ON FAILED TOTALITARIANISM

...We never control a man so totally as when we kill him...

...Conceivably, the first succession crisis is functional to the movement-state...

...They rule by brute force—not even their own brute force— and they are concerned above all with holding on...

...Orwell sees it as an epistemological problem...

...Just in his private journal, makes the heart grow cold...

...Perhaps no this-worldly creed can survive the survival of this world...

...The place to begin is with the elite movement or party that replaces all the demobilized movements, parties, unions, cooperative associations, sects, factions, and so on...

...it is enough if they neither think nor act in an oppositionist way...

...I suspect that this conclusion is implicit in the literature of the 1950s, just as it is inherent in the phenomenon that literature attempted to explain...

...most often it serves only hortatory and legitimizing purposes—like other and older ideologies...

...This is the real world of 1984...

...But is this an accurate account of contemporary politics...

...they have too much to lose...

...Is it, for that matter, an accurate account of the history of authoritarianism...

...Indeed, it is one of the purposes of conservative intellectuals to revive the spirit of the cold war...

...the Party has settled in for the long haul...

...Novus ordo seclorum, a new cycle of the ages: these words are engraved on the Great Seal of the United States and suggest that a nontotalitarian and a secular politics can also be founded upon revolutionary aspiration...

...For all the weight of its new institutions and the frequent corruption of their personnel, its leaders still inspired awe...

...In a certain sense, they live off the memory of the totalitarian moment, but they have no intention of repeating that moment...

...Terror, wrote the Jacobin St...

...The thrust toward totality is so extravagant a version of willfulness that it is doomed to failure...

...In power too, the movement requires permanent revolution, permanent war, or what Brzezinski called "permanent purge," else enthusiasm flags and the new regime, committed in principle to total transformation, is itself transformed into something less than total...

...For reasons he helps us understand, the most intense social control has been achieved under the most heightened form of personal rule...

...We never control a man so totally as when we seize his soul...

...it draws its special power from a disciplined, active, engaged population...

...And this suggests that the movement-state may not be capable of routinization but only of decay...

...But it is a strange heir who disowns his heritage, and it might more easily be said that totalitarianism represents the demobilization of democratic parties, movements, and unions—the transformation of political action into ritual performance and of arguments into slogans...

...The crucial means of totalitarian endurance, he argues in his novel and more explicitly in the Appendix to the novel, is Newspeak, a language actively fostered by the Ingsoc regime, designed to replace conventional English...

...All those together breed uncertainty and distrust among the people or among the members of the Party, and mutual distrust (as Aristotle said) is the key to all the forms of tyrannical rule...

...And then the charisma doesn't pass on...

...One way to answer this question is to talk in terms of a Weberian routinization: the end of days has been postponed, not forgotten...

...Completely different, something new under the sun, the terrible creation of our own contemporaries...

...Copyright © 1983 by F.S.I.S.I...

...For its leaders, like the absolutist monarchs of the early modern period, have managed to create a fairly cohesive elite...

...Milosz's captive minds were really captive...

...More accurately, that insistence serves a repugnant purpose: it provides an apologia for 305 authoritarian politics...

...But I think that an argument of this sort misses the main point...

...The shift in terminology suggests a certain loss of confidence in the idea of a free world—a loss that helps to explain, perhaps, the increasing stridency with which we are called upon to defend not only free but also tyrannical re297 gimes, so long as they are not totalitarian...

...But the totalitarian state, because of the deep transformations it brings about and the intense control it exercises over its subjects, is something entirely different: totalitarianism is a long dark night...

...Is Russia today usefully described as a totalitarian regime...

...It only intermittently determines the policies of the totalitarian party...

...The second mark of totalitarianism is its extraordinary sense of purpose...

...The totalitarian movementstate strives to break up every sort of loyalty among individuals, from class solidarity to friendship and family love, and then to focus undifferentiated loyalty on the Party or the leader of the Party: thus Orwell's Big Brother, whom no one really knows...

...The easy contrast surely misconstrues the impact of oldfashioned tyranny on its subjects and victims...

