Totalitarianism Reconsidered

...What followed the Stalin dictatorship was a mere oligarchy, dead in spirit and unable to preserve even its powers and privileges...

...Now that the communist world has collapsed, it is tempting to stress the mistakes and excesses of the 1950s theorists: their categorical absolutism, their "essentialism," their inclination to see an apocalypse that would bring historical motion to an end, and their tendency to endow the totalitarian state with an almost mystical "perfection" that it did not really have...

...Written in 1938, before the full impact of the total state could be registered, this passage points to the historically unprecedented extent of its reach: the wish and, for a time at least, the ability to control the whole of existence...

...but apathy, socially regarded, is always more than just apathy...

...If he accepts only 99 per cent, he will necessarily have to be considered a foe, for from that remaining one percent a new church can arise...

...But this expectation did not last...

...And at their head, wrote the historian of Nazism, Konrad Heiden, "from the wreckage of dead classes arises the new class of intellectuals .. . the most ruthless, those with the least to lose, hence the strongest: the armed bohemians...

...It is the essence of a totalitarian state that it subjects the economy to its aims...

...One of the first was Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian Social Democratic economist, who in 1940 argued against those who called the Stalinist regime "socialist" and those who labeled it "state capitalist...

...It had its own socioeconomic system...

...In the camps, the Nazis created a picture of their ultimate rule: total domination of the individual, total destruction of human spontaneity...

...The psychic-moral components of this flight from the mundane are brilliantly described by Hannah Arendt: The modern masses] do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience...

...In the vocabulary of Nazism, "selection" also referred to the Ubermenschen or the process by which the Nazi leadership, above and sometimes against the formal party structure, renewed itself (a process for which Stalin also showed a decided talent...

...Which may be why Riesman's observations exerted little influence...

...permanent revolution from above," as the state mobilized itself against internal and external enemies...

...And then there were the commonplace factors of opportunism, fear, greed, vanity...

...The heart of Milosz's book consists of sketches of famous Polish writers who had accepted the Stalinist regime: Alpha, the hero of whose novel "had merely traded his priest's cassock for the leather jacket of a Communist...

...In an oblique thrust at Arendt, he warned against succumbing to "the appeal of an evil mystery...

...the total state, gripped by a mixture of renovating fervor and sadistic fury, proposed to break down the barriers between public and private, transforming the masses into warriors of endless mobilization within and without...

...Traditional tyrannies lacked the means, perhaps the imagination, for exerting complete control over human life...

...The Nazis had an idea—it would be a grave error to ignore this...

...The "ideological heresy of the totalitarian party," wrote the German social democratic theorist Richard Lowenthal, "can only become historically effective when it merges with the material and psychological despair of the masses, owing to the failure of a social order to solve, in accordance with its own fundamental values, the concrete and urgent problems imposed on it by the uncontrolled process of change...

...All of these sketches were brilliantly evocative, dramatizing the feckless repudiation of humanist values that forms so large a portion of twentieth-century intellectual history...

...they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught up by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself...

...It would be a striking mistake," he WINTER • 1991 • 69 Totalitarianism Reconsidered wrote, "to treat totalitarianism metaphysically as a state of society's utter immobility, or of history's absolute freezing, which exclude any political movement in the form of action from below or reform from above...

...Arendt and Orwell had captured the madness of their moment, not as aberration or excrescence but as a driving historical power, and in that, for a time, they were right...

...According to these historians, the possibility of a Stalinist seizure of power in France and Italy was very slight, if only because Moscow realized that any such attempt would probably lead to a war it was not prepared to wage...

...So the role of the follower is fixed: to merge with the movement, to yield heart, soul, and body to the Leader embodying the mystique of history, to abandon personal experience in behalf of phantasmagorical exercises, and to accept the legitimacy of all methods in order to achieve—once and for all...

...And for this they were convinced that it was not very helpful to see totalitarianism as essentially the extension of monopoly capitalism or Leninist dictatorship or even human beings' inherent sinfulness...

