Conclusion

Abstract

This book has explored the ideological history of totalitarianism. It has done so with the effect of corroborating three findings:

• i) The book has tried to show the case for wean-ing the theory of totalitarianism away from its structural conception. On this repositioning of the theory, commonalities in systems of rule are of less interest than anchorage in a common intellectual trajectory.

• ii) Both the form and the content of this common intellectual trajectory have been set out. First, the form has been argued to consist in the presence of three strands of thought or, as they have been called here, ‘totalitarian currents’. The shared ideological space across Nazism and Stalinism is the outcome of the interaction of the three currents over time. Because this process of ideational articulation and reception is complex (itself an expression of the fact that measuring the causal significance of ideas in politics is complex), a vocabulary was developed for identifying the causal weight of particular ideas; specifically, the vocabulary that was developed was directed at gauging variations in types of intellectual ‘affinity’ and ‘influence’. Second, according to the argument set out, the content of totalitarianism’s intellectual trajectory consists in three modernist currents: utopianism, scientism, and revolutionary violence. One important point at stake in this contention is that all three currents emerge, in the nineteenth century, in reaction to the mainstream of ideological modernity. Thus, to conceptualise the sources of totalitarianism as ‘modernist’ has been to capture the senses in which they are post-Enlightenment phenomena, both in their identity and their appeal. A further point that has been emphasised is that the three currents evolved and built up in ways which were not predetermined in advance. This is one reason, among others, why the stronger version of the political religion thesis is flawed. Political religion arguments tend to register the source of totalitarianism in a psychological need for ‘meaning’. But in doing so they are obliged to sideline the ways in which totalitarianism’s sources comprise intellectual contexts that are far from being fixed and unchanging, and instead mutate over time.

• iii) A final finding that has been corroborated is the common participation of the three totalitarian currents in the idea of the ‘New Man’: totalitarian utopianism wanted man to live in a condition of authenticity, in union with his fellow man (who had to share in the same identity); totalitarian scientism provided this end-state with an account of how it would materialise; and totalitarian revolutionary violence entailed that the activity of conflict and upheaval would itself give man a new direction.