In a sign of how much the meaning of the words drifted, however, those who later adopted them into political philosophy did not necessarily consider fascist Italy to have been totalitarian. Instead, Arendt considered totalitarianism to be a way of understanding fundamental similarities between Stalinism and Hitlerism, despite their diametrical opposition on the political spectrum. This archetypal comparison remains the bedrock of studies of totalitarian dictatorship.
In Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt laid out what she saw as its internal dynamic:. 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. Airstrip One, as Orwell renamed Great Britain, is dominated by an omniscient Big Brother who sees, hears, and knows all.
Through a reform of language, Airstrip One even tries to make it impossible to think illegal thoughts. Of course, what Arendt and Orwell described are systems of government that have never actually existed.
Neither Nazism nor Stalinism succeeded in controlling or dominating its citizens from within. The other classic account of totalitarianism is Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy , published in by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Their goal was to understand structural similarities between different modern dictatorships. In the decades since, historians and political scientists have gone back and forth, defining the concept in new ways and showing how those definitions fail in one way or another.
It is also a clear illustration of the role technology plays in totalitarian fantasies. This pared-down definition of totalitarianism is still only of dubious utility. Studies of everyday life in both countries have underscored the limits of the totalitarian model. They were alert to what would now be called questions of agency. During the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, politicians, journalists, and scholars all painted East Germany as a totalitarian government on par with the Nazi state.
But that characterization is simply wrong. For instance, the East German and Nazi secret police forces, the Stasi and the Gestapo, functioned in fundamentally different ways. The Gestapo was a relatively small organization that relied on thousands of spontaneous denunciations. It practiced brutal torture and was embedded in a system of extralegal justice that was responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of German citizens not to mention the millions more killed in the Holocaust.
The Stasi was quite different. It employed a vast bureaucracy—three times larger than the Gestapo in a population four times smaller—and cultivated an even larger network of collaborators. Around 5 percent of East Germans are estimated to have worked for the Stasi at some point, blurring the lines between persecutors and persecuted. Against those unlucky enough to wind up in a Stasi prison, the secret police employed methods of psychological torture.
But it never induced the same level of terror as did the Gestapo. Nor was it responsible for anywhere near the same number of deaths.
But there is ample evidence that East Germans enjoyed robust private lives, along with a sense of individual self. East Germans wrote millions of petitions to their government, for instance, complaining about everything from vacations to apartments. How does totalitarianism incite this kind of fanaticism? As Arendt demonstrates, both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia capitalized on tensions already present in society. There was essentially a massive rejection of the existing political system as ineffectual and self-serving.
The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. How does a totalitarian government harness this attitude of the masses?
This feeling is what totalitarianism figured out how to manipulate by random terror that severed any form of connection with other human beings. Totalitarianism does not have an end goal in the usual political sense. Its only real goal is to perpetuate its own existence.
There is no one party line that, if you stick to it, will save you from persecution. Remember the random mass murders. Stalin repeatedly purged whole sections of his government — just because. The fear is a requirement. The fear is what keeps the movement going. This battle with truth is something we see today. Opinions are being given the same weight as facts, leading to endless debates and the assumption that nothing can be known anyway.
Or maybe more so…. By my definition, a totalitarian society would be one in which 1 a single monolithic party, whether communist, fascist, or democratic, monopolizes both 2 the legitimate methods of exercising violence military, police, courts etc. A totalitarian regime then would be one in which a dictator leader military junta or single party oligarchy dictates what opinions and behaviors are acceptable and enforces them on everybody, thereby ostracizing marginalizing exiling or killing anybody who does not at least at pay lip-service to those opinions and conform to those behaviors, whether those opinions and behaviors are communist or fascist, democratic or republican, liberal or conservative, heterosexual or homosexual, patriarchal or matriarchal, black white red brown green or purple, and so on.
Frankly, I do not see a situation fitting this description of totalitarianism existing in contemporary American society. Unlike Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler, Trump cannot make the trains run on time, nor can he enforce his opinions even in his own party viz.
I have suggested that the American Constitution should be amended to allow for invalidating fraudulent elections viz, and for taking a no-confidence vote against an administration that clearly does not represent the will of the people viz, the Trump administration. So far, no American politicians have recognized wisdom of? There is, of course, also impeachment.
