Concept

Totalitarianism

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Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a model of dictatorship, developed by political scientists — Hannah Arendt chief among them — in the 1950s to explain why Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, ideological enemies who each treated the other as history’s ultimate evil, nonetheless resembled each other structurally. Arendt borrowed the term from the fascists’ own self-description and used it to name something she argued was genuinely new: a dictatorship that demands not mere obedience but fanatical, total loyalty, and that seeks to command belief and private conscience, not just public conduct.

The model’s defining move, as Vejas Liulevicius frames it, is a claim about ambition, not achievement. Totalitarian regimes combine fear with compulsion to atomise a population into compliance, and to generate the appearance — sometimes the reality — of belief rather than mere acquiescence. Arendt’s most unsettling suggestion is that this is not a throwback to ‘ancient barbarism’ confined to the twentieth century, but potentially a template the future could repeat under the right conditions; and that within the system, the specific leader is structurally interchangeable, even if particular figures (Stalin, Hitler) were also strikingly singular as individuals.

Mechanism: fear, compulsion, and recruited agency

Liulevicius’s account and Stephen Kotkin‘s independent biographical work on Stalin converge on the same mechanism from different angles. Kotkin, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of micropower, argues that totalitarian control does not depend on constant coercion from above: it recruits ordinary people’s own agency — denunciations, performed enthusiasm, compliant activism — to dissolve the social trust and independent capacity that resistance would require. A person ‘using your agency’ to demonstrate loyalty ends up, in the same act, destroying their own power to act independently.

Liulevicius supplies the ideological complement: Stalin’s Great Terror (1936–38) generated its own supply of confessions once provincial secret-police units were assigned arrest quotas, producing a self-sustaining machine of denunciation detached from any actual security threat — even devoted, loyal communists were not exempt, since the system no longer required an external target to keep running. The same negative-selection dynamic — a totalising plan punishing exactly the independent-minded and capable people it needs — recurs in Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Hundred Flowers Campaign, and Nazi Germany’s genocidal plans for Eastern Europe (Generalplan Ost), despite the three regimes’ opposed ideological content.

The standard objection, and why it misses the claim

The most common criticism of the totalitarianism model is empirical: no regime in human history has ever achieved total control of its population — there is always inefficiency, resistance, private divergence from official belief. Liulevicius treats this objection as true but beside the point. Arendt was not claiming regimes achieved total control; she was naming the articulation of the ambition that such control might be possible — the aspiration to reshape hearts and minds, not merely to police behaviour. That the ambition was never fully realised does not make it any less historically distinctive, or any less consequential for how these regimes were actually run.

Grossman: negotiability and the psychology of confession

Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate adds a phenomenological mechanism the structural accounts above do not reach, drawn from Grossman’s novel Life and Fate. Two claims stand out. First, negotiability: Roberts and Cowen read Grossman as insisting fascism and Communism are not interchangeable from the inside — Soviet Communism retained, however cruelly, a residue of dialogue and reprieve (a case could be pleaded, a line held, a person occasionally spared), where Nazism’s racial logic offered its victims no such opening at all. This is a boundary case for the standard ‘one category’ model: the machineries rhyme, but the subjective room to manoeuvre differs.

Second, the psychology of confession: Grossman dramatises why the guiltless confessed to crimes they did not commit — not only under torture but to preserve their own faith in the system. To admit the state was arresting an innocent was to admit the whole edifice of meaning was a lie; confessing a fictitious guilt let the believer keep the faith intact and the self coherent. This supplies, at the level of the individual conscience, the counterpart to the page’s structural ‘demand for total belief’ — showing how that demand was internalised rather than merely imposed.

Where mainstream views differ

Comparative-totalitarianism scholarship (Arendt, and later Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s six-point model of the totalitarian syndrome) treats Nazism and Stalinism as members of one analytic category. This has drawn a long-standing objection, mostly from historians sympathetic to the political left, that grouping the two flattens a morally significant difference: Nazism’s foundational goal was racial extermination, while Soviet communism’s stated goal — however badly and violently it was pursued — was a classless, egalitarian society. On this view, ‘totalitarianism’ functions less as neutral historical analysis than as a Cold War-era rhetorical device equating a professedly emancipatory project with an explicitly genocidal one, and obscuring real differences in aim, however similar the resulting machinery of terror.

Liulevicius does not resolve this dispute directly, but his own material cuts both ways: he insists the two ideologies were ‘ideological arch enemies’ with genuinely opposed content, while also arguing that shared structural features — the demand for total belief, the negative selection of the capable and independent-minded, the reliance on a self-sustaining terror apparatus — are real and worth naming, regardless of what each regime claimed to be building toward.

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