Totalitarianism

Ignored origins of the inter-war period

Very often, the genesis of the concept of totalitarianism is allotted to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whereas it takes place in the Entre-deux-guerres. The “totalitarian” adjective ( totalitario ) appeared in Italy as of May 1923 (one lends sometimes its invention to Giovanni Amendola, opponent and victim of the Fascisme). This concept was from the start an instrument of political struggle. Its employment was spread in a pejorative way in Italian the antifascists mediums. In 1925, the theorists of Fascism took again in an opportunist way the term on their account, by allotting a positive connotation to him. Benito Mussolini exaltait its “savage totalitarian will”, called to deliver the company of the oppositions and the conflicts of interests. Giovanni Gentile, theorist of Fascism mentioned totalitarianism in the article “doctrines of the Fascism” which he wrote for the Italian encyclopedia and in which he affirmed that “… for the fascist all is in the State and nothing human and spiritual exists and he has even less value out of the State. In this direction Fascism is totalitarian… ”. In second half of the Years 1920, the former president of the Italian Council of Ministers Francesco Saverio Nitti “would have the first bench of the bringings together between the structure of Italian Fascism and the Bolchevism”.

The German writer Ernst Jünger, by its exaltation of the “total mobilization”, described contours of totalitarianism. It celebrates the war and modern technology like heralding a new order, incarnated by the figure of the workman-soldier, working within a company framed and disciplined like an army. According to him, the First World War had marked an historical turning point towards this new form of civilization: for the first time in the history of Europe, the man power and material of the modern Industrial world had been mobilized in their “totality” to make the effort of war.

The first use of the term of totalitarianism to indicate in same time the States fascistic and communist seems to be made in Great Britain in 1929. In the Years 1930, the concept was used under the feather of writers pro-Nazis. Carl Schmitt employed the term of totalitarianism to clarify the crisis of the Libéralisme and the Parlementarisme and to express the need for a more authoritative policy. The ultra-authoritative mode resulting from the military coup d'etat of 1936 in Spain was defined as totalitarian in its first years, thus affirming its relationship with Fascism, before erasing this term of the constitution.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, William Henry Chamberlin and Michael Florinsky were among the first to make use of the concept of totalitarianism. Various theorists of left, like Franz Borkenau or Richard Löwenthal, employed the concept “to characterize all that appears new to them and specific in Fascism (or the Nazism), apart from any comparison with Soviet Communism”. The concept of totalitarianism also crystallized the reflection on the modern forms of Tyrannie and, more particularly, on the violence exerted on others, which seemed inseparable from operation from the modes Nazi and Communist. Finally, the fundamental features which dominated the discussion of the post-war period over totalitarianism were already present in the years 1930. Pierre Hassner affirms: “One can say that in a direction Hannah Arendt did nothing but tie in a brilliant synthesis the various elements by releasing the logic which underlay them. ”

The appearance of a new type of mode (the antithesis of liberalism) seemed entirely confirmed by the signature of the Pacte germano-Soviet in August 1939. Many observers established a bond between the ideologies fascistic and Soviet, shown to carry both attack to peace and freedom. In The Totalitarian Enemy , appeared in London in 1940, the Austrian former Communist Franz Borkenau wanted to inform the public opinion on truths stakes of the war: it was a question of destroying the totalitarianism incarnated in the Nazisme and the Bolchevisme. The differences between these two currents were tiny for the author: the Bolchevism was limited to a “red Fascism” and the Nazism with a “brown Bolchevism”. According to Borkenau, dynamics inherent in the capitalist market inevitably led on a centralization and a Planification of the economy: the totalitarian revolution was anything else only the socialist revolution prophesied by Karl Marx. But this undervaluation of the differences between the Bolchevism and the Nazism “does not decrease, according to Krzysztof Pomian, the historical importance of Totalitarian Enemy . Y are evoked, indeed, almost all the topics taken again later by the abundant literature devoted to totalitarianism. ”

Various definitions

Definition according to Hannah Arendt

The philosopher Hannah Arendt brought a definition of the concept of totalitarianism in his famous book the Origins of totalitarianism (1951). According to it, two countries only had then known a true totalitarianism: the Germany under the Nazism and the the USSR under Stalin. It distinguishes however totalitarian tendencies or episodes apart from these two cases. It quotes in particular the Maccarthisme at the beginning of the Années 1950 with the the United States or the concentration camps French where were locked up the refugees of the Guerre of Spain.