...And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—"child hero" was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police...

...The "frenzy" of Party members will seem especially peculiar and artificial if there hasn't been a local struggle for power...

...There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown...

...It won't be a matter of simultaneously knowing and not-knowing, as Orwell thought, but rather of performing in a certain way while deriding the performance: a coexistence of opportunism and contempt...

...What struck Orwell, Arendt, Talmon, Milosz, and the others was the sheer success of totalitarian politics...

...Totalitarianism, we are told, is incompatible with passivity...

...The attack on the family is the most important of totalitarianism's internal wars...

...To a significant degree, obviously, the reversal is self-inflicted—at least in the sense that revolutionary movements destroyed or fatally weakened the old authority structures and then were unable to replace them with democratic institutions...

...The revolutions, wars, purges, crises must have a visible end—and then they must have an end...

...Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism appeared in 1951, Jacob Talmon's Origins of Totalitarian Democracy in the same year...

...they can't quite manage the required upheaval, nor can they achieve a genuine Gleichschaltung of social spheres...

...Totalitarianism is parasitic on failed revolutions: this is so when its agents are themselves revolutionaries, like Stalin, and when they are counterrevolutionaries, like Hitler...

...In another of the essays in 1984 Revisited, Robert Tucker explores the importance of personality and of the "cult of personality" in totalitarian politics...

...parents and children will find their way back to some more stable and trusting pattern of family relations...

...The end of days becomes nothing more than a rhetorical flourish...

...The regime can't rest on Newspeak, then, because the success of Newspeak depends on the success of the regime...

...revolutionary hope is turned into an ideology of domination...

...Hannah Arendt makes a similar point when she writes that the totalitarian regime finds its perfect form not in the messianic kingdom but in the death camp...

...But whether the strictness is an aftereffect of the Stalinist terror or some more lasting feature of the post-Stalinist regime remains unclear...

...Contemporary conservatives have taken the step with calculated ease...

...But neither of these seems likely...

...it makes for struggles, denunciations, and purges...

...The moment can be repeated in new places, as it has recently been repeated in Cambodia, but it can't be sustained...

...The argument that totalitarianism represents a radical break even within the long history of unfreedom has recently been revived by a group of conservative intellectuals...

...Nor is there any such thing in human life as "continuous frenzy...

...The Massacre of St...

...But I shall attend more closely to the epigones of Hitler and Stalin, the men who come after, the heirs and imitators...

...If the people are to march, they must march somewhere, and where else but to the promised land, the messianic kingdom...

...I shall adopt the conservatives' terms, using "authoritarian" to refer to all the forms of unfreedom—tyrannies, oligarchies, military dictatorships, colonial regimes, and so on— save for those that resemble nazism and Stalinism...

...Still, the argument for novelty is interesting and deep, and I mean to consider it here at some length...

...The greater the distrust, the more total the tyranny...

...What is more likely than opposition, as I have suggested, is cynicism and corruption...

...They are the authoritarian autocrats and oligarchs of our own time, doing what autocrats and oligarchs have always done...

...Whenever the replacement was successful—even when, as in France, it was precariously successful—totalitarian politics had little appeal...

...Moreover, to someone who knew only Newspeak, every past utterance would be literally incomprehensible...

...One can also achieve it by imitation...

...they don't break under pressure...

...But we must come to grips with the return of tyranny after the failures of messianism, with the sheer persistence of regimes that are ugly enough, though neither utopian nor antiutopian—with non-ideal brutality...

...It is a form continuous with the other forms, but marked by a sense of secular willfulness that is immediately recognizable as a general feature of modern culture...

...S V talin's epigones in Russia (and now Mao's in China) rule their own country like imperial bureaucrats...

...The movement must move, the members must march, toward the end of days...

...But I don't want to concede that novelty, for the argument looks rather different today than it did in 1949 and the years immediately following...

...Or consider the history of religious repression: Louis XIV's destruction of French Protestantism, for example...

