Totalitarianism

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 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.

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 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.

The word totalitarian was first used in the early 1920s to describe the Italian Fascist regime. The term totalitarianism gained wider usage 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.

Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian. 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. However, not all scholars believe these regimes and ideologies exemplify totalitarianism: some of those who support of the concept of totalitarianism exclude Burma, Iran 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).

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."

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—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; his approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causation 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.

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; 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.

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.