Totalitarianism is a political concept that
defines a mode of government, which prohibits
opposition parties, restricts individual opposition
to the state and its claims, and exercises
an extremely high degree of control over public
and private life. It is regarded as the most
extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.
Political power in totalitarian states has
often involved rule by one leader and an all-encompassing
propaganda campaign, which is disseminated
through the state-controlled mass media and
are often marked by political repression,
personality cultism, control over the economy
and restriction of speech, mass surveillance
and widespread use of state terrorism. Historian
Robert Conquest describes "totalitarian" states
as recognizing no limits to their authority
in any sphere of public or private life and
extending that authority wherever feasible.The
concept was first developed in the 1920s by
the Weimar jurist and later Nazi academic
Carl Schmitt as well as Italian fascists.
Italian fascist Benito Mussolini said "Everything
within the state, nothing outside the state,
nothing against the state". Schmitt used the
term Totalstaat in his influential 1927 work
on the legal basis of an all-powerful state,
The Concept of the Political. Later, the concept
was used extensively to compare Nazism and
Stalinism. The Economist has described China's
recently developed social credit system to
screen and rank its citizens based on their
personal behavior as "totalitarian".Totalitarian
regimes are different from other authoritarian
ones. The latter denotes a state in which
the single power holder – an individual
"dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise
small group of political elite – monopolizes
political power. "[The] authoritarian state
[...] is only concerned with political power
and as long as that is not contested it gives
society a certain degree of liberty". Authoritarianism
"does not attempt to change the world and
human nature". In contrast, a totalitarian
regime attempts to control virtually all aspects
of the social life, including the economy,
education, art, science, private life and
morals of citizens. Some totalitarian governments
may promote an elaborate ideology: "The officially
proclaimed ideology penetrates into the deepest
reaches of societal structure and the totalitarian
government seeks to completely control the
thoughts and actions of its citizens". It
also mobilizes the whole population in pursuit
of its goals. Carl Joachim Friedrich writes
that "a totalist ideology, a party reinforced
by a secret police, and monopoly control of
[...] industrial mass society" are the three
features of totalitarian regimes that distinguish
them from other autocracies.
== Early concepts and use ==
The notion of totalitarianism as a "total"
political power by the state was formulated
in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola, who described
Italian Fascism as a system fundamentally
different from conventional dictatorships.
The term was later assigned a positive meaning
in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s
most prominent philosopher and leading theorist
of fascism. He used the term totalitario to
refer to the structure and goals of the new
state, which were to provide the "total representation
of the nation and total guidance of national
goals". He described totalitarianism as a
society in which the ideology of the state
had influence, if not power, over most of
its citizens. According to Benito Mussolini,
this system politicizes everything spiritual
and human: "Everything within the state, nothing
outside the state, nothing against the state".
One of the first to use the term "totalitarianism"
in the English language was the Austrian writer
Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist
International, in which he commented that
it united the Soviet and German dictatorships
more than it divided them. The label "totalitarian"
was twice affixed to the Hitler regime during
Winston Churchill's speech of October 5, 1938
before the House of Commons in opposition
to the Munich Agreement, by which France and
Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's
annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was
then a backbencher MP representing the Epping
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".The leader of the historic
Spanish reactionary conservative party called
the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous
Right 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, either
parliament submits or we will eliminate it".George
Orwell made frequent use of the word totalitarian
and its cognates in multiple essays published
in 1940, 1941 and 1942. In his essay Why I
Write, he wrote: "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 for democratic socialism, as I understand
it".During a 1945 lecture series entitled
The Soviet Impact on the Western World (published
as a book in 1946), the pro-Soviet British
historian E. H. Carr claimed: "The trend away
from individualism and towards totalitarianism
is everywhere unmistakable" and that Marxism–Leninism
was by far the most successful type of totalitarianism
as proved by Soviet industrial growth and
the Red Army's role in defeating Germany.