...Recently, a Russian newspaper reviewed the brief history of "child heroes" and concluded: "There is something fundamentally unnatural in having a child . . . assailing the holy of holies —respect and love for father and mother...

...Nazism had been defeated only by overwhelming external force...

...Orwell and those who followed him were driven to explain what looked indeed, though not in the sense of the messianic faith, like the end of days...

...The members of this elite are bound together more by place and privilege than by doctrinal commitment, more by personal than by ideological ambition, but they are bound together nonetheless...

...There is no reason to think, however, that it can control ordinary conversations or that it can bar slang usages or dominate entirely the rhythms, intonations, juxtapositions, and so on that constitute what we can think of as the linguistic resources of any people who can speak at all...

...As an account of the internal politics of the movement-state, this is surely wrong: for we have seen both the decay of the Party and the power of the proles...

...But the only purpose of party discipline, Orwell argues, is greater discipline...

...To be published in September by Harper & Row...

...It requires agitation, disturbance, crisis—the "continuous frenzy" that Orwell describes...

...One might think of it as an authoritarian state with a peculiar (and a peculiarly brutal) history...

...everyone evades the discipline...

...These regimes are the work of political leaders who have, perhaps, the ambition but not the resources necessary for totalitarian rule...

...Or consider the history of political terror: the proscriptions of the late Roman republic and the early empire, when the political elites of the city were systematically slaughtered, first by one military faction, then by another, and finally by the early emperors and their henchmen, seeking not total but absolute power...

...Thus the single-party states of the Third World, with their faked ideologies and their ideologically justified brutality...

...These won't necessarily be oppositionist ideas...

...or the more far-reaching terror of the Zulu emperor Shaka, which has been powerfully evoked in Victor Walter's well-known study and sounds indeed like a primitive totalitarianism —except, again, that none of the special features of totalitarian politics are present...

...Even the least efficient of authoritarian rulers makes some gesture toward a program of this sort...

...But the contrast makes less sense if we focus on the regimes that are today called totalitarian, that is, if we query the permanence of the totalitarianism described by the theorists of the '50s...

...Power is actually used with other ends in mind...

...Bureaucratic and police control are probably more strict than in most historical and contemporary authoritarian states...

...But Orwell had already taken the argument one step further: Winston Smith is alive at the end of 1984 and ready at last to acknowledge that he loves the leader of the Party...

...Political (as distinct from religious) messianism is an impossible creed without a lively sense of motion, the constant overcoming of material obstacles and, what is probably more important because more dangerous and stirring, of human enemies...

...in any case, they "were content to leave loose ends everywhere...

...They repress their enemies, control their subjects, and look only for some marginal improvement in their domestic or international position...

...The reference here is to a specific historical incident...

...This is not a mental set consistent with the kind of political mobilization or messianic zeal described by the early theorists of totalitarianism, and while it represents an accommodation to social control, it is also an evasion of anything that can plausibly be called total control...

...At least, it can't do these things through linguistic means, but only through social and political means: by listening in on every conversation and punishing anyone who speaks (or pauses in speech, or shrugs while speaking) inappropriately...

...social control is intensified to the point where commitment and self-discipline lose all meaning...

...306...

...When Weber talked about the routinization of charisma he did not mean to describe the death of charisma...

...The human costs 299 of their rule, therefore, are hardly worth noticing...

...And the novelty of totalitarianism is tied, backhandedly, to the novelty of radical politics—to the hopes it engendered, the discipline it taught, and the people it organized...

...It is not an unambitious program, and it doesn't support the radical distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism...

...The query is appropriate because it is one of the points of the contrast—emphasized heavily by contemporary conservatives—that totalitarianism is stable in a way that authoritarianism is not...

...Authoritarian rule has turned out to be the true legacy of totalitarian movements and parties...

...Still, in describing the regime of the oligarchs, it is hard to strike the apocalyptic note so easily struck in the 1950s...

...The contrast between totalitarianism and authoritarianism makes sense if we imagine Hitler's and Stalin's regimes as permanent political systems (or as theoretical ideal types...

