"Totalitarianism"-The Disintegration of an Idea
Whitfield, Stephen J.
Stephen J. Whitfield "Totalitarianism"-The Disintegration of an Idea Images of totalitarianism were kept alive in the sixties, not as a means of understanding modern dictatorships, but as a way...
...That "etc...
...what Communists and their sympathizers challenged in the fifties was not expulsion but travel restrictions that the State Department imposed (unjustly) on American citizens...
...Even Soviet observers were officially invited to the trial, in which she was effectively represented by counsel, acquitted, and freed...
...Freedom of speech and assembly should be denied to "groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of oublic services, social security, medical care, etc...
...With the sad exception of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, however, most dissenters were not forced into silence by the threat of execution...
...It was so complete'a dictatorship that the author, Warren Susman, could add, without restriction on his freedom to say so: "Hitler had no more power than John F. Kennedy-in fact, he had less...
...The archetypal academic of the era, Howard Zinn, once offered the following defense of civil disobedience: "To exalt the rule of law as an absolute is the mark of totalitarianism, and it is possible to have an atmosphere of totalitarianism in a society which has many of the attributes of democracy...
...Parallels are so easy to construct that at this moment some literary critic is probably comparing Jack London and Franz Kafka because they both wrote animal stories...
...Indeed, some intellectuals went well beyond Lasch and Clecak by seeking to demonstrate resemblances between contemporary America and earlier tyranny...
...Or so it seemed from the late 1930s until the decade of the 1960s, when for many articulate Americans the distinction between totalitarianism and democracy disintegrated...
...Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism, pp...
...Though beginning with different perspectives, Carl J. Friedrich and Leonard Schapiro both concluded that no theory could better assimilate what we have learned about the organization of the masses through terror and ideology, the monopolistic control over the economy, mass communications, and social groups, and the one-party rule dominated often by a charismatic leader...
...Sentenced for contempt of court, he told Judge Hoffman: "You want us to be like good Germans supporting the evils of our decade and then when we refused to be good Germans and came to Chicago and demonstrated...now you want us to be like good Jews, going quietly and politely to the concentration camps while you and this court suppress freedom and truth...
...and the GPU operated under the favorite maxim, "Just give us a person, and we'll create a case...
...While acknowledging the "preservation of a comparatively wide scope of personal and political freedom" in America, Clecak observed that in the fifties "independent intellectuals...identified with the Communist Party faced prison and exile...
...Stephen J. Whitfield "Totalitarianism"-The Disintegration of an Idea Images of totalitarianism were kept alive in the sixties, not as a means of understanding modern dictatorships, but as a way oflibelling the U.S...
...Yet that was the form that revisionism took in the historiography of modetn Germany...
...Davis' fate was the object of international sympathy and concern...
...Under what circumstances is such suppression necessary...
...it dies when power is wrenched from its hands...
...and the successful efforts of an invigorated press, persistent legislators, and aroused citizens could hardly be construed as evidence of an impending tyranny...
...In the sixties, the mistake of many left-wingers was to be against the American political system without distinguishing it from totalitarianism...
...The photograph so shocked James Baldwin that he publicly wrote her: "You look exceedingly alone-as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau...
...No names of these independent intellectuals are given, so perhaps one-the most eminent-should be mentioned here...
...Believers in private medical programs, opponents of affirmative action, and advocates of military parity with the Soviet Union could not say they hadn't been warned...
...1 * Giovanni Gentile, "The Philosophic Basis of Fascism," Foreign Affairs, 6 (January 1928), pp...
...eight of the jurors were black...
...and the Holocaust was too gruesome for polemicists not to exploit it...
...Finally, a jury decided that the Rosenbergs were guilty-not of dissent but of conspiracy to commit espionage...
...Marcuse thus boxed himself into the paradox of criticizing the United States because a) it was totalitarian and b) it was not repressive enough...
...Once endowed with some categorical exactness, the term "totalitarian" in the 1960s became diffuse, ambiguous in its connection with the most ominous European dictatorships, and all too accessible as an instrument of invective...
...Moreover, greater anxiety is now expressed about the irresponsibilities of isolationism and military weakness than about hunger for foreign conquest, which was characteristic of the European totalitarianisms of the 1930s and 1940s...
...Radical Paradoxes spurned utopian extremism and expressed enthusiasm for the democratic brand of socialism...
...This theme was picked up by Dave Dellinger, who complained that the government attorneys had treated him and the other defendants "in a manner that reminds me of Prosecutor Vishinsky and the other Russian prosecutors in the...political purges...in the Thirties...