...What, then, is the ultimate end of totalitarianism, if indeed it has one...

...A man who swallowed Murti-Bing pills became impervious to any metaphysical concerns...

...Yet it enjoyed an immense following in Europe, as well as a new set of allies in the Third World—glamorized dictators, shabby dictatorships...

...In effect, if not with explicit recognition, this new kind of society comes to signify an end to history...

...The endless purges, the demolition of the Bolshevik cadre, the extreme shifts of line requiring complete shifts of personnel, the uprooting of whole populations, the liquidations of entire social classes: this was his version of total mobilization, called the intensification of the class struggle...

...Even conservatives like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers conceded this...

...There is no reason to believe, wrote Walzer, that the state can control human conversation, "the rhythms, intonations, juxtapositions of any people who can speak at all...

...The darkening of the political horizon in Eastern Europe, with Czechoslovakia taken over by Stalin's troops in 1948, as if to repeat what Hitler had done a decade earlier, brought on a mood of profound depression...

...before brotherhood, destruction...

...Less irrational perhaps than that of Hitlerism, the politics of Stalinism evidently had a greater social appeal, a deeper root in traditional European insurgency, and would therefore prove harder to oppose...

...In fairness, however, we must grant one essential point to Deutscher...

...Perhaps, as a burden of advantage, there was a disposition to accept a little uncritically the notion of a totalitarian "essence," a sort of ideal Platonic form of which the regimes headed by Hitler and Stalin were flawed realizations...

...For what Arendt and Orwell were trying to do was to imagine something at once unimaginable and not at all unlikely...

...I'd merely say they were wrong...

...70 • DISSENT Totalitarianism Reconsidered what was historically novel in the Hitler and Stalin regimes...

...A more fundamental criticism began to unfold after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956...

...For we are witnessing one of the most remarkable transformations in modern history, giving reason to hope that the time of the total state is gone, even if there remains the possibility of a reversion to authoritarian rule...

...In thinking about the world of 1984 morbidity is hardly the worst of possible errors...

...A man who used these pills changed completely...

...For they stress a central feature in the thought of the 1950s: 64 • DISSENT Totalitarianism Reconsidered that totalitarianism was a new and unprecedented phenomenon, both as political movement and repressive regime, not to be assimilated to previous tyrannies, as certain nononsense traditionalist historians preferred to do...

...What may seem the apathy of people held down by oppressive 68 • DISSENT Totalitarianism Reconsidered regimes and forced to keep chanting and marching also contains a streak of good sense, of saving skepticism, of rudimentary resistance...

...It led us to conclude that totalitarianism as a system could not be changed from within or modified through conflicts among segments of its ruling elite—a conclusion, as we shall soon see, that in time would be happily damaged...

...Milosz himself remarked, "The one thing that seems to deny the perfection of Murti-Bing [but then, also diamat] is the apathy that is born in people, and that lives on despite their feverish activity...

...He knows that he is evil, but since he does evil for the sake of goodness . . . he considers himself to be the holy evil...

...Once in power, the totalitarian state embarks— its claim to final solutions requires that it embark—on a series of upheavals, assaulting both its own hierarchical structures and other social institutions...

...I have in mind here the decade of the 1950s, close enough in time but separated from us by an intellectual and emotional chasm...

...and the consolidation of a ruling elite, exalted in the Leader, claiming not just a monopoly of power or a variety of goods but the ownership, so to say, of state and society...

...In any case, this was the setting, by no means ideal, for what would prove to be a major intellectual enterprise of the 1950s: the discussion of theories of totalitarianism...

...The implicit assumption was that totalitarianism is a society that has reached a kind of stasis, even if one of sustained chaos...

...Yes...

...I want to end by discussing the criticisms of the totalitarian theorists of the 1950s, but first a brief digression to a still-earlier discussion of the same problems as it flourished in the milieu of the anti-Stalinist left...

...My intent is neither to defend nor assault the thinkers of that decade, but rather to evoke its distinctive provenance and tone, in the hope of never having to encounter it again...

