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Totalitarianism is a political system and a form 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 the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all political 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 private mass media.
The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, sciences, and private morality of its citizens. In the exercise of power, the difference between a totalitarian regime of government and an authoritarian regime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview, authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power. The authoritarian dictator is supported, either jointly or individually, by a military junta and by the socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country.
The word totalitarian was first used in the early 1920s to describe the Italian Fascist regime. The term totalitarianism gained wider usage in politics of the interwar period; in the early years of the Cold War, it arose from comparison of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler as a theoretical concept of Western political science, achieving hegemony in explaining the nature of Fascism and , and later entered the Western historiography of Communism, the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution; in the 21st century, it became applied to Islamist 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 and Stalinism, their internal logic and structure were substantially different. The applicability of the concept to Islamism has also been criticized.
There were similar "ideocratic" attempts in traditions of the Counter-Enlightenment 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 the Reformation which led to a world deprived of any religiosity; Jacob Talmon thought totalitarianism to be a merger of left-wing radical democracy (from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maximilien Robespierre and François-Noël Babeuf) and right-wing irrationalism (from Johann Gottlieb Fichte) as traditions opposed to empirical liberalism; the German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor 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 the Enlightenment from emancipatory reason to instrumental rationality, and as a product of Anthropocentrism 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 of Supernatural to earthly politics of government.
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 describe World War I by its contemporaries: the war "shaped the imagination of an Lost 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 the Armenian genocide. "Total war" became "total state", and after the war, it was used as a pejorative by the Italian anti-fascists of the 1920s and later by the Italian Fascists themselves.
American historian William Rubinstein wrote that:
The 'Age of Totalitarianism' included nearly all the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by the Jewish Holocaust, but also comprising the mass murders and purges of the Communist world, other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I, without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in the minds of unknown agitators and crackpots.
In the 20th century, Giovanni Gentile classified Italian 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 with Benito Mussolini. In 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Führerprinzip.
Since the Cold War, the so-called 'traditionalist', or 'totalitarian', historians (see below) argued that Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, was the first politician to establish a totalitarian state; such description of Lenin is opposed by the so-called 'revisionist' historians of Communism and the Soviet Union as well as by a broad range of authors including Hannah Arendt.
As the Duce leading the Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy (1922–1943) the representative Totalitarian State: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Retrieved April 8, 2022 Likewise, in The Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish the legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader; later Joseph Goebbels would call a totalitarian state the goal of the Nazi Party, although the concept became downplayed in Nazi discourse.
After the Second World War (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) and the terms totalitarian, totalitarianism, and totalitarian model. In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit the anti-fascism of the Second World War as misguided foreign policy and at the same time direct anti-fascists against Communism, McCarthyism politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism was an existential threat to Western culture, and so facilitated the creation of the American national security state to execute the anti-communist Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought by client state proxies of the US and the USSR.
While the concept of totalitarianism became dominant in Anglo-American political discourse after World War II, it remained neglected in continental Europe except for West Germany: in such countries as Italy and France, where the Communist parties played a hegemonic role in the anti-fascist resistance, the pioneering works of the theory of totalitarianism by such authors as Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich were often ignored or not even translated; the political theory of totalitarianism in these countries was promoted by Congress for Cultural Freedom supported by the CIA.
Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism allegedly inherent to Marxism, to Communism, and to the political nature of Communist 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. Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history which they say leads it to 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. (2025). 9781893554726, Encounter. ISBN 9781893554726 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 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.
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, and traditionalists present "history from above", directed by the leaders, while the revisionists put emphasis on "history from below" and social history of the Soviet regime, and they describe the traditionalists as '(right-wing) Romanticism.' 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 or Adolf 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 President Jimmy Carter, while Richard Pipes, a prominent historian of 'totalitarian school', headed the CIA group Team B; after 1991, their views have found popularity not only in the West, but also in the former USSR.
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. 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 as Moshe Lewin and break the consensus.9781412835022, Transaction Publishers. . ISBN 9781412835022 According to Evan Mawdsley, "the 'revisionist’ school had been dominant from the 1970s", and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists.
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 historian Robert 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." 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."
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)." A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the reign of Stalin (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that state terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government: to critics of totalitarian model state terror was a mark of a weak regime, and J. Arch Getty wrote of a "technically weak and politically divided party whose organisational relationships seem more primitive than totalitarian", commenting the Smolensk 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); the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of personal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens psychologically atomised by the totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that Bureaucracy often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose", (2005). 9781139446631, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139446631 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. That the legitimacy 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 upward social mobility for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the Russian Revolution (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became Stalinism loyal to the USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism.
