| Thesaurus: totalitarianism |
noun
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| US Military Dictionary: totalitarianism |
n.a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
| Political Dictionary: totalitarianism |
A dictatorial form of centralized government that regulates every aspect of state and private behaviour. Although the term was originally intended to designate fascist and communist regimes, totalitarianism is mainly associated with characterizations of the Soviet Union. Its proponents do not agree on when, if ever, the Soviet Union ceased to be totalitarian, but they tend to converge on the view that at some point the political leadership was both all powerful and totally illegitimate. For many commentators, the Soviet Union entered a new phase after the abandonment of mass terror on Stalin's death. However, others operating within the totalitarian paradigm point to institutional continuity, KGB harassment of dissidents, and the ever present possibilities of the reassertion of arbitrary state power until 1989. The total and sudden collapse of the Soviet Union since then casts doubt not only on this school, but perhaps on the whole concept of totalitarianism. In the 1970s, a new school of Sovietology emerged which pointed to evidence both for popular support for the regime and for widespread dispersion of power, at least in implementation of policy, among sectoral and regional authorities. For some of the ‘pluralists’, this was evidence of the ability of the regime to adapt to include new demands. However, totalitarian theorists claimed that the failure of the system to survive showed not only its inability to adapt but the formality of supposed popular participation. See also Arendt.
— Stephen Whitefield
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: totalitarianism |
For more information on totalitarianism, visit Britannica.com.
| Philosophy Dictionary: totalitarianism |
The principle of government according to which all institutional and private arrangements are subject to control by the state. There are thus no autonomous associations, nor is there any principled or legally recognized private/public distinction. See privacy (social).
| Archaeology Dictionary: totalitarianism |
A form of political administration in which power is concentrated in the hands of a dictator, who operates through a mixture of cultivating a devoted following and terrorizing those who do not agree with stated policies.
| Russian History Encyclopedia: Totalitarianism |
The concept of totalitarianism was used to describe the more extreme forms of the hypertrophic states of the twentieth century, with their ideologies, elaborate mechanisms of control, and uniquely invasive efforts to diminish or even obliterate the distinction between public and private. The term was coined in the early 1920s, in Fascist Italy, by Mussolini's opponents and was expanded in the early 1930s to include National Socialist Germany. Although the term was coined by opponents of Fascism and early usages were largely hostile, it was also episodically employed by supporters of the Italian and German regimes, such as Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini himself, to differentiate their governments from the allegedly decadent liberal regimes they so detested. The very early Italian usages connoted extreme violence, but as Italian Fascism evolved from its movement phase and became an ideology of government, the term increasingly suggested the intent of the state to absorb every aspect of human life into itself. This notion was in harmony with the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile. The term was most systematically and positively used in Germany by Carl Schmitt, but Hitler eventually forbade its positive use, since it evoked an Italian comparison, which he disliked.
Even in the 1920s and early 1930s, there were a number of people who suggested that the Soviet Union bore certain similarities to both Italy and Germany. After Hitler's blood purge in 1934, the similarities between the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy became the subject of frequent and systematic comparison; after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), such comparisons became widespread. Only in strongly pro-communist circles was there an understandable reluctance to conclude that the Soviet Union had degenerated so badly that it could be compared with Nazi Germany.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, this comparison came to dominate the term's usage, right up to the end of the Cold War. The Truman administration suddenly began discussing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime when it had to justify the strongly anti-Soviet turn in American foreign policy that began in 1947, expressed most vividly in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
Prewar usages in the 1920s and 1930s had been unsystematic and largely journalistic, though such dedicated students of Russia as William Henry Chamberlin had compared the Soviet Union and Germany more systematically as early as 1935. But World War II and the development of the Cold War created a community of Russian experts in academia, where the term became thoroughly institutionalized in the early 1950s. The first systematic and grand-scale comparison, however, was not by an American academic, but by a German-Jewish émigré, Hannah Arendt, whose brilliant but uneven Origins of Totalitarianism was a sensation when it appeared in 1951. The most influential academic treatment of the term was Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, which appeared in 1956 and had a long and controversial life. Brzezinski and Friedrich's account provided what was variously called a syndrome and a model to classify states as totalitarian. To be accounted, a state had to exhibit six features: an all-encompassing ideology; a single mass party, typically led by one man; a system of terror; a near-monopoly on all means of mass communication; a similar near-monopoly of instruments of force; and a centrally controlled economy.
