Our Peculiar Hell

...Our peculiar hell is not, after all, simply the penalty of human hubris trying to achieve the impossible—it is at least as much the penalty of human failure to move forward as far as possible in a changing world...

...But beyond this, we must bear in mind that the most dynamic free societies we have known have belonged to civilizations which believed in a social order founded on freedom and in the value of the effort of the individual...

...it denies the very ideas of truth and justice...

...Now the functioning of any society depends on a set of common beliefs and institutions which together characterize a civilization...

...Northern Viet-Nam would not be Communist to-day if France had granted independence to the Indo-China states at the same time and on similar terms as Britain did in India, Burma and Ceylon...

...it is equally obvious that they are changes within a continuity of fundamental values...

...They point to the age-old tradition of Asiatic despotism, to the Pharaohs who had their pyramids built by state slaves, or—more pertinently—to the pattern of plebeian revolution ending in tyrannis in ancient Greece or in the Italian Renaissance...

...Moreover, our analysis has tended to show that the victories of totalitarianism so far have been due to the failures of free societies to move forward in timely adjustment to the spontaneous changes they have produced...

...For it is implied in the definition of a free society that there is no single center responsible for making these adjustments—that its overall development is not "planned...

...The most widespread among these interpretations centers around the concept of "secular religion...

...But such a breakdown in the continuity of development of a civilization inevitably gives a chance to the totalitarians—the spiritually disaffected minorities who are prepared to sacrifice the basic values of that civilization to the cult of absolute power for the sake of the accomplishment of a preconceived "perfect" social order...

...but this by itself would hardly entitle us to speak of a basically new political and social phenomenon...

...If traditional societies are characterized by built-in resistance to change, and free societies by the production of spontaneous and uncoordinated change, totalitarianism may be described as an engine of centrally manipulated change...

...At that time, the medieval forms of social and political organization broke down in all the most advanced areas of Europe...

...An analysis which stresses the crucial importance of these humdrum political, economic and social problems for the victory or defeat of totalitarianism in a given situation may seem less profound than one that emphasizes man's loss of faith and his subsequent rebellion against the human condition as the ultimate cause...

...The first thing to note here is that any free society is bound to produce spontaneous, manifold and uncoordinated change...

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...It is in that sense that the survival of a free society is always precarious...

...while the Church, the authoritative guardian of these norms, visibly shared in the general demoralization...

...the Communist system fails to promote productivity at the required rate...

...It is surely significant that it was only during this period that the chiliastic heresies, which had occurred for centuries before, acquired the form of political mass movements and thus became true precursors of modern totalitarianism...

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

...but there must be continuity in the fundamental values underlying all the changing formulations and institutional forms if the civilization is to survive...

...They have discussed the dynamic nature of the totalitarian power-drive and of the ideologies in which it finds expression, and the resulting tendency both to limitless outward expansion and to the limitless internal transformation of the conquered society according to a preconceived pattern...

...MODERN TOTALITARIAN PARTIES, then, get the chance to win power owing to the failure of free—or of newly freed traditional—societies to respond adequately to the problems created by accelerated or even catastrophic social change, and to their consequent breakdown...

...And it is striking at first sight that the Greco-Roman and Western societies have also been the great seedbeds of spontaneous social change—culminating in the modern era of worldwide technological and economic transformation...

...Both ultimately reduce themselves to the limits of human foresight or, to put it positively, to the infinite productivity of history...

...Whole social strata have been destroyed and new ones created in country after country...

...But both the political scientists and the historians who have studied the rise and fall of this or that particular dictatorship have been somewhat reluctant to ask the basic historical question about twentieth-century totalitarianism—the question of what are the fundamental forces that have brought it into being at this particular stage in the development of humanity...

...Belief in the rule of "the people," in the abstraction of the volonte generale, is shown to rest on the illusion of the natural "goodness" of the common people and the harmony of their interests...

...By "free society" I do not mean in this context a particular political system, such as modern parliamentary democracy...

...Progress, in that view, becomes a necessary object of endeavor not in order to achieve heaven on earth, but simply in order to avoid hell on earth...

...and this doctrine implies that only a limited number of wicked oppressors stands between the people and the attainment of universal happiness by political means...

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

...If I had to select items of twentieth-century evidence to be found one day by future historians and archaeologists, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the protocols of the Moscow trials would be high on my list...

...It would be far more debatable if the concept were applied to the later centuries of Roman Caesarism or to the Eastern Christian empires of Byzantium and Muscovy, and certainly wrong to use it for any of the great indigenous civilizations of Asia...

