evident that the pioneers of the Cold War definition of totalitarianism molded their conception on the least developed of totalitarian systems... Tailored to Stalinism, [totalitarianism] aimed to predetermine that the negation of liberal capitalism would logically and empirically lead to a horrific system of total and arbitrary terror"; "Philosophically, their account of totalitarianism is invalid because it stipulates "criteria" that amount to an abstracted description of Stalin's USSR, rendering the notion predeterministic."[117]
In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten,Vladimir Tismăneanu, and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms in different political systems but all of them focus onutopianism,scientism, orpolitical violence. They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also sawpolymathy as a thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups.[126][127][128] Their arguments have been criticised by other scholars due to their partiality and anachronism.Juan Francisco Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an "invented tradition" and he believes that the notion of "moderndespotism" is a "reverse anachronism"; for Fuentes, "the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present".[129]
Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According toShoshana Zuboff, the economic pressures of modernsurveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action.[130]Toby Ord believed that George Orwell's fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanenttechnological dystopia. Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot ofNineteen Eighty-Four. In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently".[131] That same year,Bertrand Russell wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states".[132]
In 2016,The Economist described China's developedSocial Credit System underChinese Communist Partygeneral secretaryXi Jinping'sadministration, to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, astotalitarian.[133] Opponents of China's ranking system say that it is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilised and law-abiding society.[134] Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian.[135]
InRevolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022), the political scientistsSteven Levitsky and Lucan Way said that nascent revolutionary régimes usually became totalitarian régimes if not destroyed with a military invasion. Such a revolutionary régime begins as asocial revolution independent of the existing social structures of the state (not political succession, election to office, or a militarycoup d'état). For example, theSoviet Union andMaoist China were founded after the years longRussian Civil War (1917–1922) andChinese Civil War (1927–1936 and 1945–1949), respectively, not merely state succession. They produce totalitarian dictatorships with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesiveruling class comprising the military and the political élites, (ii) a strong and loyal coercive apparatus of police and military forces to suppress dissent, and (iii) the destruction of rival political parties, organisations, and independent centres of socio-political power. Moreover, the unitary functioning of the characteristics of totalitarianism allow a totalitarian government to perdure against economic crises (internal and external), large-scale failures of policy, mass social-discontent, and political pressure from other countries.[136] Some totalitarianone-party states were established throughcoups orchestrated by military officers loyal to a vanguard party that advancedsocialist revolution, such as theSocialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962),[137]Syrian Arab Republic (1963),[138] andDemocratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978).[139]
Possible future emergence
Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes includebrain-reading and various applications ofartificial intelligence.[140][141][142] PhilosopherNick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanentworld government, and in turn the establishment of such a government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship.[143]
TheTaliban is a totalitarianSunni Islamist militant group and political movement inAfghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of theSoviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from1996 to 2001 andreturned to power in 2021, controlling the entirety of Afghanistan. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition ofPashtunwali culture of the majorityPashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensiveviolations of women's rights.[144]
Criticism of the classification of Islamism as totalitarianism
Enzo Traverso, a critic of totalitarianism as a theoretical concept of historical and political sciences, is also critical of the usage of it in relation toIslamist movements likeISIS and theTaliban and their state formations: according to Traverso, such notion contradicts the very theoretical concept of totalitarianism. Systems which are commonly described as totalitarian, fascism and communism, sought to create autopian "New Man" and as a result, they set their projects toward the future, not to revive old forms ofabsolutism, as noted byTzvetan Todorov. "Thereactionary modernism ofIslamic terrorism, on the contrary, employs modern technologies in order to return to the original purity of a mythical Islam. If it has utopian tendencies, they look to the past rather than the future." More to it, totalitarianism has been applied to secular movements which have been described as irrational "political religions" which seek to abolish traditional religions, liturgies and symbols and replace them with their own liturgies and symbols, whileIslamic fundamentalism, on the contrary, is a politicized religion and a reaction to secularization and modernisation. Besides that, as a form of violence,terrorism is usually described as antipodal to state violence; while fascism was a reaction to democracy, Islamism arose in authoritarian, but weak states. "Speaking of a "theocratic" totalitarianism makes this concept even more flexible and ambiguous than ever, once again confirming its essential function: not critically interpreting history and the world, but rather fighting an enemy". Traverso writes that the usage of the term began after9/11 by Western propaganda, which previously used it against the other enemies while maintaining the geopolitical interests of the West. He notes that the Islamic state which most resembles the concept of totalitarianism,Saudi Arabia, is an ally of the West and as a result, it cannot be considered a part of the "Axis of Evil", and for that reason, as he believes, Saudi Arabia is rarely described as "totalitarian", unlikeIran.[9]
Francoist Spain (1936–1975), under the dictatorFrancisco Franco, had been commonly characterized as totalitarian until 1964, whenJuan Linz challenged this characterization and instead described Francoism as "authoritarian" because of its "limited degree of political pluralism" caused by the struggle between 'Francoist families' (Falangists, Carlists, etc.) within the sole legal partyFET y de las JONS and theMovimiento Nacional and by other such features as, according to Linz, lack of 'totalitarian' ideology, as Franco relied onNational Catholicism and traditionalism. Such revision caused a major debate, some critics of Linz felt that his concept may be a form of acquittal of Francoism and did not concern its early phase (often called "First Francoism"). Later debates focused on whether the regime could be described as 'fascist' rather than whether it was totalitarian; some historians stressed the traits of a military dictatorship, while the others emphasized the Fascist component, calling the regime apara-fascist or 'fascistized' dictatorship. WhileEnrique Moradiellos notes that "it is now increasingly rare to define Francoism as a truly fascist and totalitarian regime", although he writes that the debates on Francoism haven't finished yet,[37]Ismael Saz notes that "it has also begun to be recognised that" Francoism underwent a "totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian, fascist or quasi-fascist" phase.[76] The historians who continue to criticize Linz and describe the regime as totalitarian usually limit such characterization to ten to twenty years of the "First Francoism."[152][153][154][155]
Linz wrote that "the heteronomous control of the ideological content of Catholic thought by a universal church and specifically by the Pope is one of the most serious obstacles to the creation of a truly totalitarian system..."[156] This argument is also debated: "The frequent and saturated references to Francoist Catholic humanism... coming from Christian theology, could hardly conceal the fact that the individual was only understood as a citizen to the extent of his adherence to the Catholic, hierarchical and economically privatist community that the military uprising had saved";[157] "Catholic values that permeated the conservative ideological substratum... were precisely what was wielded by the Francoist Spanish political doctrine of the late thirties and early forties to justify the need for the constitution of a totalitarian State at the service and expansion of the Catholic religion."[158]
Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender ofCatholicism, the declaredstate religion.[159]Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by the Church, along with divorces. Divorce,contraception and abortions were forbidden.[160] According to historianStanley G. Payne, an opponent of describing Francoism as a totalitarian system, Franco had more day-to-day power thanAdolf Hitler orJoseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne, the lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco's government "the most purely arbitrary in the world."[161] However, from 1959 to 1974 the "Spanish Miracle" took place under the leadership oftechnocrats, many of whom were members ofOpus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the oldFalangist guard.[162] Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandonedautarky, reassigning economic authority from the isolationistFalangist movement.[163] This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the "Spanish miracle". This is comparable toDe-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, whereFrancoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree ofeconomic freedom.[164][full citation needed][failed verification]
^abcdCinpoes, Radu (2010).Nationalism and Identity in Romania: A History of Extreme Politics from the Birth of the State to EU Accession. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury. p. 70.ISBN978-1848851665.
^Rummel, Rudolph (1994). "Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers". In Charny, Israel W.; Horowitz, Irving Louis (eds.).The Widening Circle of Genocide (1st ed.).Routledge. pp. 3–40.doi:10.4324/9781351294089-2.ISBN9781351294089.
^William Ebenstein (1980).American Democracy in World Perspective.Harper & Row. p. 182.ISBN9780060418618.The second category includes one-party states in Asia and Africa such as Burma, Iraq, and Zaire - which are not totalitarian but allow only one political party.
^abHannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. Princeton University Press. 21 November 2023.ISBN978-0-691-22612-5.Of course, the exclusion of fascist Italy from the totalitarian family is not a surprising claim today. Those who separate ('merely' fascist) Italy from (properly totalitarian) Germany and Russia are hardly a minority among recent scholars, though their view remains contested.
^Wild, John (1964).Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 23. "Popper is committing a serious historical error in attributing the organic theory of the State to Plato, and accusing him of all the fallacies of post–Hegelian and Marxist historicism — the theory that history is controlled by the inexorable laws governing the behaviour of superindividual social entities of which human beings and their free choices are merely subordinate manifestations."
^Levinson, Ronald B. (1970).In Defense of Plato. New York: Russell and Russell. p. 20. "In spite of the high rating, one must accord his [Popper's] initial intention of fairness, his hatred for the enemies of the 'open society', his zeal to destroy whatever seems, to him, destructive of the welfare of mankind, has led him into the extensive use of what may be calledterminological counter-propaganda. [...] With a few exceptions in Popper's favour, however, it is noticeable that [book] reviewers possessed of special competence in particular fields – and here Lindsay is again to be included – have objected to Popper's conclusions in those very fields. [...] Social scientists and social philosophers have deplored his radical denial of historical causation, together with his espousal of Hayek's systematic distrust of larger programs of social reform; historical students of philosophy have protested his [Popper's] violent, polemical handling of Plato, Aristotle, and, particularly, Hegel; ethicists have found contradictions in the ethical theory ('critical dualism') upon which his [anti-Modernist] polemic is largely based."
^Delzell, Charles F. (Spring 1988)."Remembering Mussolini".The Wilson Quarterly.12 (2). Washington, D.C.: Wilson Quarterly: 127.JSTOR40257305.Archived from the original on 2022-05-13. Retrieved2022-04-24. Retrieved April 8, 2022
^Schmitt, Carl (1927). University of Chicago Press (ed.).Der Begriff des Politischen [The Concept of the Political] (in German) (1996 ed.). Rutgers University Press. p. 22.ISBN0226738868.{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
^Siegel, Achim (1998).The Totalitarian Paradigm After the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment (hardback ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 200.ISBN978-9042005525.Concepts of totalitarianism became most widespread at the height of the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, especially since the Korean War, they were condensed into a far-reaching, even hegemonic, ideology, by which the political elites of the Western world tried to explain and even to justify the Cold War constellation.
^Guilhot, Nicholas (2005).The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order (hardcover ed.). New York City: Columbia University Press. p. 33.ISBN978-0231131247.The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as 'lies' and as the product of deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.
^Reisch, George A. (2005).How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge University Press. pp. 153–154.ISBN978-0521546898.
^Defty, Brook (2007). "2. Launching the New Propaganda Policy, 1948. 3. Building a Concerted Counter-offensive: Co-operation with other powers. 4. Close and Continuous Liaison: British and American co-operation, 1950–51. 5. A Global Propaganda Offensive: Churchill and the revival of political warfare".Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953: The Information Research Department (1st paperback ed.). London: Routledge.ISBN978-0714683614.
^abLaqueur, Walter (1987).The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present. New York: Scribner's. pp. 225–227.ISBN978-0684189031.
^Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (8 September 2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas".Stalin: A New History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 4–5.ISBN978-1-139-44663-1.
^Rubin, Eli (2008).Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.ISBN978-1469606774.
^Laqueur, Walter (1987).The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present. New York: Scribner's. p. 224, 228.ISBN978-0684189031.
^Laqueur, Walter (1987).The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present. New York: Scribner's. p. 233.ISBN978-0684189031.
^Neumayer, Laure (2018).The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War. Routledge.ISBN9781351141741.
^Schönpflug, Daniel (2007). "Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements".European History Quarterly.37 (2):265–290.doi:10.1177/0265691407075595.S2CID143074271.
