thumb|350px|Two versions of the [[World War II U.S. propaganda poster "Your Lot in a Totalitarian State" depicting a process of compulsory sham election which took place in totalitarian states, the flags of which – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union – are presented below. In the version on the right, produced after Operation Barbarossa, the flag of the Soviet Union (Allied member) is replaced with that of the Empire of Japan (Axis member), which is not always regarded as totalitarian by Western scholars. In regards to the USSR, the label has also received some criticism.]]

Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties as well as outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state. This system completely controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all political power is held by a dictator. This figure controls the national politics and peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and state-aligned private mass communications media.

A 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 and sciences, and the private morality of its citizens.

The word totalitarian was first used in the early 1920s to describe the Italian Fascist government. The term totalitarianism gained wider usage in politics of the interwar period; in the early years of the Cold War, it arose from comparison of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler as a theoretical concept of Western political science. The term achieved hegemony in explaining the nature of Fascist and Communist states, and later entered the Western historiography of Communism, the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution; in the 21st century, it became applied to Islamist movements and their governments. The concept of totalitarianism has been challenged and criticized by some historians of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR. While the two states are defined as exemplary cases of totalitarianism, these historians argue that the main characteristics of the concept – total control over society, total mobilization of the masses, and a monolithic centralized character of the government – were never achieved by the dictatorships called totalitarian. To support this claim, the historians argue that the political structures of these states were disorganized and chaotic, and that despite the supposed external similarities between Nazism and Stalinism, their internal logic and structure were substantially different. The applicability of the concept to Islamism has also been criticized.

Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian. Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism. However, not all scholars believe these regimes and ideologies exemplify totalitarianism: some of those who support of the concept of totalitarianism exclude Burma, Iran and even Fascist Italy 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. Popper's approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causation 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.

There were similar "ideocratic" 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,

Enzo Traverso believes that the idea of "total state", or "totalitarian state" as it would be called later, came from the concept of "total war" which was used to describe World War I by its contemporaries: the war "shaped the imagination of an entire generation" by rationalizing nihilism and "methodical destruction of the enemy", introducing "a new warrior ethos in which the old ideals of heroism and chivalry merged with modern technology" and a process of brutalization of politics and such examples of "continentally planned industrial killing" as the Armenian genocide. "Total war" became "total state", and after the war, it was used as a pejorative by the Italian anti-fascists of the 1920s and later by the Italian Fascists themselves.</blockquote>

In the 20th century, Giovanni Gentile classified Italian Fascism as a political ideology with a philosophy that is "totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people"; Gentile expressed his ideas in "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), an essay he co-authored with Benito Mussolini. 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.

Since the Cold War, the so-called 'traditionalist', or 'totalitarian', historians (see below) have argued such description of Lenin is opposed by the so-called 'revisionist' historians of Communism and the Soviet Union Likewise, in The Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish the legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader; later Joseph Goebbels would call a totalitarian state the goal of the Nazi Party,

While the concept of totalitarianism became dominant in Anglo-American political discourse after World War II, it remained neglected in continental Europe except for West Germany: in such countries as Italy and France, where the Communist parties played a hegemonic role in the anti-fascist resistance, the pioneering works of the theory of totalitarianism by such authors as Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich were often ignored or not even translated; the political theory of totalitarianism in these countries was promoted by Congress for Cultural Freedom supported by the CIA. for relying on concepts and interpretations rooted in the early years of the Cold War and even in the sphere Russian White émigrés of the 1920s. In the 1960s, revisionists studying the Cold War and the Communist movement in the U.S. criticized the dominant ideas that American Communists were an actual threat to the United States and social history of the Soviet government, that Lenin was the "inventor" (Riley) of totalitarianism, and that further totalitarian governments just implemented the policies already invented:

Martin Malia noted that the debates on history were politically significant: if the 'traditionalists' were right, "Communism" "must be abolished", but if they were not, it could be reformed. According to Evan Mawdsley, "the 'revisionist' school had been dominant from the 1970s", and achieved "some success" in challenging the traditionalists. Starting from the 1970s, the 'revisionist' historians, 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.