...In all this, the elements of the totalitarian ethos are driven to an extreme...

...In the struggle for world domination, Stalinism seemed to hold the initiative...

...The central premise—the great hubris—of the total state, embodied in the mania of Hitler and the will of Stalin, was "the assumption that everything is possible," which "leads through consistent elimination of all factual restraints to the absurd and terrible consequence that every crime the rulers can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has been committed...

...the erasure of boundaries between state and society, so that "secondary institutions" would be deprived of autonomy...

...Orwell failed to consider that the energies making for terror might also run down, so that it would be replaced, as it was for some years in the Soviet Union, by terror-in-reserve...

...Corruption might serve "as an antidote to fanaticism," a modest human failing against monstrous inhumanity...

...Crucial for him was the presence of a one-party dictatorship arrogating to itself complete authority in social and political life...

...Human nature was not being transformed...

...Some fourteen years later Czeslaw Milosz wrote in The Captive Mind: [I]ntellectual terror is a principle that LeninismStalinism can never forsake, even if it should achieve victory on a world scale...

...From the vantage point of retrospect—one that always grants a keener wisdom than that of our predecessors—the theory of totalitarianism had the great value that it forced attention upon Totalitarianism, Arendt recognized the historical significance of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and keenly suggested certain comparisons between its improvised institutions of self-rule and earlier efforts in Europe to set up workers' councils...

...Try, today in Warsaw or Budapest, to deny this...

...Human nature buckled, adapted, weaved, but survived largely intact...

...Totalitarian movements arose in a soil of decomposition, usually the decomposition of bourgeois society in the early decades of this century, partly as a consequence of an unprecedented pace of social change leading to spiritual disaffection, widespread anomie, and extreme moral confusion...

...Indeed, "Murti-Bing is more tempting to an intellectual than to a peasant or laborer...

...In America intellectuals were captivated by those brilliant young Frenchmen, Sartre, Camus, and Merleau Ponty, with their notions of an existential freedom that might open into social liberation...

...The yearning expressed after the First World War by T.E...

...I begin unsystematically, with two citations from Nazi sources and two from critics of Stalinism...

...What Riesman was warning against was the tendency to see the total state in totalistic terms, making of it something beyond comprehension and thereby perhaps beyond opposition...

...But as experience would soon show, once terror disappeared, such a dictatorship could not long maintain total power, since the risks of opposition decreased, as did the risks of any autonomous enterprise by ordinary people...

...The Nazi and Stalinist movements did not seize control of the world...

...Even the few of us on the anti-Stalinist left inclined to skepticism were impressed by the scope and sweep of Milosz's analysis...

...This, said Arendt, entails not merely the transformation of society but "of human nature itself...

...It now seems quite the other way round: that it is the crisis of the economy and the failure to provide material well-being that have provoked glasnost and perestroika...

...We are still debating the French Revolution...

...He became serene and happy...

...In the main, the reality seems to have been that the experience of intellectuals under Stalinism was not so different from that of other people...

...It was, one felt, This essay was first written for a group of two Tanner lectures, presented at Princeton University in 1990, under the general heading of "The Self and the State...

...I hope it doesn't seem evasive if I say, they were both: right and wrong...

...Traditional tyrannies required passive subjects, while the total state demands active participants, forever mobilized in behalf of sacrifice, meetings, parades, and ritual...

...The spirit of democracy, the tradition of democratic socialism, sentiments of national and ethnic solidarity: all come back, revealing the continuity of human experience and the resilience of the human being...

...their regimes did not survive for more than a few decades...

...it allowed a larger portion of rationality than did Nazism...

...with his quasi-Marxist attribution of the Stalinist "deformation" to Russian historical backwardness (here he followed Trotsky, though without the same critical passion), Deutscher lent a certain aura of necessity to Stalinism, partly legitimating the tyrant as one who was performing the cruel but inescapable tasks of History...

...Some years later, a somewhat crude version of this theory was advanced by Milovan Djilas in his work on the New Class...

...A state economy, however, eliminates precisely the autonomy of economic laws...