...Indeed, the routine repressiveness of authoritarian regimes helps to account for the secretive, disciplined, and elitist character of the party that seizes power—and also for its (short-lived) mass appeal...

...Radical control, control in detail: perhaps earlier rulers dreamed of such a thing, but it became technically feasible —this is one of the central themes of 1984 —only in the 20th century...

...it requires people who march...

...The speeches of Stalinist officials were already written in something very much like "Newspeak," and I don't think Orwell doubted that the two-way television set would actually be in use by 1984, if not sooner...

...Only an extraordinary lack of ambition among the epigones, however, would make this a plausible solution...

...If the idealization doesn't work in the real world, then the theory of totalitarianism needs to be revised...

...They are right, it seems to me, to stress the importance of the argument...

...A society in which this "holy of holies" is recognized in the official press may be an awful society in many ways, but it is, again, something less than totalitarian...

...Christianity after its routinization was still a vibrant faith...

...But whereas in the home country the Party is simultaneously the heir and the annihilator of revolutionary aspiration, in the countries of the empire it is simply an annihilator—and then an agent of foreign rule...

...Inside Germany it seemed to have overcome all opposition, and its officials had actually carried through the systematic murder of millions of people...

...The oligarchs are still brutal, and political opposition is still a dangerous and most often a lonely business...

...There is no space for dissent or 302 debate, no space for a free intellectual or cultural life...

...One can imagine struggles for power, large-scale proscriptions, great cruelties still to come, but the ideological frenzy and the idealized savagery of the Stalin years look now like a moment in history and not like a historical era...

...Discipline, action, and engagement are required only from the members of the new elite, the totalitarian party...

...But the regime has a short life, and we won't succeed in understanding it if we assign it a permanent place in the typologies of political science...

...Success here means that every inner thought and feeling, even vague thoughts and feelings, would be ideologically controlled...

...But is there any evidence that any totalitarian regime has accomplished anything like this anywhere in the world...

...Totalitarianism is the exercise of power for its own sake...

...The decay of the totalitarian regime will leave its mark in the language, as in the conduct, of the people: in the sardonic aside, the muttered reproach, the derisive joke and, at the same time, in the obsequious greeting and the overemphasized slogan...

...Home would become an unendurable place...

...Indeed, the regime can control the dictionary, and it can control the teaching of language in the schools and the use of language in all published materials...

...Totalitarian states can acquire an empire, as the Russians have done in Eastern Europe, and they can insist upon the supremacy of the Party in the lands they conquer...

...But the results are so frightening that the survivors are likely to decide, as Stalin's survivors decided, to do things differently next time...

...In fact, wouldbe leaders are always waiting for the Leader to die (and he does die...

...its captive minds are prisoners of necessity, not 301 converts to a messianic faith...

...We might better think of totalitarianism as the name we give to the most frightening form of authoritarian rule...

...Among the demobilized people, it produces sullen resentment and sporadic resistance...

...Stalinism might have endured had Stalin lived forever, a figure embodying and evoking terror, personalizing the seizure of power . . . and then the seizure of more and more power...

...Since authoritarian rulers aren't even touched by messianism, since they neither seek nor pretend to seek social transformation, since all they want is to hold on to their power and prerogatives, not to exercise greater and greater power, they don't produce the terrible upheavals of totalitarian politics...

...But we might follow Orwell and describe this use of power as an example of "doublethink," simultaneously genuine and deeply cynical...

...It is not quite what Orwell imagined, though his juxtaposition of Party and proles does capture something of the class structure of failed totalitarianism...

...One might think that this intense and pervasive discipline is somehow functional to the stated purposes of the party, much as worker solidarity is functional to the purposes of trade unionism...

...But this is to make both politics and political theory a great deal easier than they are...

...But party members are conceived to have made a profound commitment to political life (again, the model derives from the revolutionary movement) and to have accepted the discipline of the collective...

...Or consider the history of ethnic persecution: the slaughter of Armenians by Turks in the early 1910s or the killings of Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan in 1971...