^Singer, Daniel (17 April 1995)."The Sound and the Furet".The Nation. Archived fromthe original on 17 March 2008. Retrieved7 August 2020.Furet, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, describes Bolsheviks and Nazis as totalitarian twins, conflicting yet united.
^Traverso, Enzo. "The New Anti-Communism: Rereading the Twentieth Century" // History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike aynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007), 138–155.,
^Parenti, Michael (1997).Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. San Francisco: City Lights Books. pp. 41–58.ISBN978-0872863293.
^abConnelly, John (2010). "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word".Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.11 (4):819–835.doi:10.1353/kri.2010.0001.S2CID143510612.
^Nemoianu, Virgil (December 1982). "Review ofEnd and Beginnings".Modern Language Notes.97 (5):1235–1238.
^Churchill, Winston (5 October 1938).The Munich Agreement (Speech).House of Commons of the United Kingdom: International Churchill Society.Archived from the original on 26 June 2020. Retrieved7 August 2020.We in this country, as in other Liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian states who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds. Many of those countries, in fear of the rise of the Nazi power, ... loathed the idea of having this arbitrary rule of the totalitarian system thrust upon them, and hoped that a stand would be made.
^Hanebrink, Paul (July 2018). "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?".Journal of Contemporary History.53 (3): 624.doi:10.1177/0022009417704894.S2CID158028188.
^Hanebrink, Paul (July 2018). "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?".Journal of Contemporary History.53 (3):622–643.doi:10.1177/0022009417704894.S2CID158028188.
^Laqueur, Walter (1987).The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present. New York: Scribner's. pp. 186–189,233–234.ISBN978-0684189031.
^abKershaw, Ian (2000).The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London; New York: Arnold; Oxford University Press. p. 25.ISBN978-0340760284.OCLC43419425.
^Laqueur, Walter (1987).The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present. New York: Scribner's. p. 241.ISBN978-0684189031.
^Khamis, B. Gold, Vaughn, Sahar, Paul, Katherine (2013). "22. Propaganda in Egypt and Syria's "Cyberwars": Contexts, Actors, Tools, and Tactics". In Auerbach, Castronovo, Jonathan, Russ (ed.).The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016: Oxford University Press. p. 422.ISBN978-0-19-976441-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^abZimmerman, William (September 1980). "Review: How the Soviet Union is Governed".Slavic Review.39 (3). Cambridge University Press:482–486.doi:10.2307/2497167.JSTOR2497167.
^abSaladdin, Ahmed (2019).Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura. Albany: SUNY Press. p. 7.ISBN978-1438472935.
^Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas".Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 3.ISBN978-1139446631.Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.
^abDavies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas".Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 4–5.ISBN978-1139446631.Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was, increasingly, challenged by later revisionist historians. In hisOrigins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on anad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose. Getty's work was influenced by political [the] science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.
^Fitzpatrick, Sheila (November 2007). "Revisionism in Soviet History".History and Theory.46 (4):77–91.doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00429.x.ISSN1468-2303.. . . the Western scholars who, in the 1990s and 2000s, were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
^Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas".Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–4.ISBN978-1139446631.In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader.' There was, of course, an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled, unquestioningly, by his subordinates.
^Saad, Asma (21 February 2018)."Eritrea's Silent Totalitarianism".McGill Journal of Political Studies (21).Archived from the original on 7 October 2018. Retrieved7 August 2020.
^Žižek, Slavoj (2002).Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London and New York: Verso. p. 169.ISBN9781859844250.
^Shorten, Richard (2012).Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present. Palgrave.ISBN978-0230252073.
^Tismăneanu, Vladimir (2012).The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. University of California Press.ISBN978-0520954175.
^Tucker, Aviezer (2015).The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework. Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-1316393055.
^Fuentes, Juan Francisco (2015). "How Words Reshape the Past: The 'Old, Old Story of Totalitarianism".Politics, Religion & Ideology.16 (2–3):282–297.doi:10.1080/21567689.2015.1084928.S2CID155157905.
^Zuboff, Shoshana (2019).The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs.ISBN978-1610395694.OCLC1049577294.
