totalitarianism
{{Short description|Extreme form of authoritarianism and a theoretical concept}}
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File:Your Lot in a Totalitarian State.jpg U. S. propaganda poster "Your Lot in a Totalitarian State" depicting a process of compulsory sham elections which took place in the states, flags of which – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy{{efn|shows the Standard of the Duce instead of the national flag}} and the Soviet Union – are presented below. In the version on the right, produced after Operation Barbarossa, flag of the Soviet Union (Allied member) is replaced with the one of the Empire of Japan{{efn|shows the Rising Sun Flag instead of the national one}} (Axis member), which is not regarded as totalitarian by majority of Western scholars,{{cite book|last1=Lucken |first1=Michael |title=The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory |publisher=Columbia University Press |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-231-54398-9 |location=Columbia University}} while such description of Italy is also contested, and in regards to Germany and the USSR the label has also received certain criticism.{{Citation needed|date=April 2025}}]]
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| footer = Joseph Stalin (left), leader of the Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler (right), leader of Nazi Germany, respectively to their positions on the left–right political spectrum; totalitarianism as a concept of Western political science and later historiography emerged from comparison of their regimes defined as exemplary cases of totalitarianism;{{cite book |last1=Kershaw |first1=Ian|author-link1=Ian Kershaw|last2=Lewin |first2=Moshe|author-link2=Moshe Lewin |title=Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison |date=28 April 1997 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-56521-9|language=en}}
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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 socio-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 communications media.{{cite book |first=Robert |last=Conquest |author-link=Robert Conquest |title=Reflections on a Ravaged Century |year=1999 |isbn=0393048187 |pages=73–74|publisher=Norton }}
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 socio-political 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.{{cite book |last=Cinpoes |first=Radu |date=2010 |title=Nationalism and Identity in Romania: A History of Extreme Politics from the Birth of the State to EU Accession |url= |location=London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney |publisher=Bloomsbury |page=70 |isbn=978-1848851665}}
The term totalitarianism emerged 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 Fascist and Communist states, 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.
The concept of totalitarianism has also been applied to historical states that existed prior to the 20th century or even belonged to the period of Ancient history, such as the Mauryan dynasty of India, the Qin dynasty of China, and others.{{cite web | url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/totalitarianism | title=Totalitarianism | Definition, Characteristics, Examples, & Facts | Britannica }}
Definitions
=Contemporary background=
File:Kim Il Sung Portrait.png was the founder and leader (from 1948 to 1994) of North Korea, a state which was created and functioned with the assistance of the Soviet Union after World War II and by the early 1970s had become a totalitarian regime.{{cite book | last=Suh | first=J.J. | title=Origins of North Korea's Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development | publisher=Lexington Books | year=2012 | isbn=978-0-7391-7659-7 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7dmysjj13QwC&pg=PA149 | access-date=2023-02-05 | page=149}}]]
Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian.{{cite book | author1 = Linz, Juan José | date = 2000 | title = Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes | publisher =Lynne Rienner Publisher | pages = 143| isbn = 978-1-55587-890-0 | oclc = 1172052725 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=8cYk_ABfMJIC&pg=PA143}}{{cite book | editor = Jonathan Michie | date = 3 February 2014 | title = Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences | publisher = Routledge | page = 95 | isbn = 978-1-135-93226-8 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=ip_IAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA95}} Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism. In the essay "Democide in Totalitarian States" (1994) the American political scientist Rudolph Rummel, while acknowledging that there is "much confusion about what is meant by totalitarian" up to denial that totalitarian systems have ever existed, defined a totalitarian state as "one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either] constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic secret and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships." According to Rummel, such governments act as "agencies of totalitarianism" itself, that is, "the ideology of absolute power", which installs "mortacracy" in states controlled by it. Rummel cited Marxism–Leninism and communism in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, China under Mao Zedong and in East Germany, Nazism in Germany under Adolf Hitler and fascism in other states, state socialism (Burmese way to socialism) in Burma under U Ne Win and Islamic fundamentalism (Islamism) in Iran as examples of totalitarianism.{{cite book|last=Rummel|first=Rudolph|year=1994|chapter=Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers |editor-last1=Charny|editor-first1=Israel W.|editor-last2=Horowitz|editor-first2=Irving Louis|title=The Widening Circle of Genocide|pages=3–40|edition=1st|publisher=Routledge|doi=10.4324/9781351294089-2|isbn=9781351294089}}{{cite journal|last1=Tago|first1=Atsushi|last2=Wayman|first2=Frank|date=January 2010|title=Explaining the Onset of Mass Killing, 1949–87|journal=Journal of Peace Research|location=Thousand Oaks, CA|publisher=Sage Publications|volume=47|issue=1|pages=3–13|doi=10.1177/0022343309342944|issn=0022-3433|jstor=25654524|s2cid=145155872}} However, not all scholars believe these regimes and ideologies exemplify totalitarianism: some of those who support of the concept of totalitarianism exclude Burma,{{cite book|author1=William Ebenstein|quote=The second category includes one-party states in Asia and Africa such as Burma, Iraq, and Zaire - which are not totalitarian but allow only one political party.|page=182|isbn=9780060418618|title=American Democracy in World Perspective|date=1980 |publisher=Harper & Row}} Iran{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gZMTDGajvu0C | title=Iran's Struggle for Economic Independence: Reform and Counter-Reform in the Post-Revolutionary Era | isbn=978-1-136-73557-8 | last1=Pesaran | first1=Evaleila | date=25 April 2011 | publisher=Taylor & Francis }} and even Fascist Italy from this category, while historians who state that the concept can not adequately describe Stalinism nor Nazism criticize the concept of totalitarianism in general (see below).
;Degree of control
In exercising the power of government upon society, the application of an official dominant ideology differentiates the worldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty." Having no ideology to propagate, the politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature", whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens", by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a secret police, and monopolistic control of industrial mass society."
=Historical background=
For influential philosopher Karl Popper, the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism, which Popper said originated in humanist philosophy; in the Republic (res publica) proposed by Plato in Ancient Greece, in Hegel's conception of the State as a polity of peoples, and in the political economy of Karl Marx in the 19th century{{cite book|last=Popper|first=Karl|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EaKc0RRqlvYC&q=The+Open+society+and+its+enemies|title=The Open Society and Its Enemies|editor-last=Gombrich|editor-first=E. H.|year=2013|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0691158136|access-date=17 August 2021|archive-date=11 January 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220111091824/https://books.google.com/books?id=EaKc0RRqlvYC&q=The+Open+society+and+its+enemies|url-status=live}}—yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute the historiographic accuracy of Popper's 20th-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because, for example, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent the modern State;Wild, John (1964). Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 23. "Popper is committing a serious historical error in attributing the organic theory of the State to Plato, and accusing him of all the fallacies of post–Hegelian and Marxist historicism — the theory that history is controlled by the inexorable laws governing the behaviour of superindividual social entities of which human beings and their free choices are merely subordinate manifestations." his approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causationLevinson, Ronald B. (1970). In Defense of Plato. New York: Russell and Russell. p. 20. "In spite of the high rating, one must accord his [Popper's] initial intention of fairness, his hatred for the enemies of the 'open society', his zeal to destroy whatever seems, to him, destructive of the welfare of mankind, has led him into the extensive use of what may be called terminological counter-propaganda. [...] With a few exceptions in Popper's favour, however, it is noticeable that [book] reviewers possessed of special competence in particular fields – and here Lindsay is again to be included – have objected to Popper's conclusions in those very fields. [...] Social scientists and social philosophers have deplored his radical denial of historical causation, together with his espousal of Hayek's systematic distrust of larger programs of social reform; historical students of philosophy have protested his [Popper's] violent, polemical handling of Plato, Aristotle, and, particularly, Hegel; ethicists have found contradictions in the ethical theory ('critical dualism') upon which his [anti-Modernist] polemic is largely based." and as an ahistorical attempt to present totalitarianism and liberalism not as products of historical development, but as eternal and timeless categories of humankind itself.Enzo Traverso, Despina Lalaki. [https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3644-against-totalitarianism-a-conversation-with-enzo-traverso Against "Totalitarianism": A Conversation with Enzo Traverso]
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;{{cite journal | url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26650707 | jstor=26650707 | title=Totalitarianism Between History and Theory | last1=Traverso | first1=Enzo |author-link1=Enzo Traverso|journal=History and Theory | date=2017 | volume=56 | issue=4 | pages=97–118 | doi=10.1111/hith.12040 }} 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 anthropocentrist 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 beings to earthly politics of government.{{cite book |last1=Horkheimer |first1=Max |author-link=Max Horkheimer |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l-75zLjGlZQC&q=the+dialectic+of+enlightenment |title=Dialectic of Enlightenment |last2=Adorno |first2=Theodor W. |author2-link=Theodor W. Adorno |last3=Noeri |first3=Gunzelin |date=2002 |publisher=Stanford University Press |isbn=978-0804736336 |language=en |access-date=2021-08-17 |archive-date=2022-01-10 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220110122043/https://books.google.com/books?id=l-75zLjGlZQC&q=the+dialectic+of+enlightenment |url-status=live }}
