Totalitarianism: A Conceptual Journey
Written by Bastiaan Hoks
Bastiaan is currently following the Research Master’s Modern History and International Relations at the University of Groningen. He specializes in democratic collapse, totalitarianism, racism, great power politics and NATO. This paper was submitted in June 2024 as part of the course Kinship Politics.
Totalitarianism: A Conceptual Journey
Introduction
In this theoretical paper, I will look at the conceptual journey that Hannah Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism has made since it was popularized by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In this book, Arendt examined the horrific regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, arguing that despite being commonly classified differently as either having fascist or communist structures, these regimes shared a fundamental underlying structure called totalitarianism. Hereby Arendt joined a circle of conceptualizing and reconceptualizing totalitarianism that has been started by different authors ever since the 1930s. Overall, most authors would agree that totalitarianism entails a centralized authority, mostly the modern state, that aspires to control all aspects of society [1].
Arendt contributed one of the most valuable and well-known accounts discussing how, and to what scope, states want to control all aspects of society. However, the original conceptualization of the concept as formulated by Arendt has been scrutinized based on real-time developments in the world ‘out there’. Therefore, I want to analyse the conceptual journey of Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism ever since the Second World War by looking at how various cases challenge and subsequently redefine Arendt’s theory on totalitarianism. Throughout this paper, I will focus exclusively on Arendt’s concept of power accumulation in totalitarian regimes, as it represents one of the most central and generalizable tenets of her book. I structure this paper in the following way: firstly, I will briefly discuss the paradox of conceptualization to discuss why it is that the concept of totalitarianism can mean different things in different contexts over time. Then, I will look at what motivates the conceptual debate on totalitarianism by discussing the Collingwoodian historical method as it allows me to historicize the conceptual journey of totalitarianism. Subsequently, I will evaluate Arendt’s theory through the examination of two cases and analyze how these cases influence her conceptualization. The first case will explore how Maoist China presents a non-Western challenge to her theories, while the second case, discussing modern Western states, represents the well-known 'least likely case' challenge to her theory. Lastly, I will conclude with a theoretical question on the current state of the concept based on questions that arise out of this paper.
The Paradox of Conceptualization
To understand the conceptual journey that totalitarianism has taken, one has to understand the “paradox of conceptualisation” or the “hermeneutic paradox” that is at the heart of conceptualisations in social sciences. According to Kaplan, one needs appropriate concepts to build robust theories, yet operationalizing such concepts typically depends on pre-existing theoretical frameworks [2]. Thus, to build extensive theories about totalitarianism as it is ‘out there’, a researcher needs to conceptualize the concept of totalitarianism first to use it as an analytical tool in theory building. However, the concept can only be defined with some pre-existing theory of what it is we see ‘out there’.
The only way then to define totalitarianism is for a scholar to use one’s interpretation and make a well-developed argument on why this is a good definition of totalitarianism. However, despite that the researchers have to rely on their interpretations, they often make claims about the generalizability of their concepts, and even Arendt seems to do so. To question the universality of these claims, I will now turn to R.G. Collingwood and examine how his historical method historicizes the circle of conceptualization and the propositional logic it produces.
Collingwood
One way to look at the conceptualisations of totalitarianism is to look at what exact questions the authors tried to answer at the time of conceptualisation. R.G. Collingwood introduced this method in his famous piece of Questions and Answers. According to Collingwood, the predominant propositional logic in his time treated propositions as mere self-sufficient statements that can be either true or false in themselves [3]. For Collingwood, propositions can not be false or true in themselves, only in the relation between a proposition and strict correlative questions that the proposition answers [4].
Hereby Collingwood revolutionized the field of history by arguing that historical propositions should not be understood as mere descriptive ‘units of thought’, but rather as answers to questions that arose in a specific socio-historical context. Each question and each answer are part of a whole series of questions and answers that constantly proceed as the right answers to correlative questions enable us to get further with the process of questioning and answering. Therefore, according to Collingwood, we must understand propositions in this exact process as understanding the questions that arose from this process makes us understand the proposition that answered it [5].
