Talmon published a liberal indictment of those views of eighteenth century thought that saw the French Enlightenment as manifesting overwhelmingly liberal tendencies.
Talmon argued, in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy , that both liberal-empirical and totalitarian tendencies were significant and influential in European thought by the time of the French Revolution. Like Berlin, Talmon stresses the fundamental divergence between individualist and collectivist or statist conceptions of freedom.
The former led, through a long process of parliamentary development across the nineteenth century, to the institutions regarded as democratic in the mid-twentieth century. The liberal democratic thought of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville in France, as well as John Stuart Mill in England, were instrumental in developing this political tradition to a philosophical apogee.
Totalitarian democracy, on the other hand, developed largely from radical French Enlightenment thought through Babeuf and the Jacobin stream of the French Revolution, and through nineteenth and early twentieth century Marxism. Liberal democracy has stressed the importance of individual human rights, empiricism and the rule of law from its beginnings. It advocates piecemeal reform and the application of rationality to arrive at optimal political remedies to social problems.
Totalitarian democracy from Robespierre and the Jacobins through Karl Marx and into the twentieth century has been utopian, collectivist and statist. Talmon furthermore holds it to be characterised by historical determinism and a notion of a single comprehensible truth in political life. The two intellectual tendencies both claim to promote freedom to the highest degree, but differ greatly in their conceptions of legitimate freedom. Both schools affirm the supreme value of liberty, but whereas the one finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose.
Liberal democrats believe that, in the absence of coercion, men and society may one day reach through a process of trial and error a state of ideal harmony. In the case of totalitarian democracy, this state is precisely defined, and is treated as a matter of immediate urgency, a challenge for direct action, an imminent event:.
Talmon, This ideal involves a notion of democracy as the constant and unanimous participation of the citizens of an ideal state in the acting out of the general will, thereby realising true democratic citizenship. The Canadian scholar C. Macpherson, influenced by Marxism, argued that Talmon erred in stressing ideas over class and social realities, and in thus making too strong a causal claim in linking notions of natural order and political unanimity to inevitable totalitarianism.
Furthermore, he claimed that the Jacobins instituted a type of early totalitarian rule largely in response to the social pressures of revolutionary power and foreign counter-revolutionary invasion. In effect, the true causes of historical change are thus seen as grounded in class and general social trends, and not merely in purely philosophical or ideological causes.
This criticism implies holds that understanding key ideas and movements requires an understanding of their class background:. A petit-bourgeois movement like Jacobinism, or a proletarian movement still based on the same individualist assumptions like Bavouism is particularly liable to demand a completely general unanimity at a time when it is least possible. It might be argued that it was the petit-bourgeois character of these ideologies, rather than the assumption of a natural order, that led so readily to totalitarian dictatorship.
Macpherson, To what extent are philosophical ideas responsible solely, or at least primarily, for mass movements throughout history, including totalitarianism?
If Talmon and Arendt are right, they certainly possess sufficient causal potency to be determining factors in social and political development. If their critics hold the high ground, they have inflated the importance of secondary or even epiphenomenal notions and properties to an unrealistic station. In her seminal book, Hannah Arendt attempted to show how totalitarianism emerged as a distinctly modern utopian problem in the twentieth century, growing out of a lethal combination of imperialism, anti-Semitism and extreme statist bureaucracies.
As much a work of intellectual history as political philosophy, The Origins of Totalitarianism jarred many due to its indictment of European civilization during a period of post-war reconstruction.
Arendt held that totalitarianism was not a reactionary aberration, an attempt to turn back the clock to earlier tyrannies, but rather a revolutionary form of radical evil explicable by particularly destructive tendencies in modern mass politics. The atomisation of lonely individuals and the receptivity to propaganda of mass society in the modern age makes it an ongoing temptation to be resisted through critical thinking and the affirmation of fundamental human values.
Tracing what she took to be the prime causes of totalitarianism to the nineteenth century, Arendt focused on the rise of imperialism and political anti-Semitism, and the concomitant decline of both the remnants of the feudal order and the nation state. Imperialism and anti-Semitism both drew from racist and Social Darwinist wellsprings in their repudiation of unity through language, culture, and universal rights in favour of biologically fixed and hierarchical distinctions within humanity and a struggle for world conquest.