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 entire 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.{{cite book |last=Rubinstein |first=W.D. |url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=nMMAk4VwLLwC}} |title=Genocide: a history |publisher=Pearson Education |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-582-50601-5 |page=7}}
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.{{cite book |last1=Gentile |first1=Giovanni |author-link1=Giovanni Gentile |last2=Mussolini |first2=Benito |author-link2=Benito Mussolini |date=1932 |title=La dottrina del fascismo |trans-title=The Doctrine of Fascism |title-link=The Doctrine of Fascism}} 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;{{cite journal |last1=Hough |first1=Jerry F. |title=The "Dark Forces," the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History |journal=The Russian Review |date=1987 |volume=46 |issue=4 |pages=397–403 |doi=10.2307/130293 |jstor=130293 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/130293 |issn=0036-0341}}{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CNeaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9|title=The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution|first1=Alexander|last1=Riley|first2=Alfred Kentigern|last2=Siewers|date=June 18, 2019|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|isbn=9781793605344 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002550/https://books.google.com/books?id=CNeaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9|url-status=live}}{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-eaWDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PA98|title=Totalitarianisms: The Closed Society and Its Friends. A History of Crossed Languages|first=Juan Francisco|last=Fuentes|date=April 29, 2019|publisher=Ed. Universidad de Cantabria|isbn=9788481028898 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002552/https://books.google.com/books?id=-eaWDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA98|url-status=live}}{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pHUzDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PT85|title=Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective|first=Lennard|last=Gerson|date=September 1, 2013|publisher=Hoover Press|isbn=9780817979331 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002551/https://books.google.com/books?id=pHUzDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT85&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjShc7Ht5n3AhXhkGoFHa8jCS0Q6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false|url-status=live}}{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MjQ5DwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PT13|title=Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 2: The Early Soviet Period 1917–1929|first=Richard|last=Gregor|date=1974|publisher=University of Toronto Press|isbn=9781487590116 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002552/https://books.google.com/books?id=MjQ5DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT13&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjso5nU0pn3AhUXVzABHborA044ChDoAXoECAgQAw#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false|url-status=live}} 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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5UQX1l4KmUYC | isbn=978-0-415-19278-1 | title=The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics | date=2006 | publisher=Taylor & Francis }}
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."{{cite journal |last=Delzell |first=Charles F. |title=Remembering Mussolini |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257305 |journal=The Wilson Quarterly |volume=12 |number=2 |date=Spring 1988 |page=127 |publisher=Wilson Quarterly |location=Washington, D.C. |jstor=40257305 |access-date=2022-04-24 |archive-date=2022-05-13 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220513050107/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257305 |url-status=live }} 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;{{cite book |first=Carl |last=Schmitt |author-link=Carl Schmitt |date=1927 |title=Der Begriff des Politischen |trans-title=The Concept of the Political|isbn=0226738868 |edition=1996 |editor=University of Chicago Press |publisher=Rutgers University Press |page=22 |language=de}} 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, McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism was an existential threat to Western civilisation, 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.{{cite book|last=Siegel|first=Achim|year=1998|title=The Totalitarian Paradigm After the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment|edition=hardback|location=Amsterdam|publisher=Rodopi|page=200|isbn=978-9042005525|quote=Concepts of totalitarianism became most widespread at the height of the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, especially since the Korean War, they were condensed into a far-reaching, even hegemonic, ideology, by which the political elites of the Western world tried to explain and even to justify the Cold War constellation.}}{{cite book|last=Guilhot|first=Nicholas|year=2005|title=The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order|edition=hardcover|location=New York City|publisher=Columbia University Press|page=33|isbn=978-0231131247|quote=The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as 'lies' and as the product of deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.}}{{cite book |last=Reisch |first=George A. |date=2005 |title=How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=153–154 |isbn=978-0521546898}}{{cite book|first=Brook|last=Defty|year=2007|chapter=2. Launching the New Propaganda Policy, 1948. 3. Building a Concerted Counter-offensive: Co-operation with other powers. 4. Close and Continuous Liaison: British and American co-operation, 1950–51. 5. A Global Propaganda Offensive: Churchill and the revival of political warfare|title=Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953: The Information Research Department|edition=1st paperback|location=London|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0714683614}}{{cite book |last=Caute |first=David |year=2010 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95 |title=Politics and the Novel during the Cold War |publisher=Transaction Publishers |pages=95–99 |isbn=978-1412831369 |access-date=2020-11-22 |archive-date=2021-04-14 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210414175538/https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95 |url-status=live }}
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.
Historiography
= "Totalitarians" and "Revisionists" =
The Western historiography of the USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history and is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography; the traditionalists and neo-traditionalists, or anti-revisionists, are also known as 'totalitarian school' or 'totalitarian approach' and 'Cold War' historians,Ronald Suny. Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians and the Russian Revolution (Verso Books, 2017). for relying on concepts and interpretations rooted in the early years of the Cold War and even in the sphere Russian White émigrés of the 1920s.
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{{failed verification|date=January 2025}} 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.{{cite book |last1=Haynes |first1=John Earl |author-link1=John Earl Haynes |last2=Klehr |first2=Harvey |author-link2=Harvey Klehr |date=2003 |chapter=Revising History |title=In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage |location=San Francisco |publisher=Encounter |pages=11–57 |isbn=1893554724}} 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"{{Cite book |last=Mawdsley |first=Evan |author-link=Evan Mawdsley |title=The Russian Civil War|year=2011|publisher=Birlinn |isbn=9780857901231}} and social history of the Soviet regime, and they describe the traditionalists as '(right-wing) romantics.' 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.
File:Dyadya lenin.jpg by Viktor Deni. According to 'traditionalist' historians, Lenin was the first politician to establish a totalitarian regime; such description have been opposed by the 'revisionists' and other authors]]
= Leninism and the October Revolution =
{{main|October Revolution#Historiography}}
Since the 1980s, there has been a debate over the nature of the October Revolution between the traditionalists and the revisionists as well as a debate about the nature of the government of Vladimir Lenin. Traditionalist scholars believe that the government of Vladimir Lenin was a totalitarian dictatorship but revisionist scholars do not; the core argument of the traditionalists was based on their belief that the Revolution was a violent act which was carried out "from above" by a small group of intellectuals with brute force. Such traditionalist historians as Richard Pipes claimed that Soviet Russia of 1917–1924 was as totalitarian as the Soviet Union under Stalin was, and they also claim that Stalinist totalitarianism was a mere continuation of Lenin's policies because Stalinism was prefigured by Lenin's ideology,{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xxGttzFXqaYC | isbn=978-0-415-67396-9 | title=Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence | date=2012 | publisher=Routledge }} thar Lenin was the "inventor" (Riley) of totalitarianism, and that further totalitarian regimes just implemented the policies already invented: for example, Pipes compared Lenin to Hitler and stated that "The Stalinist and Nazi holocausts" stemmed from Lenin's Red Terror and had "much greater decorum" than the latter. The revisionists, on the contrary, stressed the genuinely 'popular' nature of the 1917 Revolution, and tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism; a revisionist historian Ronald Suny cites Hannah Arendt who distinguished Lenin's terror of the Russian Civil War, "a means to exterminate and frighten opponents", from totalitarian terror aimed not at specific enemies but at fulfilling ideological goals, solving the problem of inequality and poverty, "an instrument to rule masses who are perfectly obedient." It was also noted that Stalin became an uncontested dictator after a period of "authoritarian pluralism", while the one-party dictatorship and mass violence (the Red Terror) were interpreted not as a result not of Lenin's totalitarian "blueprint", but rather of reactions (yet justified by the ideology) to current events and external factors, including wartime conditions and the struggle for survival, some historians highlighted the initial attempts of the Bolsheviks to form a coalition government.{{cite book |last1=Carr |first1=Edward Hallett |author-link1=E. H. Carr|title=The Bolshevik revolution 1917 – 1923. Vol. 1 |date=1977 |publisher=Penguin books |isbn=978-0-14-020749-1 |pages=111–112 |edition=Reprinted}}
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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sJGoHCNBoOQC | title=Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation | publisher=Transaction Publishers | isbn=978-1-4128-3502-2 }} According to Evan Mawdsley, "the 'revisionist’ school had been dominant from the 1970s", and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists.