...Stalin can justly say, unlike the Sun King, "La Societe, c'est moi...

...So perhaps Milosz was not entirely wrong...

...The destruction of Nazism brought feelings of elation...

...Intellectually, Stalinism evoked keener discomforts than did Nazism, since here the enemy seemed to have come out of "our own" milieu, that of the left...

...George Orwell's Goldstein in 1984, a fictional stand-in for Trotsky, remarks that "By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient...

...In the end, he throws himself into the flames for the glory of mankind...

...in Stalinism it found a kind of distorting mirror, raising problems of identity...

...Hitler's upheavals took, first of all, the form of terror against segments of the Nazi party and then against the German population, purging the former of any potential dissidents and reducing the latter to an all-but-undifferentiated mass (or so, at least, the theory of totalitarianism affirmed...

...He began by evoking a forgotten book WINTER • 1991 • 67 Totalitarianism Reconsidered that had appeared in Warsaw in 1932: its author, Stanislaw Wietkiewicz, creates "an atmosphere of decay and senselessness [that] extends through the entire country...

...the apocalyptic mood they stirred in both followers and opponents has largely faded...

...Orwell, in this respect, was shrewder than Arendt, since in 1984 he anticipated a gradual slackening of the unfuture, a diminution of that ferocious intensity that had marked the totalitarian state...

...Total control of the state in a country with a nationalized economy meant total domination of society...

...We thank the Tanner Lectures for permission to print this, the second one, in Dissent...

...The writers of the 1950s, it may be, were offering less a scientific analysis than a kind of historical poetry, a brilliantly evocative image of what had shattered the modern world...

...66 • DISSENT Totalitarianism Reconsidered the demands of a conception rather than fitting conceptions to the "unevenness" of reality...

...People talked about "a new Europe" rising up from the ashes of the old...

...A special virtue of Michael Walzer's essay "On Failed Totalitarianism" (Dissent, Summer 1983) is that it is written in a spirit of generosity, making clear that its amendments and corrections would not be possible without the prior achievements of those he is criticizing...

...Yet, if I will be allowed a paradox, I believe that these analysts were less "wrong" than were some of their critics who were more "right...

...Certain constants of human behavior, not perhaps the most admirable but valuable as limited defenses against the omnipotent state—such defenses as apathy, corruption, opportunism, crime—still operated, wrote Riesman, in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia...

...The ideology was still there, even if in deep decay...

...No, it's not the end of days...

...For the intellectual, the New Faith [communism] is a candle that he circles like a moth...

...Primo Levi, in his memoir of Auschwitz, tells the story of a Nazi guard who, responding to an inmate, said: "Hier ist kein warum," here there is no why, nothing need be explained...

...As for Stalinism, in its fusion of revolutionary appeals with a code of murderous cynicism, it seemed a coarse parody of long-cherished persuasions...

...There can be no peace...

...And meanwhile, its rise within Europe coincided with the emerging reports of the magnitude— the unimaginableness — of the Holocaust...

...I think the fear of Communist power in the 1950s was justified, with serious liberals and radicals sharing this fear because they saw that wherever Stalinism took over, freedom died...

...The question that was ultimately raised by both Arendt and Orwell—the question of human nature: whether it is endlessly malleable, whether the totalitarian program of leveling it to uniformity could be more than a wild fantasy—was canvassed in another remarkable book of the 1950s, Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind...

...He warned against those in the West—quite as Arendt had warned against the limitations of liberal rationality—who saw the fate of Eastern Europe "in terms of might and coercion...

...This apathy was a defense mechanism employed by those who, against the commands of History, were "victims of the delusion," as Milosz nicely puts it, "that each individual exists as a self...

...There are times when brilliant improvisation is more suggestive and useful than rational caution...

...In any case, how long does a theory have to last...

...The absolute coherence of doctrine—this "Orwellian" notion, in various forms—would become a central element in theories of totalitarianism advanced in the 1950s...