Only the "blind and incurable" could ignore
the trend towards totalitarianism, said Carr.In
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and
The Poverty of Historicism (1961), Karl Popper
articulated an influential critique of totalitarianism:
in both works, he contrasted the "open society"
of liberal democracy with totalitarianism
and argued that the latter is grounded in
the belief that history moves toward an immutable
future in accordance with knowable laws.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah
Arendt argued that Nazi and Communist regimes
were new forms of government and not merely
updated versions of the old tyrannies. According
to Arendt, the source of the mass appeal of
totalitarian regimes is their ideology, which
provides a comforting, single answer to the
mysteries of the past, present and future.
For Nazism, all history is the history of
race struggle and for Marxism all history
is the history of class struggle. Once that
premise is accepted, all actions of the state
can be justified by appeal to nature or the
law of history, justifying their establishment
of authoritarian state apparatus.In addition
to Arendt, many scholars from a variety of
academic backgrounds and ideological positions
have closely examined totalitarianism. Among
the most noted commentators on totalitarianism
are Raymond Aron, Lawrence Aronsen, Franz
Borkenau, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Carl Joachim
Friedrich, Eckhard Jesse, Leopold Labedz,
Walter Laqueur, Claude Lefort, Juan Linz,
Richard Löwenthal, Karl Popper, Richard Pipes,
Leonard Schapiro and Adam Ulam. Each one of
these describes totalitarianism in slightly
different ways, but they all agree that totalitarianism
seeks to mobilize entire populations in support
of an official state ideology and is intolerant
of activities which are not directed towards
the goals of the state, entailing repression
or state control of business, labour unions,
non-profit organizations, religious organizations
and buildings and political parties.
== Cold War anti-totalitarianism ==
The concept became prominent in Western anti-communist
political discourse during the Cold War era
as a tool to convert pre-war anti-fascism
into postwar anti-communism.The political
scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski
were primarily responsible for expanding the
usage of the term in university social science
and professional research, reformulating it
as a paradigm for the Soviet Union as well
as fascist regimes. Friedrich and Brzezinski
argue that a totalitarian system has the following
six, mutually supportive, defining characteristics:
Elaborate guiding ideology.
Single mass party, typically led by a dictator.
System of terror, using such instruments as
violence and secret police.
Monopoly on weapons.
Monopoly on the means of communication.
Central direction and control of the economy
through state planning.Totalitarian regimes
in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union had
initial origins in the chaos that followed
in the wake of World War I and allowed totalitarian
movements to seize control of the government
while the sophistication of modern weapons
and communications enabled them to effectively
establish what Friedrich and Brzezinski called
a "totalitarian dictatorship". Some social
scientists have criticized Friedrich and Brzezinski's
anti-totalitarian approach, arguing that the
Soviet system, both as a political and as
a social entity, was in fact better understood
in terms of interest groups, competing elites,
or even in class terms (using the concept
of the nomenklatura as a vehicle for a new
ruling class). These critics pointed to evidence
of popular support for the regime and widespread
dispersion of power, at least in the implementation
of policy, among sectoral and regional authorities.
For some followers of this pluralist approach,
this was evidence of the ability of the regime
to adapt to include new demands. However,
proponents of the totalitarian model claimed
that the failure of the system to survive
showed not only its inability to adapt, but
the mere formality of supposed popular participation.
The German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher,
whose work is primarily concerned with Nazi
Germany, argues that the "totalitarian typology"
as developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski is
an excessively inflexible model and failed
to consider the "revolutionary dynamic" that
Bracher asserts is at the heart of totalitarianism.
Bracher maintains that the essence of totalitarianism
is the total claim to control and remake all
aspects of society combined with an all-embracing
ideology, the value on authoritarian leadership
and the pretence of the common identity of
state and society, which distinguished the
totalitarian "closed" understanding of politics
from the "open" democratic understanding.
Unlike the Friedrich-Brzezinski definition,
Bracher argued that totalitarian regimes did
not require a single leader and could function
with a collective leadership, which led the
American historian Walter Laqueur to argue
that Bracher's definition seemed to fit reality
better than the Friedrich-Brzezinski definition.In
his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer argues
that mass movements like Stalinism, fascism
and Nazism had a common trait in picturing
Western democracies and their values as decadent,
with people "too soft, too pleasure-loving
and too selfish" to sacrifice for a higher
cause, which for them implies an inner moral
and biological decay. He further claims that
those movements offered the prospect of a
glorious future to frustrated people, enabling
them to find a refuge from the lack of personal
accomplishments in their individual existence.