...Even vague feelings of unease about the regime, of the sort that "can't be put into words," probably require words before they can be felt—for otherwise they would be nothing more than sensations, and the connection to the regime could not consciously be grasped...

...Orwell recognized this fact earlier than anyone else (except, perhaps, the totalitarian leaders themselves), and he proposed to solve the succession problem by making Big Brother immortal: in 1984, the faceless Party rules permanently behind the mask of an eternal Stalin...

...Modern totalitarian democracy," Talmon wrote a few years later, " . . . is completely different from the absolutism wielded by a divine-right king or by a usurping tyrant...

...The dominant fact about politics today is the dominance of repression, censorship, torture, and murder, all of a largely traditional kind, though the traditionalism is sometimes masked by ideological pretension...

...Perhaps, as Orwell's Goldstein says, "the ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas" (though it's not hard to list authoritarian rulers of whom that can't plausibly be said...

...It doesn't generate any sort of enthusiasm...

...The break with the past would be definitive, and the projection of the present into the future would be permanent...

...I suggest that we call it failed totalitarianism...

...These books are often treated as if they were so many volleys in the developing cold war— efforts to draw the line between the free world and Communist tyranny and to define the Russian enemy as the very embodiment of evil...

...It doesn't produce a new man and a new woman...

...Thus the Nazi Gleichschaltung, the top-down coordination of economy, politics, education, religion, culture, and family...

...they are allowed no private 298 thoughts or feelings, no respite from political enthusiasm...

...I don't mean to compare any of these examples of authoritarian brutality with the Holocaust or the Gulag...

...About China's rulers we know very little, but the leaders of Russia today are very much like old-fashioned oligarchs: heavy, suspicious, uninspired, brutal—and, like their counterparts in the empire, holding on...

...Yet, in another sense, Orwell was a forerunner: the major theoretical works on totalitarianism as a political regime—on its origins, history, and internal character—all appeared in the early and middle 1950s...

...Old-fashioned authoritarianism is neither petty nor benign...

...When things slow down, when patterns emerge and institutions and relationships take on some sort of stability, totalitarian rule becomes impossible...

...Not only explicitly oppositionist thought: every form of irony, sarcasm, doubt, hesitation must be eliminated from the minds of the people, and this is to be achieved in the most direct and simple way: words simply won't be available to formulate, let alone express, ironic, sarcastic, doubtful, or hesitant thoughts...

...The result is one or another variety of authoritarian rule, dressed up to look "total," in which this or that aspect of communist or fascist ideology is haphazardly acted out...

...There is no merely linguistic remedy for this coldness, no way in which words alone, however rigorously they are defined, can heat the heart...

...The proletarians will never revolt," O'Brien tells Winston Smith in 1984, "not in a thousand years or a million...

...I suppose it isn't inconceivable that there could be a political messianist revival or even a Communist Reformation...

...certainly their arguments, in vulgarized form, made useful propaganda...

...Consider the tyranny of conquest and imperial rule: the Spanish destruction of Aztec civilization, for example, or the terrible cruelty of the early years of Belgian rule in the Congo...

...Totalitarian ambition is bred by authoritarian politics, and terror on the Stalinist or Nazi model seems more likely to figure in the future of old-fashioned tyrannies than in the future of failed totalitarianisms...

...I suspect it is also their nursing mother...

...Orwell saw this clearly, more clearly, I think, than theorists transfixed by the idea of totality...

...A regime that systematically murders its own people is in one respect at least like a utopian community whose members are pledged to celibacy: neither one of them can last indefinitely...

...The line that marks off these two is hard to draw, and to insist upon its central importance doesn't serve any useful political or moral purpose...

...It was never the intention of the theorists of the '50s to celebrate authoritarianism, but perhaps the celebration is a natural step once the contrast has been drawn in this way...

...But who could live with such a child...

...Seizing power and staying in power can both be a brutal business...

...They were not ambitious, or they did not have the resources to realize their ambitions...

...So their lives are carefully shaped and directed...

...where his carnage and his conquests cease...