Some historians who did not align themselves with the 'revisionist school' later openly stated that Stalinist system cannot be regarded as totalitarian. For example, the historian Robert Service in his biography of Stalin wrote that "this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes." Eric Hobsbawm wrote that although Stalin indeed wanted to achieve total control of the population, he did not establish an actual totalitarian system, what, as he said, "throws considerable doubt on the usefulness of the term."

According to Fitzpatrick, "totalitarian-model scholarship" - the USSR as a "top-down entity," a monolithic party grounded on ideology and ruling by terror over a passive society – "was in effect a mirror image of the Soviet self-representation, but with the moral signs reversed (instead of the party being always right, it was always wrong)."—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the center, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose", and many purges and forced collectivizations 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.

Nazism and Fascism

thumb|upright|[[Otto Schumann, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Fritz Schmidt award a sportswoman with a portrait of Adolf Hitler.]]

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 exercising 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; Historians like Mommsen and Ian Kershaw were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. Michael Mann wrote that these descriptions doubted theories of totalitarianism, since "anything less like the rigid top-down bureaucracy of totalitarian theory is hard to imagine", but that Stalinism and Nazism "belong together", and that "it is only a question of finding the right family name". According to Mann, "totalitarian theorists depicted an unreal level of coherence for any state. Modern states are a long way short of Hegelian or Weberian rational bureaucracy and they rarely act as singular, coherent actors. Normally regimes are factionalized; in an unpredictable world they stumble along with many foul-ups. Second, we should remember Weber's essential point about bureaucracy: it kept politics out of administration. Political and moral values ('value rationality') were settled outside of bureaucratic administration, which then limited itself to finding efficient means of implementing those values ('formal rationality'). Contrary to totalitarian theory, the twentieth-century states most capable of such formally rational bureaucracy were not the dictatorships but the democracies."

Stanley Payne wrote that indeed, both Mussolini and Hitler failed to achieve full totalitarianism, and of Mussolini it was said that his regime was not totalitarian (excluding "merely fascist" Italy from totalitarian regimes, started by Hannah Arendt who also thought that Nazism became totalitarian only in 1938–1942, is a not unpopular but contested position in contemporary historiography), so Payne concludes that "only a socialist or Communist system can achieve full totalitarianism, since total control requires total institutional revolution that can only be effected by state socialism" (according to Payne, both Lenin and Stalin were totalitarian). Payne writes that "it is easy to argue either that many different kinds of regimes are totalitarian or conversely that none were perfectly total", yet, he writes that the concept "totalitarianism is both valid and useful if defined in the precise and literal sense of a state system that attempts to exercise direct control over all significant aspects of all major national institutions."

Further debates

1980s - 1990s

thumb|An 'anti-totalitarian' graffiti in Bucharest, Romania, in 2013, equating Communism with Nazism and [[Iron Guard]]

Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur dismissed the arguments of revisionists as "reappraisals of Stalin and Stalinism" and compared them with German 'revisionist' historians of Nazism, particularly Ernst Nolte, whom he did not distinguish from functionalist historians of Nazism ("weak dictator" thesis), and called their analysis "Marxist", for which Stalin was "not promising material". As Laqueur wrote, the historians who disagreed with the revisionists "still ha[d] very strong feelings" towards Stalinism and found concepts such as modernization inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history, unlike the concept of totalitarianism; citing Mikhail Gorbachev using the term "totalitarianism", Laqueur wrote that the efforts of the revisionists to abolish the totalitarian model "ha[d] become difficult."