Furthermore, the narrow chauvinism of pan-Slavism coupled with notions of class warfare and annihilation paved the way for a parallel communist regime of terror in the Soviet Union. Unlike authoritarian dictatorships that strive to uphold conservative values, such regimes by their very nature aim to destroy civil society and tradition in favour of a utopian re-fashioning of humanity to suit their collectivist ideological purposes. The twentieth century totalitarian state thus emerges as a juggernaut of terror, a terror maintained in no small part by the eradication of fundamental human values and all critical thought in favour of ideology and propaganda.
It thereby seeks to destroy all communal and civil institutions between it and its atomised and lonely citizens. Arendt wrote:. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction that is, the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false that is, the standards of thought no longer exist.
Arendt, Establishing such causal connections requires the extensive use of detailed historical evidence, as well as the colligation of coexisting ideas upon which Arendt relied. So, the account is subject to the usual historiographical and logical criticisms concerning the possible gap between the causation of events and the correlation of trends.
For all of the considerable attention that The Origins of Totalitarianism attracted in , it was in that Arendt was to produce one of the most controversial works ever written by a political philosopher. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil did not merely generate much discussion; it produced an intellectual shock wave heard around the world that still reverberates:.
Lilla, Arendt here developed and expanded her general conclusions on the Holocaust and fascist bureaucracy from a series of articles that she wrote on the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker.
She claimed that for all of his extreme evil, Eichmann was not a mysterious monster, neither in his overall demeanour nor in his political and moral psychology. His evil was as much a matter of consequences as of intent, and in fact his intentions emerged as mixed, during the trial before the Israeli court.
She was thus struck by his at times entirely average bearing and thought patterns throughout the trial, for all of the enormous evil that he perpetrated. Furthermore, Arendt claimed that the Eichmann case confirmed her view that totalitarianism represents a gross perversion of fundamental civilised and ethical values in favour of mass bureaucracy, propaganda and thoughtlessness. Both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust were thus corrupted through a process involving the malevolence and instrumental efficiency of the Nazis, as well as the activities of a collaborating minority in the ghetto police and Jewish Councils.
This last point was to provoke particular discomfort and sheer hostility, giving Arendt a virtual pariah status, although later Holocaust historiography has placed the general problem of collaboration in a more balanced context.
For Arendt, Eichmann was as much a product of the worst possible tendencies of state bureaucracy as a creator of them. This bureaucratic context in no way exonerated him, as she was careful to indicate; she held his execution in to be justified, even though she thought that there was a strong case in international law for an international tribunal for the case, rather than the Israeli court.
That there is a tension between this account and the notion of radical evil developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism seems clear. However, both works share the important common denominator of an indictment of totalitarian bureaucracies that render the unthinkable not just possible, but probable and even banal.
If Arendt was right overall, totalitarianism is a constant threat in modern mass societies, and no complacency on the matter can be justified. Adorno and his co-authors in their work, The Authoritarian Personality. Fromm was a philosophically inclined sociologist, who drew from both the Freudian and Marxist traditions in elaborating an explanation of diverse social phenomena.
This is apparent in his view that there exists what might termed a self-reinforcing causal mechanism between social processes and ideology, in which psycho-social factors are reinforced by belief systems, and vice versa. Medieval social psychology was strongly transcendental in its emphasis of the secondary character of secular authority under God, and thus it inhibited the development of the sense of loneliness and isolation that characterised Western history from about the sixteenth century onwards.
For Fromm, Protestantism stimulated the development of individualism in its stress on individual success and good works, dutiful submission to God, thrift, and a significant sphere for secular authority. A self-reinforcing causal mechanism became increasingly apparent, especially among the middle classes of modern capitalist society, as the new form of Christianity helped to create the modern individual, and was in turn strengthened by the resultant socio-economic psychology of modern European society.
However, there can be no turning back the clock according to Fromm. Rather, modern humanity must strive to encourage healthy life-affirming values and the expression of human freedom. This is best done by recognising, as a society, the values of love, spontaneity, and secure personal development. Fromm proposes that the anxiety in isolated individuals, produced by the great burden to succeed demonstrably and without secured grace in the eyes of God, led to severe social and psycho-pathologies.