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 Soviet forced labour camps () 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 of extermination 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.
In the case of East 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.
The concept of totalitarianism appeared in the debates among German historians and public intellectuals known as Historikerstreit, 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 as Karl-Dietrich Bracher and Klaus 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.
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 by Hannah Arendt who also thought that Nazism became totalitarian only in 1938–1942, is a not unpopular but contested position in contemporary historiography), 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."
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". In 1978, the term was 'revived' in Western Europe: such historians as François Furet produced 'revisionist' critical re-evaluations of the French Revolution which, according to them, led to the emergence of totalitarianism, while in Italy, "anti-anti-Fascist" historians, notably Renzo De Felice and after him Emilio 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 by Martin Malia. In 1995, Furet made a comparative analysis and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism. 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 of ideocracy. Furet and Ernst Nolte, a historian praised by Furet, also identified anti-Fascism as Communist totalitarianism; Nolte presented a conflict between totalitarianisms as European 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 and Operation Barbarossa as "both a retaliation and a preventive measure" against Bolshevism. Another major work belonging to the same period was The 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 NazismTraverso, 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., or any other ideology from counting and summing the number of victims that can be attributed to '' 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. While Nolte and the historians supporting him were not victorious in the Historikerstreit, 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 along with the "Double genocide theory", which summarized Nazi and Stalinist violence into a single metanarrative and became an influential framework of interpretation.
Furet's totalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution, directed against the classic "Marxist" or "Jacobin" interpretation, triggered debates with such historians as Michel Vovelle, who led new studies on it; as Eric Hobsbawm concluded in 2007, "the Furet Revolution" was "now over". In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that "Nazism 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". Historians Enzo Traverso and Arno J. Mayer and the author Domenico 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.
Michael Parenti (1997) and James 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. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism."
According to some scholars and authors, such as Domenico Losurdo calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian 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 in Christian 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.
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.
In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010), the historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory 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 tell Vaclav Havel or Adam 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."
In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government (1922–1943), the anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as a régime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power (political, military, economic, social) as Il Duce of The State. That Italian fascism is a political system with an ideological, utopian worldview unlike the Realpolitik of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power. The term "totalitarian" became used by the Fascists themselves: later, the theoretician of Italian Fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to the ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defence of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term totalitario to identify and describe the ideological nature of the societal structures (government, social, economic, political) and the practical goals (economic, geopolitical, social) of the new Fascist Italy (1922–1943), which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian Fascism, Gentile defined and described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (subservience to the state) determined the public sphere and the private sphere of the lives of the Italian people. That to achieve the Fascist utopia 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."
Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of the key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner mass 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.... Even 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 and one-party rule."For example, Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a figurehead and helped play a role in the dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Also, the Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in Vatican City per the 1929 Lateran Treaty, under the leadership of Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). 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 has to be a totalitarian state that penetrates into all spheres of public life." However, the concept of totalitarianism was downplayed among the Nazis who preferred the term Volksstaat ("people's state" or "racial state") to describe their regime.
José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones, the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary party called the CEDA (CEDA), 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 Cortes Generales submits or we will eliminate it." General Francisco 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.
General Franco began using the term 'totalitarian' towards his regime during the Spanish 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 into FET 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, as World War II progressed, Franco stopped using the term, and it received a negative connotation as Franco called for a struggle with "Bolshevist totalitarianism."
Ioannis Metaxas, the leader of the 4th 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." 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.
Ion Antonescu, the Axis-aligned dictator of the Kingdom of Romania during World War II, described his regime as "ethnocratic", "ethnic Christian" and as "the national-totalitarian regime, the regime of national 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 the Holocaust; however, in 1941, Antonescu dissolved the ruling party, the Iron 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.
In 1940, the foreign minister of the Empire of Japan Matsuoka Yosuke expressed in an interview the ideological assumptions prevailing within the Shōwa 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." 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".
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 first9781412831659, Transaction Publishers. . ISBN 9781412831659 to do so, thus producing perhaps most famous example of such usage of the term by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident. It seems that the first to use the term towards the USSR was the writer and left-wing activist Victor 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 the Soviet 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." In The 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; 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.
One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was 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 Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill's speech of 5 October 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 concept gained legitimacy in 1939 with the Molotov–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. The concept was abandoned in 1941, as the Third Reich invaded the USSR, and the latter became depicted in Western propaganda as "valiant freedom-loving" ally in the war; among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the 1941 book of the same name.