^Ord, Toby (2020). "Future Risks".The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Bloomsbury Publishing.ISBN978-1526600196.
^Levitsky, Steven; Way, Lucan (13 September 2022).Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism. Princeton University Press.ISBN978-0691169521.
^Rummel, R.J. (1994). "Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers.". In Charney, Israel W. (ed.).Widening circle of genocide. Transaction Publishers. p. 5.
Wieland, Carsten (2018). "6: De-neutralizing Aid: All Roads Lead to Damascus".Syria and the Neutrality Trap: The Dilemmas of Delivering Humanitarian Aid Through Violent Regimes. London: I.B. Tauris. p. 68.ISBN978-0-7556-4138-3.
Meininghaus, Esther (2016).Creating Consent in Ba'thist Syria: Women and Welfare in a Totalitarian State. London: I. B. Tauris. pp. 69, 70.ISBN978-1-78453-115-7.
Tucker, Ernest (2019). "21: Middle East at the End of the Cold War, 1979–1993".The Middle East in Modern World History (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. p. 303.ISBN978-1-138-49190-8.LCCN2018043096.
S.Margolis, Eric (2005). "2: The Bravest Men on Earth".War at the top of the World. 29New York: Routledge. pp. 14, 15.ISBN0-415-92712-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
^Helbing, Dirk; Frey, Bruno S.; Gigerenzer, Gerd; Hafen, Ernst; Hagner, Michael; Hofstetter, Yvonne; van den Hoven, Jeroen; Zicari, Roberto V.; Zwitter, Andrej (2019)."Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?".Towards Digital Enlightenment. pp. 73–98.doi:10.1007/978-3-319-90869-4_7.ISBN978-3-319-90868-7.S2CID46925747.Archived(PDF) from the original on 2022-05-26. (also published inHelbing, D.; Frey, B. S.; Gigerenzer, G.; et al. (2019). "Will democracy survive big data and artificial intelligence?".Towards Digital Enlightenment: Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution. Springer, Cham. pp. 73–98.ISBN978-3319908694.)
^Bostrom, Nick (February 2013). "Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority".Global Policy.4 (1):15–31.doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12002.
^*Sakhi, Nilofar (December 2022). "The Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan and Security Paradox".Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs.9 (3):383–401.doi:10.1177/23477970221130882.S2CID253945821.Afghanistan is now controlled by a militant group that operates out of a totalitarian ideology.
Madadi, Sayed (6 September 2022)."Dysfunctional centralization and growing fragility under Taliban rule".Middle East Institute. Retrieved28 November 2022.In other words, the centralized political and governance institutions of the former republic were unaccountable enough that they now comfortably accommodate the totalitarian objectives of the Taliban without giving the people any chance to resist peacefully.
Sadr, Omar (23 March 2022)."Afghanistan's Public Intellectuals Fail to Denounce the Taliban".Fair Observer. Retrieved28 November 2022.The Taliban government currently installed in Afghanistan is not simply another dictatorship. By all standards, it is a totalitarian regime.
^Filipec, Ondrej (2020).The Islamic State From Terrorism to Totalitarian Insurgency. Routledge.ISBN9780367457631.
^Peter, Bernholz (February 2019). "Supreme Values, Totalitarianism, and Terrorism".The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice. Vol. 1.
^Haslett, Allison (2021)."The Islamic State: A Political-Religious Totalitarian Regime".Scientia et Humanitas: A Journal of Student Research.Middle Tennessee State University.Islamic State embraces the most violent, extreme traits of Jihadi-Salafism. the State merged religious dogma and state control together to create apolitical-religious totalitarian regime that was not bound by physical borders
Bernholz, Peter. "Ideocracy and totalitarianism: A formal analysis incorporating ideology",Public Choice 108, 2001, pp. 33–75.
Bernholz, Peter. "Ideology, sects, state and totalitarianism. A general theory". In: H. Maier and M. Schaefer (eds.):Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Vol. II (Routledge, 2007), pp. 246–270.
Borkenau, Franz,The Totalitarian Enemy (London: Faber and Faber 1940).
