Totalitarianism

[3] 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, the sciences, and the private-life morality of the citizens.

[5] The term totalitarianism emerged in politics of the interwar period; in the ealy 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, hegemonic in explaining nature of Fascist and Communist states, and later entered Western historiography of Communism, the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution; in the 21st century, it became applied to Islamist movements and their governments.

"[5] From the right-wing perspective, the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism, which the philosopher Karl 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[13]—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;[14] his approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causation[15] 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.

[16] There were similar "ideocratic"[1] attempts in traditions of the Counter-Enlightenment[17] 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;[1] 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,[16] 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.

All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I, without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in the minds of unknown agitators and crackpots.

[20] In 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Führerprinzip.

'[37] In their turn, the traditionalists defend their approach and methodology, dismiss focus on social history and accuse their opponents of Marxism and of rationalizing the actions of the Bolsheviks and failing to recognize the primary role of "one man" leading a movement (Vladimir Lenin or Adolf Hitler).

Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist approaches became largely accepted in academic circles, and the term "revisionism" migrated to characterize a group of social historians focusing on the working class and the upheavals of the Stalin years.

[22] The revisionists, on the contrary, stressed the genuinely 'popular' nature of the 1917 Revolution, and tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism;[21] a revisionist historian Ronald Suny cites Hannah Arendt who distinguished Lenin's terror of the Russian Civil War, "a means to exterminate and frighten opponents", from totalitarian terror aimed not at specific enemies but at fulfilling ideological goals, solving the problem of inequality and poverty, "an instrument to rule masses who are perfectly obedient.

"[22] It was also noted that Stalin became an uncontested dictator after a period of "authoritarian pluralism",[2] while the one-party dictatorship and mass violence (the Red Terror) were interpreted not as a result not of Lenin's totalitarian "blueprint", but rather of reactions (yet justified by the ideology) to current events and external factors, including wartime conditions and the struggle for survival,[38][22] some historians highlighted the initial attempts of the Bolsheviks to form a coalition government.

[42] More to it, they examined the substantial differences of Stalinist and Nazi violence that inevitably put into question the attempt to gather Stalin's and Hitler's regimes into a single category which was presented by the concept of totalitarianism.

"[1] A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the reign of Stalin (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that state terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government:[41] to critics of totalitarian model state terror was a mark of a weak regime, and J. Arch Getty wrote of a "technically weak and politically divided party whose organisational relationships seem more primitive than totalitarian", commenting the Smolensk Archive, and so, the criticism of accepted model became with labelling Stalinism as "inefficient totalitarianism", where the dictator had to rely on "shock methods" to counter the resistance of local autonomies and administrations and political factionalism within the apparatus (including its highest levels);[2] the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of personal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens psychologically atomised by the totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union[45]—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose",[46] and many purges and forced collectivisations were local or even "popular initiatives which Stalin and his henchmen' could not control", while the people collectively resisted by such methods as refusing to work efficiently and migrating by the millions.

That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward social mobility for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the Russian Revolution (1917–1924).

Mass state violence was also different: Soviet violence was primarily iternal, while the one of the Nazis primarily external; the former was an ineffective and irrational means of a rational goal, modernization, while Nazis sought extremely irrational goals with rational industrial means; the efficiency of Soviet forced labour camps (Gulags) was measured by the authorities by practical results, like building train tracks, which would eventually lay a basis of modernity, while Nazism mobilized industry for extermination, and the efficiency of extermination camps was measured by the number of deaths.

[47] Enzo Traverso and Andrew Vincent point out that the "totalitarian approach" or the theoretical concept of totalitarianism, which presented the idea of a monolithic party, no separation between state and society, and total mobilization of the atomized masses and total control over the state, society and economy, is not applicable not only to the USSR, but also to Nazi Germany and Fascist states as well, since it also did not present a monolithic structure excercising total control over society, but on the contrary, that Nazi bureaucracy was highly "chaotic", anomic and disorganized and disunited, and that Adolf Hitler was a "weak dictator" and "laissez-faire leader", as said by such historians as Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw;[1][2] this description of Nazi Germany was first introduced in 1942 by Franz Leopold Neumann in the work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, where he provocatively presented Hitlerism "a Behemoth, a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy", and later entered historiography of Nazism.

[1][6] Historians like Mommsen and Ian Kershaw were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of beureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction.

"[52] Laure Neumayer posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War".

[53] In 1978, the term was 'revived' in Western Europe: such historians as François Furet produced 'revisionist' critical re-evaluations of the French Revolution which, according to them, led to the emergence of totalitarianism, while in Italy, "anti-anti-Fascist" historians, notably Renzo De Felice and after him Emilio Gentile, challenged the 'myth' produced by the hegemonic role of the Communists in the Italian resistance, stated that the choice between Fascism and Communism was equal for Italy, and implied that the latter could be even worse, what led to the resurgence of the concept of totalitarianism as a new dimension of studies of Fascism, while the ones who doubted their theories were "swept away" with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991.

[62][63] Historians Enzo Traverso and Arno J. Mayer and the author Domenico Losurdo accepted Nolte's concept of the "European Civil War", although set its beginning to 1914 and differently interpreted it, not in terms of struggle between two totalitarianisms.

Beyond being a Western banner, it stores the memory a century that experienced Auschwitz and Kolyma, the death camps of Nazism, the Stalinist Gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields.

One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them.

However, his concept was much less defined than the one of the Cold War theorists, and he would have disagreed with their core points: that 'central control and direction of the entire economy' was applicable to fascism, and would have rejected their tendency to depict 'totalitarian' societies as politically monolithic and inherently static, as well as their anti-communist perspective and their description of Lenin as a totalitarian dictator;[83] scholars even argued that for him it was a pejorative, not a sociologal concept based on equating Fascism and socialism, like it was for Cold War theorists.

Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists said that the old image of the Stalinist USSR of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent upon world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, because the death of Stalin changed Soviet society.

[106] Revisionist Kremlinologists, such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola, transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model by recognising and reporting that the Soviet government, the communist party, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin.

They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw polymathy as a thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups.

According to Shoshana Zuboff, the economic pressures of modern surveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action.

[118] In 2016, The Economist described China's developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping's administration, to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian.

Following its territorial expansion in 2014, the group renamed itself as the "Islamic State" and declared itself as a caliphate[a] that sought domination over the Muslim world and established what has been described as a "political-religious totalitarian regime".

Systems which are commonly described as totalitarian, fascism and communism, sought to create a utopian "New Man" and as a result, they set their projects toward the future, not to revive old forms of absolutism, as noted by Tzvetan Todorov.

within the sole legal party FET y de las JONS and the Movimiento Nacional and by other such features as, according to Linz, lack of 'totalitarian' ideology, as Franco relied on National Catholicism and traditionalism.