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Why Should We Care about Totalitarianism?

A new political phenomenon

Coined by an Italian anti-fascist in 1923, the term “totalitarianism” quickly became part of our vocabulary, and the concept has now been central to political discussion for almost a century. However, it has long been one of the most uncertain and controversial of the key concepts in political theory. Some critics advocate abandoning it altogether. But after surveying the uses that have been made of the category, and looking again at the most prominent cases, this book will argue that totalitarianism remains essential to understanding the modern political universe. Still, the notion has often been misused or misconstrued, so we need a deeper, recast understanding of what totalitarianism might mean.

It is not hard to explain why we should care about the political phenomena most frequently labeled totalitarian, starting with three novel experiments that emerged in Europe in the wake of World War I. These were the fascist regime in Italy, the Nazi regime in Germany, and the communist regime in the Soviet Union, especially as it settled out the 1930s under Joseph Stalin. They were not only new but largely unanticipated, though in retrospect we can see foreshadowing in the “total mobilization” during World War I, including government coordination of the economy and manipulation of public opinion. For the influential Bulgarian-born Parisian intellectual Tzvetan Todorov, writing in 2000, the emergence of totalitarianism, leading to a long conflict with democracy, was nothing less than the central event of the twentieth century.1

The trajectories of the Soviet, German, and Italian experiments profoundly affected not only the shape of our world but also our self-understanding, our sense of what can happen. So images of those regimes still trouble us, perhaps especially because of the violence, terror, and genocidal killing they spawned. But each was also overtly antithetical to liberal procedures and values – individualism, freedom, pluralism, representative democracy, and the distinction between public and private.

We still struggle to understand what fed those three departures from what seems the political norm. Totalitarianism has offered a way of characterizing, and possibly explaining, the most troubling features of the three regimes and what differentiates them from others, especially from liberal democracies. And thus, not surprisingly, the term has come to have overwhelmingly negative connotations of violence, domination, and oppression. Moreover, those three earlier regimes all led to failure, or even disaster, outcomes that seem to suggest the deep error of the totalitarian mode of action.

However, totalitarianism was not so obviously a negative at the time. Although it had been coined as a term of abuse by opponents, the Italian fascists promptly embraced the category in the 1920s to characterize the revolution they claimed to be engineering. Moreover, the utility of the category, and the desirability of the direction it seemed to indicate, were central to discussions among those seeking political innovation, especially on the Right, prior to World War II. By the 1930s, this discussion ranged well beyond Europe to include, for example, Turkey, Argentina, and Japan. As one of the novel possibilities on the table, totalitarianism everywhere attracted some, even as it also repelled or confused others. But what did its proponents see in it?

Especially after the Stalinist turn in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and the advent of Hitler’s regime in Germany in 1933, the term “totalitarianism” was adopted by outside observers seeking to make sense of the three novel regimes, and it came significantly to shape our understanding. Above all, it seemed a way of characterizing what was new about them. To call them totalitarian was to suggest that although their hostility to liberal democracy gave them something in common with earlier authoritarian, dictatorial, and police-state governmental systems, they could not be understood in terms of those preexisting categories. Among the factors that, in combination, made these regimes unprecedented were mass mobilization, the expansion of state sovereignty, the political monopoly of a single party, and the turn to active population engineering. The state or party could intervene in anything and everything, from the educational system to the economy.

Writing in 1954, the political scientist Karl Deutsch summed up the consensus at that point:

Though with obvious hyperbole, this formulation suggests, as a rough approximation, what differentiates totalitarianism from liberal democracy, on the one hand, and authoritarianism, on the other. Of the three, liberal democracy places the greatest premium on individual freedom, including the freedom to participate in public life. Authoritarianism, more concerned to keep society under control, restricts political participation but allows freedom within a restricted framework. Totalitarianism goes a step further and denies individual freedom altogether – not, however, simply to maximize control but to mobilize the population. That is why there is no place for privacy or even free time. And thus the insistence on compulsion. But why seek such total mobilization in the first place?

The range of totalitarianism

Although the totalitarianism category emerged in response to a particular era of political experiment, the era of the two world wars in Europe, it has also been applied more widely to a variety of political regimes, movements, aspirations, and visions – and even to non-political phenomena. The spectrum of uses has raised questions about the chronological, geographical, and topical range of the phenomena that might appropriately be considered totalitarian.

Although World War II brought about the end of the Italian and German regimes, the communist experiment continued in the Soviet Union; indeed, the Soviet Union emerged a major victor from World War II, its prestige and power much enhanced. The later 1940s saw the expansion of communism to the Soviet satellite states of east central Europe, as well as, not coincidentally, the advent of the Cold War. Despite a modicum of liberalization in the Soviet bloc after Stalin’s death in 1953, totalitarianism continued to be applied to the whole Soviet system until it came crashing down from 1989 to 1991.

Meanwhile, in China the communists, led by Mao Zedong,3 took power in 1949 and, despite fits and starts, the ensuing regime followed a direction widely labeled totalitarian until Mao’s death in 1976. Thereafter, his successors pulled back from what seemed the totalitarian excesses of the Mao era. But though the Chinese system became less overtly totalitarian, it entailed significant continuities from the Mao period and certainly no embrace of multiparty democracy. Meanwhile, other communist regimes emerged in, most notably, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, and Vietnam, all with features widely considered totalitarian. Each developed its own particular trajectory, however, and, as in China after Mao, the totalitarian thrust seemed to dissipate in some of them.

Just as totalitarianism might have seemed to be petering out in the communist world, Islamic extremism moved to center stage, first in 1979 with the revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran. That regime has been labeled totalitarian, and the term has also been used to characterize other Islamist movements and regimes, most notably the self-described Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), established in 2013. Indeed, it may characterize the whole radical political ideology that some label “Islamism” to distinguish it from Islam the religion.

Moreover, some observers see a return to totalitarianism with the recent evolution of China under Xi Jinping, or even in Russia under Vladimir Putin. And if we add phenomena like the potential abuses of new technologies, to be considered under the topical range below, it is clear that, at least as a question worth raising, totalitarianism remains current.

The question of chronological range also points to the centuries before the term was applied. Some students of modern totalitarianism have found parallels and even continuities with premodern religious millenarian movements. Others have found the origins of at least the leftist brand of totalitarianism in the maelstrom of the French Revolution. Is use of the concept to characterize earlier phenomena inherently anachronistic? Reasonable observers will continue to differ, but totalitarianism has generally been considered a specifically modern phenomenon, presupposing at least indirect experience with secular liberalism and parliamentary democracy and requiring modern technologies for mobilization and indoctrination.

Precisely as modern, moreover, totalitarianism has generally been considered a specifically secular phenomenon. But that would appear to rule out earlier millenarianism, and it might seem to call into question any association of Islamic political extremism with...