Bracher, Karl Dietrich, "The Disputed Concept of Totalitarianism," pp. 11–33 fromTotalitarianism Reconsidered edited by Ernest A. Menze (Kennikat Press, 1981)ISBN0804692688.
Congleton, Roger D. "Governance by true believers: Supreme duties with and without totalitarianism."Constitutional Political Economy 31.1 (2020): 111–141.online
Connelly, John. "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word"Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11#4 (2010) 819–835.online.
Devlin, Nicholas. "Hannah Arendt and Marxist Theories of Totalitarianism."Modern Intellectual History (2021): 1–23online.
Diamond, Larry. "The road to digital unfreedom: The threat of postmodern totalitarianism."Journal of Democracy 30.1 (2019): 20–24.excerpt
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Michael Geyer, eds.Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Friedrich, Carl andZ. K. Brzezinski,Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 1st ed. 1956, 2nd ed. 1965).
Gach, Nataliia. "From totalitarianism to democracy: Building learner autonomy in Ukrainian higher education."Issues in Educational Research 30.2 (2020): 532–554.online
Gleason, Abbott.Totalitarianism: The Inner History Of The Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),ISBN0195050177.
Gray, Phillip W.Totalitarianism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2023),ISBN9781032183732.
Gregor, A.Totalitarianism and political religion (Stanford University Press, 2020).
Hanebrink, Paul. "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?"Journal of Contemporary History (July 2018) Vol. 53, Issue 3, pp. 622–643
Hermet, Guy, with Pierre Hassner and Jacques Rupnik,Totalitarismes (Paris: Éditions Economica, 1984).
Jainchill, Andrew, and Samuel Moyn. "French democracy between totalitarianism and solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and revisionist historiography."Journal of Modern History 76.1 (2004): 107–154.online
Joscelyne, Sophie. "Norman Mailer and American Totalitarianism in the 1960s."Modern Intellectual History 19.1 (2022): 241–267online.
Keller, Marcello Sorce. "Why is Music so Ideological, Why Do Totalitarian States Take It So Seriously",Journal of Musicological Research, XXVI (2007), no. 2–3, pp. 91–122.
Kirkpatrick, Jeane,Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and reason in politics (London: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
Laqueur, Walter,The Fate of the Revolution Interpretations of Soviet History From 1917 to the Present (London: Collier Books, 1987)ISBN002034080X.
Menze, Ernest, ed.Totalitarianism reconsidered (1981)online essays by experts
Murray, Ewan.Shut Up: Tale of Totalitarianism (2005).
Nicholls, A.J. "Historians and Totalitarianism: The Impact of German Unification."Journal of Contemporary History 36.4 (2001): 653–661.
Patrikeeff, Felix. "Stalinism, Totalitarian Society and the Politics of 'Perfect Control'",Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, (Summer 2003), Vol. 4 Issue 1, pp. 23–46.
Rak, Joanna, and Roman Bäcker. "Theory behind Russian Quest for Totalitarianism. Analysis of Discursive Swing in Putin's Speeches."Communist and Post-Communist Studies 53.1 (2020): 13–26online.
Ritterbusch,Paul.Demokratie und Diktatur : über Wesen und Wirklichkeit des westeuropäischen Parteienstaates (Berlin; Wien : Deutscher Rechtsverlag, 1939).online.
Roberts, David D.Totalitarianism (John Wiley & Sons, 2020).
Saxonberg, Steven.Pre-modernity, totalitarianism and the non-banality of evil: A comparison of Germany, Spain, Sweden and France (Springer Nature, 2019).
Schapiro, Leonard.Totalitarianism (London: The Pall Mall Press, 1972).
Selinger, William. "The politics of Arendtian historiography: European federation and the origins of totalitarianism."Modern Intellectual History 13.2 (2016): 417–446.
Skotheim, Robert Allen.Totalitarianism and American social thought (1971)online
Traverso, Enzo,Le Totalitarisme : Le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Poche, 2001).
Tuori, Kaius. "Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II."Law and History Review 37.2 (2019): 605–638online.
Žižek, Slavoj,Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001).online
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