...America, which was earlier settled by refugees from persecution, now provides a haven for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writing and example constitute the most formidable reminder that the chief danger to freedom lies elsewhere...
...Other intellectuals expressed moral reservations if the idea of totalitarianism were used too loosely or not at all...
...DuBois was indeed prosecuted in 1951 for failing to register as an "agent of a foreign principal" (the World Peace Council...
...Irving Howe added that the writings of Arendt and Orwell, "whatever their faults and 'exaggerations,' did us a moral and intellectual service by insisting that totalitarianism was not merely an extension of monopoly capitalism, Russian expansionism, Leninist Sdictatorship, man's inherent sinfulness, or anything else...
...Admittedly, Clecak did not ignore Stalin's crimes, which he listed as follows: "despotic rule, denial of basic freedoms, abrogation of elementary legal guarantees, and severe restrictions on consumption...
...35, 52, 76-77...
...The charge of "totalitarianism" conveyed horror, but it sometimes collided with evidence of effective opposition to government policies and prosecutors...
...Though the legacy of the hostility to Nazism and Communism still reverberated in the political discourse of American intellectuals in the 1960s, the model of totalitarianism began to collapse in the decade's scholarly literature on Germany and the Soviet Union...
...For if...
...The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger...
...ism, in stressing the unprecedented use of terror and ideology, in accounting for the enthusiasm of the masses and the banality of the killers, Arendt's book became perhaps the most authoritative interpretation of totalitarianism for the next decade...
...Of course, there has long been controversy about the meaning of totalitarianism, its implications, and its importance...
...Symptomatic of this new spirit was an analysis published almost a decade later, Peter Clecak's Radical Paradoxes, which Eugene Genovese hailed as "easily the most important book on the American Left...
...This rigid assertion was omitted in the 1963 edition of Fainsod's standard text...
...Without authoritarian socialism as a beginning point," he asserted, "most nations of the Third World will not have the opportunity to fashion even limited modes of democracy and personal freedom that masses of people can use...
...He considered his adopted land totalitarian because of its "non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests....Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a 'pluralism' of parties, newspapers, 'countervailing powers,' etc...
...But my own view is that only Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin can properly be called totalitarian, and that the recent imprecision and extension of the term constitute not only a semantic problem but a cultural problem as well...
...and accusations, such as Dellinger's and Hoffman's, which were intended to shock the conscience, may well have resulted in insulting the intelligence...
...Nothing better suggests the contrast between the forties and fifties and the decade of the sixties than the concluding chapter of The New Radicalism in America, in which Christopher Lasch vivisected some leading postwar intellectuals for having betrayed their responsibilities of political opposition and cultural alienation...
...the United States is classified as totalitarian, then toleration is fraudulent, "an instrument for the continuation of servitude...
...Who is to stop him or them or whatever power is in the United States...
...If the phenomenon could be "flexible" and "flaccid," it could be almost anything, even "non-terroristic," which is what it became in the writings of the preeminent theoretician of American totalitarianism, Herbert Marcuse...
...What is omitted from this catalog is the apparently minor detail that Stalin was also a mass murderer...
...299, 301...
...Unfortunately, in spite of these efforts, many scholars today do not accept the theory of totalitarianism as the best way to understand the historical experience of Germany and Russia...
...In the sixties, the Cold War receded and the thaw was proclaimed...
...The lawlessness ascribed to Nazism and Stalinism got reversed, however, in the definitions of the sixties...
...Eventually the convictions were overturned upon appellate review...
...Leszek Kolakowski, "Marxist Roots of Stalinism," also in Tucker, p. 286...
...is priceless...
...the excesses of the "imperial presidency" provoked their own correctives...
...Such camps-whether for purposes of labor, sheer cruelty, or deathcame to be commonly understood as the primary institutions of totalitarianism, a form of tyranny not easily absorbed in the imaginations of Americans and yet clearly recognized as dangerously antagonistic to our political life...
...In particular the memories of Nazism were exploited for purposes of radical excoriation of the United States (that is why the illustrations for my thesis are drawn from the Left...
...Lasch's book was therefore important for its disparagement of the distinction, previously taken for granted, between a free society and its sworn enemies...
...Lasch thus dismissed the intellectual defense of the open society as mere "cant...
...An important shift occurred here...
...The "Jewish housewife" never made the cover of Newsweek (which is where Baldwin saw the photograph), had no legal rights, was never tried, and went to her death not alone but in the company of millions of nonAryans...
...I maintain that our society is in...an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs...
...Thus began the dispatch of the London Times correspondent who witnessed the liberation of Belsen...
...Liberals were then blaming this American "dictator"' for his failure to get domestic legislation through a Congress his own party controlled...