= Revisionists on Stalinism =
File:PropagandaStudy 6.jpg, equating Nazism with Stalinism (Communism)]]
The death of Stalin in 1953 voided the simplistic totalitarian model of the police-state USSR as the epitome of the totalitarian state.{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages=225–227 |isbn=978-0684189031}} Starting from the 1970s, the 'revisionist' historians, described as those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong" and focused not on typology of power, but social history,{{cite journal|last=Lenoe|first=Matt|title=Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?|journal=The Journal of Modern History|volume=74|issue=2|year=2002|pages=352–380|issn=0022-2801|doi=10.1086/343411|s2cid=142829949}} such as Sheila Fitzpatrick began challenging the totalitarian paradigm; without denying the state violence by the regime, these scholars argued that the Stalinist system could not and did not rule only through coercion and terror, and pointed to support within the population for many of Stalin's policies and argued that the party and state were often responsive to people's desires and values.{{Cite book |last1=Riasanovsky |first1=Nicholas Valentine |author-link1=Nicholas V. Riasanovsky |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofrussia0000rias_l2q3 |title=A History of Russia |last2=Steinberg |first2=Mark D. |author-link2=Mark D. Steinberg |date=2011 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-1953-4197-3 |edition=8th |location=New York Oxford |page=468}} More to it, they examined the substantial differences of Stalinist and Nazi violence that inevitably put into question the attempt to gather Stalin's and Hitler's regimes into a single category which was presented by the concept of totalitarianism. In 1999 the sociologists Randall Collins and David Waller grouped the concept of totalitarianism among the "theories that were completely wrong"; in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (2008), Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer critically examined the concept of totalitarianism and made a very detailed comparison of similarities and substantial differences between Hitler and Stalin and made conclusion in agreement with the point of Collins and Waller.{{cite journal | url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/460844/pdf | title=Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Review) | journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies | date=2011 | volume=25 | issue=3 | pages=457–459 | last1=Orlow | first1=Dietrich | doi=10.1093/hgs/dcr052 }}
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."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC | isbn=978-0-674-01697-2 | title=Stalin: A Biography | date=2005 | publisher=Harvard University Press }} 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."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ktcvDwAAQBAJ | isbn=978-963-386-130-1 | title=Totalitarian Societies and Democratic Transition: Essays in memory of Victor Zaslavsky | date=10 July 2017 | publisher=Central European University Press }}
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{{cite book |last=Fitzpatrick |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Fitzpatrick |date=1999 |title=Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0195050004}}—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions 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",{{cite book|last1=Davies|first1=Sarah|last2=Harris|first2=James|title=Stalin: A New History|chapter=Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas|date=8 September 2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-44663-1|pages=4–5}} 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 Stalinists 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 the one 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 (Gulags) 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 commited 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.{{cite book |last=Rubin |first=Eli |date=2008 |title=Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |isbn=978-1469606774}}
= Nazism and Fascism =
File:Gen. Otto Schumann, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Fritz Schmidt (1941, Den Haag).jpg, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Fritz Schmidt award a sportswoman with a portrait of Adolf Hitler]]
Enzo Traverso and Andrew Vincent point out that the "totalitarian approach" or the theoretical concept of totalitarianism, which presented the idea of a monolithic party, no separation between state and society, and total mobilization of the atomized masses and total control over the state, society and economy, is not applicable not only to the USSR, but also to Nazi Germany and Fascist states as well, since it also did not present a monolithic structure exercising total control over society, but on the contrary, that Nazi bureaucracy was highly "chaotic", anomic and disorganized and disunited, and that Adolf Hitler was a "weak dictator" and "laissez-faire leader", as said by such historians as Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw; this description of Nazi Germany was first introduced in 1942 by Franz Leopold Neumann in the work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, where he provocatively presented Hitlerism "a Behemoth, a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy", and later entered historiography of Nazism. In the 1970s, the German historians of functionalist school presented Nazism as a "polycratic" system grounded on different centers of power – the Nazi party, the army, the economic elites, and the state bureaucracy; to such historians, totalitarian monolithic state and party were just a facade (similarly to Fitzpatrick's assessment of Stalinism).{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6XpEAAAQBAJ | title=Modern Political Ideologies | isbn=978-1-119-98165-7 | last1=Vincent | first1=Andrew | date=15 December 2023 | publisher=John Wiley & Sons }} Historians like Mommsen and Ian Kershaw were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. Michael Mann wrote that these descriptions doubted theories of totalitarianism, since "anything less like the rigid top-down bureaucracy of totalitarian theory is hard to imagine", but that Stalinism and Nazism "belong together", and that "it is only a question of finding the right family name". According to Mann, "totalitarian theorists depicted an unreal level of coherence for any state. Modern states are a long way short of Hegelian or Weberian rational bureaucracy and they rarely act as singular, coherent actors. Normally regimes are factionalised; in an unpredictable world they stumble along with many foul-ups. Second, we should remember Weber's essential point about bureaucracy: it kept politics out of administration. Political and moral values ('value rationality') were settled outside of bureaucratic administration, which then limited itself to finding efficient means of implementing those values ('formal rationality'). Contrary to totalitarian theory, the twentieth-century states most capable of such formally rational bureaucracy were not the dictatorships but the democracies."
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.{{cite journal | url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i176/articles/ian-kershaw-the-nazi-state-an-exceptional-state | title=The Nazi State: An Exceptional State? | journal=New Left Review | date=August 1989 | issue=I/176 | pages=47–67 | last1=Kershaw | first1=Ian }}
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{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3urAEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-0-691-22612-5 | title=Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity | date=21 November 2023 | publisher=Princeton University Press|quote=Of course, the exclusion of fascist Italy from the totalitarian family is not a surprising claim today. Those who separate ('merely' fascist) Italy from (properly totalitarian) Germany and Russia are hardly a minority among recent scholars, though their view remains contested.}}), 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."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x_MeR06xqXAC | title=A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 | isbn=978-0-299-14873-7 | last1=Payne | first1=Stanley G. | date=January 1996 | publisher=University of Wisconsin Pres }}
= Further debates =
== 1980s - 1990s ==
Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur dismissed the arguments of revisionists as "reappraisals of Stalin and Stalinism" and compared them with German 'revisionist' historians of Nazism, particularly Ernst Nolte, whom he did not distinguish from functionalist historians of Nazism ("weak dictator" thesis), and called their analysis "Marxist", for which Stalin was "not promising material".{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=224, 228|isbn=978-0684189031}} As Laqueur wrote, the historians who disagreed with the revisionists "still ha[d] very strong feelings" towards Stalinism and found concepts such as modernisation inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history, unlike the concept of totalitarianism; citing Mikhail Gorbachev using the term "totalitarianism", Laqueur wrote that the efforts of the revisionists to abolish the totalitarian model "ha[d] become difficult."{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=233 |isbn=978-0684189031}}
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".{{cite book |last=Neumayer |first=Laure |author-link=Laure Neumayer |year=2018 |title=The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War |publisher=Routledge |isbn= 9781351141741}} 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,{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gcFEAQAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-135-04397-1 | title=Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories | date=8 October 2013 | publisher=Routledge }} Furet made a comparative analysis{{cite journal |last=Schönpflug |first=Daniel |date=2007 |title=Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements |journal=European History Quarterly |volume=37 |issue=2 |pages=265–290 |doi=10.1177/0265691407075595|s2cid=143074271 }} and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism.{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=17 April 1995 |title=The Sound and the Furet |url=http://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |url-status=dead |magazine=The Nation |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080317075608/https://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer |archive-date=17 March 2008 |access-date= 7 August 2020 |quote=Furet, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, describes Bolsheviks and Nazis as totalitarian twins, conflicting yet united.}}{{cite magazine |last=Singer |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Singer (journalist) |date=2 November 1999 |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |title=Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir |magazine=The Nation |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=... the totalitarian nature of Stalin's Russia is undeniable. |archive-date=26 July 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190726020527/https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/ |url-status=live }}{{cite web |url=http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |title=Nazi Fascism and the Modern Totalitarian State |last=Grobman |first=Gary M. |date=1990 |website=Remember.org |access-date=7 August 2020 |quote=The government of Nazi Germany was a fascist, totalitarian state. |archive-date=2 April 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150402073405/http://www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html |url-status=live }} 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 'Communist states' 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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u29KEAAAQBAJ | title=European Memory and Conflicting Visions of the Past | isbn=978-3-030-79843-7 | last1=Toth | first1=Mano | date=25 October 2021 | publisher=Springer }}
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".{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9bstBgAAQBAJ | title=A Companion to the French Revolution | isbn=978-1-118-97752-1 | last1=McPhee | first1=Peter | date=15 December 2014 | publisher=John Wiley & Sons }} In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that "[Nazism and Stalinism] 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".{{cite journal | url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i220/articles/eric-hobsbawm-history-and-illusion | title=History and Illusion | journal=New Left Review | date=December 1996 | issue=I/220 | pages=116–125 | last1=Hobsbawm | first1=Eric }}{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8YvXEAAAQBAJ | title=Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe | isbn=978-1-80429-227-3 | last1=Bresciani | first1=Marco | date=18 June 2024 | publisher=Verso Books }} 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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MeKzEAAAQBAJ | title=Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union | isbn=978-1-6669-3090-0 | last1=Greene | first1=Douglas | date=20 March 2023 | publisher=Rowman & Littlefield }}
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.{{cite book |last=Parenti |first=Michael |author-link=Michael Parenti |date=1997 |title=Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism |location=San Francisco |publisher=City Lights Books |pages=41–58 |isbn=978-0872863293}} For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism."{{cite journal |last=Petras |first=James |author-link=James Petras |date=November 1, 1999 |title=The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited |url=https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/ |url-status=live |journal=Monthly Review |volume=51 |issue=6 |page=47 |doi=10.14452/MR-051-06-1999-10_4 |access-date=June 19, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210516153420/https://monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited/ |archive-date=May 16, 2021}}
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.{{cite journal |last=Losurdo |first=Domenico |author-link=Domenico Losurdo |date=January 2004 |title=Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism |journal=Historical Materialism |volume=12 |issue=2 |pages=25–55 |doi=10.1163/1569206041551663}}
==After the 1990s==
After 1990s, criticisms of totalitarianism as a historical concept and a tool of analysis continued; however, while these critics called for expulsion of the concept from academic field, they stated that its legitimate outside it. Hans Mommsen criticized it as "a descriptive concept, not a theory" with "little or no explanatory power": "But the basis of comparison is a shallow one, largely confined to the apparatus of rule." However, he wrote that "the totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself", and that it is legitimate in "non-scholarly usage". Enzo Traverso in his essay "Totalitarianism Between History and Theory" (2017) dismisses the term as "both useless and irreplaceable" for political science and academic history and cites Franz Leopold Neumann who called it a Weberian "ideal type", an abstraction that does not exist in reality as opposed to concrete totality of history, and believes it to be a term of abuse in Western political science and propaganda, he writes about its legitimacy for storing traumatic collective experience of the 20th century state violence:
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 Václav 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."{{cite journal |last=Connelly |first=John |date=2010 |title=Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word |journal=Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History |volume=11 |issue=4 |pages=819–835 |doi=10.1353/kri.2010.0001|s2cid=143510612 }}
Politics
=Early usages=
==Self-description of autocracies==
The term "totalitarian" was used by leaders and senior officials of right-wing and far-right dictatorships and autocracies established during the interwar period and World War II to describe their regimes, most notably by Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy. While in the triade of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in the latter it became an official self-description, in the second it was also used but to a less extent, and in the first it was not used it all, this pattern of self-description was reversed by later theories of totalitarianism which regarded the USSR as an epitome of totalitarianism, projected this understanding on Nazi Germany and to a less extent on Fascist Italy. Thus, the meaning of the term used in self-descriptions of the Fascists and the one used after World War II were different.