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". 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. The 'revival' of the concept which started in the 1970s in Europe took some time to re-appear in English-language literature, as the 'revisionists' achieved hegemony in the academy, while the 'totalitarians' retained control over public discourse; the European debates were transferred to English-language historiography by Martin Malia. In 1995, Furet made a comparative analysis and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism. Pipes and Malia continued depicting ideological developments as the grounds of communism, and thus, totalitarianism, drawing a line from utopianism and the French Revolution, which Pipes compared to a "virus", to Lenin, and to describe the nature of totalitarianism, they used the concept of ideocracy. Furet and Ernst Nolte, a historian praised by Furet, also identified anti-Fascism as Communist totalitarianism; Nolte presented a conflict between totalitarianisms as European Civil War, stating that it was begun by Bolshevism and produced Nazism, an "inverted Bolshevism", thus assessing the latter as only a response to the threat of Bolshevism and the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa as "both a retaliation and a preventive measure" against Bolshevism. Another major work belonging to the same period was The Black Book of Communism (1997), the editor of which, Stephane Courtois, stressed structural homology of totalitarian systems embodied in identity of "class genocide" of Communism and "race genocide" of Nazism, and concluded that Communism was more murderous than Nazism or any other ideology from counting and summing the number of victims that can be attributed to 'Communist states' and thus communism in general, what triggered an emotional debate in France on whether Communism should be treated as a single unified phenomena and whether "a blanket condemnation" of Communism as an ideology makes sense.

Furet's totalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution, directed against the classic "Marxist" or "Jacobin" interpretation, triggered debates with such historians as Michel Vovelle, who led new studies on it; as Eric Hobsbawm concluded in 2007, "the Furet Revolution" was "now over". In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that "[Nazism and Stalinism] were functionally and not ideologically derived [...] Furet, as a distinguished historian of ideas, knows that they belonged to different if structurally convergent taxonomic families"; contrary to conception of anti-Fascism as a mask of Stalinism, Hobsbawm attributed the "alliance" between liberalism and communism, which had enabled capitalism to overcome its crisis, and wrote that Furet's work "reads like a belated product of the Cold War era". 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.

Michael Parenti (1997) and James Petras (1999) have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism."

According to some scholars and authors, such as Domenico Losurdo calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian has been asserted to be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Losurdo, totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.

After the 1990s

After 1990s, criticisms of totalitarianism as a historical concept and a tool of analysis continued; however, while these critics called for expulsion of the concept from academic field, they stated that its legitimate outside it.

Politics

Early usages

Self-description of autocracies

The term "totalitarian" was used by leaders and top officials of right-wing and far-right dictatorships and autocracies established during the interwar period and World War II to describe their regimes—most notably by Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy. Among the Soviet Union (USSR), Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, it became an official self-description only in the case of Fascist Italy; it was also used in Nazi Germany but to a lesser extent, and it was not used at all by the USSR—this pattern was later reversed by theorists of totalitarianism who viewed the USSR as a prime example. Therefore, the meaning of the term as used in the self-descriptions by fascists differed from its post-World War II interpretations. The term "totalitarian" became used by Italian fascists themselves: later, theoretician of Italian fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to the terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defence of Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term to identify and describe the ideological nature of Italian societal structures and the practical economic, geopolitical, and social goals of the new Fascist Italy, which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian fascism, Gentile described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (i.e., subservience to the state) determined the public sphere and the private sphere of the Italian nation.

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of the key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner mass mobilization, Arendt wrote:

For example, Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a figurehead and helped play a role in the dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Additionally, the Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in the Vatican City, per the 1929 Lateran Treaty, under the leadership of Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958).

thumb|A 1937 propaganda image featuring [[Francisco Franco and his motto Una patria! Un estado! Un caudillo! resembling the Nazi motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. During the Spanish Civil War, Franco proclaimed that his Spanish State would be modelled after "other countries of totalitarian regimes", these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.]]

As the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, it began using the concept of a totalitarian state propagated by Mussolini and Carl Schmitt to characterize its ideal regime. Joseph Goebbels stated in a 1933 speech: "Our party has always aspired to the totalitarian state. […] the goal of the revolution [National Socialist] has to be a totalitarian state that penetrates into all spheres of public life." declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity". He went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it." General Francisco Franco was determined to prevent the growth of competing right-wing parties in Spain, and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into exile.