Although Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy achieved wide acceptance in the 1950s, the restricted nature of its comparison, as well as the changing political times, made it highly controversial in the following two decades, with most of the academic community turning against it. Its fate was intimately bound up with the Cold War, which lost its broad base of popular support among Western academics and intellectuals during the 1960s. The viability of a term as value-laden as totalitarianism, in light of the demand for analytical rigor in the social sciences, was now considered highly debatable. In addition, as American historians of Russia became more and more enamored of social history, the focus of the totalitarian point of view on the politics of the center seemed far too restrictive for their research agenda, which was more focused on the experiences of ordinary people and everyday life, especially in the provinces.
During the Reagan years, the term was revived by neoconservatives interested in a more aggressive political and military challenge to the Soviet Union and also in distinguishing the Soviet Union and its satellites from the (allegedly less radical) rightist states whom the Reagan administration regarded as allies against Communism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the term has become less politically charged and seems to be evolving in a more diffuse fashion to suggest closed or antidemocratic states in general, particularly those with strong ideological or religious coloration.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Friedrich, Carl J., and Brzezinski, Zbigniew. (1965). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gleason, Abbott. (1995). Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.
Halberstam, Michael. (2000). Totalitarianism and the Modern Concept of Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Havel, Vaclav. (1985). "The Power of the Powerless." In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Lifka, Thomas E. (1988). The Concept "Totalitarianism" and American Foreign Policy, 1933 - 1949. New York: Garland.
Orwell, George. (1949). 1984. New York: New American Library.
—ABBOTT GLEASON
| Columbia Encyclopedia: totalitarianism |
Various totalitarian systems, however, have different ideological goals. For example, of the states most commonly described as totalitarian-the Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany, and the People's Republic of China under Mao-the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China sought the universal fulfillment of humankind through the establishment of a classless society (see communism); German National Socialism, on the other hand, attempted to establish the superiority of the so-called Aryan race.
Characteristics
Despite the many differences among totalitarian states, they have several characteristics in common, of which the two most important are: the existence of an ideology that addresses all aspects of life and outlines means to attain the final goal, and a single mass party through which the people are mobilized to muster energy and support. The party is generally led by a dictator and, typically, participation in politics, especially voting, is compulsory. The party leadership maintains monopoly control over the governmental system, which includes the police, military, communications, and economic and education systems. Dissent is systematically suppressed and people terrorized by a secret police. Autocracies through the ages have attempted to exercise control over the lives of their subjects, by whatever means were available to them, including the use of secret police and military force. However, only with modern technology have governments acquired the means to control society; therefore, totalitarianism is, historically, a recent phenomenon.
By the 1960s there was a sharp decline in the concept's popularity among scholars. Subsequently, the decline in Soviet centralization after Stalin, research into Nazism revealing significant inefficiency and improvisation, and the Soviet collapse may have reduced the utility of the concept to that of an ideal or abstract type. In addition, constitutional democracy and totalitarianism, as forms of the modern state, share many characteristics. In both, those in authority have a monopoly on the use of the nation's military power and on certain forms of mass communication; and the suppression of dissent, especially during times of crisis, often occurs in democracies as well. Moreover, one-party systems are found in some nontotalitarian states, as are government-controlled economies and dictators.
Causes
There is no single cause for the growth of totalitarian tendencies. There may be theoretical roots in the collectivist political theories of Plato Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx. But the emergence of totalitarian forms of government is probably more the result of specific historical forces. For example, the chaos that followed in the wake of World War I allowed or encouraged the establishment of totalitarian regimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany, while the sophistication of modern weapons and communications enabled them to extend and consolidate their power.
Bibliography
See E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941, repr. 1960); H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958, new ed. 1966); C. J. Friedrich and Z. K. Brezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (2d ed. 1967); M. Curtis, ed., Totalitarianism (1979); S. P. Soper, Totalitarianism: A Conceptual Approach (1985); H. Buchheim, Totalitarian Rule (1962, tr. 1987); A. Gleason, Totalitarianism (1995).
| Politics: totalitarianism |
Domination by a government of all political, social, and economic activities in a nation. Totalitarianism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century: earlier forms of despotism and autocracy lacked the technical capacity to control every aspect of life. The term is applied both to fascist governments (see fascism) and to many forms of communism.
| Quotes About: Totalitarianism |
Quotes:
"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
- Hannah Arendt
"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."
- Hannah Arendt
"One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves."