It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group…. The fear of isolation and the relative weakness of moral principles help any party to win the loyalty of a large sector of the population once that party has captured the power of the state.
Fromm, A chilling picture thus emerges of an inherently alienated and insecure modern society that generates mass social movements of conformity. For Fromm, this was especially true of the German lower middle class, which he held to be strongly influenced by modern individualistic ideologies. He furthermore held that this class was the most alienated class in Germany, and thereby prone to a compensatory destructiveness, and that it was strongly characterised in Weimar Germany by a sense of having lost its legitimate class status.
Thus the rise of Nazism had both important psycho-social and class factors, in his view. The latter trend he saw not just in totalitarian society, but in capitalist democracies as well, and as requiring concerted social activism. Both sadism and masochism are seen by Fromm as attempts to overcome feelings of individual powerlessness and meaninglessness. In politics, the authoritarian character is characterized by a slavish and nihilistic submission to authority, and a desire to have it over others.
This character type, for Fromm, is the one most easily seduced by fascism. If Fromm was correct in this, then the root causes of totalitarianism are both internal or psychological and external, in the form of trends in class relations and ideological evolution.
The threat therefore remains nascent even in seemingly highly democratic modern societies, although Fromm did not advocate a relativism that would blur the lines between imperfect democracies and dictatorships.
Fromm, like Taylor, holds that positive notions of freedom can be of constructive value in counteracting political and social distortions and pathologies. In particular, a social democratic society that provides the individual with adequate resources and a sense of autonomous personal development can do much, he held, to reduce the appeal of totalitarian ideologies and to promote mental health and social ethics:.
We must replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent cooperation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people to the economic sphere. Its political diagnosis of Nazism, in particular, has been faulted even by sympathetic critics on several counts:.
Nor did Fromm point to the discredited Social Darwinist premises behind the Nazi quest for Aryan purity…. His hypothesis about the lower middle class has not held up. The Nazis gained votes from all classes. Friedman, In his later work, Fromm extended his classic work on human aggression and destructiveness, providing psycho-biographies of totalitarian leaders such as Hitler, Himmler, and Stalin.
Throughout her work, the American political theorist Judith Shklar stressed the importance of seeing liberalism not as a utopian or perfectionistic ideal, but rather as a bulwark against tyranny and cruelty.
In effect, she claimed that liberalism ought to be defined more by its opposition to oppression and nastiness than by anything else. Shklar traces the roots of liberalism to the struggle for religious toleration in Reformation and Baroque Europe. In her model, a progressive consensus emerged in Western thought, holding that cruelty is supremely wicked. Early figures in this development include Montaigne and Montesquieu, whom Shklar contrasted with Machiavelli on this question.
This implies an affirmation of memory over hope, and of sensitivity to the horrors of oppression over utopian aspiration.
Not merely property rights, cultural pluralism, and the rule of law, but anti-tyranny first and foremost define the modern liberal perspective. If liberalism is rare historically and globally, this has more to do with the widespread character of cruel delusion than with any intrinsic defect on its part.
For Shklar, we ought to remember at all costs the disastrous consequences of not putting cruelty first:. We must…be suspicious of ideologies of solidarity, precisely because they are so attractive to those who find liberalism emotionally unsatisfying, and who have gone on in our century to create oppressive and cruel regimes of unparalleled horror. Shklar, We always have to be afraid of political power; that is the central liberal insight. Nor does this fear by itself make for an adequate theory of political power.
We must address the uses of power as well as its dangers. Then we try to enforce those policies, carefully if we are wise, remembering the last time we were fearful, and acting within the limits of liberal negativity. Walzer, If this is correct, then the strong anti-totalitarianism of the liberalism of fear should be seen as setting boundaries against tyranny, rather than final limits to progressive social policy.
Positive liberty is thereby affirmed, within strong democratic boundaries. Kirkpatrick was right about the significant differences between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and why the scope of the atrocities the former typically perpetrate is narrower and less irreversible than those of the latter.
