Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism describes a system in which the state, usually through a single party and a supreme leader, claims the right to control every part of public and private life. It differs from ordinary dictatorship in its ambition: rather than simply suppressing opposition, a totalitarian regime tries to remake society and human beings according to an official ideology. Scholars use the term mainly for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and often for China under Mao and North Korea. Few movements have called themselves totalitarian, so the concept is mostly used by historians and political scientists to analyze regimes, while the profile here reflects the outlook such regimes put into practice.

The word was first used in Italy in the early 1920s by critics of Mussolini, and Mussolini then adopted it with pride, describing a state in which nothing exists outside or against the state. After the Second World War, scholars applied the term to both Nazism and Stalinism. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced its roots to modern antisemitism, imperialism and the collapse of traditional social bonds, and stressed the role of terror and concentration camps. In 1956 Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski listed six features: an official ideology, a single mass party, terroristic police control, a monopoly of mass communication, a monopoly of weapons and central control of the economy. George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) made the idea familiar to a wide public.

Scholars distinguish right-wing totalitarianism, as in Nazi Germany, from left-wing or communist totalitarianism, as in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Some speak of post-totalitarian regimes, in which the ideology hardens into routine and terror declines. Political scientist Juan Linz distinguished totalitarian systems from authoritarian ones, which allow some limited pluralism and do not demand active belief.

Totalitarian regimes are criticized for mass terror, show trials, forced labor camps, famines caused by policy and genocide. The concept itself has also been debated. Some historians of the Soviet Union argued that the model exaggerated how complete state control was and ignored social pressures from below. Others say the term was used as a Cold War tool to equate communism with Nazism. Defenders of the concept reply that it captures real shared features of these regimes, especially their attempt to abolish any space independent of the state.

Under Stalin, millions were sent to Gulag labor camps or executed, especially during the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938. Nazi Germany combined total control with racial persecution and the Holocaust. Under Mao, the Great Leap Forward led to a famine in which tens of millions died, and the Cultural Revolution brought mass persecution. North Korea remains the clearest present-day example often described as totalitarian.