Tyranny in the Machine Age
LICHTBLAU, JOHN H.
Tyranny in the Machine Age Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. By Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. Harvard. 346 pp. $4.25. Reviewed by John H. Lichtblau Contributor, N. Y....
...Such vested interests, not unlike the autocracies of the past, are very much concerned with maintaining their new preferential status quo and thus help prepare the way for a new conservativism...
...It is this "passion for unanimity" which in turn leads to the use of totalitarian terror as an indispensable instrument of political action...
...But superimposed upon the unalterable basic reasons why man needs to be governed at all are the shifting superstructures of the prevailing states of mind, arts and science, all of which exercise a very powerful influence on existing political institutions...
...Here lies, of course, the essential problem of our time: the lag of our spiritual progress behind our material achievements...
...Since the progress in science and technology over the past hundred years has been faster than that of any past period, it is quite logical that our current political life should have certain features for which there is simply no precedent...
...For example, it is nowhere pointed out that while the first Communist regime came about as the result of a successful violent revolution, Hitler came to power under a democratic multi-party system in which he had managed to attract a larger bloc of voters than any other single party...
...A major distinction between modern dictatorships and past autocracies is the dynamic aspect of dictatorships as contrasted with the inherent conservatism of conventional absolutist regimes...
...Up to a certain point, there is no question of the correctness of this analysis, but perhaps the authors over-stress the internal dynamism of modern totalitarianism somewhat...
...In its attempt to stress similarities, however, the book sometimes tends to ignore the equally important features distinguishing the two systems from each other...
...The post-Stalin period in Russia offers striking examples...
...This is hardly a novel approach, but the book manages to shed some new light on it, particularly in its comments on the terroristic and irrational aspects of push-button tyrannies...
...Reviewed by John H. Lichtblau Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review, " Reporter", "Commentary," "Saturday Review" Finding precedents for current political developments is a favorite preoccupation of many historians...
...They seem to ignore the rapidity with which new vested interests spring up to take the place of those just destroyed...
...Nazism, Fascism and Communism are all founded upon the principle of "permanent revolution...
...Evidence of this had appeared in Nazi Germany by the time it had existed less than ten years...
...Of the authors' six "syndromes" of totalitarianism — ideology, single party, terroristic police, communications monopoly, weapons monopoly and centrally directed economy—the last four presuppose a modern technology...
...The fact that he first became Chancellor and then made the revolution distinguishes him historically from Lenin...
...As the authors point out in an excellent introductory chapter, though "totalitarian dictatorship resembles earlier forms of autocracy it is historically unique and sui generis...
...There is a certain limited validity to pulling men and events of previous centuries out of history's grab bag to hold them up as a mirror to ourselves...
...The reason is largely technological...
...Their ultimate aim is a society where the last vestige of opposition has been destroyed and replaced by complete unanimity...
...In the perspective of these four traits, therefore, totalitarian societies appear to be merely exaggerations, but nonetheless logical exaggerations, of the technological state of modern society...
...They must make and remake society completely, simply in order to maintain themselves...
...When this happens, purges and other terroristic instruments cease to be of the non-directive type which threaten all segments of society but become increasingly a means for the new ruling class to stay in power...
...This book is concerned with one such feature, totalitarian dictatorship...
...Notwithstanding such omissions, within the limitations of a 300-page book on such a vast subject the authors have done an outstanding job in bringing together in one place the bulk of the current thinking on totalitarian dictatorship...
...On the question of comparability between the two types of modern dictatorships, the authors hold "that Fascist and Communist totalitarian dictatorships are basically alike...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 35
