The Books of My Life: Totalitarianism

Abbott Gleason’s Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) is a largely dispassionate exploration and analysis of the origins, life, and ups and downs, of the idea “totalitarian” since it arose in the 1920s as an apologetic and polemical way to “describe” fascist Italy. As Gleason notes the term became more prominent in the 1930s, particularly in application to Nazi Germany, became a prominent way to characterise the USSR during the Cold War, declined in academic usage after the cultural revolution in the 1960s, was resurrected by neoconservative polemicists in the era from Reagan to the fall of the USSR, an era of increased tension between the great powers of the US and USSR, and has become somewhat popular in post-Soviet Russia, in part, as a way to assuage feelings of guilt.

There are a number of things I took away from Gleason’s informative book though I am not sure how happy he would be about what I took away from it. Gleason’s book shows that the term “totalitarian” has been, particularly since the 1940s, one of those key symbols that Cultural Anthropologists sometimes talk about, symbols that reveal much about their societies and cultures in general because they interact with, interweave with, intertwine with, and give meaning to a host of other political, economic, and cultural symbols in those societies and cultures. As Gleason’s book shows, the key symbol “totalitarian” became politically, economically, and culturally central during the Cold War in the West and particularly to the United States. Currently, the ideologically loaded term "dictatorship" seems to have replaced "totalitarian" in demagogic discourse.

As a key symbol in the West and the US “totalitarian” worked or functioned, particularly on the political policy, journalistic, and popular levels, in a Manichean "us" versus them way. For many polemical users of the symbolic term "totalitarian", the West and the US, were “democratic” while Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the USSR, or Stalin era USSR, were “totalitarian”. For many polemical users of the symbolic term we, the“free nations”, were “free”, while they, the "totalitarian" states, were not. For many polemical users of the term we, the "free" nations were "good" while they, the "bad" states, were not. For many polemical users of the term they, the "totalitarian" nations, “brainwashed” their subjects, while we, the “free nations”, respected and treasured "freedom of "speech" and "freedom of thought". For many polemical users of the term we, the "free nations" are “civilised” while they, the "totalitarian" states, are "brutal" and "thuggish" bringers of "terror". For many polemical users of the term we “democracies” and  “free nations”, respect human rights while they, "totalitarian" states, did not. Such symbolic binary formulations like these, by the way, miss several things. They miss that even during the more egalitarian days of American New Deal liberalism and the post-World War II Atlee era of Labour dominance in the United Kingdom, “free nations” were—and still are—oligarchic. They miss that every group or society that survives socialises its "citizens" in both coercive and more non-coercive ways, that some societies or groups socialise more intensely while others socialise less intensely, and that all human groups and societies socialise for conformity.

Gleason shows that the tern “totalitarian” has been used polemically and academically in inconsistent ways. For some Nazi Germany was “totalitarian”. For some the USSR was “totalitarian”. For some Nazi Germany and the Stalin era Soviet Union were “totalitarian”. For some Japan, Argentina, Spain, and Portugal were, during their years of military rule, “totalitarian”. For others these nations were “authoritarian”. The latter, claimed those polemicists, many of who were ensconced in government positions, who made the distinction between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” regimes, assumed that “totalitarianism” was new and that “authoritarian” regimes could be transformed while "totalitarian" ones could not be transformed.  For some, as early as the 1930s, not only were Nazi Germany and the USSR “totalitarian”, so was US New Deal liberalism. Needless to say, the demonisation of American liberalism has become increasingly prominent in 21^st century American neoconservative polemical circles. Ignoring the "terror" of "authoritarian" regimes was functional in a world divided into us, the "free world", those who are with us ("authoritarians" who will become more like us over time), and them, the "totalitarian" Communist bloc. 

Gleason shows that the symbolic term “totalitarian” has been used in a largely ahistorical and hence problematic way. Those who use the term miss that, as Max Weber noted, that supposedly “rational” bureaucracies are one of the central characteristics of a modernity that became dominate in the modern West, including in the USSR, and remains a central component in a postmodernity brought about, in large part, by the advent of new digital communications technologies which became important in the postmodern West. In the final analysis, I would argue, it is best to see “totalitarianism” as the modern form of "autocracy" rather than as something new as many polemicists would have it. The fact that so many of those, whether of the polemical or more academic variety, used the "totalitarian" use as a synonym for "despotism" and "autocracy" strongly suggests that "totalitarianism" was not new, despite the protestations of some, and that it was simply the old "autocracy" and "despotism" dressed up in modern demagogues clothing. The "autocratic" modern USSR, it turns out, by the way, was unable to adapt to the new postmodernist realities of globalisation and digital communications media. Given all this, I think we have to conclude, that the symbolic term "totalitarian", was, for many Western polemicists, consciously or unconsciously, a means to strike fear into the emotion laden hearts and minds of the masses in an era of modern mass propaganda and continuing great power competitions.

Fascinating book. Highly recommended.