To take this back to Arendt and totalitarianism, it will be important to historicize the historical question that gave rise to certain works on totalitarianism as only this will make me understand why they conceptualized it in such a way. This could solve the paradox of conceptualization to some extent as it historicizes the hermeneutic process. Collingwood’s proposed method would shift the focus from a neutral and objective observer who tries to conceptualise a universal concept to one of a context-specific historian who tries to answer socio-historic-specific questions. Hereby the Collingwoodian method helps to historicize totalitarianism, which will be useful when analyzing Arendt’s theory and the totalitarian cases after her in the next sections.
Hannah Arendt and the Accumulation of Power
In this section, I will discuss Hannah Arendt’s theory on the necessity of power accumulation for a totalitarian regime to survive. Here I will explore Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and thereafter I will question the historical situatedness of this book.
The depiction of totalitarian power in The Origins of Totalitarianism is quite negative, characterized by its inherently destructive and dominating nature. This conception of power is formulated by Arendt in her theory on power accumulation in totalitarian states. Arendt argues that totalitarian movements inherently need to accumulate power as not doing so would lead the movement to fall still and ‘die’. Pivotal is the idea that the totalitarian movement must be kept in motion.
Therefore, totalitarian movements are power-accumulating machines that constantly need more ‘material’ to dominate to survive. Here Arendt argues that totalitarian states with large populations have a longer survival time as they have continuously had ‘superfluous’ masses to dominate that can replace the parts of the populations that have been executed as a result of internal terror. If a totalitarian movement does not have enough superfluous masses within its state, like Nazi Germany, the only way to keep its movement alive is to conquer new territories and dominate these newly conquered people. However, as both superfluous and newly conquered people can be dominated and thus run out as ‘new material’, every totalitarian movement has the ultimate goal of world domination according to Arendt [6].
Furthermore, Arendt also elaborates on how the power-accumulation process works on the level of the individual. Power is accumulated on the level of the individual by dominating more and more aspects of a person’s life. The totalitarian movement can do this by atomizing and individualizing the individual.
This process implies that the totalitarian movement will aim to destroy every still-existing non-political bond, such as cultural groups or even family ties, that keeps the individual from being completely isolated. No bonds or social relations can be for the sake of its own, all relations must be subjected to the totalitarian movement. To do so, the totalitarian movement has to rely on terror that would execute suspects and thereby instil such fear under the rest of the population that the masses would ultimately turn in other people that they perceived as enemies to the movement. Subsequently, the atomization and individualization of the masses enable the totalitarian movement to yield control over the masses as they can demand full loyalty from its subjects as they have no other loyalties left [7].
However, coming back to Collingwood, one could ask what question Arendt was trying to answer with her theories about the role of power accumulation in totalitarian regimes. Arendt’s book historically answers a question in a consecutive series of questions and answers. While totalitarianism was first used in the modern sense to describe Italian fascism, Arendt redefined the concept by answering questions that arose during and right after the Second World War. Giovanni Gentile, an Italian fascist philosopher and loyalist to Mussolini, is considered to be the first to argue for a ‘totalitarian state’. In an ‘ethical totalitarian state’ the educational system should instil a shared sense of common responsibility for the future of the state on the one hand, and the capabilities of the state should be expanded on the other hand to shape the social world more systematically and coherently. By extending the power of the state to a ‘totalitarian’ level, the people enable the state to ‘enhance our freedom to act’ more effectively, extensively and responsibly according to Gentile. It does not aim to limit the freedom of individuals or reduce their lives to uniform lives [8].
Although totalitarianism was first used in the context of fascist Italy, Arendt redefined the concept in such a way that it would be inapplicable to Italy. According to Arendt, Mussolini did not seek to create a full-fledged totalitarian state. She argued it was rather a strong one-man dictatorship with a one-party rule [9]. Fascist Italy’s only true goal was to take over the state and establish the fascist elite as the undisputed rulers of Italy. Hereby Arendt makes quite a notable statement as she directly distinguishes fascist Italy from totalitarian Germany. For totalitarianism, she argues, the external means of control of state violence are not enough, totalitarianism aims to dominate and terrorise its subjects from within. This internal control of the subject was never the true goal in fascist Italy. As a result, Arendt argues that Mussolini’s movement and its power-accumulating process were not kept in motion. It took over the state apparatus, but after that, it stopped setting the state, and its institutions and subjects, in motion and subjugating every aspect of life to the totalitarian movement [10].