File:Palazzo Braschi Fascist Poster, 1934.png (Rome, 1934) with Il Duce Benito Mussolini's face. As the leader of Fascist Italy (1922–1943), Mussolini and his ideologues used the term 'totalitarian' to characterize his government]]
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 realistic politics of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power.{{cite book |last=Pipes |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Pipes |year=1995 |title=Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime |location=New York |publisher=Vintage Books, Random House |isbn=0394502426 |page=[https://archive.org/details/russiaunderbolsh00rich/page/243 243] |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/russiaunderbolsh00rich/page/243}} 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."{{cite book |last=Payne |first=Stanley G. |author-link=Stanley G. Payne |date=1980 |title=Fascism: Comparison and Definition |publisher=University of Washington Press |page=73 |isbn=978-0299080600}} 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."{{cite book |last=Conquest |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Conquest |date=1990 |title=The Great Terror: A Reassessment |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=249 |isbn=0195071328}}
Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938.{{sfn|Arendt|1958|pp=256-257}} 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.... [E]ven 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."{{sfn|Arendt|1958|pp=308–309}}
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).
File:Una patria, un estado, un caudillo.jpg and his motto Una patria! Un estado! Un caudillo! resembling the Nazi motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. During the Spanish Civil War, Franco proclaimed that his Spanish State would be modelled after "other countries of totalitarian regime", these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy]]
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 Socialist] 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 Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA),{{cite book|last=Mann|first=Michael|author-link=Michael Mann (sociologist)|year=2004|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eTE7ytbtp_cC|title=Fascists|location=New York|publisher=Cambridge University Press|page=331|isbn=978-0521831314|access-date=2017-10-26|archive-date=2020-08-19|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200819062157/https://books.google.com/books?id=eTE7ytbtp_cC|url-status=live}} 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."{{cite book |last=Preston |first=Paul |author-link=Paul Preston |date=2007 |title=The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge |edition=3rd |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |page=64 |isbn=978-0393329872}} 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.{{cite book|last=Salvadó|first=Francisco J. Romero|year=2013|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i5e7wRi-HGcC&pg=PA149|title=Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Civil War|publisher=Scarecrow Press|page=149|isbn=978-0810880092|access-date=2019-04-27|archive-date=2020-08-19|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200819120937/https://books.google.com/books?id=i5e7wRi-HGcC&pg=PA149|url-status=live}}
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."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RdWLDwAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-78672-300-0 | title=Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator | date=18 December 2017 | publisher=Bloomsbury }}{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=14RJCAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-0-19-028148-9 | title=Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War | date=20 March 1997 | publisher=Oxford University Press }}
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 "by beating Greece, they were beating what their flag stood for."https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/11/2/article-p315_8.xml 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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lClpAwAAQBAJ | title=Popular Autocracy in Greece, 1936-1941: A Political Biography of General Ioannis Metaxas | isbn=978-1-134-72926-5 | last1=Vatikiotis | first1=P. J. | date=23 April 2014 | publisher=Routledge }}
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.https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/pdf-drupal/en/report/english/1.5-the-holocaust-in-romania.pdfhttps://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Romania/twelve.pdf
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."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-FgMS9xpeV4C | title=Antitrust and Global Capitalism, 1930–2004 | isbn=978-1-139-45558-9 | last1=Freyer | first1=Tony A. | date=9 October 2006 | publisher=Cambridge University Press }} 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".{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=k7q6BwAAQBAJ | title=The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II | isbn=978-0-19-960582-8 | last1=Overy | first1=R. J. | date=2015 | publisher=Oxford University Press }}
== Criticism and analysis ==
File:Leon Trotsky, 1930s.jpg formulated a concept of totalitarianism in his analysis of the USSR in the 1930s]]
In the interwar period totalitarianism emerged as a term used in criticism and analysis of dictatorships of the time. In this critical period, the term began to be used to describe fascism and later became a ground of comparison of fascist states and the Soviet Union, but was not understood as an element of a single liberal-totalitarian dychotomy and as something opposite to liberal democracy.
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 first{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DAxVjDG4p_0C | title=Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses | isbn=978-1-4128-3165-9 | last1=Wrong | first1=Dennis Hume | publisher=Transaction Publishers }} to do so, thus producing perhaps most famous example of such usage of the term by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RF3LFMID9k8C | title=The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism | isbn=978-0-252-06796-9 | last1=Jones | first1=William David | date=1999 | publisher=University of Illinois Press }} 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 the one 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;{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3o2fAwAAQBAJ | title=Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy | isbn=978-90-04-26953-8 | last1=Twiss | first1=Thomas M. | date=8 May 2014 | publisher=BRILL }} 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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Kc1oAAAAMAAJ | title=The Trotsky Reappraisal | isbn=978-0-7486-0317-6 | last1=Brotherstone | first1=Terry | last2=Dukes | first2=Paul | date=1992 }}
File:Carriers of the New Black Plague.jpg; the caption mentions "Totalitarian Eclipse" threatening democracy]]
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.{{cite journal |last=Nemoianu |first=Virgil |date=December 1982 |title=Review of End and Beginnings |journal=Modern Language Notes |volume=97 |issue=5 |pages=1235–1238}} 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.{{cite speech |last=Churchill |first=Winston |author-link=Winston Churchill |title=The Munich Agreement |date=5 October 1938 |location=House of Commons of the United Kingdom |publisher=International Churchill Society |url=http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-munich-agreement |access-date=7 August 2020 |language=English |quote=We in this country, as in other Liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian states who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds. Many of those countries, in fear of the rise of the Nazi power, ... loathed the idea of having this arbitrary rule of the totalitarian system thrust upon them, and hoped that a stand would be made. |archive-date=26 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200626193227/https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-munich-agreement/ |url-status=live }} 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."{{cite speech |last=Churchill |first=Winston |author-link=Winston Churchill |title=Broadcast to the United States and to London |date=16 October 1938 |publisher=International Churchill Society |url=http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-defence-of-freedom-and-peace |access-date=7 August 2020 |archive-date=25 September 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200925195010/https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-defence-of-freedom-and-peace/ |url-status=live }}
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.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jmeBDwAAQBAJ | title=The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right | isbn=978-1-78873-046-4 | last1=Traverso | first1=Enzo | date=29 January 2019 | publisher=Verso Books }} 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;{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MeKzEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-6669-3090-0 | title=Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union | date=20 March 2023 | publisher=Rowman & Littlefield }} 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 decolonising 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.{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |page=131 |isbn=0684189038}}
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."{{cite magazine |last=Orwell |first=George |author-link=George Orwell |date=1946 |title=Why I Write |url=http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part47 |magazine=Gangrel |access-date=7 August 2020 |archive-date=25 July 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200725130413/http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part47 |url-status=live }}
=Cold War=
File:Hannah Arendt 1933.jpg was of the totalitarian model.]]
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the political scientist Hannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate Nazism and soviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of a military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian worldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of ethnic conflict, of the survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history of class conflict, of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to historicism (Law of History) or by an appeal to nature, as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus.{{cite book |last=Villa |first=Dana Richard |date=2000 |title=The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=2–3 |isbn=0521645719}}
;True belief
In The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), Eric Hoffer said that political mass movements, such as Italian Fascism (1922–1943), German Nazism (1933–1945), and Russian Stalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as culturally superior to the morally decadent societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That such mass psychology indicates that participating in and then joining a political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both the public sphere and in the private sphere. In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from the official texts of the totalitarian ideology.{{cite book |last=Hoffer |first=Eric |author-link=Eric Hoffer |date=2002 |title=The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements |publisher=Harper Perennial Modern Classics |pages=61, 163 |isbn=0060505915}}
;Collaborationism
In "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" (2018) the historian Paul Hanebrink said that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism, because for European Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, the new postwar 'culture war' crystallized as a struggle against Communism. Throughout the European interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians to demonize the Communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of secular materialism and [as] a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order".{{cite journal |last=Hanebrink |first=Paul |date=July 2018 |title=European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf? |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=53 |issue=3 |page=624 |doi=10.1177/0022009417704894|s2cid=158028188 }} That throughout Europe, the Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived Communism and communist régimes of government as an existential threat to the moral order of their respective societies; and collaborated with Fascists and Nazis in the idealistic hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to their root Christian culture.{{cite journal |last=Hanebrink |first=Paul |date=July 2018 |title=European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf? |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=53 |issue=3 |pages=622–643 |doi=10.1177/0022009417704894|s2cid=158028188 }}
==Totalitarian model==
In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms totalitarianism, totalitarian, and totalitarian model, presented in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in the foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the totalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for Kremlinology, the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of the politburo crafting policy (national and foreign) yielded strategic intelligence for dealing with the USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a banana republic country.{{cite book |last1=Brzezinski |first1=Zbigniew |author-link1=Zbigniew Brzezinski |last2=Friedrich |first2=Carl |author-link2=Carl Joachim Friedrich |date=1956 |title=Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy |publisher=Harvard University Press |page= |isbn=978-0674332607}} As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:
- Elaborate guiding ideology.
