Totalitarianism

TOTALITARIANISM

The concept of totalitarianism was used to describe the more extreme forms of the hypertrophic states of the twentieth century, with their ideologies, elaborate mechanisms of control, and uniquely invasive efforts to diminish or even obliterate the distinction between public and private. The term was coined in the early 1920s, in Fascist Italy, by Mussolini's opponents and was expanded in the early 1930s to include National Socialist Germany. Although the term was coined by opponents of Fascism and early usages were largely hostile, it was also episodically employed by supporters of the Italian and German regimes, such as Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini himself, to differentiate their governments from the allegedly decadent liberal regimes they so detested. The very early Italian usages connoted extreme violence, but as Italian Fascism evolved from its movement phase and became an ideology of government, the term increasingly suggested the intent of the state to absorb every aspect of human life into itself. This notion was in harmony with the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile. The term was most systematically and positively used in Germany by Carl Schmitt, but Hitler eventually forbade its positive use, since it evoked an Italian comparison, which he disliked.

Even in the 1920s and early 1930s, there were a number of people who suggested that the Soviet Union bore certain similarities to both Italy and Germany. After Hitler's blood purge in 1934, the similarities between the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy became the subject of frequent and systematic comparison; after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), such comparisons became widespread. Only in strongly pro-communist circles was there an understandable reluctance to conclude that the Soviet Union had degenerated so badly that it could be compared with Nazi Germany.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, this comparison came to dominate the term's usage, right up to the end of the Cold War. The Truman administration suddenly began discussing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime when it had to justify the strongly anti-Soviet turn in American foreign policy that began in 1947, expressed most vividly in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

Prewar usages in the 1920s and 1930s had been unsystematic and largely journalistic, though such dedicated students of Russia as William Henry Chamberlin had compared the Soviet Union and Germany more systematically as early as 1935. But World War II and the development of the Cold War created a community of Russian experts in academia, where the term became thoroughly institutionalized in the early 1950s. The first systematic and grand-scale comparison, however, was not by an American academic, but by a German-Jewish émigré, Hannah Arendt, whose brilliant but uneven Origins of Totalitarianism was a sensation when it appeared in 1951. The most influential academic treatment of the term was Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, which appeared in 1956 and had a long and controversial life. Brzezinski and Friedrich's account provided what was variously called a syndrome and a model to classify states as totalitarian. To be accounted, a state had to exhibit six features: an all-encompassing ideology; a single mass party, typically led by one man; a system of terror; a near-monopoly on all means of mass communication; a similar near-monopoly of instruments of force; and a centrally controlled economy.

Although Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy achieved wide acceptance in the 1950s, the restricted nature of its comparison, as well as the changing political times, made it highly controversial in the following two decades, with most of the academic community turning against it. Its fate was intimately bound up with the Cold War, which lost its broad base of popular support among Western academics and intellectuals during the 1960s. The viability of a term as value-laden as totalitarianism, in light of the demand for analytical rigor in the social sciences, was now considered highly debatable. In addition, as American historians of Russia became more and more enamored of social history, the focus of the totalitarian point of view on the politics of the center seemed far too restrictive for their research agenda, which was more focused on the experiences of ordinary people and everyday life, especially in the provinces.

During the Reagan years, the term was revived by neoconservatives interested in a more aggressive political and military challenge to the Soviet Union and also in distinguishing the Soviet Union and its satellites from the (allegedly less radical) rightist states whom the Reagan administration regarded as allies against Communism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the term has become less politically charged and seems to be evolving in a more diffuse fashion to suggest closed or antidemocratic states in general, particularly those with strong ideological or religious coloration.

See also: autocracy

bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Friedrich, Carl J., and Brzezinski, Zbigniew. (1965). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gleason, Abbott. (1995). Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.

Halberstam, Michael. (2000). Totalitarianism and the Modern Concept of Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Havel, Vaclav. (1985). "The Power of the Powerless." In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Lifka, Thomas E. (1988). The Concept "Totalitarianism" and American Foreign Policy, 1933–1949. New York: Garland.

Orwell, George. (1949). 1984. New York: New American Library.

Abbott Gleason