...Precisely the inability of the existing order to satisfy mundane, specifiable needs prompts masses of people to enter a fraternity of combat pledged to unremittent struggle and—because the goal is total—to total methods (falsehood, murder, terror as a system...

...Gamma, "who considered himself a servant of the devil that ruled History, but . . . did not love his master...

...Nor is this symmetry between elite and damned accidental: it is crucial to the workings of the Nazi mind, entailing constant upheaval, a "permanent revolution" within both the master class and the enslaved, which can never be brought to rest or completion if only because the goal of "purity" must always prove elusive...

...Arendt sought to reach the ultimate spirit, the kernel of motive, in Nazism, that which prompted people joyously to kill and be killed...

...Historians of a later moment, usually revisionist in outlook, would write that the fear of communist expansion in Europe had been greatly exaggerated during the 1950s, largely WINTER • 1991 • 63 Totalitarianism Reconsidered because liberals and the anti-Stalinist left had been swept away by cold war hysteria...

...Nor lulled into "harmony and happiness" through dialectical materialism, a philosophy most Polish intellectuals could not begin to fathom...

...ideology as the mental double of terror...

...Later, when I met some young leaders of the Hungarian Democratic Opposition, I listened to their stories of having been brought up in the homes of fanatical Stalinists, true believers even during the years of terror...

...precisely its embodiment of a radical new ethos of blood, terror, nihilism...

...The call goes out for total mobilization, permanent alert, recurrent battle...

...Such an effort must be especially hard for intellectuals, who tend to impose theories drawn from the present upon a helpless past...

...Still, Milosz's narrative persuades one that among these Polish writers there was indeed a kind of idealism at work, often hopelessly entangled with cynical and nihilist sentiments...

...Stalinism used words and symbols representing our hopes...

...All these were no doubt present as contributing factors, but what made totalitarianism so powerful and frightening was precisely its break with old traditions, good and bad...

...To dehumanize systematically both prisoners and guards in the camps meant to create a realm of subjugation no longer responsive to common social norms...

...Her response was exemplary, but I don't believe that her theory of totalitarianism provided a ground, or at least a sufficient ground, for the expectation that there could be major revolts against totalitarian rule...

...Nor was the totalitarian corruption of language a lasting phenomenon...

...and what the camps anticipated in "essence," society would become in substance...

...The meaning of the Holocaust, if it had a meaning, we could not fathom, nor could we absorb its emotional impact...

...And—this strikes close to my theme—one lesson from the post-Hitler years and the stories of refugees from the Iron Curtain is "how hard it is permanently to destroy most people psychologically...

...That is wrong...

...And at home, we were trying to cope with the squalor of McCarthyism...

...to grasp the inner meaning of totalitarianism—again, with the proviso, if there is one—you must yield yourself a little imaginatively, even, as some critics remarked rather nastily about Orwell, with a streak of morbidity...

...to see for a moment what drove a Himmler in reality, an O'Brien in fiction...

...and it claimed to speak in behalf of humanist values, which the Nazis openly despised...

...The followers are welded by the totalitarian movement into an "iron solidarity" marked both by selflessness and by the self-dismantling of fanaticism...

...The totalitarian state goes far beyond Caesero-Papism, for it has encompassed the entire economy of the country as well...

...About Nazism it had little of theoretical interest to say...

...Lawrence and other writers who wished to "lose their selves" was now taken over by millions of persons who had no awareness that they had a self...

...Thereupon, the totalitarian movements break through the cracks of society and rally the masses, those who have lost a consciousness of group interest or class identity and those who have never known it...

...it drew upon or exploited the Marxist tradition...

...To penetrate to the devil's soul, you need a touch of the devil yourself...

...Barbarism had been uprooted...

...a final transformaWINTER • 1991 • 65 Totalitarianism Reconsidered tion...

...Anti-Stalinists of both right and left tended to minimize the possibility that there were serious intellectuals in Eastern Europe who sincerely believed in Stalinism, even during the bitter years of Rakosi and Gottwald...

...Let us now ask the inevitable question about the theorists of the 1950s—Arendt et al...