These modes do not admit that a Sole party which controls the State, which itself endeavors to control the company and more generally all the individuals in all the aspects of their life (total domination). From a totalitarian point of view, this vision is erroneous: there is only one party because there is only one whole, that only one country, to want another party it is already of treason or the mental disease (schizophrenia: to believe itself several whereas one is one).

Totalitarianism such as it is thus described by Hannah Arendt is not a political “mode as well” as a autodestructive “dynamics” resting on a dissolution of the social structures.

Accordingly, the bases of the social structures were voluntarily sabotaged or destroyed: the camps for youth for example contributed to sabotage the family institution inside by instilling the fear of the denouncement even hearths, the religion is prohibited and replaced by new myths invented of any part or recomposed starting from older myths, the culture is also a privileged target. Hans Johst had thus written in a play: “When I hear the word culture, I remove the safety catch of my Browning . ” (also marked sentence in public by Baldur von Schirach, chief of the Youths hitlériennes).

The social identity of the individuals leaves room to the feeling of membership of a formless mass, without value with the eyes of the capacity, nor even in its own eyes. The devotion with the chief and the nation becomes the only raison d'être of an existence which overflows beyond the individual form for a going result of fanaticism psychotic to the depression. The total domination is carried out: the “objective enemies” make their self-criticism during their lawsuits and admit the sentence. The agents of Russian NKVD decrees had a reasoning of the type thus “if the Party stopped me and wishes to ego a confession, it is that it has good reasons to do it”. Arendt notices moreover that no stopped agent forever tempted to reveal any secret of State, and always remained faithful to the capacity in place, even when its death was assured.

The totalitarian companies are characterized by the promise from a “paradise”, the Fin of the history or the Pureté of the race for example, and federate the mass against an objective enemy. This one is external than interior as much and will be likely to change, according to the interpretation of the laws of the History (class struggle) or of Nature (fight of the races) at the moment “T”. The totalitarian companies create a perpetual motion and paranoiac of monitoring, denouncement and reversal. The police forces and the special units multiply and are competed with in greatest confusion.

Contrary to the traditional dictatorships (military or different), totalitarianism does not use the Terreur with an aim of crushing the opposition. Totalitarian terror starts really only when any opposition is crushed. Even if the group considered as an enemy were destroyed (for example the Trotskistes in the USSR), the capacity will indicate another continuously of them. Hitler and the Nazis had thus envisaged the extermination of the Ukrainian, Polish and Russian people once the eliminated Jews.

Regular purgings ordered by the Head of the State, only fixed point, give the tempo of a company which eliminates per million its own population, nourishing its own flesh to some extent. This program is applied until the absurdity, the trains of deportees towards the camps of the Nazi Germany remained always priority on the trains of supply of the face while at the same time the German army the war lost. The totalitarian modes are distinguished from the authoritarian regimes and dictatorial by their permanent use of terror, against the whole of the population (there-included/understood the “innocent ones” with the eyes even of the ideology in force) and not against the real opponents. The permanent use of terror has as a corollary that of the Propagande, omnipresent in a totalitarian State.

In addition, totalitarianism does not obey any principle of utility: the administrative structures are geared down without superimposing itself, divisions of the territory are multiple and do not recut themselves. The Bureaucratie is consubstantial totalitarianism. The purpose of all that is to remove any hierarchy between the chief and the masses, and to guarantee the total domination, without any obstacle relativizing it. The chief orders directly and without mediation any civil servant of the mode, in any point of the territory. Totalitarianism is to be differentiated from the Absolutisme (the chief holds its legitimacy of the masses and not of an external concept like God) and from the Autoritarisme (no intermediate hierarchy theoretically comes “to relativize” the authority of the totalitarian chief).

In its introduction of a new edition of The Origins off Totalitarianism , in 1966, Hannah Arendt was opposed to the ideological use of the term of totalitarianism concerning all the Communist regimes with sole party. She considered that its interpretation did not apply more to the successors of Stalin that to his predecessor.

