Abstract
In light of its title, there is a temptation to begin this book with an overstated ambition: to heroically challenge a rigid ‘orthodoxy’ that totalitarianism is a throwback to a pre-modern, unenlightened past. In truth there is no such orthodoxy. Or at least, among serious commentators, there has not been one for what is by now a considerable amount of time. But this is not quite the same as saying that a consensus exists about exactly how totalitarianism is modern. That raises a different question, and it is the question that this book seeks to explore.
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Notes
Two statements, made in passing, by two celebrated historians of Nazism and Soviet communism respectively, are good evidence of this tendency to assume that totalitarianism equals a structural model of political rule. See Ian Kershaw’s observation that ‘the totalitarian concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination’ (Kershaw, ‘“Working Towards the Führer”: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, in, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 88). See also Robert Service’s statement that ‘[f]ascism was in many ways a structural copy of [the Soviet order], albeit with a different set of ideological purposes’ (Comrades. Communism: A World History [London: Pan, 2008], 9).
Note that here I argue against something of an emerging consensus. The case for classifying Fascist Italy as totalitarian has recently been argued most forcefully by Emilio Gentile. See Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. by Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). On the other hand, Hannah Arendt long ago established a convention of excluding the Italian case, mainly because it lacks a murderous aspect on anything approaching the same scale.
See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Schocken, 2004 [orig. 1951], esp. 256–9).
See Richard Shorten, ‘Political Theology, Political Religion and Secularisation’, Political Studies Review, 8, 2 (2010), 180–91.
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 494. On the debate about the ‘revolutionary’ status of totalitarianism, fascism, and communism,
see both Roger Griffin, ‘Exploding the Continuum of History: A Non-Marxist’s Marxist Model of Fascism’s Revolutionary Dynamics’, in A Fascist Century (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2008) and
David D. Roberts, ‘Fascism, Marxism, and the Question of Modern Revolution’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9, 2 (2010), 183–201.
See Richard Shorten, ‘The Failure of Political Argument: The Languages of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Totalitarianism in Post-September 11th Discourse’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 11, 3 (2009), 479–503.
Michael Geyer (with assistance from Sheila Fitzpatrick), ‘Introduction. After Totalitarianism — Stalinism and Nazism Compared’, in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–37.
On the German case, consult Jurgen Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), 3–16. For the continuity thesis in Russian history, see both
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990) and
R.C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990).
See, for instance, Jeffrey Herf’s suggestive notion of a ‘reactionary modernism’, which Herf first applied to the Third Reich and has since sought to apply more generally: Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
Herf, ‘Liberal Legacies, Europe’s Totalitarian Era, and the Iraq War’, in A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, ed. Thomas Cushman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). On anti-liberal political thought and practice, see
Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
On different strands of Marxism, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (London: Macmillan, 1980).
For a rejection of the concept, see Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001).
Some texts that deserve credit for breaking with this tendency are David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (London: Routledge, 2006), and
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
For this astute observation, see John Connolly, ‘Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 11, 4 (2010), 819.
See Anson Rabinbach, ‘Moments of Totalitarianism’, History and Theory, 45 (2006), 72–100.
Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Peter Baehr, ‘The Novelty of Jihadist Terror’, Society, 46, 3 (2009), 210–13.
This is one drawback of the otherwise excellent account in Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment. Recent historical surveys of this kind are: Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: HarperCollins, 1991);
Kershaw and Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism; Henry Rousso (ed.), Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), trans. by Lucy Golsan et al.;
Richard J. Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004);
Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Knopf, 2007).
See for example Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), which locates totalitarianism at the centre of Arendt’s political philosophy.
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010), 19.
Intellectuals were drawn to totalitarianism, and the theme is a fascinating one. Nevertheless, it is not a principal theme of this book. See esp. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYRB, 2001).
For an excellent case study, see also Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1945–1956 (London: University of California Press, 1992).
At this point detractors might still complain that I have made an argument for thinking in terms of, say, ‘Nazi political thought’ or ‘Bolshevik political thought’, but not in terms of Hitler’s or Stalin’s political thought as such. It is true that nothing specific has been said that implies the centrality of the worldview of political leaders. However, this is where some of the historians who count themselves as ‘revisionists’ of the totalitarian model have overreached themselves: for example, there may have been no straight line from Mein Kampf to the Holocaust, and the sources of power in Nazi Germany may have been more dispersed than was once thought to be the case, but this is not to have demonstrated that Hitler’s writings and speeches did not express a view of the world that was internally coherent and, moreover, one around which the Nazi state was organised. There are good discussions of these issues (by two leading protagonists) in Martin Malia, ‘Revolution Fulfilled: How the Revisionists are Still Trying to Take the Ideology out of Stalinism’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2001, 3–4; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Revisionism in Soviet History’, History and Theory, 46, 4 (2007), 77–91. In respect of current historiographic trends, ‘post-revisionism’ tends to point towards the linguistic turn and a more sophisticated appreciation of discourse and discursive practices.
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (London: Penguin, 2001 [orig. 1953]), 199.
Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (London: Atlantic, 2005).
A fine attempt to do justice to the breadth and subtlety of Arendt on totalitarianism, which also reads her in connection with her interlocutors, is Peter Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
On the historical approach to political thought, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
and J.G.A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
One short case study on anti-totalitarian discourse that also takes this contextualist approach is Robert Brier, ‘Adam Michnik’s Understanding of Totalitarianism and the Western European Left: A Historical and Transnational Approach to Dissident Political Thought’, East European Politics and Societies, 25, 2 (2011), 197–218.
Terence Ball, ‘The Value of the History of Political Philosophy’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, ed. George Klosko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–3.
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Shorten, R. (2012). Introduction. In: Modernism and Totalitarianism. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284372_1
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