...By the 1960s, in any case, it had become clear that if you held strictly to Arendt's theory, the Soviet regime in the post-Stalin years could no longer be called totalitarian...

...Unlike theorists who became fixated before the horrors of totalitarianism, he stressed the inescapability of change within the Soviet system...

...Yet precisely because they were more complex and modulated than the theory enclosing them, the sketches undermined Milosz's thesis, for in each case his description made clear that these intellectuals were not simply drawn, like moths to the flame, by the idea of "totalitarian terror for the sake of an hypothetical future...

...The process of "selection," both above and below, could not stand still...

...Totalitarian goals are articulated not as the usual demands of social insurgency—better economic conditions, greater political rights— but as encompassing suprahistorical visions, engrossing fictions of emancipation, which give a kind of perverse validity to Himmler's remark—a parody of Bolshevik doctrine—that his SS men were not interested in "everyday problems" but only "in ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries" (the purification of the race, and so on...

...The Nazi idea would lead to and draw upon sadism but, at least among the leaders and theoreticians, it was to be distinguished from mere sadism...

...It suggests how difficult it is for the rational mind fully to apprehend the totalitarian ethos: arational, anti-utilitarian, disdainful of the idea of limit, persuaded that through will, organization, and terror all existence can be compressed into a mad coherence...

...David Riesman, for example, stressed the danger of overestimating the "capacity of totalitarianism to restructure human personality," of overestimating Stalinism's "efficiency in achieving its horrible ends," and of "mistaking blundering compulsions or even accidents of the 'system' for conspiratorial genius...

...It began to seem that we were entering a time of lively thought and imagination, unshackled by ideological systems...

...A union of world domination and apocalypse, with the aim of straightening everything out, breaking reality to * An apprehension of the psychology behind the nihilism of the Nazis can be found in Sartre's description of the generic anti-Semite: As someone who "has chosen hatred, for hatred is a religion," the anti-Semite "is a criminal for good motives...

...Both the "stimulating fire of competition" and the passionate striving for profit, which provides the basic incentives of capitalist production, die out...

...She wanted to penetrate the heart of darkness, even if the cost was that occasionally her work took on a slight tint of darkness too...

...He was guilty, I think, of an intellectualistic fallacy, that which examines the behavior of intellectuals exclusively or mainly in terms of an autonomous life of ideas—a way of looking at their experience that may lend drama and pathos to an otherwise sordid story...

...With his stress on economic determinism and his belief that the decades of Stalinism constituted a time of "primitive accumulation" (yes, but in behalf of what kind of society...

...Aware that in major respects totalitarianism did reach some of its goals—Hitler destroyed half of European Jewry, Stalin the original Bolshevik leadership as well as millions of innocents—Walzer argued that finally totalitarianism had failed...

...the atomization of social life, with all classes beaten down to a passive, featureless mass...

...This analysis was followed by writings from the dissident left and ex-Trotskyist groups, notably those of Max Shachtman, who developed a theory called "bureaucratic collectivism," which asserted that Stalinist Russia was a new form of exploitative society in which the bureaucracy had stiffened into a ruling class...

...to enter the wanton spaces of the totalitarian mind...

...The enemy, in a potential form, will always be there...

...The critics who so attacked Arendt and Orwell were not entirely inaccurate...

...It is not his fault, at any rate, if his mission is to reduce Evil by Evil...

...Its weaknesses were that it provided a static "take" rather than a "picture in motion," making little or no provision for historical dynamic, and that it did little to analyze the inner workings of the Stalinist economy...

...As Hannah Arendt, the most original theorist of totalitarianism, wrote, "The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into an organization based on common interest...

...The mind reeled...

...Perhaps more useful than Arendt's approach to Stalinism was Trotsky's insight in 1938 that Stalinism and Nazism were "symmetrical phenomena," that is, similar in surface methods but different in social structure and historical character...

...Louis XIV identified himself only with the State...

...The problems he had struggled with until then suddenly appeared to be superficial and unimportant...