- One-party state
- State terrorism
- Monopoly control of weapons
- Monopoly control of the mass communications media
- Centrally directed and controlled planned economyBrzezinski & Friedrich, 1956, p.22.
==Criticism and evolution of the totalitarian model==
File:Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1977.jpg popularised 'combating left-wing totalitarianism' in U.S. foreign policy and served as National Security Advisor to the United States President Jimmy Carter]]
As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that the totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government of Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper.Brzezinski & Friedrich 1956, p. 22. Revisionist historians noted the historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into the nomenklatura, the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of the USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy.{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages=186–189, 233–234 |isbn=978-0684189031}}
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.{{cite book |last=Kershaw |first=Ian |author-link=Ian Kershaw |date=2000 |title=The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation |location=London; New York |publisher=Arnold; Oxford University Press |page=25 |isbn=978-0340760284 |oclc=43419425}} 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.{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=241 |isbn=978-0684189031}}
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| footer = Dynasty of totalitarians: Ba'athist Syria was ruled by the generational dictatorships of Hafez al-Assad (r. 1971–2000) and his son Bashar al-Assad (r. 2000 – 2024) between the late Cold War in the 1970s{{Cite book |last=Khamis, B. Gold, Vaughn |first=Sahar, Paul, Katherine |title=The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-19-976441-9 |editor-last=Auerbach, Castronovo |editor-first=Jonathan, Russ |location=198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 |pages=422 |chapter=22. Propaganda in Egypt and Syria's "Cyberwars": Contexts, Actors, Tools, and Tactics}}{{Cite book |last=Wedeen |first=Lisa |title=Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2015 |isbn=978-0-226-33337-3 |location=Chicago |pages= |chapter= |doi=10.7208/chicago/978022345536.001.0001|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 }}{{Cite book |last=Meininghaus |first=Esther |title=Creating Consent in Ba'thist Syria: Women and Welfare in a Totalitarian State |publisher=I. B. Tauris |year=2016 |isbn=978-1-78453-115-7 |pages= |chapter=}} until 2024.{{cite news |title=Syrian rebels topple President Assad, prime minister calls for free elections |url=https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syria-rebels-celebrate-captured-homs-set-sights-damascus-2024-12-07/ |access-date=8 December 2024 |publisher=Reuters |date=8 December 2024}}
}}
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:
- A one-party state where the ruling party has a monopoly on all political activity.
- A state ideology upheld by the ruling party that is given official status as the only authority.
- A state monopoly on information; control of the mass communications media to broadcast the official truth.
- A state-controlled economy featuring major economic entities under state control.
- An ideological police-state terror; criminalisation of political, economic, and professional activities.{{cite book |last=Aron |first=Raymond |author-link=Raymond Aron |date=1968 |title=Democracy and Totalitarianism |publisher=Littlehampton Book Services |page=195 |isbn=978-0297002529}}
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 the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], 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 Communist totalitarianism]. 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 the USSR]." 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 Stalin was her attempt to intellectually distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]" as anti-Communist propaganda.{{cite book |last=Saladdin |first=Ahmed |date=2019 |title=Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura |location=Albany |publisher=SUNY Press |page=7 |isbn=978-1438472935}}{{cn|date=March 2025|reason=The text cites the book review not the book, but current note only references the book}}
=Kremlinology=
During the Russo–American Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field of Kremlinology (analysing politburo policy politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by the totalitarian model of the USSR as a police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader Stalin, who heads a monolithic, centralised hierarchy of government.{{cite book |last1=Davies |first1=Sarah |last2=Harris |first2=James |year=2005 |chapter=Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas |title=Stalin: A New History |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |page=3 |isbn=978-1139446631 |quote=Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.}} The study of the internal politics of the politburo crafting policy at the Kremlin produced two schools of historiographic interpretation of Cold War history: (i) traditionalist Kremlinology and (ii) revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for the totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state version of Communist Russia. The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of politburo policies upon Soviet society, civil and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists said that the old image of the Stalinist USSR of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent upon world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, because the death of Stalin changed Soviet society.{{cite journal |last=Lenoe |first=Matt |date=June 2002|title=Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does it Matter?|journal=The Journal of Modern History |volume=74 |issue=2 |pages=352–380 |doi=10.1086/343411 |issn=0022-2801 |s2cid=142829949}} After the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, most revisionist Kremlinologists worked the national archives of ex–Communist states, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation about Soviet-period Russia.{{cite journal |last=Fitzpatrick |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Fitzpatrick |date=November 2007 |title=Revisionism in Soviet History |journal=History and Theory |volume=46 |issue=4 |pages=77–91 |doi=10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00429.x |issn=1468-2303 |quote= . . . the Western scholars who, in the 1990s and 2000s, were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.}}
==Totalitarian model as an official policy==
In the 1950s, the political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich said that Communist states, such as Soviet Russia and Red China, were countries which were systematically controlled by a supreme leader who used the five features of the totalitarian model of government: (i) an official dominant ideology that includes a cult of personality about the leader, (ii) control of all civil and military weapons, (iii) control of the public and the private mass communications media, (iv) the use of state terrorism to police the populace, and (v) a political party of mass membership who perpetually re-elect The Leader.{{cite book |last1=Davies |first1=Sarah |last2=Harris |first2=James |year=2005 |chapter=Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas |title=Stalin: A New History |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=3–4 |isbn=978-1139446631 |quote=In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader.' There was, of course, an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled, unquestioningly, by his subordinates.}}
In the 1960s, the revisionist Kremlinologists researched the organisations and they also studied the policies of the relatively autonomous bureaucracies that influenced the crafting of high-level policy for governing Soviet society in the USSR.{{cite book |last1=Davies |first1=Sarah |last2=Harris |first2=James |year=2005 |chapter=Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas |title=Stalin: A New History |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=4–5 |isbn=978-1139446631 |quote=Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was, increasingly, challenged by later revisionist historians. In his Origins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions 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. Getty's work was influenced by political [the] science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.}} 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 social forces 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.{{cite journal |last=Lenoe |first=Matt |date=June 2002|title=Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?|journal=The Journal of Modern History |volume=74 |issue=2 |pages=352–380 |doi=10.1086/343411 |issn=0022-2801 |s2cid=142829949}} Hence, Russian modern history had outdated the totalitarian model that was the post–Stalinist perception of the police-state USSR of the 1950s.{{cite journal|last=Zimmerman|first=William|date=September 1980|title=Review: How the Soviet Union is Governed|publisher=Cambridge University Press|journal=Slavic Review|volume=39|issue=3|pages=482–486|doi=10.2307/2497167|jstor=2497167}}
=Post–Cold War=
File:Ambassador Nura Abba Rimi & President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea (cropped).jpg has ruled Eritrea as a totalitarian dictator since the country's independence in 1993.{{cite journal|last=Saad|first=Asma|date=21 February 2018|url=https://mjps.ssmu.ca/2018/02/21/eritreas-silent-totalitarianism/|title=Eritrea's Silent Totalitarianism|journal=McGill Journal of Political Studies|issue=21|access-date=7 August 2020|archive-date=7 October 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181007040952/https://mjps.ssmu.ca/2018/02/21/eritreas-silent-totalitarianism/|url-status=live}}]]
File:AQMI Flag asymmetric.svg, which is a self-proclaimed caliphate that demands the religious, political, and military obedience of Muslims worldwide]]
In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, Slavoj Žižek ironically described the concept of totalitarianism as an "ideological antioxidant" similar to the "Celestial Seasonings" green tea that, according to its advertisement, "neutralizes harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals" and wrote that "[t]he notion of 'totalitarianism', far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking".{{cite book |last=Žižek |first=Slavoj |author-link=Slavoj Žižek |date=2002 |title=Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion |location=London and New York |publisher=Verso |page=169 |isbn=9781859844250}}
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 utopianism, scientism, or political violence. They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw polymathy 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.{{cite book |last=Shorten |first=Richard |date=2012 |title=Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present |publisher=Palgrave |isbn=978-0230252073}}{{cite book |last=Tismăneanu |first=Vladimir |date=2012 |title=The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century |publisher=University of California Press |isbn=978-0520954175}}{{cite book |last=Tucker |first=Aviezer |date=2015 |title=The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1316393055}} 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".{{cite journal |last=Fuentes |first=Juan Francisco |date=2015 |title=How Words Reshape the Past: The 'Old, Old Story of Totalitarianism |journal=Politics, Religion & Ideology |volume=16 |issue=2–3 |pages=282–297 |doi=10.1080/21567689.2015.1084928|s2cid=155157905 }}
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.{{cite book|last1=Zuboff|first1=Shoshana|title=The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power|publisher=PublicAffairs|year=2019|isbn=978-1610395694|location=New York|oclc=1049577294}} 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".{{cite book|last=Ord|first=Toby|year=2020|chapter=Future Risks|title=The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1526600196}} 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".{{cite journal|last=Clarke|first=R.|year=1988|title=Information Technology and Dataveillance|journal=Communications of the ACM|volume=31|number=5|pages=498–512|doi=10.1145/42411.42413|s2cid=6826824|doi-access=free}}
