Totalitarianism is a political concept often either combined with, or even confused with, others such as authoritarianism or dictatorship. The confusion arises because there tends to be an empirical connection so that authoritarian or dictatorial societies are often also totalitarian. There is, however, no necessary connection. To call a society totalitarian means that the political rulers control every aspect of private and social life in the society, as well as having so extensive a political power that virtually no liberty or autonomy in decision-making is left to individuals or groups outside the political power system. Thus the Soviet Union was often described as being totalitarian, particularly under Stalin, but this was not because it operated a single-party system where only the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) wielded power. The Soviet Union was totalitarian because of the way it used power. The whole of the media, educational system, and social, sporting and other leisure activities, were controlled by, and used to propagate the ideology of, the CPSU. All industrial decisions, including activities of trade unions, were under direct control of party-appointed officials.
Even the militaryorganizations were controlled and ideologized directly by the party, via the system of making the deputy commander of each unit, of whatever level, a party ‘political commissar’. It is this character of complete permeation of a society by the personnel and ideas of the ruling group that makes for totalitarianism. Other forms of society could, and at times have been, equally totalitarian. A thorough-going theocracy, for example, where the church had the ability to penetrate and organize all aspects of life, would be totalitarian. Some writers have even tried to claim that the exponents of radically participatory democracy, like, for example, Rousseau in his Social Contract, were ‘totalitarian democrats’. This latter example arises from the way that Rousseau insists on as much communal activity, and as much homogeneity, as possible among citizens in order to minimize conflict and to aid the production of a publicly-spirited general will among all citizens. It is similar to the fears of writers like John Stuart Mill and de Tocqueville about the tyranny of the majority. In practice few political systems can wholly penetrate a society, and some form of underground libertarianism usually flourishes, as with the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, or the capacity to combat some aspects of Nazism by the churches in the Third Reich.
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