The individual is then assimilated into a
compact collective body and "fact-proof screens
from reality" are established.
== Later research ==
In the 1990s, François Furet used the term
"totalitarian twins" to link Stalinism and
Nazism. Eric Hobsbawm criticized Furet for
his temptation to stress a common ground between
two systems of different ideological roots.In
the field of Soviet history, the totalitarian
concept has been disparaged by the revisionist
school, some of whose more prominent members
were Sheila Fitzpatrick, Jerry F. Hough, William
McCagg, Robert W. Thurston and J. Arch Getty.
Though their individual interpretations differ,
the revisionists have argued that the Soviet
state under Joseph Stalin was institutionally
weak, that the level of terror was much exaggerated
and that—to the extent it occurred—it
reflected the weaknesses rather than the strengths
of the Soviet state. Fitzpatrick argued that
the Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union provided
an increased social mobility and therefore
a chance for a better life.Writing in 1987,
Walter Laqueur said that the revisionists
in the field of Soviet history were guilty
of confusing popularity with morality and
of making highly embarrassing and not very
convincing arguments against the concept of
the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state.
Laqueur argued that the revisionists' arguments
with regard to Soviet history were highly
similar to the arguments made by Ernst Nolte
regarding German history. Laqueur asserted
that concepts such as modernization were inadequate
tools for explaining Soviet history while
totalitarianism was not.Laqueur's argument
has been criticized by modern revisionist
historians, such as Paul Buhle, who claim
that Laqueur wrongly equates Cold-war revisionism
with the German revisionism. The latter reflected
a "revanchist, military-minded conservative
nationalism". More recently, Enzo Traverso
has attacked the creators of the concept of
totalitarianism, who invented it to designate
the enemies of the West. For Domenico Losurdo,
totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with
origins in Christian theology, and that 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 USSR in the
dock together, serving the anti-communism
of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than
reflecting intellectual research. Other scholars,
such as F. William Engdahl, Sheldon Wolin
and Slavoj Žižek, have linked totalitarianism
to capitalism and liberalism and used concepts,
such as totalitarian democracy, inverted totalitarianism
or totalitarian capitalism.
In the 2010s, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Richard
Shorten and Aviezer Tucker argued that totalitarian
ideologies can take different forms in different
political systems, but all of them focus on
utopianism, scientism and/or political violence.
They think that both Nazism and Soviet Communism
emphasised the role of specialisation in modern
societies and saw polymathy as "a thing of
the past"; both claimed to have statistical
scientific support for their claims, which
led to a strict "ethical" control of culture,
psychological violence and persecution of
entire groups. Their arguments have been criticised
by other scholars due to their partiality
and anachronism. For instance, Juan Francisco
Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an “invented
tradition” and the use of notion of “modern
despotism” as 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.”
== 
Totalitarianism in architecture ==
Non-political aspects of the culture and motifs
of totalitarian countries have themselves
often been labeled innately "totalitarian".
For example, Theodore Dalrymple, a British
author, physician and political commentator,
has written for City Journal that brutalist
structures are an expression of totalitarianism
given that their grand, concrete-based design
involves destroying gentler, more-human places
such as gardens. In 1949, author George Orwell
described the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen
Eighty-Four as an "enormous, pyramidal structure
of white concrete, soaring up terrace after
terrace, three hundred metres into the air".
Columnist Ben Macintyre of The Times wrote
that it was "a prescient description of the
sort of totalitarian architecture that would
soon dominate the Communist bloc".Another
example of totalitarianism in architecture
is the Panopticon, a type of institutional
building designed by English philosopher and
social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late
eighteenth century. The concept of the design
is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon)
all (pan-) inmates of an institution without
their being able to tell whether or not they
are being watched. It was invoked by Michel
Foucault in Discipline and Punish as metaphor
for "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive
inclination to observe and normalise.
== See also ==
Anti-authoritarianism
Absolute monarchy
== References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
"Totalitarianism". Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