In the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–1945), in the lecture series (1945) and book (1946) titled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, the British historian E. H. Carr said that "the trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable" in the Decolonization countries of Eurasia. That revolutionary Marxism–Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's rapid industrialisation (1929–1941) and the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of the Communist bloc only the "blind and incurable" ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies.
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 for democratic 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."
The historian of Nazi Germany, Karl Dietrich Bracher said that the totalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. 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. 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 of collective leadership. The American historian Walter 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.
In Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968) the political scientist Raymond 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:
In 1980, in a book review of How 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 no longer satisfies our, 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. 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." In a book review of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), by Ahmed Saladdin, Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR after Stalinism was her attempt to distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept of" as anti-Communist propaganda.
In the 1960s, the revisionist Kremlinologists researched the organisations and they also studied the policies of the relatively autonomous bureaucracy that influenced the crafting of high-level policy for governing Soviet society in the USSR. (2025). 9781139446631, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139446631 Revisionist Kremlinologists, such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola, transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model by recognising and reporting that the Soviet government, the communist party, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. The revisionist social history indicated that the sociology of Soviet society had compelled the Government of the USSR to adjust public policy to the actual political economy of a Soviet society composed of pre–War and post–War generations of people with different perceptions of the utility of Communist economics for all the Russias. Hence, Russian modern history had outdated the totalitarian model that was the post–Stalinism perception of the police-state USSR of the 1950s.
Saladdin Ahmed criticizes the concept of totalitarianism as formulated by Brzezinski and Friedrich, and to less extent, Arendt, in Totalitarian 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 while Chile under Pinochet had no "official" ideology, there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago 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 to Nicolae 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."
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 on , scientism, or political violence. They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw 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. 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 "modern despotism" 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".
Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to Shoshana Zuboff, the economic pressures of modern surveillance 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. (2025). 9781610395694, PublicAffairs. ISBN 9781610395694 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 permanent technological dystopia. Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of Nineteen 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". 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".
In 2016, The Economist described China's developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping's administration, to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian. 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. Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian.
In Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022), the political scientists Steven 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 a social revolution independent of the existing social structures of the state (not political succession, election to office, or a military coup d'état). For example, the Soviet Union and Maoist China were founded after the years long Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and Chinese Civil War (1927–1936 and 1945–1949), respectively, not merely state succession. They produce totalitarian dictatorships with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesive ruling 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. (2022). 9780691169521, Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691169521 Some totalitarian were established through coups orchestrated by military officers loyal to a vanguard party that advanced socialist revolution, such as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962), Syrian Arab Republic (1963),Sources:
and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978).Sources:
North Korea is the only country in East Asia to survive totalitarianism after the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and handed over to his son Kim Jong-il and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011, as of today in the 21st century.
Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include brain-reading, contact tracing, and various applications of artificial intelligence. (2025). 9783319908687 ISBN 9783319908687 (also published in (2025). 9783319908694, Springer, Cham.. ISBN 9783319908694) Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent world 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.
The Islamic State is a Salafi jihadism militant group that was established in 2006 by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi during the Iraqi insurgency, under the name "Islamic State of Iraq". Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the organization later changed its name to the "Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" in 2013. The group espouses a totalitarian ideology that is a fundamentalist hybrid of Jihadism, Wahhabism, and Qutbism. Following its territorial expansion in 2014, the group renamed itself as the "Islamic State" and declared itself as a caliphate that sought domination over the Muslim world and established what has been described as a " political-religious totalitarian regime". The quasi-state held significant territory in Iraq and Syria during the course of the Third Iraq War and the Syrian civil war from 2013 to 2019 under the dictatorship of its first Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who imposed a strict interpretation of Sharia law.
Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of Catholicism, the declared state religion. that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by the Church, along with divorces. Divorce, Birth control and abortions were forbidden. According to historian Stanley G. Payne, an opponent of describing Francoism as a totalitarian system, Franco had more day-to-day power than Adolf Hitler or Joseph 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." However, from 1959 to 1974 the "Spanish Miracle" took place under the leadership of technocrats, many of whom were members of Opus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the old Falangist guard.Jensen, Geoffrey. "Franco: Soldier, Commander, Dictator". Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005. p. 110-111. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky, reassigning economic authority from the isolationist Falangism. This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the "Spanish miracle". This is comparable to De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, where Francoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree of economic freedom.Payne (2000), p. 645
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