- Albert Camus
"People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being."
- Vaclav Havel
"There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself."
- Eric Hoffer
"Man is more disposed to domination than freedom; and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations."
- Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
See more famous quotes about Totalitarianism
| Wikipedia: Totalitarianism |
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single party or faction, recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.[2] Totalitarianism is generally characterized by the coincidence of authoritarianism (i.e., where ordinary citizens have no significant share in state decision-making) and ideology (i.e., a pervasive scheme of values promulgated by institutional means to direct the most significant aspects of public and private life)[3].
Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of state terrorism.
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The notion of Totalitarianism as "total" political power by state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola who described Italian Fascism as a system fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships.[4] The term was later assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism. He used the term “totalitario” to refer to the structure and goals of the new state. The new state was to provide the “total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals.”[5] He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens.[6] According to Benito Mussolini, this system politicizes everything spiritual and human:[4]
| “ | Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. | ” |
According to Karl Loewenstein, "the term 'Authoritarian' denotes a political organization in which the single power holder - an individual person or 'dictator', an assembly, a committee, a junta, or a party - monopolizes political power. The term 'Authoritarian' refers rather to the structure of government than to the structure of society. An Authoritarian regime confines itself to political control of the state.
"The governmental techniques of a totalitarian regime are necessarily Authoritarian. But a totalitarian regime does much more. It attempts to mold the private life, soul, and morals of citizens to a dominant ideology. The officially proclaimed ideology penetrates into every nook and cranny of society; its ambition is total.
"Totalitarian regimes seek to destroy civil society i.e. communities that operate independently of the State. Neither the Italian fascists nor the Nazis completely 'destroyed their respective social structures', and so these countries 'could rapidly return to normalcy' after defeat in World War II. In contrast, attempts to reform the regime in the USSR 'led to nowhere because every non-governmental institution, whether social or economic, had to be built from scratch. The result was neither reform of Communism nor establishment of democracy, but a progressive breakdown of organized life'".[4]
In a comment about the similarity of religion to totalitarianism Christopher Hitchens has said "the urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere, and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian".[7]
One of the first to use the term "totalitarianism" in the English language was the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International, in which he commented that more united the Soviet and German dictatorships than divided them.[8] Isabel Paterson, in The God of the Machine (1943), used the term in connection with the collectivist societies of the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany.
During a 1945 lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World (published as a book in 1946), the pro-Soviet British historian E. H. Carr claimed that "The trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable", and that Marxism was much the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army's role in defeating Germany. Only the "blind and incurable" could ignore the trend towards totalitarianism, said Carr.[9]
Sir Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1961), articulated an influential critique of totalitarianism: in both works, he contrasted the "open society" of liberal democracy with totalitarianism, and argued that the latter is grounded in the belief that history moves toward an immutable future, in accordance with knowable laws.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Nazi and Communist regimes were new forms of government, and not merely updated versions of the old tyrannies. According to Arendt, the source of the mass appeal of totalitarian regimes is their ideology, which provides a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the past, present, and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of racial struggle; and, for Marxism, all history is the history of class struggle. Once that premise is accepted, all actions of the regime could be justified by appeal to Nature or the Law of History.[10]
Scholars such as Lawrence Aronsen, Richard Pipes, Leopold Labedz, Franz Borkenau, Walter Laqueur, Sir Karl Popper, Eckhard Jesse, Leonard Schapiro, Adam Ulam, Raymond Aron, Claude Lefort, Richard Löwenthal, Hannah Arendt, Robert Conquest, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Carl Joachim Friedrich and Juan Linz describe totalitarianism in slightly different ways. They all agree, however, that totalitarianism seeks to mobilize entire populations in support of an official state ideology, and is intolerant of activities which are not directed towards the goals of the state, entailing repression or state control of business, labour unions, churches or political parties.
The political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski were primarily responsible for expanding the usage of the term in university social science and professional research, reformulating it as a paradigm for the communist Soviet Union as well as fascist regimes. For Friedrich and Brzezinski, the defining elements were intended to be taken as a mutually supportive organic entity composed of the following: an elaborating guiding ideology; a single mass party, typically led by a dictator; a system of terror; a monopoly of the means of communication and physical force; and central direction, and control of the economy through state planning. Such regimes had initial origins in the chaos that followed in the wake of World War I, at which point the sophistication of modern weapons and communications enabled totalitarian movements to consolidate power.
