Totalitarianism
Not merely obedience but belief: the state claims the whole of life — work, family, thought — and permits no private sphere at all.
What does this mean?
Totalitarianism is distinguished from ordinary authoritarianism by ambition. An authoritarian government wants compliance; it will tolerate private life, apolitical religion and non-political association so long as its power is not challenged. A totalitarian one denies that any sphere is private. It runs a single mass party, an official ideology claiming to explain history, a monopoly on communication and weapons, and a terror apparatus that operates against people who have done nothing — because its purpose is not to punish acts but to make the population governable through unpredictability.
Hannah Arendt, who supplied the category, argued that its precondition is mass atomisation: people stripped of stable class, community and occupational ties become available for total mobilisation. She also argued that its ideology is not a set of policies but a claim to have discovered the law of history — of race, or of class — which the movement is merely executing, and which therefore cannot be argued with.
The entry exists here because it is the tradition several figures in this project actually occupied, and because the distinction from authoritarianism carries real information: Franco and Pinochet were authoritarian, Hitler and Stalin were not merely more of the same.
Where did it come from?
The concept was developed in the 1940s and 1950s, principally by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to name what Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had in common that ordinary dictatorships did not. It has since been applied to Maoist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea.
Major thinkers
- Hannah Arendt
- Carl Friedrich
- Zbigniew Brzezinski
- Karl Popper
- Isaiah Berlin
Historical figures
- Adolf Hitler
- Joseph Stalin
- Mao Zedong
- Pol Pot
- Kim Il-sung
What it looks like today
- North Korea, generally treated as the only surviving full case
- The concept is more often used comparatively, to measure how far a state falls short of it, than to classify contemporary governments
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
Economic arrangements vary widely — Nazi Germany kept private ownership, the Soviet Union abolished it — so this axis carries little information about the type.
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
At the extreme of the collective-order pole: there is no protected private sphere, and no conduct is treated as outside the state’s concern.
Tradition and change
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Power is concentrated absolutely, with the party or leader claiming to embody the popular will directly and elections used as acclamation.
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Punishment is detached from guilt. Terror is applied to categories of people rather than to acts, by design.
Its strongest arguments
- As an analytic category it identifies something real that "dictatorship" does not: the attempt to abolish the private sphere rather than merely to police it.
- It explains why such regimes persecute people who pose no threat, which ordinary theories of dictatorship cannot account for.
- It gives a usable early-warning checklist — control of information, a single mass movement, terror detached from guilt.
Its strongest criticisms
- Cold War use of the term was often polemical, grouping regimes together to serve an argument rather than because they were alike.
- Some historians hold that no state has achieved total control, making the type an ideal rather than a description.
- Applying one label to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union obscures differences that mattered enormously to the people living under them.
Common misconceptions
- That it means any government one strongly dislikes. The category has specific criteria — official ideology, single mass party, terror against the innocent, monopoly on communication and force — and most authoritarian states do not meet them.
- That it is a left-wing or a right-wing phenomenon. Its two canonical cases sat at opposite ends of the economic axis, which is why that axis carries almost no weight here.
- That it requires a popular majority to oppose it. Arendt’s argument is the reverse: it depends on mass support, at least initially.
A caveat
No one is offered this as a personal result. It is included so that the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian government can be seen and reasoned about, which is a distinction the rest of this project depends on.
Sources
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism · 1951
- Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy · Harvard University Press · 1956
- Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes · Lynne Rienner · 2000