Franco began applying "totalitarian" to his regime during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). On 1 October 1936, he announced his intent to organize Spain "within a broad totalitarian concept of unity and continuity"; practical realization of this began with the forced unification of all parties of the Nationalist zone into FET y de las JONS, the sole governing party of the new state. Afterward, he and his ideologues stressed the similarly "missionary and totalitarian" nature of the state under construction vis-à-vis Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and totalitarianism was described as an essentially Spanish way of government. In December 1942, as World War II progressed, Franco stopped using the term, and it received a negative connotation as Franco called for a struggle with "Bolshevist totalitarianism."

Ioannis Metaxas, the leader of the 4th of August Regime in Greece, which took some inspiration from fascism, wrote in his diary that he had established "an anti-communist, anti-parliamentary state, a totalitarian state, a state based on agriculture and labour, and therefore anti-plutocratic". After the Italian and German invasions of Greece, he wrote that "by beating Greece, they were beating what their flag stood for." Although Metaxas did not create a one-party state, he believed that the whole of the Greek people—the nation—constituted said party, excluding any real or hypothetical communists, reactionaries, or democrats.

Ion Antonescu, the Axis-aligned dictator of the Kingdom of Romania during World War II, described his regime as "ethnocratic" and "ethnic Christian" and as "the national-totalitarian regime, the regime of national and social restoration"—devoted to the ideology of an extreme Romanian nationalism and Romanian heritage. It enacted antisemitic and racist legislation and was active in perpetrating the Holocaust; however, in 1941, Antonescu dissolved the ruling party, the Iron Guard, denounced its terrorist methods, and continued his rule without a single-party system. The regime also spared half of resident Romanian Jews during its existence.

In 1940, then-foreign minister of the Empire of Japan Matsuoka Yosuke expressed in an interview the ideological assumptions prevailing within the Shōwa statist government: "In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt... Fascism will develop in Japan through the people's will. It will come out of love for the Emperor." A document produced by the government's cabinet-planning board pointed out that, "since the founding of our country, Japan has had an unparalleled totalitarianism... an ideal totalitarianism is manifest in our national polity... Germany's totalitarianism has existed for only eight years, but Japanese [totalitarianism] has shone through 3,000 years of ageless tradition".

Criticism and analysis

thumb|left|upright|[[Leon Trotsky formulated a concept of totalitarianism in his analysis of the USSR in the 1930s.]]

In the interwar period, totalitarianism emerged as a term used to criticize and analyze the dictatorships of the time. It was used to describe fascism and later became a ground for comparing fascist states to the Soviet Union; it was not understood as an element of a liberal–totalitarian dichotomy or as the inverse of liberal democracy. producing perhaps the most famous example of such usage by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident. The first to direct the term toward the USSR was writer and left-wing activist Victor Serge, who did so shortly before his arrest in a letter published in France. Also that year, Trotsky compared fascist and Soviet bureaucracies, describing both as parasitic, and later stated that "in the last period, the Soviet bureaucracy has familiarized itself with many traits of victorious fascism, first of all by getting rid of the control of the party and establishing the cult of the leader." In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky used "totalitarian" to analyse the USSR, attributing to totalitarianism—rooted in "the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history"—such features as concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, the abolition of popular control over the leadership, the use of extreme repression, and the elimination of contending loci of power. Later, he included "the suppression of all freedom to criticize; the subjection of the accused to the military; examining magistrates, a prosecutor and judge in one; a monolithic press whose howlings terrorize the accused and hypnotize public opinion". Trotsky wrote that the USSR "had become totalitarian" in character several years before the word arrived from Germany. However, his concept was much less defined than those of the Cold War theorists, and he would have disagreed with their core points—e.g., that "central control and direction of the entire economy" applied 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 description of Lenin as a totalitarian dictator. Scholars have argued that for him it was a pejorative, not a sociological concept based on equating fascism and socialism like it was for Cold War theorists.

thumb|1938 satirical illustration "Carriers of the New Black Plague" by [[William Cotton (artist)|William Cotton; the caption mentions "Totalitarian Eclipse" threatening democracy.]]

One of the uses of totalitarianism in English was by 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. The label totalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill's speech of 5 October 1938 before the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, in opposition to the Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was then a backbencher member of parliament representing the Epping constituency. In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to "a communist or a Nazi tyranny."