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.{{cite news|url=https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/12/17/china-invents-the-digital-totalitarian-state|title=China invents the digital totalitarian state|newspaper=The Economist|date=17 December 2017|access-date=14 September 2018|archive-date=14 September 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180914200819/https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/12/17/china-invents-the-digital-totalitarian-state|url-status=live}} 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.{{cite news |last1=Leigh |first1=Karen |last2=Lee |first2=Dandan |date=2 December 2018 |title=China's Radical Plan to Judge Each Citizen's Behavior |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chinas-radical-plan-to-judge-each-citizens-behavior/2018/12/02/0a281258-f69b-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190102090447/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chinas-radical-plan-to-judge-each-citizens-behavior/2018/12/02/0a281258-f69b-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=2 January 2019 |newspaper=The Washington Post |access-date=23 January 2020}} Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian.{{cite journal |last=Lucas |first=Rob |date=January–February 2020 |title=The Surveillance Business |url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business |journal=New Left Review |volume=121 |issue= |pages= |doi= |access-date=23 March 2020 |archive-date=21 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200621022016/https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business |url-status=live }}
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.{{cite book |first1=Steven|last1=Levitsky|last2=Way|first2=Lucan|date=13 September 2022 |title=Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism |publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0691169521}} Some totalitarian one-party states 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),{{cite book |last1=Rummel |first1=R.J. |title=Widening circle of genocide |date=1994 |publisher=Transaction Publishers |editor1-last=Charney |editor1-first=Israel W. |page=5 |chapter=Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers.}} Syrian Arab Republic (1963),Sources:
- {{Cite book |last=Wieland |first=Carsten |title=Syria and the Neutrality Trap: The Dilemmas of Delivering Humanitarian Aid Through Violent Regimes |publisher=I.B. Tauris |year=2018 |isbn=978-0-7556-4138-3 |location= London |pages=68 |chapter=6: De-neutralizing Aid: All Roads Lead to Damascus}}
- {{Cite book |last=Meininghaus |first=Esther |title=Creating Consent in Ba'thist Syria: Women and Welfare in a Totalitarian State |publisher=I. B. Tauris |year=2016 |isbn=978-1-78453-115-7 |location=London|pages=69, 70}}
- {{Cite journal |last=Hashem |first=Mazen |date=Spring 2012 |title=The Levant Reconciling a Century of Contradictions |url=https://www.academia.edu/51919018 |journal=AJISS |volume=29 |issue=2 |pages=141 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240305093704/https://www.academia.edu/51919018/The_Levant_Reconciling_a_Century_of_Contradictions |archive-date=5 March 2024 |via=academia.edu}} and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978).Sources:
- {{Cite book |last=Tucker |first=Ernest |title=The Middle East in Modern World History |publisher=Routledge |year=2019 |isbn=978-1-138-49190-8 |edition=2nd|location=New York|page=303 |chapter=21: Middle East at the End of the Cold War, 1979–1993 |lccn=2018043096 |quote=}}
- {{Cite journal |last=Kirkpatrick |first=Jeane J |date=1981 |title=Afghanistan: Implications for Peace and Security |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/20671902 |journal=World Affairs |volume=144 |issue=3 |pages=243 |jstor=20671902 |quote=}}
- {{Cite book |last=S.Margolis |first=Eric |title=War at the top of the World |publisher=Routledge |year=2005 |isbn=0-415-92712-9 |location=29New York |pages=14, 15 |chapter=2: The Bravest Men on Earth}}
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.{{cite journal |last=Brennan-Marquez |first=K. |date=2012 |title=A Modest Defence of Mind Reading |url=https://yjolt.org/modest-defense-mind-reading |journal=Yale Journal of Law and Technology |volume=15 |issue=214 |pages= |doi= |access-date= |archive-date=2020-08-10 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200810195039/https://yjolt.org/modest-defense-mind-reading |url-status=live }}{{cite news |last=Pickett |first=K. |date=16 April 2020 |title=Totalitarianism: Congressman calls method to track coronavirus cases an invasion of privacy |url=https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/totalitarianism-congressman-calls-method-to-track-coronavirus-cases-an-invasion-of-privacy |work=Washington Examiner |access-date=23 April 2020 |archive-date=22 April 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200422082819/https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/totalitarianism-congressman-calls-method-to-track-coronavirus-cases-an-invasion-of-privacy |url-status=live }}{{cite book |last1=Helbing |first1=Dirk |last2=Frey |first2=Bruno S. |last3=Gigerenzer |first3=Gerd |last4=Hafen |first4=Ernst |last5=Hagner |first5=Michael |last6=Hofstetter |first6=Yvonne |last7=van den Hoven |first7=Jeroen |last8=Zicari |first8=Roberto V. |last9=Zwitter |first9=Andrej |title=Towards Digital Enlightenment |chapter=Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence? |date=2019 |pages=73–98 |doi=10.1007/978-3-319-90869-4_7 |isbn=978-3-319-90868-7 |s2cid=46925747 |chapter-url=https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/111453647/Helbing2019_Chapter_WillDemocracySurviveBigDataAnd.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220526083948/https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/111453647/Helbing2019_Chapter_WillDemocracySurviveBigDataAnd.pdf |archive-date= 2022-05-26}} (also published in {{cite book |last1=Helbing |first1=D. |last2=Frey |first2=B. S. |last3=Gigerenzer |first3=G. |display-authors=etal |date=2019 |chapter=Will democracy survive big data and artificial intelligence? |title=Towards Digital Enlightenment: Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution |location= |publisher=Springer, Cham. |pages=73–98 |isbn=978-3319908694}}){{cite journal|last1=Turchin|first1=Alexey|last2=Denkenberger|first2=David|s2cid=19208453|title=Classification of global catastrophic risks connected with artificial intelligence|journal=AI & Society|date=3 May 2018|volume=35|issue=1|pages=147–163|doi=10.1007/s00146-018-0845-5|url=https://philarchive.org/rec/TURCOG-2}} 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.{{cite journal|last1=Bostrom|first1=Nick|title=Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority|journal=Global Policy|date=February 2013|volume=4|issue=1|pages=15–31|doi=10.1111/1758-5899.12002}}
=Religious totalitarianism=
==Islamic==
File:Flag of the Taliban.svg]]
The Taliban is a totalitarian Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and returned to power in 2021, controlling the entirety of Afghanistan. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of Pashtunwali culture of the majority Pashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive violations of women's rights.*{{cite journal |last1=Sakhi |first1=Nilofar |title=The Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan and Security Paradox |journal=Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs |date=December 2022 |volume=9 |issue=3 |pages=383–401 |doi=10.1177/23477970221130882 |s2cid=253945821 |quote=Afghanistan is now controlled by a militant group that operates out of a totalitarian ideology.}}
- {{cite web |last1=Madadi |first1=Sayed |title=Dysfunctional centralization and growing fragility under Taliban rule |url=https://www.mei.edu/publications/dysfunctional-centralization-and-growing-fragility-under-taliban-rule |website=Middle East Institute |access-date=28 November 2022 |date=6 September 2022 |quote=In other words, the centralized political and governance institutions of the former republic were unaccountable enough that they now comfortably accommodate the totalitarian objectives of the Taliban without giving the people any chance to resist peacefully.}}
- {{cite web |last1=Sadr |first1=Omar |title=Afghanistan's Public Intellectuals Fail to Denounce the Taliban |url=https://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/omar-sadr-afghanistan-taliban-rule-totalitarianism-human-rights-news-2441/ |website=Fair Observer |access-date=28 November 2022 |date=23 March 2022 |quote=The Taliban government currently installed in Afghanistan is not simply another dictatorship. By all standards, it is a totalitarian regime.}}
- {{cite web |title=Dismantlement of the Taliban regime is the only way forward for Afghanistan |url=https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/southasiasource/dismantlement-of-the-taliban-regime-is-the-only-way-forward-for-afghanistan/ |website=Atlantic Council |access-date=28 November 2022 |date=8 September 2022 |quote=As with any other ideological movement, the Taliban's Islamic government is transformative and totalitarian in nature.}}
- {{cite web |last1=Akbari |first1=Farkhondeh |title=The Risks Facing Hazaras in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan |url=https://extremism.gwu.edu/risks-facing-hazaras-taliban-ruled-afghanistan |website=George Washington University |access-date=28 November 2022 |date=7 March 2022 |quote=In the Taliban's totalitarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, there is no meaningful political inclusivity or representation for Hazaras at any level. |archive-date=14 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230114164914/https://extremism.gwu.edu/risks-facing-hazaras-taliban-ruled-afghanistan |url-status=dead}}
The Islamic State is a Salafi-Jihadist 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 Global Jihadism, Wahhabism, and Qutbism. Following its territorial expansion in 2014, the group renamed itself as the "Islamic State" and declared itself as a caliphate{{efn|Caliphate claim of "Islamic State" group is disputed and declared as illegal by traditional Islamic scholarship.Yusuf al-Qaradawi stated: "[The] declaration issued by the Islamic State is void under sharia and has dangerous consequences for the Sunnis in Iraq and for the revolt in Syria", adding that the title of caliph can "only be given by the entire Muslim nation", not by a single group. – {{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220112/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html |archive-date=12 January 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi addresses Muslims in Mosul|last=Strange|first=Hannah|date=5 July 2014|work=The Daily Telegraph|access-date=6 July 2014}}{{cbignore}}{{Cite web|url=http://www.jihadica.com/caliph-incognito/|title=Caliph Incognito: The Ridicule of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi|last=Bunzel|first=Cole|website=www.jihadica.com|date=27 November 2019 |language=en-US|access-date=2 January 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200102184946/http://www.jihadica.com/caliph-incognito/|archive-date=2 January 2020|url-status=live}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/11/01/what-a-caliphate-really-is-and-how-the-islamic-state-is-not-one/|title=What a caliphate really is—and how the Islamic State is not one|last=Hamid|first=Shadi|date=1 November 2016|website=Brookings|language=en-US|access-date=5 February 2020|archive-date=1 April 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200401231616/https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/11/01/what-a-caliphate-really-is-and-how-the-islamic-state-is-not-one/|url-status=live}}}} 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.{{cite web |last=Winter |first=Charlie |date=27 March 2016 |title=Totalitarianism 101: The Islamic State's Offline Propaganda Strategy |work=Lawfare |url=https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/totalitarianism-101-islamic-states-offline-propaganda-strategy}}{{Cite book |last=Filipec |first=Ondrej |title=The Islamic State From Terrorism to Totalitarian Insurgency |publisher=Routledge |year=2020 |isbn=9780367457631}}{{cite book|last=Peter |first=Bernholz |date=February 2019 |chapter=Supreme Values, Totalitarianism, and Terrorism |title=The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice |volume=1}}{{cite journal |last=Haslett |first=Allison |date=2021 |title=The Islamic State: A Political-Religious Totalitarian Regime. |url=https://libjournals.mtsu.edu/index.php/scientia/article/download/2075/1251/5752 |journal=Scientia et Humanitas: A Journal of Student Research |publisher=Middle Tennessee State University |quote="Islamic State embraces the most violent, extreme traits of Jihadi-Salafism. the State merged religious dogma and state control together to create a political-religious totalitarian regime that was not bound by physical borders"}}