...I think of the rending instance of Leszek Kolakowski, today a major intellectual figure of humane sensibilities, who before 1956 was an ardent Stalinist...

...This remark by a shrewd thug provides as good an insight into the camps and the minds of their creators as anything in the entire scholarly literature...

...Theories that serve even a brief historical moment serve us well...

...That no actual society conformed, or could conform, to Arendt's model is not of course a fatal criticism of her work...

...Milosz's own work showed that many of these writers were in fact already marred or soiled by earlier intellectual-moral compromises, that some brought to Stalinism previously nurtured delusions of elitist superiority, and that others had experienced breakdowns of character making them susceptible to totalitarian manipulation...

...Even in the 1950s there was a certain common-sense skepticism with regard to the dominant theories about the total state...

...Before reaching paradise, we have been traditionally taught, we must experience apocalypse...

...So let me here, as one premise of what follows, briefly reaffirm the basic validity of liberal/ leftist anticommunism, while adding that of course this could and often did decline into error, crudity, and oversimplification—something all but unavoidable in moments of severe historical tension...

...They were stronger at evocation than prognosis, keener in searching out historical novelty than in acknowledging historical continuity...

...the only friend will be the man who accepts the doctrine 100 per cent...

...It was an abstract rage, the most terrible of all...

...What Murti-Bing did in Wietkiewicz's fiction, diamat (dialectical materialism) was now doing, said Milosz, for true believers in Eastern Europe, bringing harmony and happiness to the point where they became "impervious to any metaphysical concerns...

...It's an error, argued Riesman, "to imagine social systems as monolithic, and as needing to be relatively efficient to remain in power...

...why then should we expect theories of totalitarianism to be anything but vulnerable...

...Present-day state power...

...Yet some theorists, like Richard Lowenthal, argued that there were still grounds for describing the Soviet Union as a totalitarian society...

...The end of days has not come...

...But Deutscher was mistaken in his assumption that the Soviet Union, because it had a "planned economy" (we might better call it an ill-planned economy) was thereby creating the ground for its own liberalization...

...All this Stalin grasped intuitively, without articulating it to the extent that some of the Nazis did...

...Turning away from Trotsky's Marxist orthodoxy, which labeled the Stalin regime a "degenerated workers state" because it continued to rest on noncapitalist property forms, several figures in the anti-Stalinist left developed an incipient theory of totalitarianism within or near the categories of an unorthodox Marxism...

...The masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency...

...And even Walzer's view that the true legacy of totalitarianism is "authoritarian rule" must now, happily, be greatly modified...

...Her vision was that of a mad relentlessness, a dash toward apocalypse, accepting no enduring peace but driving on toward climaxes of struggle...

...were they "right" or "wrong" in their analysis of totalitarianism...

...And when the Nazis established their realm of subjection in the camps, they brought to a point of completion the impulse to nihilism that is so powerful in modern culture...

...still, honor to those who had enough imagination a few decades ago to fear it would be...

...Before so fearful a prospect, the mind balks, since "in each of us there lurks . . . a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense," taking the phenomenon of terror to be a mere aberration and the stress placed on it by writers like Arendt and Orwell as a yielding to hysteria...

...Wrote Hilferding: A capitalist economy is governed by the laws of the market . . . and the autonomy of these laws constitutes the decisive symptom of the capitalist system...

...But while keenly envisioning a drop from fanaticism to torpor, Orwell did not suppose this would affect the continued employment of terror...

...Human beings cannot be permanently transformed by terror, nor their language by fiat...

...There was a strand of shrewdness in this critique, but it seemed to refuse the imaginative leap required for a full grasp of this new social phenomenon...

...Such assertions found a warm response because they seemed to provide an explanation in depth, beyond mere historical contingencies, for the spread of totalitarian politics, especially Stalinism...

...In the intervening decades there has been no shortage of critiques of the 1950s theorists...

...From no other writers could you gain so strong a "feel" of the totalitarian outlook, its radical demonism, its corrosive nihilism, as from Arendt and Orwell...