The concept gained legitimacy in 1939 with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, after which it became accepted, at least until 1941, to present Stalin and Hitler as "twin dictators" and call Nazism "brown Bolshevism" and Stalinism "red fascism". The same year, scholars of various disciplines held the first international symposium on totalitarianism in Philadelphia. Among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the 1941 book of the same name.

Politically matured by having fought and been wounded in and survived the Spanish Civil War, in the essay "Why I Write" (1946), the democratic socialist George Orwell writes: "the Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." He argued that future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, and that "if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

Cold War

thumb|upright|Anti-totalitarian: Hannah Arendt thwarted the totalitarian model Kremlinologists who sought to co-opt the thesis of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) as American anti–Communist propaganda that claimed that every [[Warsaw Pact|Communist state was of the totalitarian model.]]

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), political theorist Hannah Arendt writes that, in their infancy in the early 20th century, corporatist Nazism and Soviet communism were novel forms of government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of military or a corporate dictatorships. She argues that the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, given that the totalitarian worldview offers psychologically comforting, definitive answers to the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, present, and future. Thus, Nazism proposed that all history is the history of ethnic conflict, of the survival of the fittest race. In contrast, Marxism–Leninism proposed that all history is the history of class conflict, of the survival of the fittest social class. Thus, upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the communist revolutionary then possessed the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the state, either by an appeal to historicism or by an appeal to nature, as expedient actions necessary to establish an authoritarian state apparatus.

True belief

In The True Believer (1951), Eric Hoffer writes that political mass movements, such as Italian Fascism (1922–1943), German Nazism (1933–1945), and Russian Stalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as culturally superior to the morally decadent societies of democratic countries of Western Europe. Such mass psychology indicates that participating in and joining a political mass movement offers individuals the prospect of a glorious future, and that such membership in a community is an emotional refuge for those with few real-world accomplishments. The 'true believer', then, is assimilated into a collective body of other true believers who are psychologically protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from the official texts of the totalitarian ideology.

Collaborationism

In a 2018 article titled "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?", historian Paul Hanebrink writes that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism because, for European Christians—Catholic and Protestant alike—the culture war crystallized as a struggle against communism. Throughout the European interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians into demonizing the communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of secular materialism and as a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order. Throughout Europe, Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived communism and communist governments as existential threats to the moral order of their respective societies, and they collaborated with Nazi leadership and other fascists in the hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to a form of Christendom.

Totalitarian model

In late-1950s American geopolitics, totalitarianism, totalitarian, and the "totalitarian model", from Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), became common in U.S. foreign policy. The totalitarian model became a key paradigm for Kremlinology—the study of the USSR's police state. Kremlinologists analyzed internal politics (policy and personality) of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to craft national and foreign policy, providing strategic intelligence about the USSR. The U.S. also used the model to approach fascist regimes, such as banana republics. As anti-communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described totalitarianism with a model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics, including:

  1. An elaborate guiding ideology
  2. A one-party state
  3. Use of state terrorism
  4. A monopoly on the control of weapons
  5. A monopoly on the control of mass media
  6. A centrally directed and controlled planned economy

Criticism and evolution of the totalitarian model

thumb|upright|The American political scientist [[Zbigniew Brzezinski popularized combating left-wing totalitarianism in U.S. foreign policy, Revisionist historians criticized the totalitarian model for its inability to fully describe Soviet and Russian history. They argued that Friedrich and Brzezinski overlooked how the Soviet social system functioned both as a political entity (the USSR) and as a social entity (Soviet civil society). This social system could be understood through socialist class struggles among professional elites—political, academic, artistic, scientific, and military—seeking upward mobility into the nomenklatura, the ruling class. Revisionists pointed out that the Politburo's political economy allowed for some executive power to be delegated to regional authorities for policy implementation. They viewed this as evidence that a totalitarian regime adapts its economy to new demands from civil society. Traditionalist historians, however, saw the USSR's political and economic collapse as proof that the totalitarian economic system failed because the Politburo did not incorporate genuine popular participation in the economy.