Secondly, I think your definition of totalitarianism might just as well be applied to certain elements of the so-called democratic liberal left, who would like to enforce their own lifestyle preferences political thinking, liberal philosophy, sexual orientation, thoughts about marriage or abortion etc.
I think of the efforts made by gay-rights advocates in California to remove people from their jobs because they voted to support the marriage bill, for example, which might be compared to efforts made by conservatives to ostracize people who vote for abortion rights.
Yes, I admit the Trump administration has committed equal or greater crimes currently in progress, most of which nobody even wants to know about… , but my point is they are not the first to commit crimes and get away with it.
Quite the contrary…. And what about the Chinese Communist Revolution? Or The Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? What about the Chinese reeducation-through-labor camps laogai currently also still in operation…? Can you? But perhaps I misrepresent your position, and I welcome your reply.
Thanks as always for your thoughtful comments engaging my work. And my apologies for not responding sooner; last week I was swamped with teaching and grading. I have many of the same concerns myself, and see potential good and bad outcomes from the possibilities your suggest.
Eric, as I understand your argument, you object to my application of the term totalitarianism to conservatives exclusively. I have two responses to this. As you rightly point out, it is not only people who identify as conservatives that are susceptible to totalitarian tendencies. The article was focused on conservatism because that is where I see the danger coming from today. They are, above all, the ones who deny basic truths, who are demonizing certain identities, and who desire a social purity that is impossible to achieve.
It was a matter of circumstance, not necessity, that led me to my focus on conservatism. However, I do disagree with some of the claims you make about the totalitarianism tendencies of other groups. Regarding your definition of totalitarianism, it is important to recognize that a totalitarian party would be democratic or communist in name only the same is true of traditional conservatism, which is also opposed to totalitarianism.
This is why the article concludes with a call that we prevent a similar situation from happening. While I have my own disagreements with parts of the left, I find the claim that they are acting in a totalitarian manner to be, frankly, absurd. The leftist elements you mention e. To put it simply, if you support openness and heterogeneity, then you must oppose the forces that prevent society from embracing those values.
You and I agree that numerous things he did are abhorrent e. Consider the intellectual work being done by millions of philosophers, academics, scientists etc around the world. Imagine that you are in your home office working on a paper that is important to career.
And then your kitchen erupts in flames and threatens to blow up your house. In this scenario, what is the point of talking about your paper?? One quick thought about your question. Avoiding a disaster is of course important. But there are many directions disaster can come from e.
We definitely need to focus on certain issues more than others. But I would argue you are overstating things by saying there is no point in discussing anything else. In fact, we may learn some things in these other discussions that may aid us in solving the first problem just as discoveries in math have helped us solve problems in science, history, philosophy, and politics. I admit to a degree of rhetorical excess, fair point.
Your posts steer carefully clear of such exaggerations, and they are not being engaged either. Your reference to global warming seems useful.
There are clear affinities between their positions on this issue, which are best seen as continuations of the British liberal tradition well into the twentieth century, when it faced the challenge of the totalitarian state. The three representatives of British liberalism discussed here shared a commitment to individual liberty, wariness of state power, and an evident suspicion of what they took to be the collectivist and utopian excesses of various Continental thinkers.
In several works, Karl Popper articulated a vigorous defence of liberal democracy over dictatorship. In his early work there is a particular emphasis on the unscientific and ultimately illogical character of all forms of historical determinism and collectivism. In keeping with his philosophy of natural science, Popper urges us to shun certainty and dogmatism in social science and history, in favour of a piecemeal approach characterised by attention to particulars and the trial and error methods of fallibilism.
Such an approach is not only conducive to precise and clear social explanations; Popper defends it as a philosophical shield against tyranny as well.
For it is precisely the immodesty of overgeneralising to alleged rigid laws in history that has led even great philosophers and other thinkers to commit the error of historicism, which is a key component of totalitarian and fanatical patterns of thought.
He thus accuses purportedly scientific theorists of history, including Karl Marx, of misinterpreting trends as inexorable laws, thereby producing unscientific and potentially irrational schemes of historical development. When coupled with grandiose or holistic schemes of social engineering, such approaches, for Popper, combine bad social science with lethal utopianism.