...its central theological doctrines were still capable of evoking passionate belief, disinterested conduct, artistic and intellectual creativity...

...Totalitarianism is a new kind of regime, different not only from liberal democracy, but also and more importantly from every previous form of tyranny...

...Something less: the problems with the ideal type can be seen with a special clarity in all those countries to which totalitarianism was exported by force of arms...

...it doesn't produce a new language...

...Nor, finally, is it possible to conceive of an ongoing social system in which every participant radically distrusts every other (even if all of them love Big Brother...

...He makes a solitude and calls it—peace...

...The collectivism of the Ingsoc regime of 1984 derives indeed from English socialism, but the institutional structures that the socialists built have been dismantled, and the "proles" they organized have been returned to a state of apolitical quiescence...

...In 1932, Pavlik Morozov, a boy in his early teens and a member of the Young Pioneers, denounced his father to Stalin's secret police...

...But the result can be repressive enough, for the imitation commonly extends to torture, censorship, prison camps, secret police, and so on...

...Here again, totalitarianism appears as the heir of the left, building upon revolutionary aspiration as church officials once built upon eschatological hope...

...In a sense, then, totalitarianism is the heir of all those democratic and socialist movements that first brought the people into the political arena...

...Totalitarianism does not build upon an existing social base, it creates the material and moral foundations of its own 300 existence...

...The truth is that none of the totalitarian creeds was rich enough or resonant enough to sustain popular enthusiasm or official rectitude for long...

...Proclaim the messianist creed and establish the disciplined elite...

...Hannah Arendt begins her own account of the origins of totalitarian politics with the last of these (and with European imperialism generally) —though none of the three features that make for the novelty of totalitarianism are present...

...It is as hard to reproduce as to sustain the sense of perpetual motion on which totalitarian politics depends...

...Every more specific brotherhood is systematically attacked...

...Here is the likely form of doublethink...

...Most of their subjects lived, as they had always lived, more or less at peace...

...That is true, of course, of all ideal types, but here the common truth has a special pointedness...

...Against a background of urbanization, economic development, nation-building, and largescale warfare, tyrannical ambition is transformed: it reaches farther than ever before...

...They are expected to live, writes Orwell's Goldstein, "in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party...

...But however cohesive the new class is, the regime it constitutes is not exempt from internal and unplanned transformations...

...Aristotle certainly understood this when he advised the tyrants of his own time on how to maintain their position: break up traditional patterns of association, cut off the natural leaders of the people, sow distrust and mutual suspicion...

...But the list makes an important point...

...The major theoretical argument of Orwell's book and of all the books that followed is the startling novelty of totalitarian politics...

...But the collective effort to underThis essay is part of 1984 Revisited, edited by Irving Howe...

...Political messianism doesn't follow the sword...

...Those who defend authoritarianism because it isn't "total" have failed to grasp the historical connection between what they defend and what they decry...

...Popular mobilization consists only in this: that insofar as the people have any public life at all, it is planned and run by party officials...

...The installation of a totalitarian leader is unimpressive without the sacrament of blood...

...If 1984 was a piece of political science fiction, it hardly required any great imaginative leap...

...But Orwell's argument confuses vocabulary with language, and it confuses the writing of a dictionary with the establishment of a vocabu303 lary...

...Russia today is a dictatorship resting on popular apathy, the hollow shell of a totalitarian regime...

...Ideological zeal is a sign only of conformity and not of conviction...

...In both these cases, there is considerable evidence of planning and coordination...

...And what is unendurable won't be endured, not for long at any rate...

...The end of days is not a date, and totalitarianism is not a regime...

...It is the living tomb of a utopian—or better, of an antiutopian—project...

...Czeslaw Milosz's Captive Mind came out in 1953...

...We ought to distinguish, I think, between 304 the moment of totalitarian terror and the regime that makes the moment possible...

...Totalitarian endurance is usually seen as an institutional problem...

...Failed totalitarianism, both in its authentic and in its exported and imitated versions, may well be one of the relatively stable forms of authoritarian politics...