Michelle-Irene Brudny considers that the thought of Hannah Arendt comprises exaggerations, in her claim all to include: “the philosopher, sometimes intrepid or, more surely, become bold by his obsessive will to include/understand, feels held, with the risk of the paradox, to produce an interpretation " générale". ” The work of Hannah Arendt nevertheless convinced the majority of the opinion and receipt of many praises.

Other contributions to the philosophical reflection on totalitarianism

Many philosophers, seeking to find an explanation to the tragedies of the 20th century, treated question of totalitarianism. The philosophical current seeking “the gasoline” of totalitarianism stressed its ideological contents and its methods.

Fascism, the Nazism and Communism were interpreted as “secular religions”. The German philosopher Eric Voegelin built an analysis of the 20th century on the basis of this concept. The totalitarian ideologies replaced the Religion, because they asked their followers to accept the promise of a safety on ground. From the similar point of view, Waldemar Gurian, historian and Russian essay writer of origin emigrated in the United States in 1937, introduced the concept of “idéocratie”. According to Waldemar Gurian, totalitarianisms Bolshevik and Nazi, as modes generated and structured by an idea, were “ideocratic”. The idéocratie indicated any shape of political organization where there was fusion between the capacity and a given ideology. The term frequently applied to the modes where a sole party had the hand put on the official apparatus.

The Israeli historian Jacob L. Talmon also perceived totalitarianism like the product of an idea. According to him, totalitarianism had its matrix in the philosophy of the Lumières. The Russian Intelligentsia was influenced by the political messianism of the 18th century, i.e. by the advertisement of a glowing future and the assertion which there exists in policy a truth, only one. Jacob Talmon considered Jean-Jacques Rousseau (author of the theory of the general will), Maximilien de Robespierre (the first expert of Terror) and Gracchus Babeuf (the first communist conspirator) like precursors of totalitarianism.

Alain Besancon carried out a second analysis of totalitarianism like idéocratie: “The ideology is not a means of totalitarianism but on the contrary totalitarianism is the political consequence, the incarnation in the social life of the ideology”. Like Talmon Jacob, Alain Besancon sees in the French revolution the matrix of totalitarianism and carries a very critical glance on the heritage Rationaliste of the Lights.

The totalitarian model

In the years 1950, the concept of totalitarianism was sophisticated in a “model” by political economists anxious to lead to a categorization of the political regimes. The model of totalitarianism was formed in opposition to other models, like the models of the “democratic-constitutional” modes and “authoritative-conservatives”.

Under the Permanent title of Revolution , Sigmund Neumann published a study on totalitarianism in 1940. He insisted on the fact that the totalitarian State carried out a “permanent revolution”, while the traditional Autoritarisme S had generally been preserving. According to Neumann, the principal character of the totalitarian modes was to institutionalize the Révolution, which enabled them to ensure their own perpetuation.

But when the historians seize the concept, it is much more according to the fixed definition, at the origin, by Carl Friedrich, which made it possible the concept of totalitarianism to acquire its full legitimacy in the field of the Social sciences. The work written by the political economist Carl Friedrich and his young collaborator of the university of Harvard Zbigniew Brzezinski is, according to Enzo Traverso, “the book which the most polarized the debate during the Fifties and Sixties”. Their analysis of totalitarianism represented for a long time the theoretical treatment which made more authority. The two authors presented a “Syndrome” totalitarianism comprising five fundamental characteristics: a sole party controlling the apparatus of State and directed by a charismatic chief; an ideology of State promising the achievement of humanity; a police machinery resorting to terror; a central management of the economy; a monopoly of the means of communication of mass. In this vision, the totalitarian dictatorships, as a new and extremely modern form of authoritarianism, were the completed form of the despotism. Moreover, the totalitarian companies were presented like basically similar between them.

One can add to it like other practical aspects, the catch in total hand of education to base it on the ideology, and the installation of an omnipresent network of monitoring of the individual. A preponderance was granted to the technical factor: it is the modern Technologie which made the political power able to have a total influence on the populations. The totalitarian State consisted of an enormous bureaucracy, which showed an effectiveness without faults. One of the characteristics of totalitarianism was that it enrégimentait physically and mentally the population. The ideology constituted an instrument of government without similar, by the endoctrination of the populations. Propaganda had the effect of a washing of brain, making it possible to obtain the approval of the people. According to Claude Polin, the totalitarian ideologies made it possible “to put the spirits even in slavery, and to dry up any revolt with its sharp source, while removing until its intention even”.