Moreover, Arendt also notes from the Goebbels diaries that the Goebbels argued that the Italians lacked the revolutionary spirit that Hitler and Stalin had. Critical here is that Italy and its movement lacked worldwide domination aspirations [11]. Thus, while Mussolini and Gentile coined the term totalitarianism, Arendt reconceptualised the concept by extending the meaning of the ‘total’ in totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, according to Arendt, is the ever-going power-accumulation process of the movement that ultimately aims to control the ‘total’ of all social life. Internally this is through the domination of individual thought and externally it is through aiming for world domination.
But what question did Arendt try to answer with this reconceptualization of totalitarianism?
The gradual rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union gave rise to new questions to answer, especially as they started controlling their population on a larger scale than ever seen before. Therefore, I argue that the main correlative question that Arendt tried to answer was how could we understand the development of large domination systems in these two particular states that the world had not seen before (and not in Italy in particular). To answer this question, Arendt came up with her theory on power accumulation as a defining feature of totalitarianism. However, based on the way she writes, I interpret her theories as generalizable and applicable beyond Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Here I believe Arendt intended with her book to prevent the occurrence of such a system ever again.
In this section, I discussed Arendt’s theory on power accumulation and I historicised the historical question that Arendt tried to answer with this theory. Now, I will proceed by examining whether Arendt’s theories applied to totalitarian cases after her book came out and discuss whether new questions arose historically that challenged Arendt’s theory.
Maoist China
After the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, totalitarianism briefly seemed as a political structure of the past. However, new oppressive regimes rose around the globe, all posing new challenges to the concept of totalitarianism as formulated by Arendt. Therefore, it will be insightful to analyze Maoist China and discuss how its case challenges the Western-based nature of the concept as understood by Arendt.
According to Roberts, Mao installed large-scale ‘thought reforms’ (through education, forced labour, Mao’s Red Book etc.) to ‘awaken’ a workers' mindset in all individuals after he ascended to power. However, here Roberts argues that this was not ‘totalitarian’ like it was in the Arendtian sense. The most important reason for this was that the enforcement of the ‘Chinese workers mindset’ was not predominantly forced upon the people by the state through the use of state terror/coercion. The whole reform process was much more based on traditional Chinese social structures and group dynamics that fostered self-examination, confession and shame [12]. This group's self-consciousness was part of a system or ‘virtuocracy’ where the ideological commitments of people in the group would be rewarded [13]. This introduces the group as a level of agency between the totalitarian regime and the individual.
In Arendt's theory, even if there are groups, all aspects of society must be subject to the domination of the movement directly. However, the predominance of traditional Chinese social structures is not to say there was not also strong state repression in China. To enforce forced labour to realise building projects from the regime, they would rely on state repression. However, this was only a byproduct of enforcing the will of the state, and the repression was not a goal in itself [14]. Moreover, while the idea of the Chinese Revolution was to bring about a worldwide revolution against the capitalist/imperialist powers, it did not explicitly aim to conquer new lands in the same manner as the Soviets and Nazis did. China was not powerful enough to fight the great powers in the 1950s and it rather aimed at exporting Maoism as an ideological force that would break down the Western imperialist world order everywhere around the world [15]. In addition, world domination seemed an even more unrealistic goal as the world had entered the nuclear age, which made it practically impossible to conquer other great powers.
Therefore, Maoist China was arguably not a typical power-accumulating machine in the Arendtian sense, which logically poses questions on how we should understand this new regime as it does not fit a pre-existing theory on totalitarianism as formulated by Arendt. Therefore, as Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism could not perfectly be used as an analytical tool to analyze Maoist China, Roberts redefined the definition to regard “the degree of pressure to participate in a regime’s mission” as a defining feature of totalitarianism. He believed that this pressure was high as thought reform, indoctrination and group pressure led to unprecedented levels of ‘total’ control of social life, and therefore, he seems to argue that Maoist China was totalitarian [16].