...Now, it would be an exaggeration to say that these four citations are enough for a reconstruction of the theory (theories) of totalitarianism, but if the customary visitor from Mars had only these passages, he could, I believe, come up with a pretty fair approximation...

...but active terror had been sharply reduced, if not entirely eliminated...

...And then, continues Milosz, a great number of hawkers appear in the cities peddling Murti-Bing pills...

...With time the flaws in the theorizing of the 1950s grew more glaring...

...For this obscure Polish work Western readers could substitute the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, brilliant in creating, through grim farce, "an atmosphere of decay and senselessness...

...Almost everyone I knew fell into a muted gloom, a half-spoken persuasion that apocalypse would turn out to be without end...

...At the end of his unfinished biography of Stalin, Leon Trotsky writes: "L'Etat, c'est moi," is almost a liberal formula by comparison with the actualities of Stalin's totalitarian regime...

...In the world of 1984 terror takes on a life of its own, almost as if become a mere habit...

...having achieved independence, is unfolding according to its own laws, subjecting social forms and compelling them to serve its end...

...It is no longer price but rather a state planning commission that now determines what is produced and how...

...not only did it rend all theories of progress, it brought into disrepute the very idea of humanity...

...Arendt had a gift for isolating what I'd call a terror of essence...

...Within the left, the major antagonist of this approach was the historian Isaac Deutscher...

...Speaking of Nazi policies for shipping recurrent segments of "inferior peoples" or Untermenschen to concentration and death camps, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, said: "In this process of selection there can never be a standstill...

...Some of his reasons for expecting change were mistaken, but the expectation itself was an important corrective...

...the self was not being recreated, it was being violated...

...If the monstrousness of totalitarianism posited an end to history, it turned out that history did not end, it just dragged on...

...Even the most ardent admirers of Arendt had to admit that her theory offered a keener insight into Nazism than into Stalinism.* While the * In an appendix to the paperback edition of The Origins of Stalin dictatorship might roughly conform to the general traits laid down by the theorists of totalitarianism, it contained distinct elements these theories could barely account for...

...Even its dull parroting of sacred texts enabled critical readers to see that the regime was violating Marxist prescriptions and expectations...

...This Nazi idea formed a low parody of the messianism that declared that once mankind demonstrated its warrant of faith, deliverance would come through a savior bringing "the good days" —a notion debased by totalitarian movements into the physical elimination of "contaminating" races and classes...

...Compared to prevalent liberal and Marxist views of communist society, the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, which anticipates in part the theory of totalitarianism, had one great value: it stressed historical novelty, graphically outlining the shape of the party-state dictatorship...

...the dictatorship was still there, even if less brutal...

...His subject, wrote Milosz, was "the vulnerability of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future...

...Two books were central to this discussion: Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and George Orwell's 1984, the first a historical study and the second an imaginative foreboding...

...starting all over again: the totalitarian blight would remain with us for the rest of our lives...

...It was a nihilism at once selfless and self-obliterating.* The keenest analysts of the 1950s focused on whatever seemed novel in the totalitarian upsurge: terror as integral and enduring...

...The lectures were sponsored by the Tanner Lectures on Human Values and will appear in Volume XII of its annual series (University of Utah Press) in 1991...

...It was this model or nightmare vision that decisively influenced serious thought in the 1950s...

...The events in the Soviet Union show that, as in Italy and Germany a few decades ago, all the sociopolitical forces, good and bad, suppressed by the total state have a way of reappearing once a bit of freedom is allowed...

...Let me now venture a sketch of the central theory...

...q WINTER • 1991 • 71...

...There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction...

...Beta, whose terrible Holocaust experiences had turned him into a despairing nihilist appalled by human physiology and who, after churning out propaganda pieces for the party, stuck his head into a gas jet...

...The Popes of Rome identified themselves with both the State and the Church— but only during the epoch of temporal power...

...Well, this was easy enough to say a few decades later, once Stalinism in France had been crowded into a corner and the Italian Communist party had transformed itself into a quasi-social democratic movement...