The political economists of this period drew the very pessimistic conclusions in connection with the future. According to them, it was improbable that the totalitarian dictatorship, taking into account its internal dynamics, crumbles itself or is reversed by a revolution. There were also enormous obstacles with the liberalization of the mode, being given the arbitrary law and the absence of initiative Démocratique. The structures of totalitarianism made it unable to evolve/move, but not unable to reproduce. This State the Almighty even tried to extend his influence on the whole of the world. The totalitarian projects of world revolution could only be thwarted by a external Military intervention, as that had occurred vis-a-vis the Nazism.

In its clean first treating book of Soviet totalitarianism, Zbigniew Brzezinski stressed the total mobilization of the resources by the State, on the destruction of any opposition and general terror. Purging, perceived like the core of totalitarianism, “satisfied the continual needs for the system in dynamism and energy”. In this work, Zbigniew Brzezinski envisaged the constant aggravation of totalitarianism. The totalitarian movements were particularly frightening because “their intention is to institutionalize a revolution which progresses in extent, and often in intensity, as the mode is stabilized with the capacity. The objective of this revolution is to pulverize all the existing social units in order to replace old pluralism by a homogeneous unanimity”.

The destruction of the old company, by the increasing application of measurements of Coercion, was carried out in order to rebuild this company and the man himself according to certain “ideal” designs defined by the ideology. “Terror thus becomes an inevitable consequence, as well as an instrument, revolutionary program. ” In its analysis of Soviet totalitarianism, Zbigniew Brzezinski granted a great weight to the revolutionary ideology which, once taken in hand by a bureaucratized sole party, generated a total social impact.

The political economist recognizes that “the political system of Khrouchtchev is not the same one as that of Stalin, although both can be generally described like totalitarian. ” Under Khrouchtchev, terror left room to a policy of endoctrination which became the main feature of the system. But when the dynamism and the zeal revolutionists decrease, “the system is reinforced by networks of complex control which impregnate all the company and mobilize its energies through a very fine penetration. ”

Betty Brand Burch thus summarized the traditional definition of totalitarianism: “totalitarianism is an extreme form of dictatorship which is characterized by the unlimited and disproportionate capacity leaders, the suppression of all forms of autonomous opposition, and the atomization of the company in a way such as almost each phase of the life thus becomes public and prone to the control of the State. ”

According to the definition of Raymond Aron, totalitarianism qualifies the political systems in which is achieved “the absorption of the civil society in the State” and “the transfiguration of the ideology of the State in dogma imposed to the intellectuals and on the universities”. The State, relayed by the sole party, would exert in this direction a total control on the company, the culture, sciences, morals to the same individuals to which he is not recognized any clean freedom of expression or conscience.

A stake of debate

A very politicized concept

The use of the concept of totalitarianism was driven back during the period of the Second world war, because of alliance of the Western democracies with the Soviet Union in the fight against Germany Nazi. The concept knew its golden age starting from the proclamation of the Truman doctrine, in 1947. The analogy between Germany of Hitler and Russia of Stalin left think that the Cold war was simply a repetition of the years 1930, because the Soviet Russia could behave same manner as Germany in the inter-war period. According to Adler and Thomas Paterson, the “nightmare of a " Fascism rouge" a generation of Americans terrorized”. The concept of totalitarianism, which was the subject of a considerable number of work and of which the use was very widespread, was formulated then in a strictly negative connotation.

The economist Friedrich Hayek, in the Road of the constraint , perceived totalitarianism like an inescapable consequence of the application of socialist measurements to the economy. He showed that the socialization of the economy could only lead to the total suppression of freedoms, including political freedoms, therefore that the Socialisme was structurally incompatible with the democracy. Friedrich Hayek thought that systemic bonds linked the economy, the right and the political institutions. To be opposed to free operation mechanisms of the market, in which he saw the ultimate source of any civilization, would amount installing a tyrannical mode. The idea according to which economic planning would be the principle of totalitarianism was an important success in the United States. In Fatal The Conceit , Friedrich Hayek included to last once its critic of the socialism, which he regarded as a fatal error and the product of intellectual vanity.

