David D. Roberts - Totalitarianism

But I noted that doubts about lumping together fascism and communism cut deeper. Few would deny that some combination of similarities and differences was at work, but those objecting to lumping may not do justice to the real-world dynamic bringing the particular fascist and communist regimes at issue closer together than an abstract consideration might recognize.

The difference in originating aspirations does not rule out such commonalities, especially in light of the Leninist break from orthodox Marxism and the Stalinist break from within Leninism. Once the Soviets began pursuing “socialism in one country,” their Marxist underpinnings, which might seem especially to differentiate them from fascism, became ever more tenuous, even mythical. It remains the case that the Soviets made an anti-capitalist revolution as the fascists did not, but the Soviets and fascists were moving in a common statist, or arguably totalitarian, direction as an alternative to free market capitalism.

The fascists had concluded that the problem was not capitalism or private property but the wider liberal culture, which seemed responsible for what was most objectionable about capitalism. A change in political culture might yield a qualitatively superior relationship between the political and economic spheres even if major aspects of private property remained. For their part, the Soviets concluded that socialism in one country required crash industrialization based on forced collectivization in agriculture – a process very much directed from the top. Whether the break came with Lenin or with Stalin, the actual Soviet regime ended up sufficiently overlapping with the fascist regimes that not only can it be compared with them but it can fruitfully be considered together with them as instances of totalitarianism. It must be emphasized, however, that though totalitarianism cuts across the conventional Left–Right axis, it does not replace that axis, which remains essential for certain questions.

At the same time, we must ask how much difference the persistence of preexisting elites and institutions actually made. They could be co-opted, even caught up in synergistic relationships with genuine fascists, so that it may be misleading to assume that one side had to be winning and the other losing and that conservative elites were marginalizing genuine fascists. Even in this particular, it may be too easy to overplay differences between the fascist and the Soviet regimes.

A second objection concerns the image that had come to surround totalitarianism, based on a “structural model” positing top-down “total domination” as the aim, whether to serve power for its own sake or to pursue some fanatical ideological vision. Though it may linger in our imaginations, that model came to be largely rejected by specialists as research showed how chaotic, messy, and ultimately out of control the putatively totalitarian regimes actually were. Thus some came to find totalitarianism singularly inappropriate, even for dealing with Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. In his widely admired study of the two regimes, published in 2004, Richard Overy found totalitarianism almost a joke, a “political-science fantasy” presupposing “domination through fear by psychopathic tyrants” who wield “total, unlimited power.” 9To discuss these regimes in terms of totalitarianism seems bound to throw us off.

The brief defense against this objection is to ask who says it was all about total control in the first place? And even insofar as, for whatever reason, that was part of the aim, totalitarianism might plausibly be understood as an aspiration, a tendency, with no implication of complete realization. Could we recast the category as a novel mode of collective action that proved, in practice, to entail a particular tendency to spin out of control?

A third objection concerns the use of totalitarianism as a differentiating principle, especially to distinguish genuinely fascist regimes from other instances of right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship, such as Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal. Many recent authorities take its use for this purpose for granted, whether explicitly or implicitly. But scholars concerned primarily with cases other than Germany and Italy have charged that the totalitarian–authoritarian dichotomy tends to overstate differences, making the real-world distinctions too neat. Moreover, it obscures the interactive relationship between the fascist regimes and those that, though not fully fascist, were eager to learn from the seeming successes of the fascist regimes. And thus they cannot be understood as merely conservative, traditionalist, or authoritarian. The problem is that totalitarianism seems to imply an either–or approach that obscures the dynamic relationships of the time and thus fails to account for the novelty of these movements and regimes.

But even if the totalitarian–authoritarian dichotomy was long overdone, totalitarianism, appropriately nuanced, can still serve as a differentiating category. This entails simply loosening the dichotomy, making it less either–or. It remains the case that if any political formation was not seeking or moving in a totalitarian direction, it was not fascism.

In short, though these objections force us to nuance our thinking, they do not indicate that totalitarianism has outlived its usefulness – or was misguided in the first place. However, the category has been left in a somewhat anomalous situation overall. Whereas some see it as outmoded, others still use it but sometimes unthinkingly. As presently applied, in scholarly discussion and more widely, it can indeed become formulaic, compromising understanding, so reaction against it has been healthy up to a point. But some eschew it for reasons that seem merely tendentious or short-sighted. If we keep a more open mind, we might see how a recast notion of totalitarianism can better interpret new researches like those organized by Geyer and Fitzpatrick and David-Fox, deepen our understanding of the three earlier regimes, and illuminate more recent phenomena as well.

In any case, we must think of totalitarianism simply as an aspiration and direction, not as some system that could ever be completely realized. If it is to be appropriately flexible, moreover, totalitarianism cannot be confined by a formal definition or checklist. But we already have a working conception, including statist intervention and total mobilization, and we will find additional characteristics indicating a novel mode of collective action, emerging early in chapter 3.

For decades, the failures of the earlier totalitarian experiments bred confidence in the superiority of liberal democracy and a concomitant assumption that totalitarianism could never recur from within the western mainstream. But in the volatile world of the twenty-first century, we are less prone to such complacent liberal triumphalism. There are obviously those today who reject the whole panoply of liberal values and procedures and, on that basis, support movements or regimes we find troubling. Insofar as we seek to prevent any recurrence of totalitarianism in the West, surely we can learn by better engaging the earlier phenomena labeled totalitarian. The question is how we do so most fruitfully. What understanding of totalitarianism might better serve that aim?

Writing in 1967, the noted American intellectual Irving Howe asserted that none of the theorists of totalitarianism could tell us the “ultimate purpose” of the Nazis or Stalinists. Howe doubted that such questions could presently be answered and suggested that perhaps they were not even genuine problems: “A movement in which terror and irrationality play so great a role may finally have no goal beyond terror and irrationality; to search for an ultimate end that can be significantly related to its immediate activity may itself be a rationalist fallacy.” 10We assume that there had to have been a reason, in other words, and we may be tempted to make one up.