Popper, It is therefore best seen as an intellectual contribution to the Allied cause against fascism, which was subsequently readily adapted to the struggle against Soviet dictatorship during the Cold War. Both works are permeated by a sense that democracy was under fire and could potentially be annihilated by its totalitarian rivals. Here Popper broadens his critique of totalitarianism by indicting major figures of the Western philosophical tradition, notably Plato, Hegel and Marx.
All three, he held, were guilty of collectivist and utopian social projects. This method ought to at all costs be substituted for historicist and utopian grand schemes of social science and philosophy of history that are characterised by a kind of oracular faith in their own future prophesies, dogmatism, and immunity to falsification. Popper explained the appeal of historicism as a product of a false conception of the power of social science and historiography, combined with alienation and dissatisfaction:.
Why do all these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection.
The tendency of historicism and of related views to support the revolt against civilization may be due to the fact that historicism itself is, largely, a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility. Popper, xxxix. Kolakowski holds that the diverse ends of open societies can come into conflict with each other, thereby vitiating attempts to combine liberal values coherently. The open society is described less as a state constitution and more as a collection of values, among which tolerance, rationality, and a lack of commitment to tradition appear at the top of the list.
It is assumed, naively so I think, that this set is wholly free of contradictions, meaning that the values that it comprises support each other in all circumstances or at least do not limit each other.
This criticism points to the question of value pluralism as discussed by Isaiah Berlin: how can a multiplicity of values, some of them potentially mutually exclusive, provide a coherent and adequate buffer against repressive, totalitarian state power? Throughout his career, Isaiah Berlin devoted a considerable amount of attention to the question of totalitarianism. He saw it as one of the most important features of twentieth century history, and as the logical outcome of an excessive devotion to what he took to be a dangerously paternalistic conception of liberty.
In a key work on the subject , reprinted and expanded in , Berlin drew an important distinction between the negative and positive conceptions of liberty or freedom:. Berlin, He thus held that the former is the foundation of the pluralistic liberalism that he wished to defend, and that the latter is a very different notion, involving obligatory self-realisation through the perfection of the individual and society in accordance with natural or historical necessity. Long associated with despotic and dictatorial regimes, positive freedom had, by the mid-twentieth century, formed part of the justification for both communist and fascist dictatorships.
By claiming deterministic justifications including a truly scientific conception of historical law, social Darwinism or the will of the people, totalitarian states of both the extreme left and the extreme right justified the murder of millions in the name of a unitary and static utopian future that they saw as set and predictable.
For Berlin, this totalitarian development of positive liberty was not an aberration, but a logical conclusion. It emerged in a particularly lethal form in the twentieth century due to its central role in the justification of illiberal and non-humanistic ideologies, including communism, fascism, and the sort of extreme romantic nationalism and clericalism already present prototypically in the thought of nineteenth century figures such as Joseph de Maistre.
Against this, Berlin urged humanity to seek a decent society with pluralistic values, thus eschewing utopian perfectionism. This he thought to be characterised by a fallibilistic conception of knowledge, peaceful trade-offs, and the rejection of nihilism and relativism in favour of common values across genuinely diverse ways of life.
Such a society would, he held, resolve to maintain a pluralistic balance of values against any and all attempts to sacrifice entire groups of people in the name of a future that can never be fully predicted. A key criticism of a stark division between negative and positive liberty has been offered by Charles Taylor He claims that the terms have been used in an excessively narrow way so as not to do justice to the complexity of human freedom.
For Taylor, this conception of negative liberty stems from diverse and likely parallel sources in the Western philosophical tradition, such as Hobbes and Bentham.
He claims that in order to do justice to freedom, even sophisticated liberals such as Mill have made significant use of concepts of self-development and improvement, and this implies some degree of positive liberty.
So positive liberty is best understood as a part of individual freedom and flourishing, and not necessarily a component of totalitarianism.
The extent to which the state should promote it remains an important question. Understood along the lines indicated by Taylor, it may be a value to be realized through self-development in a more democratic society. This is in keeping with what not only Taylor, but other thinkers, claim. In , Jacob L. Talmon published a liberal indictment of those views of eighteenth century thought that saw the French Enlightenment as manifesting overwhelmingly liberal tendencies.