...still less do I mean a society which would guarantee an optimium of all-round freedom...

...Such a "minimum-definition" of a free society serves merely to distinguish it from totalitarian despotism on one side and from a traditional authoritarian society bound by rigid rules on the other, but leaves room for a wide variety of institutions...

...A separate, but related, explanation traces the origin of totalitarianism to the fallacy of revolutionary democracy—in fact, to Rousseau...

...In our context, on the other hand, both the ideas of the Enlightenment and their totalitarian perversions appear as so many different attempts by members of our free society to adjust their beliefs to the facts of a changing world...

...the tyrannis continues the revolutionary transformation of society...

...To this phenomenon, so familiar from the consequences of the recent worldwide spread of Western influence, the most nearly analogous event in earlier Western history is the great crisis of the Renaissance— a crisis which started in the 14th century and did not end until Reformation and Counter-reformation had done their work...

...The resources of the Nazi empire, however completely geared to war, proved insufficient to secure world domination...

...but in contrast to the latter it has the merit of focusing attention on those elements in the situation which it may be in our power to change...

...it does not aim at keeping its subjects politically quiet, but at forcing them into active support of its ever-new campaigns...

...That fact cannot be adequately explained merely by uncovering the spiritual and intellectual roots of the ideas which animate the active totalitarian minorities...

...Instead, the adjustments occur as a result of political and social struggles between different groups, and their outcome is not predetermined...

...In every case, whether consciously religious or not, these ideas derive from the isolation of the element of chiliastic prophecy in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of our civilization, which is appropriated by the self-appointed Elite for its own purposes...

...Modern man, we are told, having lost his faith in God, has found the human condition intolerable...

...In attempting that rehabilitation, I have sought to offer a correc tive for a certain bias which seems to be implicit in the one-sided spir itual and ideological explanation of totalitarianism: a bias in favor of traditional authority and revealed religion...

...Entire continents of traditional societies have been "opened up" by the expanding West and forced into a lop-sided international division of labor, only to react within a few generations with a political and economic counter-movement of autonomous modernization which expelled the intruders and forced them in turn to readjust their channels of trade...

...This danger to the continuity of a civilization is clearly greatest when the spontaneous social changes are of a kind that is in flagrant contradiction with the traditional view of what the social order ought to be and hence with the moral norms of behavior of large groups, or that destroys the functional status and material security and hence the self-esteem of such groups...

...certainly the relation of our twentieth-century party dictatorships to such phenomena as the Anabaptist republic of Jan van Leyden on one side, to the rule of the Jacobins on the other, is more genuine and throws more light on their nature than the alleged "precedents" we have mentioned before...

...Yet these technical advances in the apparatus of oppression and mass manipulation are not the decisive reason for the comparative durability of modern totalitarian regimes...

...In that case, the continuity of civilization is broken, and the door is opened to barbarism—to political and spiritual chaos...

...For another, it aims at controlling all spheres of life of a highly complex and differentiated society, at extinguishing any remnant of independent forces, every germ of pluralism...

...They recall the link-up between an expanding empire and a fanatical faith during the conquering period of Islam or the European wars of religion, and they conclude that our contemporary horrors are just another instalment in the recurrent story of unrestrained power and blind intolerance...

...But there is no guarantee that the necessary ideological and in stitutional adjustments will always be made in good time...

...or for the satanic belief that he can overcome his sense of guilt by proving in action that he belongs to the chosen elite who may cominit any crime without fear of retaliation...

...Nor is there any inherent guarantee that such improvisations must always fulfill their purpose of preserving the regime rather than undermining it...

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...The individual in a free society may always feel that he could in some sense do better than he is doing—by improving his personality in accordance with classical or purifying his soul in accordance with Christian ideals, by extending his knowledge or adapting his conduct to stricter moral demands, by bettering his station, increasing his power, accumulating wealth or making a greater contribution to the common good...

...A society which contains a multitude of autonomous units, feeling relatively secure in the pursuit of their particular goals, is apt to produce more innovation of all kinds than one that is governed by an all-powerful despot with a vested interest in keeping things as they are...

...I BELIEVE THAT THE KEY to the role of totalitarianism in our century is that contemporary civilization has to cope with an unprecedented pace of social change...

...The modern one-party state is thus seen as but a successful development of the "totalitarian democracy" of the Jacobins...

...It is not simply the consequence of a refusal to accept the human condition, but at least as much the price of a complacent readiness to accept inhuman but man-made conditions as if they were unalterable and god-given...

...From that angle, it seems plainly futile to say that the attempt ought not to have been made at all...