For Bertrand de Jouvenel, it is the democracy which is totalitarian: it thus entitled one of the chapters of its principal work Of the capacity “the totalitarian democracy”. He considers that the democracy by leaving the hope to each one to reach the capacity encourages with the seizure of power and not with the reduction of “arbitrary official”, phenomenon involving a reinforcement increasingly larger States.

In the years 1970, the concept of totalitarianism was adopted by intellectuals of Europe of the East emigrated in Occident, such Leszek Kolakowski, Michel Heller or Alexandre Zinoviev. Many dissenting of the East reproduced through their work the most traditional descriptions of totalitarianism. They insisted in a unanimous way on success of the totalitarian policies. According to Leszek Kolakowski, the Stalinist system was a “political system where all the social reports/ratios were nationalized and where the omnipotent State is found only vis-a-vis individuals reduced to the state of atoms”. The Stalinisme was “a Marxism-Leninism in action”, i.e. the inevitable result of the practical application of the vision of the world Marxiste.

Early criticisms addressed to the theory of totalitarianism

Research on the concept of totalitarianism was carried out in the political context of the cold war, where the liberal model was opposed to the communist model. After instrumentalisébeing instrumentalisé by the MacCarthy EMS with the the United States in the Years 1950, the concept of totalitarianism started to be repudiated during the Années 1960 by the empirical research of the Social sciences, within the framework of a general movement of handing-over in question of liberalism, supported by the relaxation. New interpretations then appeared: on the one hand the general hostility towards the USSR weakened, on the other hand, the new relations between the United States and the USSR involved intellectual exchanges between the two countries (the Western researchers were authorized, much more than in the current of the years 1950, to work in the Soviet files and libraries). It appeared obvious that, in the facts, the Soviet State had not managed “to atomize” the company or to eliminate the Private life: the theorists of totalitarianism had over-estimated the capacities of the Soviet capacity to control the company, and had underestimated the capacities of resistance of the individuals. The concept of totalitarianism excluded the possibility of any material change from the system, otherwise than by a military defeat. However, after the death of Stalin, starting from Khrouchtchev, the Soviet Russia had started to change, which cancelled the opposition to progress lent to the system by the “totalitarian model”. The Terreur had calmed down (however regarded as a fundamental characteristic of totalitarianism), the personal capacity of Stalin had left room to a collective direction, groups of the Nomenklatura profited from an increased role, the “purging permanent” had left room to the preoccupation with a safety of the Oligarchie. The Idéologie was used for the justification of the capacity in place rather than of engine dynamic of transformation of the company. Lastly, consumption and the parallel economy progressed and the country opened economically towards outside. The theorists of totalitarianism like Hannah Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski had put at the foreground of their analysis the extreme forms of the dictatorships known as totalitarian, which appeared, in the USSR like later in popular China, bound in a very broad measurement to the person of the Tyran. The theory of totalitarianism had not considered the possibility that these modes begin in a process of appeasing of the dictatorship.

The relevance of the concept of totalitarianism and its utility for the historical and comparative analysis were then called in question by a new generation of American political economists. This concept, perceived like a survival of the Cold war, was shown to underestimate the complexity of the modes to which it applied. Alexander J. Groth expressed doubts on the capacity of the concept of totalitarianism to correctly include/understand fascistic Italy, the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This concept concentrated on the features which these modes had in common, whereas their differences deserved more an great attention. Adler and Thomas Paterson shared this opinion: “the real differences between the systems fascist and Communist were darkened”. However, they, the origins, the ideologies continued, the goals and the practices of these systems were largely different. The historical research little by little blamed the legitimacy of the parallel between National-socialisme and Communisme, by in particular underlining the specificity of the genocide Nazi, and more generally the singularity of modes which do not have the same origins.

According to Robert C. Tucker, the comparison between the Nazi Germany and communist Russia were too narrow. Moreover, many convinced authors that the Soviet mode rises from historical deviations which betray the communist ideology, reproach the “totalitarian model” for establishing a filiation between Communism, the Bolchevisme and the Stalinisme. This filiation regards the communist world as a whole, and is only not very sensitive to the differences existing between the communist countries. In an article, Herbert J. Spiro regretted the fact that the term of totalitarianism was a slogan Anticommuniste during the cold war: the propagandist use of the term “tended to darken the utility which it could have for the systematic analysis and the comparison of the political entities”. Benjamin Barber, however former defender of the theory of totalitarianism, called with the going beyond of a condemned concept “if not by the lapse of memory, at least by an increasing disuse”. John Alexander Armstrong, intellectual preserving, also explicitly criticized to him the concept of totalitarianism at the end of the years 1960, asserting which it was not able to give an account of the evolution of several Communist regimes.

