The path of totalitarianism

Postmodern Openings, 2015

The concept of totalitarianism is, undoubtedly, one of the most disputed terms in political language. This article investigates the conflict between the classical interpretations of totalitarian system that was frequently seen from the monolithic and revisionist perspective which offered some pluralistic models of Soviet and Nazi systems. The main purpose of the article is to show that, in this frame of the debates, the monolithic understanding of totalitarianism was inaccurate, therefore damaging the concept itself.

Studia nad Autorytaryzmem i Totalitaryzmem

The article is of methodological nature and aims to evaluate the content validity of Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome, that is, the extent to which this theoretical framework accurately represents the social phenomena to which it refers. It introduces the critical analysis of the individual concepts extracted from the totalitarian syndrome as the indicators of totalitarianism and the model as a whole as a research tool for measuring political regimes. The paper begins with the discussion on an alternative concept of totalitarianism formulated by Nicholas Timasheff to illustrate the context in which the authors of the theoretical categories of totalitarianism created them. Then, the article goes on to analyze the nature and major characteristics of Friedrich and Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome as well as these reviews of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, which addressed the validity of the model. Social scientists have widely critici...

Studia nad Autorytaryzmem i Totalitaryzmem 43, nr 2, 2021

failed to advance any clear criteria for coding. They did not establish a line between meeting and not meeting the listed essential features. Furthermore, it is unknown what character the features enumerated under this syndrome have. This generates a question if the six "indicators" are essential, distinctive, significant, co-decisive, contours, features, factors, frames, pillars, or mechanisms. Although Friedrich and Brzezinski's totalitarian syndrome fulfilled a prominent educational role mostly for US citizens by showing that there could be social worlds completely different from those in which one lives, the proposed understanding of totalitarianism is insignificant in defining such regimes. This theoretical framework inaccurately represents the social phenomena to which it refers. The paper finishes with the argument against applying the syndrome to scrutinize political regimes because of its considerably limited content validity.

How did The Origin of Totalitarianism (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951) become a seminal work, how was it received by the broader culture, and how it does it continue to be relevant within the modern political science and political philosophy zeitgeist? While Arendt’s work is thoughtfully written in prose and structure, one can note a mixture of passion and anger. In elucidating the same masses that were either actively or silently complicit in the rise of authoritarian states across the globe, she is careful to highlight the threats that their veiled anti-semitism had in the formulation and execution of the authoritarian states of the now vanquished Nazi Germany and still ascendant Soviet Union. She strove to illustrate how something as accepted, even mildly, as the dehumanization or othering of a sector of the people could be spun into and out into a spasm of domination and fear. In this striving, she succeeded.

Throughout history, those in power always used the repressive apparatus (police and justice) and the state ideological apparatuses. It is totalitarianism where the repressive apparatus and the state ideological apparatus are used to its fullest. The first experience of totalitarianism in the world happened to the Catholic Church in the second century AD when the need arises to exercise its power to control the thinking of the individuals who was getting better until reach the Inquisition in the twelfth century. Totalitarianism reappeared in the twentieth century in Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and other countries (China, Eastern European countries, North Korea, Spain, Portugal, Cuba, etc). The totalitarianism of the twentieth century with regard to the type of government where a single individual or party controls the various levels of state and society. In the twenty-first century, in the contemporary era of economic and financial globalization, the modern totalitarianism arises, covering the entire planet. The dominant neoliberal capitalist system is defined by the omnipresence of its mercantile ideology which occupies the same time all the space and all walks of life.

Totalitarian Systems in Contemporary Philosophy and Social Sciences, 2011

Nazism and Communism are the two totalitarian systems that have left an indelible and harrowing mark on the history of humankind. When the Second World War ended and numerous crimes perpetrated in the name of ideology were disclosed, the traditional philosophical and social assumptions about human beings underwent a serious and inevitable crisis. The cornerstone of the European culture had always been the premise that people are, by nature, good and rational beings who can create a better world for themselves to live in. However, the 20th century showed that one cannot simply ignore the problem of evil.

Perspectives on Politics, 2017

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A...

2017

This paper looks at the motivation and techniques of Totalitarianism according to James Scott and Michael Oakeshott. Scott's analysis of the totalitarian threat is compatible with Oakeshott in the sense that they both attribute the desire for a more perfect social order as the motivation behind the totalitarian threat and recognize that such a threat employs techniques of abstraction, simplification, imposed uniformity, and the devaluation of practical knowledge.

History of Political Thought, 2015

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