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Totalitarianism: The Revised Standard Version

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

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Extract

The virtually simultaneous appearance of new editions of Hannah A Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Carl Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy affords an opportunity to reopen the question of the utility of the classical theory of totalitarianism in systematic comparative political analysis. The original editions of these two volumes went far toward shaping lay and academic understandings of totalitarianism in the 1950's; in addition, most subsequent general scholarship on totalitarianism has been written implicitly or explicitly in the light of—if not in reaction to—these two earlier works.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1969

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References

1 See, for example, Wolfe, Bertram D., Communist Totalitarianism (Boston 1956)Google Scholar; Armstrong, John A., The Politics of Totalitarianism (New York 1961)Google Scholar; Ulam, Adam, The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass. 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyer, Alfred, The Soviet Political System (New York 1965)Google Scholar; and Germino, Dante L., The Italian Fascist Party in Power (Minneapolis, Minn. 1959)Google Scholar.

2 See below, part III.

3 See, for example, Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Ill. 1959)Google Scholar.

4 See Arendt, 308. For a less convincing argument, which makes a large population a prerequisite of totalitarianism, see 310.

5 That “total domination” is the core of Arendt's definition is suggested by the fact that it appears at least eleven times in the Introductory Essay to the new edition.

6 In her concluding chapter, Arendt defines totalitarianism more explicitly as “a form of government whose essence is terror and whose principle of action is the logicality of ideological thinking” (474).

7 Arendt finds the absence of the more conventional power urge to be one of the most disturbing characteristics of totalitarianism (417-18).

8 For a paragraph that seems to point in a number of teleological directions, see 392.

9 See Groth, Alexander, “The ‘Isms’ of Totalitarianism,” The American Political Science Review, LVIII (December 1964) 888901CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For example, see the strained analogy on 411.

11 See Barbu, Zevedei, Democracy and Dictatorship (New York 1956), 57Google Scholar; and Kautsky, John, Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries (New York 1962), 97113Google Scholar.

12 For example, the theory itself seems to be the basis of Arendt's accepting the highest death figures for the Stalinist era. See 417.

13 Arendt takes Isaac Deutscher, Richard Lowenthal, and Merle Fainsod to task on this point, and suggests that the linkage they establish is a “Marxist hangover.” Unfortunately for Arendt's case, the absence of a systemic link between totalitarian politics and modernization is not proven by the facts that modernization could have been effected by other means and that the means chosen were probably dysfunctional to that process (xvii-xviii).

14 See 318-23.

15 Arendt writes in the main body of her text that “terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition, so that it looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of terror (as liberal accusers of the regime were wont to assert) but the last impediment to its full fury” (393).

16 See 419, 460, and also chap. 13 passim.

17 Italics in original.

18 This standard comes into play especially in Arendt's treatment of the secret police and the concentration camps. See 419-25, 437-59.

19 Arendt asserts that the police is “the true executive branch of the government” (430), and that the concentration camp is “the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power” (438).

20 For examples of the rather unfortunate lengths to which Arendt is prepared to go with logic, see xx, 350, 380, 390, 416, and 458.

21 A glaring example is Arendt's use of Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom (New York 1946)Google Scholar. Admitting that it is “a highly questionable source,” Arendt defends her use of it by asserting that it is no more questionable than “material . . . furnished by the Russian Government” (321).

22 For this metaphor carried to the point of a political distinction among Hades, Purgatory, and Hell, see 445.

23 Italics in original.

24 See also 26, 54.

25 The syndrome was first presented by Friedrich in slightly modified form in Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass. 1954)Google Scholar, a volume edited by him for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

26 The authors also use, but much less systematically, Communist China and the Eastern European “satellites” as empirical referents of totalitarianism. (See 294.)

27 This is most evident in their treatment of terror, the police, and the concentration camps. (See 46.) Interestingly, Arendt uses the quantitatively and qualitatively different character of terror in Fascist Italy as her chief argument for its nontotalitarian character. (See Arendt, 308.)

28 See Chapters 7-9.

29 Orwell does lurk in the background, and is specifically cited by Friedrich and Brzezinski on a number of occasions. (See 99, 134, 294.)

30 Elsewhere in the revised edition Friedrich defines totalitarianism as “an autocracy based upon modern technology and mass legitimation” (4).

31 Carl J. Friedrich, “The Changing Theory and Practice of Totalitarianism,” mimeographed, prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September, 1967, 2.

32 Ibid., 5, 6.

33 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York 1962), 19Google Scholar, 20.

34 “Consensus” is a major theme in the revised edition; Friedrich also refers to “general consensus” (13) and “broad national consensus” (26).

35 See also Friedrich, “The Changing Theory and Practice,” 13.

36 Ibid., 2. In the revised edition of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Friedrich takes note of the tendency toward “pragmatic goals [that] seem far removed from the earlier ideological controversies” (110).

37 Friedrich, “The Changing Theory and Practice,” 15. Italics in original.

38 Friedrich now rejects as untenable his and Brzezinski's original assertion that totalitarian regimes tend to become more and more totalitarian. (See 376.)

39 see for example Easton, David, The Political System (New York 1953)Google Scholar; Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James, eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960)Google Scholar; Macridis, Roy and Brown, Bernard, eds., Comparative Politics: Notes and Readings, rev. ed. (Homewood, Ill. 1961)Google Scholar; and Harry Eckstein's introduction to , Eckstein and , Apter, eds., Comparative Politics: A Reader (London 1963)Google Scholar.

40 For a vigorous critique of the term “totalitarianism” in terms of its relationship to the Cold War, see Herbert Spiro and Benjamin Barber, “The Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’ as the Foundation of American Counter-ideology in the Cold War,” prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 1967.

41 Tucker, Robert, “The Dictator and Totalitarianism,” World Politics, xvii (July 1965), 566Google Scholar.

42 Tucker, Robert, “Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes,” The American Political Science Review, LV (June 1961), 283Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 283, 284.

44 Ibid., 285.

45 Ibid., 288.

46 Kautsky, John, Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communism (New York 1965), 90Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., 91.

48 Ibid., 93.

49 Ibid., 91.

50 See, for example, Meyer, Alfred, The Soviet Political System (New York 1965)Google Scholar; Skilling, H. Gordon, “Interest Groups and Communist Politics,” World Politics, xviii (April 1966), 435-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; , Skilling, “Soviet and Communist Politics: A Comparative Approach,” The Journal of Politics, xxii (November 1960), 300313Google Scholar; Juviler, Peter H. and Morton, Henry W., Soviet Policy-Making (New York 1967)Google Scholar. Interestingly, Brzezinski does not make use of the concept “totalitarianism” in a volume he recently co-authored with Huntington, Samuel P., Political Power: USA/USSR (New York 1963)Google Scholar.

51 Meyer, 470-76.

52 Ibid., 470.

53 See, for example, Apter, David, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago 1965), 25Google Scholar, 36. Indeed, Apter seems to regard totalitarianism as only the most extreme form of mobilization system (see 388).

54 Tucker, “Towards a Comparative Politics,” 283.