Totalitarianism

69544_DHI_T_2291-2384.qxd 10/17/04 12:14 PM Page 2342 TOTALITARIANISM Nederman, Cary J. Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Missile Crisis, and the Hungarian, Czech, and Polish upris- Toleration, c. 1100–c. 1550. University Park: Pennsylvania ings. At each turn, the language of totalitarianism received a State University Press, 2000. further boost, though there were significant national variations Nederman, Cary J., and John Christian Laursen, eds. Difference in the credence it received. In the United States, the language and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Mod- of totalitarianism, despite dissenting voices, had wide appeal ern Europe. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. across the political spectrum. In France, by contrast, it had John Christian Laursen practically none until the decay of existentialism and the ap- pearance of Solzhenitsyn’s work on the Soviet Gulag triggered a major attitudinal shift. Postwar Germany represents an in- termediate case: officially sanctioned by the Federal Republic, TOTALITARIANISM. Totalitarianism is a concept rooted totalitarianism became the focus of major intellectual contro- in the horror of modern war, revolution, terror, genocide, and, versy from the late 1960s onward. since 1945, the threat of nuclear annihilation. It is also among the most versatile and contested terms in the political lexicon. Even periods of engagement with the Soviet Union— At its simplest, the idea suggests that despite Fascist/Nazi “par- notably détente and the Ronald Reagan–Mikhail Gorbachev ticularism” (the centrality of the nation or the master race) and dialogue—stimulated debate over totalitarianism. Some com- Bolshevist “universalism” (the aspiration toward a classless, in- mentators optimistically announced its softening and demise, ternational brotherhood of man), both regimes were basically while others deplored collaborating with the totalitarian en- alike—which, as Carl Friedrich noted early on, is not to claim emy. During the Soviet Union’s last decade, Western acade- that they were wholly alike. Extreme in its denial of liberty, mics and foreign policy experts argued over the distinction totalitarianism conveys a regime type with truly radical ambi- between two kinds of regime. Authoritarian regimes (some- tions. Its chief objectives are to rule unimpeded by legal re- times also called “traditional” or “autocratic”) typified the straint, civic pluralism, and party competition, and to refashion apartheid state in South Africa, Iran under the Pahlavis, and human nature itself. the South American military juntas. Though hierarchical, vi- cious, and unjust, they had limited goals, and they left large Coined in May 1923 by Giovanni Amendola, totalitarian- parts of society (religious practice, family, and work relations) ism began life as a condemnation of Fascist ambitions to mo- untouched. Conceivably, they were capable of reformist evolu- nopolize power and to transform Italian society through the tion toward representative government. In contrast, totalitar- creation of a new political religion. The word then quickly ian regimes were depicted as utopian, inherently expansionist, mutated to encompass National Socialism, especially after the and indelibly tyrannical, an evil empire. Treating them as nor- Nazi “seizure of power” in 1933. By the mid-1930s, invidious mal states was folly. Meanwhile, in central Europe, embattled comparisons among the German, Italian, and Soviet systems oppositionists during the late 1970s and 1980s were coining as totalitarian were becoming common; they increased con- terms that suggested novel permutations on the classical model. siderably once the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed in 1939. “Posttotalitarian” regimes, suggested Václav Havel in The Power Meanwhile, recipients of the totalitarian label took different of the Powerless (1978), retained a brutal apparatus of coercion views of it. Although, in the mid 1920s, Benito Mussolini and but were no longer able to enthuse their populations with faith. his ideologues briefly embraced the expression as an apt char- Resistance required puncturing a hollow, mechanically recited acterization of their revolutionary élan, Nazi politicians and ideology by everyday acts of noncompliance and by “living in propagandists saw a disconcerting implication. Granted, Adolf truth” (that is, by speaking and acting honestly). Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, during the early 1930s, had a penchant for cognate expressions such as “total state”; so, too, Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, twenty-first- did sympathetic writers such as Ernst Forsthoff and Carl century Islamism and the “war against terror” continued to Schmitt. At around the same time, Ernst Jünger was busy ex- keep the idea of totalitarianism salient. Yet if all these experi- pounding his idea of “total mobilization.” But “totalitarianism” ences are inseparable from the discourse of totalitarianism, its was treated with greater circumspection. The Volksgemeinschaft longevity has also been promoted by three rather different fac- (national community), Nazi spokesmen insisted, was unique: tors. One factor is the term’s elasticity. It can be applied ei- the vehicle of an inimitable German destiny based on a na- ther to institutions or to ideologies, to governments or to tional, racially based, rebirth. Totalitarianism suggested that movements, or to some combination of all of these. Addi- German aspirations were a mere variant on a theme; worse, a tionally, it can be invoked to delineate an extant reality or a theme that current usage extrapolated to the Bolshevist foe. desire, myth, aim, tendency, experiment, and project. Total and its cognates (totality, total war, etc.) are commonplaces of Once Fascism and Nazism were defeated, a new global con- the current age, so it is unsurprising that totalitarianism is also flict soon emerged, and with it a reinvigorated role for “total- one. A second factor, more important still, is the role played itarianism.” Anxiety over Soviet ambitions in Europe prompted by journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers in Churchill’s use of the term twice in his “Iron Curtain” speech publicly disseminating the images of totalitarian domination. on March 5, 1946, at Fulton, Missouri. A year later, the Their role was to ensure that totalitarianism never became a Truman Doctrine entrenched the word in American foreign recondite, academic term but one central to the vernacular of policy and security jargon. Then the Cold War took its course, educated people. Totalitarianism was a buzzword of political punctuated by the Berlin Airlift, the building of the Berlin journalism before it received, in the late 1940s and 1950s, Wall, the Sino-Soviet treaties, the Korean War, the Cuban searching treatment by social science and political theory. Its 2342 New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69544_DHI_T_2291-2384.qxd 10/17/04 12:14 PM Page 2343 TOTALITARIANISM first literary masterpiece was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at a perverted outgrowth of the Martin Luther–sanctioned au- Noon (1941) with its sinister portrayal of the Communist con- thoritarian state, or an exaggerated legacy of tsarist intolerance. fessional. Many great works on a similar theme followed, mak- Or it might be agued that “totalitarian dictatorship” is ancient, ing totalitarianism vivid and unforgettable to readers electrified prefigured in the Spartan state or the Roman imperial regime by the pathos and terror such writing evoked. of Diocletian (r. 284–305). That was the judgment of Franz Neumann, who in addition claimed that National Socialism had Still, no novelist is more responsible for the notion that to- revived the “fascist dictatorship” methods of the fourteenth- talitarianism penetrates the entire human personality, domi- century Roman demagogue Cola di Rienzo. Nor, according to nating it from within, than George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, still others, should totalitarianism be understood as an exclu- 1903–1950). That view appeared nothing less than prescient sively occidental institution. Karl Wittfogel in Oriental Despo- when stories later circulated in the 1950s about “brainwash- tism (1957) found “total power” in the hydraulic governance of ing” of captured prisoners of war (POWs) during the Korean ancient China. And while sinologists have major reservations War. Orwell deserves a special place in any historical audit of about describing Maoism as totalitarian, victims such as Harry totalitarianism for another reason. Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) Wu, imprisoned for nineteen years in the Chinese Laogai, ex- introduced terms—“Thought Police,” “Big Brother,” hibit no such compunction. Totalitarianism has also been lo- “Doublethink”—that have since entered the English language cated in Africa, for instance, in the rule of Shaka Zulu, while as unobtrusively as those of Shakespeare and the King James the Soviet Union itself was often depicted as a hybrid entity, Bible. So long as his work appears in the secondary school and more “Asian” than Western. university curricula, totalitarianism as an idea will survive. In a similar way, no one is more responsible for informing a gen- The search for the roots of totalitarian ideas, as distinct from eral public about the Soviet Gulag than Aleksandr Solzhenit- institutions, has generated yet another fertile literature. Karl syn (b. 1918). To his extraordinary novels, memoirs, and what Popper found protototalitarianism in Plato. Max Horkheimer he called “experiments in literary investigation,”

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