...it is a sober, non-Utopian, but active faith in our power and duty to preserve our free civilization in the only way it can be preserved—by the unending labor of progress...

...The saving grace remains that even the most perfect man-made hell is based on the necessarily imperfect calculations of men...

...Ours is the century in which novels about the future ceased to be Utopias and became nightmares—and not without reason...

...It extinguishes freedom and individual security...

...In other words, the spiritual or ideological "heresy" of the true totalitarians will 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 processes of change...

...There is some truth in both these interpretations...

...I simply mean any society which is "pluralistic" in the widest possible sense—any society, that is, where political, economic and spiritual power are not concentrated at a single point, where the social structure is not frozen in castelike rigidity, and where the individual enjoys a minimum of security under the rule of law...

...A belief in representative government and individual rights might in the Middle Ages have been interpreted as a belief in corporative institutions—the Estates—and in the rights of each according to his station...

...The danger of totalitarian revolution is greatest where the resistance of the ruling groups to ideological and institutional change is most rigid...

...One is given by the fact that even the most efficient totalitarian state is unable to foresee, prevent or canalize all the spontaneous changes that may arise in the lives and minds of its members...

...For where the necessary adjustments fail to be made, the official institutions and beliefs cease to correspond to the evident facts of social life and thus lose their binding force—their hold over the minds of men...

...They have studied the centralized structure of the totalitarian party, which enables its leaders to change their "social basis" at need and to rely on a shifting balance of classes, and the manner in which this party merges with the state machine after the seizure of power...

...By contrast, attempts at such a general and fundamental interpretation have come from political philosophers and religious thinkers: totalitarianism, when it has been recognized at all as one of the crucial problems of our time, has been largely "explained" as an error of thought—as a spiritual heresy or a fallacious political doctrine...

...To quote the closing words of Trotsky's unfinished biography of Stalin: 'L'Etat, c'est moi' is almost a liberal formula by comparison with the actualities of Stalin's totalitarian regime...

...There are still historians and other educated people who would deny the originality and uniqueness of what, for want of a shorter name, we call totalitarianism...

...and that will be doubly true if the citizens of a free society have as much chance to better their position by their independent efforts as the subjects of the despot might get by carrying out his will...

...Free societies" in this sense have clearly existed during the main periods of the classical, Greco-Roman civilization, and—with the exception of certain periods of crisis—during most of the history of our own "WesternChristian" civilization, and have to some extent spread with the latter over large portions of the globe...

...Yet it still fails to answer the historical question why this recurrent heresy, or recurrent paranoia, should have attained such enormous destructive power just in our century...

...in our time, it has increasingly come to include the demand for democratic control over economic life and for equality of economic opportunity...

...the party tends to perpetuate its rule by the very fact that it continues to distort the development of society into an artificial pat tern by what we have called a "permanent revolution from above," so that the resulting structure would collapse without the support of the dictatorial power...

...For far from confirming the view that these aberrations are the consequence of the widespread loss of religious faith, the evidence shows that they arose again and again within the religious universe of the Middle Ages and have undergone no essential change by assuming a secular form in modern times...

...The answer to the totalitarian challenge is not the acceptance of things as they are...

...The paranoiac reactions, including the precursors of mod ern totalitarianism, had been part of a profound crisis of that civilization— due to a failure of its beliefs and institutions to keep pace with the realities of spontaneous social change...

...For it is only under the impact of catastrophic social change, and of the apparent impossibility to regain their lost personal dignity and material security within an order based on the old values, that millions of people are prepared to entrust their fate to the advocates of "total" revolution, to take flight from freedom and to seek salvation in the arms of the omnipotent state...

...Cohn has pointed out, it was only then that large masses of people found themselves in a situation of helpless disorientation and material and spiritual insecurity which offered a fertile soil for paranoiac reactions...

...IT MAY APPEAR that in this article I have been mouthing the Platitudes of Progress...

...In that view, a passionate concern with the phenomenon of totalitarianism appears merely as proof of a parochial timehorizon— a deplorable lack of historical detachment...

...For one thing, totalitarian dictatorship is the product of the age of mass democracy...

...If the ever-new revolutions imposed on Soviet society by its rulers bear witness to the ingenuity of the latter, they also prove their need to improvize in response to changes and pressures not foreseen in the doctrine: Stalin's plan for the "transition to Communism" has had to be shelved, while Khrushchev's reorganization, suddenly conceived as an act of self-preservation of the party regime, was as unforeshadowed by Communist theory as Stalin's blood purge itself...