...In our minds and memories the moment is (and should be) eternal: we can never forget it or give up trying to explain how it happened...

...But the distinction they go on to draw between totalitarian and "authoritarian" regimes plays a part in their work that the theorists of the '50s never intended: it functions very much like and often simply replaces the cold war distinction between communism and the free world...

...It was the peace that the tyrant brought, after all, that was once called the peace of the grave (as by Byron in The Bride of Abydos...

...But except in the matter of murder, it isn't notably successful...

...The officials of the regime believe, and they are probably right, that their power can be maintained only by upholding the apparatus of the movement-state—Gleichschaltung, parallel hierarchies, party discipline, secret police, and so on—even if none of these serve any "higher" purpose, even if the movement-state doesn't move...

...O VI rwell makes the most heroic and perhaps the most original attempt to defend the long dark night thesis...

...What is necessary is that the people be present and accounted for, available for demonstrations and mass meetings...

...stand what had happened in Germany and Russia was immensely serious, and the level of analysis in the books I have listed was very high...

...In the course of the struggle for power the movement cultivates this sense of motion, and can't relinquish it afterward...

...The situation isn't very different in pretotalitarian tyrannies, which are also open to unplanned transformations—one of which, of course, is the totalitarian seizure of power itself...

...Orwell suggests that control has two forms, negative and positive...

...VII W hat are we to call this regime of coldness, this government of opportunists and cynics...

...Social control too, at least in the heightened form that Orwell gives it, is dependent upon continuous upheaval, crisis, struggle, and instability...

...Nor is there an imaginable political elite that will accept and live with the reality of a "permanent purge...

...This probably means that inimical "ideas" could not be entertained at all...

...Compared with all this, merely authoritarian regimes can indeed be made to look like a kind of small-time thuggery: amateurish, corrupt, inefficient...

...Nor was the distinction between freedom and tyranny their central point...

...Hence no political or cultural thaw can ever be allowed to usher in a genuine spring...

...No one can say that of Soviet Marxism today...

...Corruption and cynicism are common at every level of society...

...By then many of its major themes had been anticipated, both in conservative literature and in the internal debates of the democratic left (and in such earlier antiutopian novels as Zamiatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World...

...In the regime of the epigones, the frenzy ceases, enthusiasm fades...

...That apologia was no part of the original theory, whose terms were fixed by the Holocaust and the Gulag...

...Stalinism was triumphant not only in Russia, but in Eastern Europe—and then in China too...

...But others can build here too...

...The governments of Eastern Europe, especially after the East German uprising of 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the Czech spring of 1968, the rise and fall of Poland's Solidarity union in 1980-81, all look like authoritarian regimes, dressed up, as it were, in the ideology of totalitarianism...

...Totalitarianism is far more dependent than religious messianism upon a quick success...

...their language is a bureaucratic version of Oldspeak...

...Ingsoc is parasitic on English socialism, which it defeats and replaces...

...The brutality of old-fashioned tyrants is temporary, a brief eruption...

...working for the cause has been transformed from a calling into a career...

...Recent events in Poland suggest that one way of dealing with these phenomena, one response to the ultimate failure of failed totalitarianism, is a military takeover and an overt return to authoritarian rule...

...That popular resistance is still possible has been demonstrated repeatedly in Eastern Europe...

...Totalitarianism involves a systematic effort to control every aspect of social and intellectual life...

...Mass mobilization, political messianism, and intense social control are supposed to produce a new age and a new human being...

...Some paragraphs of this essay are drawn from a talk on J. L. Talmon and the theory of totalitarianism, prepared for a colloquium in Talmon's memory held in Jerusalem under the sponsorship of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in June 1982...

...Were Newspeak established, Orwell writes, "ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form...

...Orwell provides a portrait in his account of the Parsons family—which concludes: lt was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children...

...C. J. Friedrich's Totalitarianism, an important collection of essays, appeared in 1954 and marked the academic arrival of the new theory...

...it has a characteristic form that we know from Russian history...

