Benjamin Barber's (1969) assertion that the term has been a ‘conceptual harlot …belonging to no one but at the service of all’, may be correct. Use of the term has often been heavily overladen with ideology, and often associated with sweeping evaluation rather than careful description and analysis. However, the main characteristics of totalitarian rule compared with previous forms of‘absolute’ or despotic rule, and in comparison with most modern forms of democratic government, are clear. They are outlined by Friedrich (1954) as follows:
Such a system thus possesses means of SURVEILLANCE and terror on a scale simply unavailable to premodern regimes (compare ABSOLUTISM, ORIENTAL DESPOTISM), the use of which it justifies on grounds of national interest, and in terms of general ideologies, including RACISM, NATIONALISM AND COMMUNISM. (As Tolstoy prophetically observed, ‘imagine Genghis Khan with a telephone’.) Because of these ideologies, and since totalitarianism is often based on SOCIAL MOVEMENTS which may enjoy wide support, it will rarely survive if based on force alone.
It is in the sharpness of the distinction often drawn between modern forms of totalitarianism and other modern forms of democratic government that the difficulties lie in use of the concept. One reason why too sharp a distinction is misplaced is that a totalizing tendency, including the use of general systems of surveillance, exists as a feature of all modern states. Furthermore, in totalitarian as well as non-totalitarian regimes, it is an ideology of democracy, in the sense of‘the rule of the many’, that acts as a justification for the requirement for involvement and support that exists in both types of regime. In non-totalitarian regimes, of course, such a totalizing tendency is offset by the institutionalized acceptance of political opposition. However, even this distinction can be taken too far, if the assumption is made that no forms of opposition exist or can ever be effective in totalitarian systems. The presence of opposition in some form must be seen as an inherent feature of all systems. Compare LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.
a school of bourgeois political thought that justifies statism and authoritarianism. Various philosophers in the past have viewed the state as an all-encompassing entity; they included Hobbes (“the state is a Leviathan”) and Hegel. Totalitarianism was most widely accepted when fascism was developing as a result of the general crisis of capitalism; it became the official ideology of fascist Germany and Italy. Bourgeois liberal ideologists used the conceptual framework of totalitarianism to make a critical evaluation of the fascist regimes.
During the cold war, anticommunist propaganda referred to socialist states as totalitarian, slanderously equating them with fascist states and opposing them to “democratic, ” “free” societies. Even today, reactionary bourgeois politicians and ideologists attempt to use the concept of totalitarianism for anticommunist purposes.
The doctrine of totalitarianism is currenty discredited in the eyes of the masses and has lost its influence in the West; however, the sharpening of social contradictions in capitalist countries is reviving totalitarian, fascist tendencies. The struggle against the ideology and practice of totalitarianism is one of the most important tasks facing the communist movement and Marxist-Leninist social science.
V. O. PECHATNOV