The experiment of democratization carried out in Czechoslovakia at the time of the “Printemps of Prague” of 1968 reopened the debate on the change in the communist countries and on the differences between those. The paradigm of totalitarianism thus entered in conflict with the new fields of research which interested the specialists in social sciences and the Historiens which opened with the methods of social sciences. The “totalitarian model”, for example, did not encourage the studies relating to the relationship and the differences between the center and the periphery. Georges Mink for example, in Life and Mort of the Soviet block , prefers speech of sovietization/desovietisation when it is a question of approaching the countries of the Eastern bloc (the USSR and satellite countries).

Nevertheless, the idea of totalitarianism was not completely isolated: it indicated a phase characteristic of the beginnings of the communist domination which required the mobilization of the company, generally due to Industrialization. Following this phase of industrialization, the revolutionary elite is bureaucratized and the communist company became much more complex and differentiated. This is why, in comparison with the Nazi Germany of Hitler, certain researchers limit the totalitarian period to the mode of Stalin, particularly in his last years (1950-1953), where the Paranoïa of Stalin reached his paroxysm. As from 1970, the report that the Communist regimes were not static, but that they crossed on the contrary various phases, made quasi-unanimity among the academics. They were numerous to estimate that new ideal models were necessary to study the communist States and companies during the post-Stalinist time.

In the Soviétologie, the debate around the concept of totalitarianism opposed two historiographic schools . The “school of totalitarianism”, after having been dominant in the United States in the years 1950-1960, was disputed by a school “Révisionniste”, which called in question the bases of the sovietology by the means of the social Histoire.

Criticisms contemporary

In the social sciences, the term gave place to a debate which is still not closed. The term gave place to many definitions, different and sometimes antagonists according to the convictions from the authors. Certain authors qualify totalitarian modes like the the USSR under Stalin, the Turkménistan under Saparmyrat Nyýazow, the North Korea under Kim It-sung then Kim Jong-il, the Kampuchea under Pol Pot, Cuba under Fidel Castro or the China at the time of Mao Zedong.

The political economists of the beginnings of the cold war quoted much Hannah Arendt for its comparison between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but contrary to it, they did not dig the problem from the social and historical point of view. Carl Friedrich and his school were limited to the analysis of the totalitarian modes once made up, even if it means to neglect the question of their origins. Like says it Enzo Traverso, “essential affinity between the Nazi Germany and the USSR was postulated on the basis of phenomenologic, static comparison simple, descriptive, ever studied starting from the genesis and of the dynamics of these modes. ” Carl Friedrich seems to excuse himself: “why the totalitarian companies are what they are, we do not know it”. According to the historian Enzo Traverso, the principal consequence of the application of the concepts of idéocratie and secular religion was “of déshistoriser the totalitarian fact, which will not be studied like result of a process social and political but reduced to the incarnation of an idea. ”

In an article with the eloquent title, Ian Kershaw mark its strong reserves with regard to the theory of totalitarianism. Concerning the Third Reich, the English historian disputes the atomization of the civil society, first of the features of totalitarianism according to Hannah Arendt. Its study on the Bavaria enables him to affirm that a popular opinion remains, independently of the ideology Nazi. The company knew to be based on its traditions to express its complaints or to oppose a compressive strength, it was thus not reduced to “the single man” about which Arendt spoke. According to Ian Kershaw, the concept of totalitarianism “helps, against the proper will of the majority of its users, to mark the radical differences which exist” between the two modes Stalinist and Nazi. He concludes by considering that “the concept of totalitarianism has a primarily descriptive capacity, very slightly explanatory - it in what he is not a concept perhaps besides”.