...During the New Politics convention in Chicago in 1967, one reporter ruefully observed that "the word 'genocide' began to be tossed about as though it could apply to acts of simple rudeness...
...Clecak did not explain why a professed democrat should abide by the timetables of dictators for the introduction of freedom...
...Images of totalitarianism were kept alive in the sixties, not primarily as a means of understanding peculiarly modern dictatorships, but as a way of blurring the differences between them and the United States...
...Especially after Watergate the polity appeared less sinister...
...This conceptual havoc was the inevitable result of trying to apply the idea of totalitarianism to a polity which, when attacked by critics armed with European categories of thought, is notorious for rolling with the punch...
...After her trial Angela Davis contracted to write an autobiography, and Publishers Weekly reported a "high sixfigure" advance against royalties...
...But Clecak seemed to forget libertarian sentiments when the discussion turned to dictatorships on the Left...
...One example of this tendency was the response to the Cuban missile crisis that appeared in the journal Studies on the Left...
...Rhetorical violence against American institutions was tempered, and a chastened sense of proportion was restored...
...If totalitarianism could be' compatible with pluralism as well as terror, Marcuse's deduction was inexorable...
...t Stephen F. Cohen, "Bolshevism and Stalinism," in Robert C. Tucker (editor), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, pp...
...In the forties, the rule of law governing a liberal democracy was contrasted with the absence of basic rights in totalitarian regimes: The Gestapo commonly arrested, tortured, and killed its victims according to decr-4"s which were passed and promulgated after the fact...
...The editors of an important collection of Nazi documents announced that "the conventional view of the Third Reich as a monolithic totalitarian state, a view perpetuated by numerous popular accounts of the regime,...bears little resemblance to reality...
...If not even Nazi Germany could be so categorized, a paradigm had become a phantom...
...That is why the author of Nobody Knows My Name did not know the name of the "Jewish housewife," whose martyrdom was anonymous...
...Perhaps realizing that the rambunctious conduct of the Chicago defendants could never be mistaken for the abject confessions of the Old Bolsheviks, Dellinger dropped that analogy...
...Permissiveness toward pre- - vailing beliefs can be dangerous, and therefore Marcuse recommended that such toleration be withdrawn whenever "the pacification of existence [and...
...The disappearance of the anti-war movement coincided with a renewed perception of the nature of the Soviet Union, an awareness sparked not only by the brutality of its policies but by the moral appeal of its dissidents...
...If it] becomes an all-purpose term forrepression, it will simply become another promiscuously used dirty word-and that is a sure way for a word to lose even its dirtiness...
...Clecak's work, like Lasch's, consisted primarily of case studies of the radical as thinker, and deemed alienation obligatory...
...Few comparisons could have been more farfetched...
...Such anxiety was to be registered and tested in the courtroom itself...
...Susman's historical analogy is, of course, impossible to sustain, quite apart from comparing Kennedy to the most mephitic of all leaders-to the former's disadvantage...
...Radical Paradoxes was not unique in coupling a relatively benign view of the Soviet system with a harsh set of standards for the United States...
...Others, however, continued to press for a definition precise enough to win the acceptance of those intellectuals for whom totalitarianism meant everything, and compelling enough to instruct those for whom totalitarianism meant nothing...
...In the struggle against totalitarianism, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., mistakenly "tended to raise political issues to the level of philosophical issues...
...Thus, "totalitarian society brings the realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity under its administration and fashions it after its own image...
...freedom and happiness are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said...
...In fact, Marcuse's own advocacy of these causes enhances such domination...
...For some intellectuals, no other formulation could with such sensitivity accommodate all the reports, from the Holocaust Kingdom and the Gulag Archipelago, that "describe something beyond the imagination of mankind...
...The most forceful expression of this view appeared in 1951 in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism...
...In unravelling its roots in racism and imperial, Stephen J. Whitfield is assistant professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, and author of Scott Nearing: Apostle of American Radicalism...
...It does not serve the cause of comparative political analysis or of polit. ical understanding," Michael Curtis therefore argued, "'to cling to the concept of totalitarianism.' To classify the Soviet regime of the sixties as no longer totalitarian was, of course, quite different from insisting that it had never been so...
...Western industrial society was charged with reducing poverty without enhancing happiness, and with abolishing toil without establishing peace...
...and while unresolved mysteries remain, Clecak bootlegged the assumption of their innocence so as to convey the impression that they were killed for something like petitioning the government for a redress of grievances...
...But his chief counsel, a former congressman, served without fee...
...Nor could his assertions be easily distinguished from the apologies for Stalin's "authoritarian socialism" in the thirties and forties...