=== Criticism of the classification of Islamism as totalitarianism ===
Enzo Traverso, a critic of totalitarianism as a theoretical concept of historical and political sciences, is also critical of the usage of it in relation to Islamist movements like ISIS and the Taliban and their state formations: according to Traverso, such notion contradicts the very theoretical concept of totalitarianism. Systems which are commonly described as totalitarian, fascism and communism, sought to create a utopian "New Man" and as a result, they set their projects toward the future, not to revive old forms of absolutism, as noted by Tzvetan Todorov. "The reactionary modernism of Islamic terrorism, on the contrary, employs modern technologies in order to return to the original purity of a mythical Islam. If it has utopian tendencies, they look to the past rather than the future." More to it, totalitarianism has been applied to secular movements which have been described as irrational "political religions" which seek to abolish traditional religions, liturgies and symbols and replace them with their own liturgies and symbols, while Islamic fundamentalism, on the contrary, is a politicized religion and a reaction to secularization and modernisation. Besides that, as a form of violence, terrorism is usually described as antipodal to state violence; while fascism was a reaction to democracy, Islamism arose in authoritarian, but weak states. "Speaking of a "theocratic" totalitarianism makes this concept even more flexible and ambiguous than ever, once again confirming its essential function: not critically interpreting history and the world, but rather fighting an enemy". Traverso writes that the usage of the term began after 9/11 by Western propaganda, which previously used it against the other enemies while maintaining the geopolitical interests of the West. He notes that the Islamic state which most resembles the concept of totalitarianism, Saudi Arabia, is an ally of the West and as a result, it cannot be considered a part of the "Axis of Evil", and for that reason, as he believes, Saudi Arabia is rarely described as "totalitarian", unlike Iran.
==Christian==
{{See also|National Catholicism|Christian fascism|Clerical fascism}}
File:RETRATO DEL GRAL. FRANCISCO FRANCO BAHAMONDE (adjusted levels).jpg]]
Francoist Spain (1936–1975), under the dictator Francisco Franco, had been commonly characterized as totalitarian until 1964, when Juan Linz challenged this characterization and instead described Francoism as "authoritarian" because of its "limited degree of political pluralism" caused by the struggle between 'Francoist families' (Falangists, Carlists, etc.) within the sole legal party FET y de las JONS and the Movimiento Nacional and by other such features as, according to Linz, lack of 'totalitarian' ideology, as Franco relied on National Catholicism and traditionalism. Such revision caused a major debate, some critics of Linz felt that his concept may be a form of acquittal of Francoism and did not concern its early phase (often called "First Francoism"). Later debates focused on whether the regime could be described as 'fascist' rather than whether it was totalitarian; some historians stressed the traits of a military dictatorship, while the others emphasized the Fascist component, calling the regime a para-fascist or 'fascistized' dictatorship. While Enrique Moradiellos notes that "it is now increasingly rare to define Francoism as a truly fascist and totalitarian regime", although he writes that the debates on Francoism haven't finished yet, Ismael Saz notes that "it has also begun to be recognised that" Francoism underwent a "totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian, fascist or quasi-fascist" phase.{{Cite book |last=Saz |first=Ismael |author-link=Ismael Saz |title=Fascismo y Franquismo |publisher=Universitat de València |year=2004 |isbn=978-84-370-5910-5 |location=València |language=es}} The historians who continue to criticize Linz and describe the regime as totalitarian usually limit such characterization to ten to twenty years of the "First Francoism ."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=D32PCwAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-317-29422-1 | title=European Dictatorships 1918-1945 | date=12 February 2016 | publisher=Routledge }}{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JzAKEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-84-8102-695-5 | title=La construcción de la dictadura franquista en Cantabria | date=20 November 2020 | publisher=Ed. Universidad de Cantabria }}{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=angGEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-84-95886-89-7 | title=El Franquismo y la apropiación del pasado: El uso de la historia, de la arqueología y de la historia del arte para la legitimación de la dictadura | date=2 July 2016 | publisher=Editorial Pablo Iglesias }}{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=F5MXzFIHWmMC | isbn=978-84-259-1008-1 | title=Estado y derecho en el franquismo: El nacionalsindicalismo. F. J. Conde y Luis Legaz Lacambra | date=1996 | publisher=Centro de Estudios Constitucionales }}
File:Pla y Deniel marzo 1942.jpg minister Esteban Bilbao (left) and Catholic archbishop Enrique Pla y Deniel (center) doing the Roman salute in Toledo Cathedral, Spain, March 1942.]]
Linz wrote that "the heteronomous control of the ideological content of Catholic thought by a universal church and specifically by the Pope is one of the most serious obstacles to the creation of a truly totalitarian system..."{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8cYk_ABfMJIC | isbn=978-1-55587-890-0 | title=Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes | date=2000 | publisher=Lynne Rienner Publishers }} This argument is also debated: "The frequent and saturated references to Francoist Catholic humanism... coming from Christian theology, could hardly conceal the fact that the individual was only understood as a citizen to the extent of his adherence to the Catholic, hierarchical and economically privatist community that the military uprising had saved";{{cite book |last1=Contreras |first1=Guillermo Portilla |title=El derecho penal bajo la dictadura franquista: Bases ideológicas y protagonistas |date=2022 |publisher=Editorial Dykinson, S.L. |location=Madrid |url=https://ruja.ujaen.es/server/api/core/bitstreams/1ff15109-4ea2-4949-967c-2183fc8000c8/content |access-date=17 January 2025 |language=es}}{{page needed|date=March 2025}} "Catholic values that permeated the conservative ideological substratum... were precisely what was wielded by the Francoist Spanish political doctrine of the late thirties and early forties to justify the need for the constitution of a totalitarian State at the service and expansion of the Catholic religion."{{cite journal | url=https://revistaderecho.posgrado.unam.mx/index.php/rpd/article/view/170/330 | doi=10.22201/ppd.26831783e.2021.14.170 | title=La voluntad totalitaria del Franquismo | date=2021 | last1=González Prieto | first1=Luis Aurelio | journal=Revista del Posgrado en Derecho de la Unam | issue=14 | pages=44 | doi-access=free }}
Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of Catholicism, the declared state religion.{{Cite book |last=Viñas |first=Ángel |url=https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/libro?codigo=511206 |title=En el combate por la historia: la República, la guerra civil, el franquismo |year=2012 |publisher=Pasado y Presente |isbn=978-8493914394 |language=es |access-date=2020-09-15 |archive-date=2020-10-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201005174834/https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/libro?codigo=511206 |url-status=live }} Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by the Church, along with divorces. Divorce, contraception and abortions were forbidden.{{Cite web |title=Franco edicts |url=http://search.boe.es/datos/imagenes/BOE/1954/198/A04862.tif |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080626065607/http://search.boe.es/datos/imagenes/BOE/1954/198/A04862.tif |archive-date=26 June 2008 |access-date=16 December 2005}} 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."{{cite book |last1=Payne |first1=Stanley G. |title=The Franco Regime, 1936–1975 |year=1987 |publisher=Univ of Wisconsin Press |isbn=978-0-299-11070-3 |pages=323–324 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mgDWLYcTYIAC&pg=PA323}} 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 Falangist movement.{{cite web |url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/timreuter/2014/05/19/before-chinas-transformation-there-was-the-spanish-miracle/#f5da6133b3e1 |title=Before China's Transformation, There Was The 'Spanish Miracle' |work=Forbes Magazine |access-date=22 August 2017 |date=19 May 2014 |first=Tim |last=Reuter |archive-date=24 December 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191224061157/https://www.forbes.com/sites/timreuter/2014/05/19/before-chinas-transformation-there-was-the-spanish-miracle/#f5da6133b3e1 |url-status=live }} 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{{full citation needed|date=February 2025}}{{failed verification|date=January 2025}}
Early totalitarianism
The concept of totalitarianism has also been applied to historical states that existed prior to the 20th century and it has even been applied to states which existed in antiquity. For example, the Encyclopædia Britannica applies the concept of totalitarianism to such states as the Mauryan dynasty of India (c. 321–c. 185 BCE), the Qin dynasty of China (221–207 BCE), and the reign of Zulu chief Shaka (c. 1816–28) Such authors as Peter Bernholz (Oxford University Press) apply the concept of totalitarianism to the city of Geneva under John Calvin's leadership, the Umayyad, Mongol, Aztec and Inca empires, Münster during the Anabaptist rebellion, and the Mahdist State.{{cite book | last=Bernholz | first=P. | title=Totalitarianism, Terrorism and Supreme Values: History and Theory | publisher=Springer International Publishing | series=Studies in Public Choice | year=2017 | isbn=978-3-319-56907-9 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dyYmDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA33 | access-date=2023-02-28 | page=33}}{{cite book | last1=Congleton | first1=R.D. | last2=Grofman | first2=B.N. | last3=Voigt | first3=S. | title=The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, Volume 1 | publisher=Oxford University Press | series=Oxford Handbooks | year=2018 | isbn=978-0-19-046974-0 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wLh9DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA860 | access-date=2023-02-28 | page=860}}{{cite book | last1=Maier | first1=H. | last2=Schäfer | first2=M. | title=Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume II: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships | publisher=Taylor & Francis | series=Totalitarianism Movements and Political Religions | year=2007 | isbn=978-1-134-06346-8 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L4d8AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA264 | access-date=2023-02-28 | page=264}}
See also
{{Portal|Politics}}
{{Div col|colwidth=20em}}
- Inverted totalitarianism
- Totalitarian democracy
- Totalitarian architecture
- Police state
- Guided democracy
- The Black Book of Communism
- Double genocide theory
- Surveillance capitalism
- List of cults of personality
- List of totalitarian regimes
- Nazism
- Fascism
- Religious supremacism
- Stalinism
- Total institution
{{Div col end}}
References
{{reflist}}
Notes
{{notelist}}
Further reading
{{div col}}
- {{Cite book |last=Arendt |first=Hannah |url=https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/ |title=The Origins of Totalitarianism |publisher=Meridian Books |year=1958 |edition=Second Enlarged |location=New York| lccn=58-11927}}
- Armstrong, John A. The Politics of Totalitarianism (New York: Random House, 1961).