Authoritarian regimes generated fewer victims than totalitarian regimes because they did not attempt to overhaul the culture, economy, or social status quo, and lacked even the pretense of a utopian ideological vision. They did not hyper-centralize the economy and left civil society alone as long as it did not pose a political challenge. Still, Kirkpatrick did not consider that revolutionary totalitarianism had already mutated in Eastern Europe by to become late-stage totalitarianism, distinguishable by its mission of maintenance, of resistance to change, of freezing the consolidated social system that resulted from the earlier revolutionary transformation.
The secret police became a conservative rather than a revolutionary social force. Though the rhetoric of revolutionary transformation was retained as ritualistic ideological chatter, radical terror and transformation ended.
The late-stage totalitarian regime ceased trying to change human nature. Instead, it attempted to encourage and manipulate individual opportunism. But they then conflated late-stage totalitarian regimes that exercise extensive low-intensity oppression over the whole population with authoritarian regimes that exercise narrow but intensive oppression over a small, politically active, section of the population, while tolerating alternative non-political for example, economic or religious elites.
I n short, there is something deficient in the bivalent menu of totalitarianism or authoritarianism. Totalitarianism was born in revolution, grew and was sustained by terror, matured into a bureaucracy, corrupted with age, and finally fell apart, scattering its constituent parts hither and yon. Yet like the phoenix that rises from its ashes, the late-stage totalitarian elite was reborn as the post-totalitarian elite. The persistence of late-stage totalitarian social stratification is crucial for understanding not just the legacies of totalitarianism in post-totalitarian societies, but also why totalitarianism imploded as it did and what this implosion consisted of.
The revolutionary totalitarian avant-garde established itself as the only elite in society by eliminating all existing, potential, possible, imaginary, and phantasmal alternative elites.
Without the elimination of alternative elites, there could not be total control of society by a single, hierarchically unified elite. Any person of actual or potential distinction who was not part of the revolutionary elite was by definition an enemy, including, in the Russian case, imaginary members of elites like Bolshoi Ballet ballerinas and Jewish doctors who were not political by any stretch of the imagination. Soviet-style totalitarian elites eliminated roughly 10 percent of the population by murder, imprisonment, or exile.
Higher percentages of totalitarian mortality resulted from the death of the weakest members of society in hunger as a result of the expropriation of their means of subsistence in the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union and China, or from ethnic genocide, as with the Crimean Tatars, or from relentless class genocide, as in Cambodia. Once the elimination of all actual or potential alternative elites was achieved, factions within the totalitarian elite turned on each other.
The revolution devoured its children; totalitarian revolutions always do. Though authoritarian regimes did not tolerate alternative political elites, they accepted non-political elites who were not connected with the regime. The demarcation lines between institutional elites—between the government, the economic elite, the church, and the military—were not as clear in authoritarian societies as they are in liberal-democratic ones; there were mutual influences between the institutions but no control.
In authoritarian regimes there was pluralism not just of elites in general, but also within the relatively autonomous branches of government.
Even some upward mobility in the military and bureaucracy was not controlled by the ruling authoritarian elite. The politicization of the state bureaucracy was also more limited in authoritarian than in totalitarian regimes.
It even had anonymous entrance exams for the civil service. Authoritarianism allowed continuity in the composition of alternative elites. Post-authoritarian alternative elites were therefore much larger than post-totalitarian alternative elites and, because of their continuity, were better prepared to assume power and replace the generals.
Totalitarianism eliminated almost any elite member who could have possibly replaced them. Schematically, the revolutionary totalitarian elite that became the only elite was divided into idealists and thugs. In the totalitarian revolution, the thugs had to gain control of the Ministry of the Interior and through it of the secret police, the militia, and the ordinary police. The secret police then seized, consolidated, and protected power. After eliminating all alternative elites, the thugs eliminated the idealists because they were weaker, cognitively disoriented about the actual totalitarian reality they had helped to create, and, of course, depended on the thugs for the maintenance of their power.
The transition from Lenin to Stalin—rather than to Trotsky—may not say it all, but it says a lot. Then, thugs fought among themselves to secure and protect power in the absence of a political mechanism regulating competition within the monolithic elite. The surviving totalitarian elite suffered from continual insecurity, purges, arrests, and revenge killings that extended to families as well. Therefore, during the revolutionary stage, totalitarian regimes did not have a stable elite; they did not develop a true ruling class as opposed to temporary coalitions of thugs in power.
