Totalitarianism

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TOTALITARIANISM.

The most important meaning of the term totalitarianism (totalitaria in Italian) resided in the way it was used to link communism with German National Socialism (Nazism) during the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, Germany, and finally France. But the term had a considerable prehistory. It was coined by an Italian journalist, Giovanni Amendola, on the eve of the march on Rome in the spring of 1923, to characterize Benito Mussolini's (1883–1945) proposed alteration of Italy's election law to give the winning party a massive legislative majority. Over the next several years the term became popular among Mussolini's left-wing critics, who used the term increasingly broadly to characterize fascism as a whole, with a particular stress on the movement's pseudo-religious fanaticism, emphasis on will, and hostility to pluralism. The term also appealed to the fascists themselves: in particular to the philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). The Duce himself used the term proudly, initially to evoke fascism's "wildness" and "ferocity," and subsequently to characterize the Italian fascist state's ambition to absorb every aspect of human life into itself.

This rather Hegelian statist usage played a role in the way the terms total and totalitarian were used in Germany, where they migrated from Italy in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The writer Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), however, influenced by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) and by his own experiences at the front in World War I, used the term to evoke a universal, collectivist industrial order on a planetary scale, which he rather paradoxically combined with German nationalism. Of particular importance in the German usage of totalitarian, however, was the vocabulary of the political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Contending that the liberal state in 1920s Europe had spinelessly given itself over to placating the masses with material welfare, Schmitt called for the creation in Germany of a totalitarian or total state, in the sense of a political entity militantly hostile to the liberal or social democratic welfare state and devoted to a ruthless defense of power politics, in the spirit of the most extreme forms of traditional authoritarianism. In Germany itself the discussion about whether National Socialism was totalitarian or not soon ended. Adolf Hitler did not care for the term, which suggested to him an Italian comparison that he rejected, and also seemed to leave out of account National Socialist racism, which he placed at the center of the Third Reich's mission.

The term began to be systematically applied to the Soviet Union only in the mid-1930s, when journalists and academics, some of them political refugees from Italy or Germany, began to notice similarities between the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, on the other, despite what appeared to be their profound ideological differences. The "purging" that began in both Germany and the Soviet Union in 1933–1934 appears to have helped focus the minds of observers on these similarities. Other commonalities between Germany and the USSR were political dictatorship, the absolute rule of a single mass party, state control of the economy, and a cult of force and violence.

Between 1935 and 1940 the question of whether the Soviet Union was really the same sort of entity as Germany and Italy was widely discussed and passionately contested among politically conscious populations in Western Europe and the United States. The arguments were particularly bitter on the political Left, where the Soviet experiment continued to have strong adherents, even as liberal criticism of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) gained ground. By the late 1930s Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was claiming in exile that Stalin had "betrayed" the Russian Revolution; both Trotsky and his followers were increasingly willing to call the Soviet Union "totalitarian." This facilitated broader acceptance of the term on the Left, at the cost, however, of embroiling the term in the sectarian disputes between "Trotskyists" and Stalinists.

THE COLD WAR

During World War II, comparatively few anti-Nazis found the Soviet-German comparison politically constructive or appetizing, with the Red Army and the Russian people bearing such a high percentage of the war's burden. But after the Cold War was under way the term enjoyed a spectacular revival, particularly in the United States. It was used by political figures in the Truman administration (1945–1950) to sell their new anti-Soviet policies. It continued to be used in the anticommunist journalism of writers like Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), Albert Camus (1913–1960), Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982), and George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–1950). And it was at the heart of major academic studies like The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956) by the Harvard professors Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. These volumes had a profound influence on highbrow readership, even as the term totalitarianism became coin of the realm in the newspapers. Arendt's profound if eccentric classic located the preconditions for the rise of totalitarianism in the decay of the Europe of national states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and so was of limited utility in the Cold War. Friedrich and Brzezinski's stout monograph had a profound influence on Soviet studies over several generations. It distinguished sharply between totalitarianism's extreme claims on the individual and the "ordinary" authoritarianisms of the past. Having some of the attributes of a field guide, it listed and analyzed six attributes by which in combination a totalitarian state could be recognized: (1) a single ideology; (2) a single elite mass party; (3) a technically conditioned near monopoly of control of the means of armed combat; (4) a similar control of all means of communication; (5) a comparable control of the economy; (6) and a system of "terroristic" police control.

