What is Totalitarianism?
In a totalitarian state, a ruling party and its leader say they may direct all of life, public and private. That goes beyond ordinary dictatorship. A dictator may be content to silence opponents. A totalitarian regime wants to reshape society, and even the people in it, to fit an official ideology. The word is applied above all to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, and often to Mao's China and North Korea. Hardly any movement has called itself totalitarian, so the term is mostly a tool that historians and political scientists use to study regimes. The profile here reflects how such regimes behaved in practice.
Core beliefs
- The party and state have a say in every sphere of life.
- A state creed claims to explain the whole of history and to set the aims of society.
- One mass party under one leader holds all political power.
- Independent groups, rival loyalties and private life are all treated as threats.
- Propaganda, mass campaigns and terror are used to remake people.
- The economy, the press and culture are steered from the center.
History
The Italian liberal Giovanni Amendola used the word in the early 1920s to attack Mussolini, who then took it up proudly and spoke of a state with nothing outside it. After 1945 writers used it for Nazism and Stalinism alike. George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, put the idea in front of millions of readers. In 1951 Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, which found its roots in antisemitism, imperialism and the collapse of social bonds, and which put terror and camps at the center of the story. In 1956 the political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski offered a checklist of six traits: an official ideology, one mass party, police terror, control of mass media, control of arms and a centrally run economy.
Variants
Experts separate a right-wing type, with Nazi Germany as the example, from a communist type, which includes the USSR, Maoist China, North Korea and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Some talk of post-totalitarian regimes, where the ideology has turned into routine and terror has eased. Juan Linz separated totalitarian regimes from authoritarian ones, which tolerate a little pluralism and do not require citizens to actively believe.
Criticisms
The regimes themselves are accused of mass terror, staged trials, forced labor, famines caused by policy and genocide. The concept is argued over as well. A group of Soviet historians said the model exaggerated the reach of state control and ignored pressure from society below. Others charge that it was a Cold War device for putting communism and Nazism in the same box. Defenders of the idea answer that it picks out real shared traits, above all the attempt to abolish any space outside the state.
In practice
In Stalin's USSR millions passed through the Gulag, and many were shot, most heavily in the terror of the late 1930s. Nazi Germany joined total control to racial persecution and the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. In Mao's China, the Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions, and the Cultural Revolution unleashed mass persecution. North Korea is the clearest case that still exists. On the 12 axes the profile sits at the extreme of Strong leader, Order and Central, and leans Planned and Protected.