In this section, I discussed how Maoist China would not match Arendt’s theory on power accumulation. Partly, this was a result of unique Chinese social and cultural and social bonds that could not be dominated and also arguably because the world had entered the nuclear age which would shift the balance of power. While history in the form of Maoist China posed new questions, it still resembled totalitarian aspects of the past such as immense levels of control over social life.
Therefore, Roberts offered a reconceptualization of the concept that operationalizes totalitarianism as applicable to Maoist China.
Totalitarian Tendencies in the West
While it would be logical to proceed by discussing how Russia and China could be regarded as totalitarian according to Arendt’s theory or not, I argue that it will be more insightful to learn more about the applicability of Arendt’s theory by looking at the seemingly least obvious cases; Western democratic states. By testing Arendt's theory using a broader and Marxist interpretation of the concept of totalitarianism against one of the most unlikely cases one can learn more about the limitations of her theory and demonstrate how a reinterpretation and redefinition of her conceptualisation can take place when one looks at the West using a Marxist lens. In this section, I will discuss how one could interpret Arendt’s theories on power accumulation in light of (technological) developments in Western states. To do so, I will analyze Paić’s argument that discusses how totalitarian tendencies are increasingly present in Western states. Here I will complement the discussion by Zuboff’s article on Surveillance Capitalism, which discusses how capitalism, combined with new technologies, enables Western governments and companies to control their citizens on a larger and arguably dystopian scale. In light of the conceptual journey of Arendt’s perception of totalitarianism, Zuboff’s observation of Surveillance Capitalism could arguably indicate the presence of Arendtian totalitarian omnipresent power and control over individuals.
According to Paić, already before the rise of ‘big data’ more Marxist-leaning academics and philosophers argued that Western societies are designed to unequally benefit capitalists over ‘the people’. To make ‘the people’ unconscious of these power structures, Paić argues that liberal states depend on propaganda to create a mass consciousness that aligns with the interests of the political rulers. Hereby the real power intentions of the rulers are hidden behind a constructed mass consciousness that promotes consumerism. Paić argues that these kinds of states are governed by ‘spectacular-democratic rule’ that hypnotises the people to not see ‘what really is going on’ [17].
While (neo) Marxists have thus argued this for some time, recent technological developments reinvigorate interest in these theories, especially in discussions on totalitarianism and the emergence of new mass technologies as discussed in Paić and Zuboff’s articles. According to Zuboff, new technologies, and especially ‘big data’ companies, are more efficient than ever to manipulate populations to consume more as new technologies allow companies such as Meta and Google to extract large amounts of data from users to analyze and predict human behaviour.
These technologies and developments undermine democracy as they erode the democratic accountability of consumers by treating them exclusively as data extraction points. Thus, instead of companies rising and falling because they would not serve consumer interests, they now have the technology to analyze, predict and even shape consumer demand and mass consciousness.
Under what Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism, liberal democratic rights are hindrances to big data large-scale extraction processes. This has led to a turn of tide whereas now big companies do not favour liberal democracies, but rather more authoritarian states to increasingly accumulate data and thereby power and control over people [18].
To protect the capitalist regimes from threats, modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, data collection and digital communication are increasingly used to enlarge state capabilities of surveillance and control the masses (often with the help of ‘big data’). This enables state control mechanisms to reach into every aspect of private and public life. According to Paić, western rulers increasingly adapt these control mechanisms and shape mass consciousness by framing these technologies in the interest of mass security or just for convenience. Thereby, increasingly evading the privacy and autonomy of the individuals. While Paić admits that a future is still perceivable where privacy is largely respected, the potential of these technologies and recent developments instil fear of totalitarian accumulation of control and surveillance in Western states [19].