- {{cite journal |last1=Béja |first1=Jean-Philippe |title=Xi Jinping's China: On the Road to Neo-totalitarianism |journal=Social Research: An International Quarterly |date=March 2019 |volume=86 |issue=1 |pages=203–230 |doi=10.1353/sor.2019.0009 |s2cid=199140716 |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/2249726077 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221203215218/https://www.proquest.com/docview/2249726077 |archive-date=December 3, 2022|id={{ProQuest|2249726077}} }}
- Bernholz, Peter. "Ideocracy and totalitarianism: A formal analysis incorporating ideology", Public Choice 108, 2001, pp. 33–75.
- Bernholz, Peter. "Ideology, sects, state and totalitarianism. A general theory". In: H. Maier and M. Schaefer (eds.): Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Vol. II (Routledge, 2007), pp. 246–270.
- Borkenau, Franz, The Totalitarian Enemy (London: Faber and Faber 1940).
- Bracher, Karl Dietrich, "The Disputed Concept of Totalitarianism," pp. 11–33 from Totalitarianism Reconsidered edited by Ernest A. Menze (Kennikat Press, 1981) {{ISBN|0804692688}}.
- Congleton, Roger D. "Governance by true believers: Supreme duties with and without totalitarianism." Constitutional Political Economy 31.1 (2020): 111–141. [http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/Supreme%20Values%20%286.3%20%20for%20CPE%29.pdf online]
- Connelly, John. "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11#4 (2010) 819–835. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/398247/summary online].
- Curtis, Michael. Totalitarianism (1979) [https://archive.org/details/totalitarianism0000curt online]
- Devlin, Nicholas. "Hannah Arendt and Marxist Theories of Totalitarianism." Modern Intellectual History (2021): 1–23 [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/BBBE9F1CDF3893E640378922DC33EF7E/S1479244321000603a.pdf/hannah-arendt-and-marxist-theories-of-totalitarianism.pdf online].
- Diamond, Larry. "The road to digital unfreedom: The threat of postmodern totalitarianism." Journal of Democracy 30.1 (2019): 20–24. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/713719/summary excerpt]
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Michael Geyer, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
- Friedrich, Carl and Z. K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 1st ed. 1956, 2nd ed. 1965).
- Gach, Nataliia. "From totalitarianism to democracy: Building learner autonomy in Ukrainian higher education." Issues in Educational Research 30.2 (2020): 532–554. [http://www.iier.org.au/iier30/gach.pdf online]
- Gleason, Abbott. Totalitarianism: The Inner History Of The Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), {{ISBN|0195050177}}.
- Gray, Phillip W. Totalitarianism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2023), {{ISBN|9781032183732}}.
- Gregor, A. Totalitarianism and political religion (Stanford University Press, 2020).
- Hanebrink, Paul. "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" Journal of Contemporary History (July 2018) Vol. 53, Issue 3, pp. 622–643
- Hermet, Guy, with Pierre Hassner and Jacques Rupnik, Totalitarismes (Paris: Éditions Economica, 1984).
- Jainchill, Andrew, and Samuel Moyn. "French democracy between totalitarianism and solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and revisionist historiography." Journal of Modern History 76.1 (2004): 107–154. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421186 online]
- Joscelyne, Sophie. "Norman Mailer and American Totalitarianism in the 1960s." Modern Intellectual History 19.1 (2022): 241–267 [https://scholar.archive.org/work/wme3bmrkhvdmrkf76b6lj2rste/access/wayback/https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/D9C056415A87BD6872B2221AB0382CFA/S1479244320000323a.pdf/div-class-title-norman-mailer-and-american-totalitarianism-in-the-1960s-div.pdf online].
- Keller, Marcello Sorce. "Why is Music so Ideological, Why Do Totalitarian States Take It So Seriously", Journal of Musicological Research, XXVI (2007), no. 2–3, pp. 91–122.
- Kirkpatrick, Jeane, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and reason in politics (London: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
- Laqueur, Walter, The Fate of the Revolution Interpretations of Soviet History From 1917 to the Present (London: Collier Books, 1987) {{ISBN|002034080X}}.
- Menze, Ernest, ed. Totalitarianism reconsidered (1981) [https://archive.org/details/totalitarianismr0000unse online] essays by experts
- Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (Yale University Press, 1944).
- Murray, Ewan. Shut Up: Tale of Totalitarianism (2005).
- Nicholls, A.J. "Historians and Totalitarianism: The Impact of German Unification." Journal of Contemporary History 36.4 (2001): 653–661.
- Patrikeeff, Felix. "Stalinism, Totalitarian Society and the Politics of 'Perfect Control{{'"}}, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, (Summer 2003), Vol. 4 Issue 1, pp. 23–46.
- Payne, Stanley G., A History of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1996).
- Rak, Joanna, and Roman Bäcker. "Theory behind Russian Quest for Totalitarianism. Analysis of Discursive Swing in Putin's Speeches." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 53.1 (2020): 13–26 [https://ucp.silverchair.com/cpcs/article-pdf/53/1/13/384689/cpcs_53_1_013.pdf online].
- Ritterbusch,Paul Demokratie und Diktatur : über Wesen und Wirklichkeit des westeuropäischen Parteienstaates (Berlin; Wien : Deutscher Rechtsverlag, 1939).
- Roberts, David D. Totalitarianism (John Wiley & Sons, 2020).
- Rocker, Rudolf, Nationalism and Culture (Covici-Friede, 1937).
- Sartori, Giovanni, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham, N.J: Chatham House, 1987).
- Sauer, Wolfgang. "National Socialism: totalitarianism or fascism?" American Historical Review, Volume 73, Issue #2 (December 1967): 404–424. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1866167 online].
- Saxonberg, Steven. Pre-modernity, totalitarianism and the non-banality of evil: A comparison of Germany, Spain, Sweden and France (Springer Nature, 2019).
- Schapiro, Leonard. Totalitarianism (London: The Pall Mall Press, 1972).
- Selinger, William. "The politics of Arendtian historiography: European federation and the origins of totalitarianism." Modern Intellectual History 13.2 (2016): 417–446.
- Skotheim, Robert Allen. Totalitarianism and American social thought (1971) [https://archive.org/details/totalitarianisma00robe online]
- Talmon, J. L., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1952).
- Traverso, Enzo, Le Totalitarisme : Le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Poche, 2001).
- Tuori, Kaius. "Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II." Law and History Review 37.2 (2019): 605–638 [https://scholar.archive.org/work/7iwqcyovg5fxxm2ebumu3hvfd4/access/wayback/https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B514D8830B3312A8B45B039922FE26D7/S0738248019000130a.pdf/div-class-title-narratives-and-normativity-totalitarianism-and-narrative-change-in-the-european-legal-tradition-after-world-war-ii-div.pdf online].
- Žižek, Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001). [https://archive.org/details/didsomebodysayto0000zize online]
{{div col end}}
External links
{{Wiktionary|totalitarianism}}
{{Wikiquote}}
- {{cite IEP|url-id=totalita|title=Totalitarianism}}
{{Authoritarian types of rule}}
{{Communism}}
{{Fascism}}
{{Political philosophy}}
{{Authority control}}
Category:20th century in politics
Category:21st century in politics