In their common work, published in 2003, Alain Blum and Martine Mespoulet consider it regrettable that the “totalitarian approach postulating the primarily political nature of the Soviet history, the company hardly has place in this analysis”. Concerning the Soviet Union, “the debate around totalitarianism often occulted the complexity of the organization of the command, and more generally of the shapes of the Stalinist government”. In a more direct way, Roland Lew, historian specialist in China Maoist, speaks about a “deeply obsolete” paradigm, based on “a design largely have-history”, which “continued to live and to even thrive only thanks to the ideological confrontation”.

An essential concept despite everything?

In spite of criticisms, the analysis through the prism of totalitarianism was not abandoned. Many authors defended the value Heuristique of it. Leszek Kolakowski recognized that “a perfect model of a totalitarian company is untraceable”. But according to the Polish philosopher, that did not constitute a serious obstacle with the use of the concept, since the concepts employed to describe the social phenomena of large scales never had perfect equivalents Empiriques. There could be significant changes in the USSR, but without fundamental transformation of Communism, total control having always been the objective of a Party which wanted to be omnipotent.

Martin Malia is him also inspired of the thought weberienne: totalitarianism is a Ideal-type, “always imperfectly carried out in the empirical field”. A ideal-type is an abstraction which will never be found such as it is in the reality, but which allows nevertheless the intelligibility of the phenomenon on the conceptual level, its comprehension. According to the American historian, the “totalitarian” word does not want to say that “modes of this kind exerted in fact a total controls population (since it is impossible), but that such a control was their fundamental aspiration”. The modes try to be totalitarian, but the resistance of the facts, the economic social reality or, and the active or passive resistance of the populations, prevent some, and manage to preserve not-controlled spaces.

The theory of totalitarianism made new great strides in the years 1990. The collapse of the USSR, in 1991, partially gave reason to its partisans. The historians of the school revisionist supported mainly that the Soviet mode was a modern State, since it was reformable. However, the attempts at reorganization carried out by Mikhaïl Gorbatchev led to the complete ruin of the system. Martin Malia announced since 1990 the failure of the Perestroïka in an article published anonymously which knew a certain repercussion. He explained there in particular why Gorbatchev would fail because there remained too much “communist” and that the Soviet system was not reformable. He introduced to the “totalitarian” mode Soviet like resting on four intangible pillars: “the role directing of the party, authoritative economic planning, the political police, and the obligatory ideology”. According to Malia, touch with the one of these pillars, all essential to the maintenance of the system, amounted causing its “total collapse”.

For many historians, totalitarianism remains a concept-key in the study and the comprehension of the 20th century. For Enzo Traverso, it is “a parapet of the thought”: it “condenses an image of the 20th century whose lapse of memory would prevent from founding a responsible attitude, so much on the ethical level than on the political plan, in the present”. In conclusion, the Italian historian considers the concept at the same time impossible to circumvent and insufficient: “impossible to circumvent for the theory political, anxious to draw up a typology of the forms of being able, and for the political Philosophie, confronted with the radical innovation of the modes aiming at the destruction of the policy; insufficient for the historiography, confronted with the concrétude of the events. ”

Recent extension of the concept

The word “totalitarianism”, entered the current language, is very often used without the methodological precautions necessary. Having a strong connotation, making think of the modes hitlérien and Stalinist, it throws discredit easily and marks the spirits. It can thus be used as weapon of propaganda against the enemy. The use of the concept requires a thorough analysis of the company or structure of the studied group, it is necessary to emphasize some the categories essential and the processes of die-differentiation suitable for totalitarianism.

The term of totalitarianism is employed, by various authors, to indicate theocratic modes such as that of the taliban S and their recourse to a religious legislation (the Charia) which applies to all the fields of the existence, being unaware of any distinction between public life and private life. Also sometimes the term is used more generally to qualify the islamist Terrorisme. This use can seem unsuitable, terrorism which cannot be regarded as a “totalitarianism” with the original direction of the term. It becomes however relevant when the terrorist activities lead to impose a mode which fills the criteria of them.

The term is also employed to indicate the mode of organization of some Secte S (such as the Scientologie or the Témoins of Jéhovah) which would not leave with their followers any sphere of clean autonomy, because of total control that they endeavor to exert on all their acts, words and thoughts.

According to the liberal author Guy Sorman, in Progress and its enemies , the concerns ecologists create contours of a “green totalitarianism”.

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