Using a broader and more Marxist interpretation of totalitarianism, one could make a case that power-accumulating tendencies are increasingly present in Western states. While they do not match Arendt’s theories in the sense that the state and companies need to terrorize or instil fear in citizens, one could make a Marxist argument that Western states are ruled by capitalist rulers who shape mass consciousness in line with their interests and hide their real intentions to acquire more power, partly with the help of new technologies. Using big data and Surveillance Capitalism, the capitalists are more capable than ever of controlling people and capitalising on that control by selling more commodities, which arguably is a matter of power accumulation. Additionally, using Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism in this specific Marxist reading, it is possible to argue that Western states and companies are ultimately aiming to spread this ‘big data’ driven capitalist model. Hereby Paić and Zuboff formulated an answer to a question that arose out of new technological developments that have the potential to control populations on a dystopian level.
In her days, Arendt would probably not have argued modern Western states are totalitarian. Social bonds are not prohibited or terrorized out of people in an Arendtian sense, nor are people in the West prohibited from critiquing the rulers or their regimes. Moreover, the multitude of actors and complex structures within capitalist Western states poses questions on whether actors intentionally increase control or whether they are forced by capitalist path dependency to do so. However, the application of the theoretical and conceptual framework developed in this essay to this counterintuitive case of potential Western totalitarianism shows how Arendt's concept of totalitarianism, seen through the lens of Collingwoodian historical contextualization, got reconceptualised in the discourse about modern-day totalitarianism and capitalism.
Conclusion and Theoretical Question
In this paper, I discussed the conceptual journey that Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism has taken ever since Hannah Arendt popularized the concept in the 1950s. I argued that the concept changes due to a hermeneutic circle where the interpretation of the concept constantly changes as a result of real-time events that tell something new about the concept. This logic throughout the paper was based on Collingwood’s historical method of situating propositional logic by looking at what question it tried to answer in a specific context. To look at how the concept changes, I first looked at Arendt’s idea of power accumulation and thereafter I analyzed how this tenet of totalitarian theory changes when one looks at Maoist China and the West. What I noticed is that Arendt’s theories on the one hand are refuted because ‘totalitarian’ cases after her book do not accumulate power in the sense that Arendt described it.
This then strengthens Collingwood’s idea that Arendt’s propositions on totalitarianism are situated in the time when she asked questions about Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. However, on the other hand, the ‘totalitarian’ cases after Arendt did share some characteristics as described by Arendt, thereby proving the relevance of her theories after the Second World War up till today. Although the form might have been different, the ‘totalitarian’ regimes did seem to aim to increasingly control and dominate their subjects, despite not always aiming for total control over all aspects of society as prophesized by Arendt. Neither did/do they aim for world domination in the sense that Arendt describes it.
Therefore, I argue that a general lust for increasing power and control is part of what we call ‘totalitarian’ regimes, however, how they do so depends on the motivation of the regimes and the technologies at their hand. For example, the introduction of artificial intelligence and large-scale surveillance systems enables regimes to control their populations on a larger and more efficient scale than ever before. This allows regimes to accumulate power in an Arendtian sense on one hand, but on the other, it has not resulted in more terror or physical violence to enforce the will of the regime as was the case in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Soviet Union. This allows one to ask profound questions about the nature of dominance in Arendt’s theory. Therefore, I came up with the following theoretical question that might be worth interesting for further research: How does the relative absence of widespread terror and physical violence in modern regimes, combined with the use and rise of advanced mass technologies, suggest a shift in the fundamental nature of control and domination as described in Arendt’s theory of power accumulation?
References
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. United Kingdom: Penguin Classics, 2017.
Collingwood, R.G. An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
Gray, Phillip W. Totalitarianism: The Basics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.
Kaplan, Abraham. The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. New York: Intertext Books, 1973.
Lovell, Julia. "Maoism as a Global Force." In Global East Asia: Into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Frank N. Pieke, 41-51. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.
Paić, Žarko. The Return of Totalitarianism: Ideology, Terror, and Total Control. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Roberts, David. Totalitarianism. Medford, Massachusetts: Polity, 2020.
Zuboff, Shoshana. "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information
Civilization." Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75-89. DOI: 10.1057/jit.2015.5.