The purge system kept bureaucrats too young and inexperienced to develop clientelist relations between senior and junior bureaucrats. Most elite members had to participate in the elimination of their predecessors. At the end of the revolutionary stage, marked by the end of the Stalinist purges after in Eastern Europe, the surviving elite reached a tacit agreement to lower the stakes, rein in the secret police, and rule collectively. Its head, Beria was killed, and a desk within the Central Committee was created to supervise it on behalf of the political elite.
The new post-revolutionary totalitarian elite maintained control by dividing and ruling the security services, charging them with controlling each other in the service of the nomenklatura. To rein in the secret police, it could not recruit informers from within the Communist Party without the approval of the higher party echelons. Since the source of control and power in totalitarian states was the network of secret informers, an organization immune to infection by clandestine informers was independent.
Obviously, in a totalitarian structure only the Communist Party could have this privilege. Shallow, ordinary, opportunistic evil replaced the radical variety. The single surviving totalitarian elite then became stable and secure enough to become a ruling class.
Losers in power struggles within the elite were demoted but rarely expelled from the elite. They remained alive and their families went unharmed. The late-stage totalitarianism bureaucratic elite gradually replaced the professional revolutionaries, or as John Hall put it, technocracy replaced ideocracy.
Bureaucrats who survived the revolutionary stage did so by knowing how to avoid creating enemies or appearing threatening. They accumulated power not so much by the ruthless and arbitrary use of violence, but rather by networking, lobbying, creating alliances, participating in illicit exchanges, conspiring, not standing out, and appearing loyal. This had been predicted well in advance of the success of totalitarianism.
Robert Michels foresaw as early as the emergence of a bureaucratic hierarchy under democratic and socialist regimes, and its transformation into a ruling class when parents attempt to pass on their status to the next generation.
Michels expected this process quickly to follow the revolutionary establishment of socialist regimes, but he did not foresee the rise of totalitarianism. As it happened, the first revolutionary totalitarian generation was too fanatic, too psychopathic, too impersonal, and too briefly in power to form a class. Class emerged only with the second and third post-revolutionary generations as a result of the selection of bureaucratic successors. T he political and geopolitical earthquakes of —91 were the unintended consequences of the adjustment of the rights of this second-generation bureaucratic nomenklatura to its interests.
This second-generation bureaucratic nomenklatura desired social stability, political predictability, and some guarantees of both inheritance rights and wealth, namely property rights in foreign banks if not at home.
Thus, private nomenklatura vices inadvertently generated public democratic virtues. A less positive unintended result of this late-stage totalitarian elite adjustment of rights to interests and the granting of at least negative liberties for the mass of people has been popular cynicism toward democracy.
Since politicians and governments seemed unable to control the elite, and, even worse, sometimes were incorporated by it, some ordinary people became disillusioned with democratic politics.
The distinctly post-totalitarian scarcity of competing elites helped enable the largely successful transmutation of the political rights of the late-stage totalitarian elite into property rights in line with economic interests in the post-totalitarian era. While this facilitated elite continuity, it undermined the establishment of new democratic norms by hollowing out the promise of social change under its auspices. The end of totalitarianism spelled the end of monolithic social hierarchy dominated by a single, externally unified elite.
Initially, former dissidents replaced the old elite in government and parts of the media. But the late-stage totalitarian elite remained largely in place in the economy, the state bureaucracy, the security services, the legal system, and the education system by default, because after totalitarianism there were no alternative national elites ready to replace them.
If there were no dissidents, late-stage totalitarianism persisted, albeit with open borders. For example, Slovakia and the Czech Republic had the same Communist regime in unified Czechoslovakia, but though there were about 2, Czech dissidents, mostly in Prague, there were only a handful of Slovak dissidents.
Specifically, Kershaw discusses how with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of Soviet Communism, and the second German Reunification that a need to revisit Stalinism and Nazism with fresh eyes developed. He ultimately comes to several conclusions, but one of the most notable is his belief that some comparisons such as National Socialism with the state system of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Stalin era have limited potential.
Only by highlighting the singularity of each system does Kershaw believe we can gain the most valuable information.
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