Introduction: The Concept of Totalitarian Democracy

Abstract

The word “totalitarian” did not exist before the twentieth-century regimes it is supposed to describe. It gained currency in the 1930s as a means of singling out those common traits which were curiously shared by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia (and perhaps similar regimes), and which distinguished them from other forms of government, including earlier forms of absolutism and dictatorship.¹ As classically defined by Carl J. Friedrich, these common and distinctive characteristics include: (1) an official chiliastic ideology which everyone is supposed to embrace; (2) a single, hierarchically organized party, composed of a passionately dedicated elite, which is completely commingled with—or superior to—the official governmental apparatus; (3) a technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of the means of violence; (4) a parallel monopoly of the means of mass communication, used to disseminate the ideology; (5) a system of lawless, terroristic police control which employs the above monopolies and modern scientific psychology to full advantage. Friedrich stressed the twentieth-century technologies, the single ideologically committed party, and the emphasis on mass politicization, which separate modern totalitarianism qualitatively from earlier kinds of despotism and dictatorship.²