...In the history of Soviet Communism—the most longlived totalitarianism within our experience—the forced collectivization of 1929-32 and the forced incorporation of the new industrial bureaucracy into the ruling party as a result of the blood purge of 1936-38 have been such artificial transformations of society in the interest of the preservation of totalitarian power...

...Bolshevism, for all its spiritual antecedents which the historians of the Russian intelligentsia have traced, would not have won power in 1917 if its opponents had been willing and able to end the war immediately and to distribute the land...

...the other is that spontaneous social development continues outside its territorial boundaries, and may for all its groping nature prove in the long run superior to the preconceived pattern...

...for the very need for them proves that something in the theoretical expectations about the direction of economic and social change has gone wrong...

...This, precisely, is the strength of totalitarianism as an established system, and the justification it proffers for all its horrors...

...The state must be all-powerful, because the state has become the demiurgus of society...

...LET US NOW RETURN to the special conditions of our century...

...Population change, stimulated by the early stages of industrial growth and sustained by the development of modern medicine, has been equally stupendous...

...They have described the institutional tools of the totalitarian state, such as its monopoly of mass organization and of information, which enable it to mobilize all social energies for its purposes, and have pointed out the contrast to the merely negative controls employed by traditional authoritarianism...

...mate a part of the study of this phenomenon as is the analysis of totalitarian political institutions...

...I have merely stated the obvious fact that free societies tend to produce "material progress" in the sense of spontaneous technical and social change...

...In fact, however, twentieth-century totalitarianism shows essential features which are not to be found in any slave state, theocracy or revolutionary tyrannis of the past...

...The totalitarian regimes are thus not only the result of the problems created by accelerated social change—they are the creators of an alternative method of coping with these problems...

...it seeks to eliminate every vestige of independent development not in order to keep things static in the manner of traditional despotism, but in order to replace the risks of "anarchic" and unforeseeable change by the certainties of "orderly" change according to a preconceived pattern, based on the values of the totalitarian movement and its concept of the future and purpose of society...

...The important difference is that the men of the Enlightenment tried to make their adjustment by a continuous development of the basic Western beliefs in the value of reason and the freedom of the human person, while the totalitarians have rejected one or both of these fundamental values...

...instead of looking for the origin of totalitarian deviltry, I suggest that we should consider the precariousness of a free society in present-day conditions...

...the medieval moral norms proved grossly inadequate to the new commercial economy...

...and that belief in itself has been a powerful agent of social change...

...It contains elements of all three, but combines them in a new context: the slave state is not static, but commands a modern industrial economy with rapidly changing technique...

...the ultimate removal of the right of the kolkhozes to dispose of their produce, envisaged in Stalin's last pamphlet as an essential feature of the transition to the higher stage of "Communism," would have been another similar "revolution from above...

...It is obvious that these changes in popular beliefs and accepted institutions have been necessitated by the changes in the social structure of our Western civilization brought about by spontaneous economic growth, by the spread of universal literacy and by the new problems posed by capitalist industry...

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...This may occur most easily when a society which only recently seemed to vegetate quietly in the shelter of a traditional way of life, where changes were slow and imperceptible, is suddenly awakened by outside intrusion and exposed to the unwonted air of freedom and drastic change...

...In either case, man's attempt to rebel against God ends in his total enslavement to the state—his effort to create heaven on earth in the creation of hell on earth...

...Taught by the humanists that he is master of his own fate, he has readily fallen for the Utopian belief that the state can abolish evil and suffering by creating a perfect society, if only the right people are given absolute power...

...according to the particular constellation of forces in a particular place and time, they may take different forms or may altogether fail to be accomplished...

...in the long run, his doctrine is likely to hamper his objective by its inevitable one-sidedness...

...the official religion is secular...

...We may add that the same period also saw the outbreak of a non-chiliastic form of mass paranoia—the hunting of witches—and that both forms rapidly lost importance after Reformation and CounterReformation had succeeded in bringing moral norms into line with the new social realities, thus restoring the continuity of Western Christian civilization...

...Khrushchev's present reorganization of the Soviet government and its economic planning machinery, aimed at establishing more direct administrative control by the party machine and breaking the independence of the economic and administrative experts which has tended to reassert itself even inside the party, looks like an attempt at yet another turn of the same screw...

...We are speaking, of course, of genuinely "homegrown" totalitarian revolutions, not of totalitarian Quisling regimes imposed by conquest, which are a secondary phenomenon...

...Twentieth-century man has brought forth his own peculiar hell—the modern one-party dictatorship, inhibited by no law or moral consideration in the exercise of its power, recognizing no private refuge of the individual in its effort to penetrate every sphere of life and to make every subject serve its purpose...