...The United States was denounced as "clearly and simply a dictatorship" in which, in moments of crisis, "no checks are at all possible...
...In the 1966 preface to her major book, Arendt concluded as well that Soviet totalitarianism coincided only with the rule of Stalin...
...In the thirties, Orwell wrote, "the sin of nearly all left-wingers" was to "have wanted to be antiFascist without being anti-totalitarian...
...In any event, with the eclipse of radicalism in the 1970s the effort to domesticate the idea of totalitarianism collapsed...
...Of the staunch anti-Communist Reinhold Niebuhr, Lasch complained: "The effect of defining a choice as a choice between rival systems was to blind him to the possibility that systems as such were neither moral nor immoral and that the choices confronting the American intellectual in the late Forties were not questions of ultimate allegiance, not questions of allegiance at all, but questions of tactics and strategy...
...4 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (editors), Documents on Nazism, 1919-1945, p. 9...
...W.E.B...
...10, 24...
...It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind...
...by his own principles he should have been silenced for tolerating those whose reformist efforts perpetuate the democractic version of totalitarianism...
...The word itself entered the American language from Italy in 1928,* and a decade later many influential scholars and writers were insisting that the novel political systems that had emerged in Russia, Germany, and Italy-and perhaps elsewhere in fascist Europe and Japan-transcended in moral and political urgency the traditional categories of Left and Right...
...For example, the 1953 edition of Merle Fainsod's How Russia Is Ruled concluded with the generalization that "the totalitarian regime does not shed its policestate characteristics...
...Later, Ralph Abernathy charged that the deaths of 28 Black Panthers in 1968-1969 showed "a calculated design of genocide in this country...
...This is as complete a dictatorship as ever existed in history...
...But the memories of Nazi totalitarianism were too available not to be invoked, the emotions it roused too powerful to remain untapped...
...In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse dismissed incremental reform because it would only strengthen the prevailing framework of repression, making the masters more bearable without abolishing the master-slave relationship...
...So John F. Kennedy takes the Sudetenland (Cuba)-what will he want next...
...and a verdict of acquittal was entered by the judge, who "held the scales of justice absolutely level," as DuBois remarked...
...A second episode that should be mentioned was the Chicago conspiracy trial of 1969, at the end of which Abbie Hoffman remarked that "all we did is walk into the courtroom, and the court system exposed itself as totalitarian...
...By the early 1960s, other le'ading specialists in Soviet studies also discarded the totalitarian model, deeming it "ahistorical" and "historically limited...
...In the forties, Niebuhr, Schlesinger, and others whom Lasch criticized-Dwight Macdonald and Sidney Hook-felt justified in finding systems such as Nazism and Stalinism "immoral"' '-repugnant at a level more basic than that of "tactics and strategy.'" Intellectuals of the late forties and fifties often remarked on the similarities between the Third Reich and the USSR-the camps and the police terror, the extinction of privacy and independence, the absolutisms of party, state, and leader...
...Yet in "Repressive Tolerance," published one year later, Marcuse argued for a guarantee of free expression to civil-rights workers, pacifists, and champions of national health insurance-groups whose political activities would, by his own analysis, make the forces of domination more powerful...
...Similar accusations were repeated, although the figure of 28-however tragic-does not add up to "genocide" even if it were true, which it wasn't, as Edward Jay Epstein's scrupulous New Yorker article demonstrated...
...For example, Angela Davis was photographed in handcuffs after her arrest, and later indictment, for having purchased a shotgun with which a judge and others were killed in an attempted prison escape...
...Nor was exile enforced...
...What Theodore Draper wrote about "fascism" was applicable to "totalitarianism"'': If it "is to have any meaning...
...And in a review of new historical literature on Nazism, Geoffrey Barraclough also claimed that the Third Reich was so distended and inefficient as to constitute "almost a 'caricature' of a totalitarian state...
...it] should refer to a particular system of tyranny...
...A longer version of this article will appear in Images and Ideas: Essays on Contemporary American Culture, to be published by the University Press of New England next spring...
...The carefree use of analogy and the appropriation of memory sometimes found wider applications...
...The democratic version of the total state, by preserving "the illusion of popular sovereignty, was therefore "the most efficient system of domination...
...In their early book on the New Left, Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau identified the enemy as "the broad liberal consensus that has developed present American society into the most 'flexible of totalitarianisms.' " And in Studies on the Left, Norman Fruchter condemned his fellow citizens for participating "in the maintenance of a totalitarian state, because we allow and support our government's treatment of individuals as things....The implicit support...which we grant our overt racists and the systems of inequality we perpetuate, increases the extent of a flaccid but pervasive totalitarianism...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