Talmon argued, in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy , that both liberal-empirical and totalitarian tendencies were significant and influential in European thought by the time of the French Revolution. Like Berlin, Talmon stresses the fundamental divergence between individualist and collectivist or statist conceptions of freedom. The former led, through a long process of parliamentary development across the nineteenth century, to the institutions regarded as democratic in the mid-twentieth century.
The liberal democratic thought of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville in France, as well as John Stuart Mill in England, were instrumental in developing this political tradition to a philosophical apogee. Totalitarian democracy, on the other hand, developed largely from radical French Enlightenment thought through Babeuf and the Jacobin stream of the French Revolution, and through nineteenth and early twentieth century Marxism.
Liberal democracy has stressed the importance of individual human rights, empiricism and the rule of law from its beginnings. It advocates piecemeal reform and the application of rationality to arrive at optimal political remedies to social problems.
Totalitarian democracy from Robespierre and the Jacobins through Karl Marx and into the twentieth century has been utopian, collectivist and statist. Talmon furthermore holds it to be characterised by historical determinism and a notion of a single comprehensible truth in political life. The two intellectual tendencies both claim to promote freedom to the highest degree, but differ greatly in their conceptions of legitimate freedom.
Both schools affirm the supreme value of liberty, but whereas the one finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose. Liberal democrats believe that, in the absence of coercion, men and society may one day reach through a process of trial and error a state of ideal harmony.
In the case of totalitarian democracy, this state is precisely defined, and is treated as a matter of immediate urgency, a challenge for direct action, an imminent event:. Talmon, This ideal involves a notion of democracy as the constant and unanimous participation of the citizens of an ideal state in the acting out of the general will, thereby realising true democratic citizenship.
The Canadian scholar C. Macpherson, influenced by Marxism, argued that Talmon erred in stressing ideas over class and social realities, and in thus making too strong a causal claim in linking notions of natural order and political unanimity to inevitable totalitarianism.
Furthermore, he claimed that the Jacobins instituted a type of early totalitarian rule largely in response to the social pressures of revolutionary power and foreign counter-revolutionary invasion.
In effect, the true causes of historical change are thus seen as grounded in class and general social trends, and not merely in purely philosophical or ideological causes. This criticism implies holds that understanding key ideas and movements requires an understanding of their class background:.
A petit-bourgeois movement like Jacobinism, or a proletarian movement still based on the same individualist assumptions like Bavouism is particularly liable to demand a completely general unanimity at a time when it is least possible.
It might be argued that it was the petit-bourgeois character of these ideologies, rather than the assumption of a natural order, that led so readily to totalitarian dictatorship. Macpherson, To what extent are philosophical ideas responsible solely, or at least primarily, for mass movements throughout history, including totalitarianism? If Talmon and Arendt are right, they certainly possess sufficient causal potency to be determining factors in social and political development.
If their critics hold the high ground, they have inflated the importance of secondary or even epiphenomenal notions and properties to an unrealistic station. In her seminal book, Hannah Arendt attempted to show how totalitarianism emerged as a distinctly modern utopian problem in the twentieth century, growing out of a lethal combination of imperialism, anti-Semitism and extreme statist bureaucracies.
As much a work of intellectual history as political philosophy, The Origins of Totalitarianism jarred many due to its indictment of European civilization during a period of post-war reconstruction. Arendt held that totalitarianism was not a reactionary aberration, an attempt to turn back the clock to earlier tyrannies, but rather a revolutionary form of radical evil explicable by particularly destructive tendencies in modern mass politics. The atomisation of lonely individuals and the receptivity to propaganda of mass society in the modern age makes it an ongoing temptation to be resisted through critical thinking and the affirmation of fundamental human values.
Tracing what she took to be the prime causes of totalitarianism to the nineteenth century, Arendt focused on the rise of imperialism and political anti-Semitism, and the concomitant decline of both the remnants of the feudal order and the nation state. Imperialism and anti-Semitism both drew from racist and Social Darwinist wellsprings in their repudiation of unity through language, culture, and universal rights in favour of biologically fixed and hierarchical distinctions within humanity and a struggle for world conquest.
0コメント