...and I have suggested that "political and ideological progress"—the adaptation of ideas and institutions to that spontaneous change—is required not in order to assure an approach to perfection, but to prevent a breakdown of civilization...

...Once in power, they benefit in comparison with their precursors from all the modern advances in the technique of centralized administration and of communications as well as in the applied psychology of propaganda and terror...

...As social change occurs, the institutions have to be adapted and the beliefs reformulated...

...Stalin can justly say, unlike the Sun King, 'La Societe, c'est moil' IN RECENT YEARS, this unique nature of modern totalitarianism in its various forms—nationalist-fascist and communist—has come to be recognized by a growing number of students of political science, particularly in the United States...

...for as Prof...

...it calls for an understanding of the special conditions which have made it possible to found powerful empires on these ideas...

...Moreover, as the actual people are normally unwilling to sacrifice their actual, limited and conflicting interests to the single-minded pursuit of this ideal, the doctrine logically leads a selfappointed elite of doctrinaires to substitute their own will for the theoretically deduced will of "the people"—i.e., to establish a revolutionary dictatorship of the Jacobin type...

...The real problem remains why, while the terroristic rules of earlier messianic movements remained ephemeral and isolated —that of the Jacobins no less than those of the Bohemian Taborites and the Muenster Anabaptists—totalitarianism has become one of the dominating forces of our age...

...In the short run, the demiurgus armed with an all-embracing theory of society is apt to prove more effective in his chosen direction —the concentration of power—than the uncoordinated efforts of free men...

...The uncovering of this "spiritual" factor in totalitarian movements —or, if one prefers, of the paranoid element in them—is thus as legiti * The Pursuit of the Millennium...

...by the end of the 18th century, it could be interpreted without absurdity only as a belief in parliamentary government and equal political and legal rights for all citizens...

...In fact, however, I have made no assumptions about progress towards a given ideal of perfection...

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

...That reason must be found in the fact that, in contrast to the more naive utopianism of their predecessors, the totalitarian movements of our time are armed with "scientific" doctrines for the transformation of the actual societies on which they operate—doctrines which claim to point the way to some kind of national or social Utopia, but which lead in their practical application to the concentration of ever-increasing power in the hands of the totalitarian elite...

...A belief which identifies the will of the ruling minority with that of "the people," its aims with universal happiness and its opponents with Evil incarnate, naturally justifies the elimination of all safeguards for dissenting groups and individuals and finally leads to the rule of a single leader—a rule as absolute as ever that of any king, but free from the restraints imposed by tradition on the hereditary monarch...

...It is, of course, no accident that this "acceleration of history" has started from the "free" west...

...Nazism, for all its roots in German history, would not have been victorious in 1933 if Keynesian full-employment policies had been developed and accepted at that time by the ruling parties of the Weimar Republic...

...Norman Cohn in his recent study of the chiliastic medieval sects* has brilliantly shown...

...It seems natural enough that in the face of such a total upheaval, the mechanism of self-adjustment of some of the younger industrial countries on the fringe of Western civilization and of some of the hitherto traditional societies now sucked into the whirlpool should have broken down...

...The most they are willing to concede is that modern communications technique, by creating more efficient media of mass propaganda, has placed an additional weapon into the hands of the despot...

...I am thus proposing to reverse the problem...

...By deriving the Utopian ism or satanism of the totalitarian movements from man's attempt to rely on himself alone, an the belief in revolutionary dictatorship from the illusions of revolutionary democracy, these interpretations tend to place the "guilt" for essentially anti-humanistic and anti-democratic movements on the humanistic and democratic ideas of the Enlighten ment...

...And whenever a number of individuals are engaged in such endeavors, whether idealistic or material, altruistic or self-seeking, the aggregate result is spontaneous social change: changes in population, in production techniques, in tastes and needs and in social stratification...

...in every case, the resulting distortion of the elite's vision of society and its own role in it amounts to a collective paranoid phantasy, as Prof...

...The pace of technical change has constantly accelerated during the last 150 years, and has been even quicker in the latecomer countries than among the pioneers of industrialization...

...Yet there are two limits to this self-perpetuating hell...

...In every case, the dictatorial elite derives its sense of mission, its self-sacrificing energy and its utter ruthlessness against all opponents from a conviction that it is the chosen bearer of revealed truth, that its victory will usher in the millennium, and that its opponents are by definition the representatives of Evil who must be annihilated so that the state of universal harmony and happiness may be attained...

...It seems to me that its rehabilitation in that modest but vital role is long overdue...