THE EVOLUTION OF TOTALITARIANISM AS A TERM

Reducing and virtually equating the totalitarian principle to a number of regimes of the past, produces the wrong impression that it is an outdated phenomenon. Nothing is farther from the truth. Totalitarianism is a powerful nationalistic trend in all societies, and a very natural trend at that, and the failure to realize its importance, and to educate the public about its essence, is a great disservice to the public as well as to social scholarship as such.

The following supplementary summary is a reference item for those readers who are interested in the historical nuts and bolts of this subject. There is little value in arguing against or agreeing with the individual scholars mentioned in this entry, in the form of special line-by-line comments on my part, as my views on all these matters are already adequately expressed throughout this section. However, my closing comment at the end of this entry may be of interest to the students of totalitarianism, and I strongly advise my readers who may consider skipping the teal-fonted material not to miss it altogether.

“The term totalitarismo, employed in the writings of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, was popularized by the Italian fascists under Mussolini. The original meaning of totalitarianism, as described in La dottrina del fascismo (1932), was a society, in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens. Thanks to the modern technologies, like radio and the printing press, which the state could, and probably would use to spread its ideology, most modern nations would naturally become totalitarian in the above-stated sense.

“While originally referring to an “all-embracing, total state,” the label has been applied to a wide variety of regimes and orders of rule in a critical sense. Karl Popper in his Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and in The Poverty of Historicism (1961), developed an influential critique of totalitarianism: 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. During the Cold War, the term gained renewed currency, especially following the publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1957). She argued that Nazi and Stalinist regimes were totally new forms of government, not merely some updated versions of the old tyrannies. The source of the mass appeal (sic!!!) of totalitarian regimes, according to Arendt, was their ideology, providing a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the past, present, and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of racial struggle, while for Marxism all history is history of class struggle. Once that premise was accepted by the public, all actions of the regime could be justified by an appeal to the Law of History or Nature.

“During the Cold War, the political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski were responsible for expanding the usage of the term in university social science and professional research, reformulating it as a paradigm for the Soviet Union under Stalin, as well as for the “fascist” regimes. In their view, the defining elements of totalitarianism included an elaborate guiding ideology; a single mass party, led by a dictator; a system of terror; a monopoly of the means of communication and physical force; and centralized direction and control of the economy through state planning. Such regimes had their initial origins in the chaos in the wake of the World War I, at which point the higher sophistication of modern weapons and communications enabled totalitarian movements to consolidate power in Italy, Germany, and Russia.

“Eric Hoffer in 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 the 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 claims that all these movements had offered the prospect of a glorious, yet imaginary, future to a frustrated people, letting them find a refuge from the lack of personal accomplishments in their individual existence. Individual is then assimilated into a compact collective body, and “fact-proof screens from reality” are established.

“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 a social entity, was in fact better understood in terms of interest groups, competing elites, or even in class terms (using the concept of nomenklatura as a vehicle for a new ruling class). 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, the 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. Its proponents do not agree on when the Soviet Union ceased to be describable as totalitarian.

“The notion of post-totalitarianism was put forward by Juan Linz. (See my entry Post-Totalitarianism As A Fake Concept, posted on July 21^st, 2012.) For some commentators, such as Linz and Alfred Stepan, the USSR entered a new phase after the abandonment of mass terror, after Stalin’s death. Discussions of “post-totalitarianism” featured prominently in debates about the reformability and durability of the Soviet system in comparative politics.

“As the Soviet system disintegrated, opponents of the concept claimed that the transformation of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and its subsequent sudden collapse, demonstrated that the totalitarian model had little explanatory value for researchers. Several decades earlier, in 1957, for example, Bertram Wolfe had claimed that the Soviet Union faced no challenge or change possible from the society at large. He called it a “solid and durable political system dominating a society that has been totally fragmented or atomized,” one which will remain “barring an explosion from within, or battering down from without.” Many of the classic theories of totalitarianism ruled out the possibility of such change, yet subsequent theorists acknowledged the possibility and in fact encouraged and welcomed it. Any suggestions of the indefinite stability of states labeled “totalitarian” among proponents of the term were largely discredited when the Soviet Union fell by the wayside.

“While totalitarianism as a political term fell into disuse during the 1970’s among many Soviet specialists, other commentators found the typology not only useful for the purposes of classification but for guiding the official policy. In her 1979 essay Dictatorships and Double Standards, Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that a number of important foreign policy implications could be drawn by distinguishing “totalitarian” regimes from autocracies in general. According to Kirkpatrick, typical autocracies are primarily interested in their own survival, and as such allow varying degrees of autonomy regarding elements of civil society, religious institutions, court, and the press. On the other hand, under totalitarianism, no individual or institution can be autonomous from the state’s all-encompassing ideology. Therefore US policy must distinguish between the two, and even grant temporary support to non-totalitarian autocratic governments, in order to combat totalitarian movements, and promote U.S. interests. Kirkpatrick’s influence, particularly, as foreign policy adviser and the United Nations ambassador, was essential to the formation of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy, and her ideas came to be known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine.”

Summarizing all of the above, we can see yet again how a dubious application of the totalitarian principle is treated as a principle and then dismissed, on the grounds that it does not meet a fixed set of standards which in themselves have been based on a cluster of compounded fallacies and misperceptions.

As for the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, it reminds me of the current neoconservative idiocy just as ludicrous, if not quite as dangerous, as the new one. It seems like each time the academic standards hit a new low, there is a still deeper ditch to descend into. (See also the previous entry in this section [Iran, Iraq, And Jeane Kirkpatrick, posted on July 20, 2012 – sic!] and the “Kirkpatrick paragraph” in the entry which precedes it. [Totalitarianism In Western Tidbits – Part II, posted on July 19, 2012.])

In so far as the details of my criticism of these doctrines is concerned, they are being discussed in numerous previous entries, and elsewhere. But the theoretical bottom line is twofold: one cannot substitute the principle by an application, and one cannot, and must not, dismiss the soundness of a principle on the grounds of the unsoundness of an application or – even worse – of something which is mistaken for a representation of the real thing.