Over time, Friedrich and Brzezinski's account proved vulnerable to several lines of criticism. It was not helpful in accounting for changes in the Soviet-style systems it analyzed, something that became important with the onset of destalinization. A society either was or was not totalitarian when analyzed strictly within the confines of their "syndrome" or model. Other critics, led by Robert Tucker of Princeton, complained that the source base was too small, examples too few in number. If one analyzed Soviet (or Polish, or Hungarian) political praxis based on a model drawn from Nazi and Soviet politics there would seem to be a limit on what new information one might discover about the system.

But more influential than these intellectual criticisms was the changing political climate in Europe and the United States as the Cold War consensus waned and the 1960s dawned. The Friedrich-Brzezinski account of totalitarianism presupposed a profound difference between the polities of the "free world" and the totalitarian states. It could be and often was used, implicitly or explicitly, to justify the Cold War. But what if the United States was just as oppressive in its Latin American sphere of influence as the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, as radicals began to argue in the 1960s? Or what if American enslavement to consumerism and technology blinded its citizens to any serious creative alternative to capitalism as it presently existed? Was that not a kind of totalitarianism too, as Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) argued in One Dimensional Man (1964)? But this kind of "totalitarianism" certainly had nothing to do with the Brzezinski-Friedrich model.

In both France and Germany there was powerful opposition to the American version of "Soviet totalitarianism." In France belief in the evolutionary possibilities of the Soviet Union was coeval with the intellectual domination of Jean-Paul Sartre's (1905–1980) tortuously noncommunist leftism. Among major figures, only Camus and the conservative liberal Raymond Aron (1905–1983) steadfastly criticized Soviet totalitarianism. Not until the appearance in France of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's (b. 1918) Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s did the hegemony of Sartrian pro-Sovietism begin to dissipate.

Hostility in Germany to the Nazi-Soviet comparison as the basis for understanding the Soviet Union as "totalitarian" came later and lasted somewhat longer. The idea that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were joint archetypes of a new and dreadful kind of polity was initially appealing to the conservative leadership of West Germany, as it served simultaneously to criticize the Soviet enemy and delegitimize the East German rival. But hostility on the German Left grew rapidly after 1960, as West German society underwent a spasm of radicalism not unlike that occurring in the United States at almost exactly the same time.

Conflicts were somewhat more muted in Italy, if not in England, where pro-Soviet attitudes had deeply penetrated official circles. But the idea of Soviet totalitarianism was much more important in Eastern Europe, where anti-Soviet intellectuals found it a powerful semantic weapon in their long struggle against Soviet domination. Theorists like Leszek Ko?akowski (b. 1927) in Poland and Václav Havel (b. 1936) in Czechoslovakia made the term the centerpiece of their efforts to attack Soviet socialism (now grotesquely referred to at home as "really existing socialism") and to delegitimize the Soviet Union's East European empire. In this long struggle, the term became strongly associated with Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. The term's revival in the United States during the Reagan years (1981–1989) had a strong domestic political dimension: to show that American liberalism had lost the will to truly confront the evils of communism.

Since the end of the Soviet Union the term totalitarianism has gradually fallen into disuse, or at least lost its analytical significance. It enjoyed some vogue in Russia during the 1990s, as it became possible for Russians to use the term about the Soviet past. But in the early twenty-first century, the distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism no longer has the cutting-edge significance it seemed to embody during the years when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union pillaged and terrorized Europe.

See alsoAnticommunism; Antifascism; Communism; Fascism; Nazism.