The German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher, whose work is primarily concerned with Nazi Germany, argues that the "totalitarian typology" as developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski is an excessively inflexible model, and failed to consider the “revolutionary dynamic” that Bracher asserts is at the heart of totalitarianism.[11] Bracher maintains that the essence of totalitarianism is the total claim to control and remake all aspects of society combined with an all-embracing ideology, the value on authoritarian leadership, and the pretence of the common identity of state and society, which distinguished the totalitarian "closed" understanding of politics from the "open" democratic understanding.[12] Unlike the Friedrich-Brzezinski definition Bracher argued that totalitarian regimes did not require a single leader and could function with a collective leadership, which led the American historian Walter Laqueur to argue that Bracher's definition seemed to fit reality better then the Friedrich-Brzezinski definition.[13]
Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer argues that mass movements like Communism, Fascism and Nazism had a common trait in picturing Western democracies and their values as decadent, with people "too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish" to sacrifice for a higher cause, which for them implies an inner moral and biological decay. He further claims that those movements offered the prospect of a glorious future to frustrated people, enabling them to find a refuge from the lack of personal accomplishments in their individual existence. The individual is then assimilated into a compact collective body and "fact-proof screens from reality" are established.[14]
In the social sciences, the approach of Friedrich and Brzezinski came under criticism from scholars who argued that the Soviet system, both as a political and as a social entity, was in fact better understood in terms of interest groups, competing elites, or even in class terms (using the concept of the nomenklatura as a vehicle for a new ruling class).[15] These critics pointed to evidence of popular support for the regime and widespread dispersion of power, at least in the implementation of policy, among sectoral and regional authorities. For some followers of this 'pluralist' approach, this was evidence of the ability of the regime to adapt to include new demands. However, proponents of the totalitarian model claimed that the failure of the system to survive showed not only its inability to adapt but the mere formality of supposed popular participation.
The notion of "post-totalitarianism" was first put forward by the German political scientist Richard Löwenthal, who argued that the Soviet Union in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953 saw the emergence of a system Löwenthal called variously "authoritarian bureaucratic oligarchy" or “post-totalitarian authoritarianism”.[16] Writing in 1960, Löwenthal contended the development of “post-totalitarianism” in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe meant "Those countries have not gone from tyranny to freedom, but from massive terror to a rule of meanness, ensuring stability at the risk of stagnation".[16]
Afterwards, the theory of "post-totalitarianism" was expanded upon by political scientist Juan Linz. For certain commentators, such as Linz and Alfred Stepan, the Soviet Union entered a new phase after the abandonment of mass terror upon Stalin's death. Discussion of "post-totalitarianism" featured prominently in debates about the reformability and durability of the Soviet system in comparative politics.
From a historical angle, the totalitarian concept has been criticized. Historians of the Nazi period inclined towards a functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw have been very hostile or lukewarm towards the totalitarianism concept, arguing that the Nazi regime was far too disorganized to be considered as totalitarian.[17]
In the field of Soviet history, the concept has disparaged by the "revisionist" school, a group of mostly American left-wing historians, some of whose more prominent members are Sheila Fitzpatrick, Jerry F. Hough, William McCagg, Robert W. Thurston, and J. Arch Getty.[18] Though their individual interpretations differ, the revisionists have argued that the Soviet state under Stalin was institutionally weak, that the level of terror was much exaggerated, and that to the extent it occurred, it reflected the weaknesses rather the strengths of the Soviet state.[18] Fitzpatrick argued that since to the extent that there was terror in the Soviet Union, since it provided for increased social mobility, and thus far from being a terrorized society, most people in the Soviet Union supported Stalin's purges as a chance for a better life.[19]
Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur commented that the revisionists in the field of Soviet history were guilty of confusing popularity with morality, and of making highly embarrassing and not very convincing arguments against the concept of the Soviet Union as totalitarian state.[20] Laqueur argued the revisionists' arguments with regards to Soviet history were highly similar to the arguments made by Ernst Nolte in regards to German history.[20] Laqueur asserted that concepts such as modernization were inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history while totalitarianism was not.[21]
François Furet used the term "totalitarian twins"[22] in an attempt to link Stalinism[23] and Nazism.[24]
According to Soviet writer Fazil Iskander,[25]
| Under the totalitarian regime, it was as if you were forced to live in the same room with an insanely violent man |
George Orwell's books Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are famous for their depiction of a totalitarian society, as is their lesser-known predecessor, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
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