...The solution lies in creating a language that serves "as a medium of expression for the . . . mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc" and that "makes all other modes of thought impossible...

...Hitler and Stalin briefly approached the "ideal," and so they encouraged theoretical idealization...

...That would be like sneaking the apocalypse into a standard chronology...

...Totalitarianism in the theory of the '50s is more clearly a kind of movement than a kind of state...

...Perhaps they played that role...

...Mark...

...For totalitarianism is the idealization of authoritarian rule...

...A mixed regime, new but not importantly new— and this outcome may well suggest the future of those totalitarian states whose failure is more authentic...

...It is Weber's "typological simplification" ruthlessly put into practice: Aristotle's advice to tyrants brought to its logical conclusion, Shaka's terror turned systematic, the Roman proscriptions universalized, and so on...

...No other goal could possibly sustain the spirit of the marchers...

...The proles are merely pacified, like a colonial population...

...Totalitarianism as an ideal type cannot be realized in fact, or it cannot endure...

...they resemble the puppets they have installed in neighboring states, and they share the same devitalized purpose...

...authoritarian regimes come and go...

...Social control is the precondition of linguistic control, and if social control is anything less than total, "ideas inimical to Ingsoc" will find expression...

...Pavlik was killed by angry relatives and subsequently made into a martyr and "hero" by the Soviet press: the model of a child who put Party and State above "old-fashioned" loyalties...

...Zbigniew Brzezinski published his Permanent Purge in 1956, and Friedrich and Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy came out that same year...

...The theorists of the '50s must have thought that the special mark of totalitarianism was to take revolutionary aspiration seriously and to use state power to enforce its ends...

...And failure brings with it what we can immediately recognize as a central feature of premodern culture: the rulers aim above all at maintaining themselves and serve no "higher" purpose...

...Tree things above all mark the novelty of totalitarian regimes as they are described in the theories of the 1950s...

...By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient"—thus Orwell's Goldstein...

...Bartholomew's Night may represent a brief eruption of brutality, but Louis's campaign was sustained over many years, and it was largely successful, a triumph of authoritarian rule...

...Instead, they and their subjects enjoy what Veblen called the advantages of coming second: they escape the trauma of creation, the revolutionary crisis out of which totalitarian politics was born, and they inherit the most advanced, which in this case means the most decayed, form of the politics they imitate...

...They make their peace with the family...

...Authoritarian rulers aim only to stay in power, but the totalitarian party aims at the creation of a new humanity and a perfect regime...

...They don't attack the traditional social structure, or turn millions of their subjects into refugees, or systematically murder men, women, and children because of their ethnic identity or their class standing: so we are told...

...Failure is instantaneous: no one believes the creed...

...Talmon called this commitment "political messianism" because it suggested the possibility of reaching the end of days through sheer political willfulness...

...In fact, however, failed totalitarianism is one of the more common forms of the modern state, and it isn't necessary to go through a Nazi or Stalinist terror in order to achieve it...

...it can't sustain the enthusiasm of its subjects or transform their primary loyalties...

...But this is what the leaders of the totalitarian homeland look like too, once the struggle for power has receded into the past: it is as hard to sustain as to export and reproduce the crucial sense of permanent crisis...

...It is as if 1984 released the flood, and writers of all sorts (many of them, unlike Orwell, refugees from totalitarian states) hurried forward to complete or revise "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" of 1984's Emmanuel Goldstein...

...Djilas's New Class, which appeared just after the spate of books on totalitarian politics and provides a useful corrective to their (anti-) utopianism, suggests what is probably a more accurate, and certainly a more conventional, sociology...

...Totalitarianism can be described as the absolute reversal of radical politics: popular movements are demobilized and replaced by a disciplined elite party...

...The first is the political mobilization of the masses...

...they make only the most routine ideological gestures...

...And what is totalitarianism as an ideal type but a superbly successful Aristotelian tyranny...

...their every movement is watched...

...If totalitarianism finds its perfection in the death camps, then it can only be a temporary society...

...The third mark is the decisive one...