The historian of Nazi Germany Karl Dietrich Bracher noted that the "totalitarian typology" developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible one because it did not include the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realizing the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. Bracher argued that the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the state.

thumb|[[Ba'athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a totalitarian state.]]

In Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968), the political scientist Raymond Aron writes that for a régime to be considered totalitarian, it can be characterized by the presence of five mutually supportive characteristics:

  1. A one-party state, wherein the ruling party has a monopoly on all political activity.
  2. A state ideology upheld by the ruling party that is given official status as the only authority.
  3. A state monopoly on information—control of the mass communications media to broadcast the official truth.
  4. A state-controlled economy featuring major economic entities under state control.
  5. An ideological police-state terror organization and criminalization of political, economic, and professional activities.

In a 1980 review of How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979) by Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, scholar of authoritarianism William Zimmerman writes: "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of the USSR]."

Kremlinology

During the Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field of Kremlinology (analysing Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union policies and politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by the totalitarian model of the USSR as a police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader Stalin, who headed a monolithic, centralized hierarchy of government. The study of the internal politics of the Politburo's crafting of policy in the Kremlin produced two schools of historiography of the Cold War: traditionalist Kremlinology and revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for the totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state portrait of communist Russia. The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of Politburo policies on Soviet society, both civilian and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists argued that the old image of Stalinist Russia of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent on world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, given that Stalin's death changed Soviet society.

Totalitarian model as an official policy

In the 1950s, the political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich argued that communist states, such as Soviet Russia and Red China, were countries that were systematically controlled by a supreme leader who used the five features of the totalitarian model:

  • an official dominant ideology that includes a cult of personality about the leader;
  • control of all civil and military weapons;
  • control of the public and the private mass communications media;
  • the use of state terrorism to police the populace;
  • a political party of mass membership that perpetually re-elects the leader.

In the 1960s, revisionist Kremlinologists researched communist organizations, as well as the relatively autonomous bureaucracies that influenced high-level policy of Soviet governance. 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, its party leadership, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. Revisionist social history indicated that the social forces of Soviet society had compelled the government of the USSR to adjust public policy to an actual political economy composed of pre-War and post-War generations with differing perceptions of the utility of communist economics.

Post-Cold War

thumb|upright|President [[Isaias Afwerki has ruled Eritrea as a totalitarian dictator since the country's independence in 1993.]]

thumb|Flag of the [[Islamic State, which is a self-proclaimed caliphate that demands the religious, political, and military obedience of Muslims worldwide]]

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, Slavoj Žižek ironically described the concept of totalitarianism as an "ideological antioxidant" similar to the "Celestial Seasonings" green tea that, according to its advertisement, "neutralizes harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals". He further wrote that "[t]he notion of 'totalitarianism', far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking".

Saladdin Ahmed criticizes the concept of totalitarianism as formulated by Brzezinski and Friedrich and, to a lesser extent, Arendt, in Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), noting that their definitions of totalitarianism are invalid if transported to other regimes. "This was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile", he writes, "yet it would be absurd to exempt it from the class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone", since while Pinochet did not adopt an "official" ideology, but "ideological hegemony, whereby the dominant ideology becomes internalized and normalized, is far more effective than imposing an official ideology." Saladdin posited that while Chile under Pinochet had no "official" ideology, there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago Boys, was Pinochet's adviser". To Saladdin, such hegemonic yet not "official" ideology is much a more effective means of "totalitarian" control of society than an "official" ideology openly imposed by the state, what is exemplified by comparing Chile to Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, which collapsed within a short period: "No one defended them; no masses poured onto the streets to mourn their deaths. Ceausescu's Romania, as an exemplary Stalinist state, met all of Friedrich and Brzezinski's criteria of a totalitarian state, but it was nowhere close to achieving total domination." In this sense, Saladdin criticized the concept of totalitarianism because it was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism. He also criticized the other criterion of totalitarianism formulated by Brzezinski, Friedrich and Arendt: