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Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert C. Tucker
Robert C. Tucker*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

Those who specialize in the study of Soviet government and politics are beginning to feel and acknowledge the need for a more effective theoretical apparatus. The post-war years of expanded research in this field have been fruitful in empirical studies of Soviet political history and institutions, but the theoretical development has not kept pace; and now the lag is beginning to inhibit the further fruitful progress of empirical research itself. Instead of a gradually developing body of theory, we still have a mélange of “ten theories in search of reality,” as Daniel Bell has summed it up in the title of a recent article.

The purpose of the present paper is not to propound an eleventh theory. It is only an exploratory effort, a consideration of a somewhat different approach to the problem than has been customary in the field of Soviet studies. In presenting it, I shall try to shed the blinkers of a Russian specialist and take a look at the whole political galaxy in which Russia is only the biggest star and probably no longer the brightest one.

The best way out of the theoretical difficulty may lie in making the study of Soviet government and politics more comparative than it has generally been so far, thus bringing it into much closer working relations with political science as a whole and particularly with the slowly growing body of theory in comparative politics. As this statement implies, our work on Soviet government and politics has been characterized by a certain theoretical isolationism.

Type
Studies in Comparative Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1961 , pp. 281 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

1

This is a revised version of a paper read at the 1960 annual meeting of The American Political Science Association.

References

2 “Ten Theories in Search of Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior in the Social Sciences,” World Politics (April 1958). The article is reprinted in A. Dallin, ed., Soviet Conduct in World Affairs, and will be quoted from this source.

3 Gordon Skilling has advocated this view in his very useful article “Soviet and Communist Politics: A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 22 (1960)Google Scholar. Skilling is primarily interested in the comparative politics of different communist political systems, whereas I shall be concerned here with the comparative politics of communist and non-communist systems.

4 Soviet Conduct in World Affairs, pp. 3, 5.

5 Mussolini wrote the following in his article on the doctrine of fascism in the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1932: “The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values may exist, much less have any value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State, as a synthesis and a unit which includes all values, interprets, develops and lends additional power to the whole life of a people.”

6 The outstanding and most influential book written from this point of view is Arendt's, Hannah The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)Google Scholar. A notable attempt to develop the approach systematically has been made by Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956)Google Scholar. Another effective proponent of the view is Bertram D. Wolfe, who calls totalitarianism “a total-power system” under which the state “strives to be coextensive with society.” “The Durability of Soviet Despotism,” Commentary, August, 1957, reprinted in A. Dallin, op. cit.

7 Friedrich, Carl J., ed., Totalitarianism (1954), pp. 335–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 312.

9 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, p. 295.

10 This analysis has been presented at greater length in the writer's paper on “The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization,” in World Politics (July 1957).

11 It must be said to the credit of Arendt that she stresses the relationship between the nineteenth-century “pan-movements” of nationalism and the totalitarian movements of the present Century. Unfortunately, however, she considers the nationalist movements as simply historical forerunners of totalitarianism, and non-European nationalisms are more Or less left out of the picture.

12 What Is To Be Done?, in Selected Works (Moscow, 1946), Vol. I, p. 165.Google Scholar

13 Talmond, J. A. discusses the eighteenthcentury background in his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952)Google Scholar.

14 Tutsch, Hans E., “Bourguiba's Tunisia—I,” The New Leader, 02 29, 1960, p. 7.Google Scholar

15 “New Mood Found in Nasser's Egypt,” by Schmidt, Dana Adams, New York Times, 12 29, 1959, p. 2 Google Scholar. The Pakistani experiment is reported by Paul Grimes in “Pakistanis Study Government by Practice on Local Problems,” ibid., June 29, 1960, p. 14.

16 In this connection it may be worth noting that a group of anti-Soviet Russian emigres has recently put forward, under the heading of “Kronstadt Thesis,” a program whose slogan is: “Down with the party, all power to free Soviets!” The program takes its name from the Kronstadt rising of 1921, when sailors and workers called for Soviets without Bolsheviki. A partial text appears in Novy Zhurnal, No. 59, 1960.

17 Gabriel Almond, for example, has recently proposed a classificatory scheme that turns on the notion of “political culture,” which is defined in part according to area. The result is a fourfold classification of political systems under the Anglo-American, Continental European, pre-industrial and totalitarian categories. See his “Comparative Political Systems,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 18 (1956)Google Scholar.

18 For a discussion of various considerations relevant to a judgment on thia question, see the forthcoming book of Vatikiotis, P. J., The Egyptian Army in Politics (Indiana University Press), ch. 7Google Scholar.

19 Kohn, Hans, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (1955), p. 79 Google Scholar.

20 Gilbert, G. M., The Psychology of Dictatorship, Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany (1950), p. 301 Google Scholar. Gilbert concludes: “Our study of Hitler's lieutenants strongly suggested that if any one of them had replaced Hitler before 1939 (even aggressive Hermann Goering, the heir apparent), or if a slight change in circumstances (such as a little less appeasement) had replaced the Nazis with leaders more responsive to the will of the people, then there probably would have been no World War II and there certainly would have been no systematic ‘extermination of my enemies’” (Ibid., pp. 302–303).

21 The statement was quoted by Khrushchev in his secret report to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, and appears in The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism (1956), p. 62 Google Scholar.

22 Soviet Conduct in World Affairs, p. 268.