Lecture 2: The Emergence of Totalitarianism PDF

Lecture 2 The emergence of the concept of totalitarianism Although soviet power had already established a totalitarian regime in Russia in 1917, the concept of totalitarianism arose in Italian anti-fascist circles, in order to define a new kind of power that fascism was creating in...

Lecture 2 The emergence of the concept of totalitarianism Although soviet power had already established a totalitarian regime in Russia in 1917, the concept of totalitarianism arose in Italian anti-fascist circles, in order to define a new kind of power that fascism was creating in Italy. Giovanni Amendola, an Italian antifascist who died in France in 1926 not many months after being beaten by fascists, claimed in 1923 that fascism was a ‘totalitarian system’, because fascists were imposing an ‘absolute domination’ in a new way. The most significant feature of the fascist uprising will appear, to those who in future will study this phenomenon, as the ‘totalitarian’ spirit. This will ensure in the future that each dawn is greeted with the Fascist salute, as today doesn’t nourish non-fascist souls. Amendola understood the totalitarian intention of the fascist movement, which demanded from citizens not only obedience, but also moral adhesion. Therefore totalitarianism should be considered a ‘political religion’, according to the famous expression of Eric Voegelin. The interesting thing is that fascism didn’t consider the label of totalitarianism as an insult. Instead, fascism appropriated the word, giving it the same meaning but a positive judgement. ‘Totalitarian’ becomes a certificate of merit for fascists. So Mussolini on 22nd June 1925 wrote: Our savage totalitarian goals will be pursued with even greater ferocity. Distinguished philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who formulated the best definition of totalitarianism, in the ‘Fascismo’ dictionary entry of Enciclopedia Treccani (1932) specified: For fascists, everything is in the State, and no humanity or spirituality can exist and they have even less value outside of the State. In this regard, fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist State, synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, strengthens and develops the whole of people’s life. Now let us move to Paris in the 1930s. Here antifascists and people persecuted by the Soviet State met. One of these, a Russian thinker and a left-wing political activist Victor Serge – who I mentioned in the first lecture - reflected for a long time on the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and published a number of books on this topic. Serge was a follower of Trockij. He returned to Russia in 1919 after a long exile and worked with the Bolsheviks until 1933, when he was exiled to Siberia. In 1936 he was expelled from the Soviet Union, taking refuge in Western Europe. He was killed in Mexico in 1947, by order of Stalin. Serge went beyond the thought and views of his idol, Trockij, pushing himself to the point of saying that the beginning of the revolution’s degeneration corresponded exactly with the start of the Bolshevik revolution. As a matter of fact, Serge wrote in one of his best works, Destin d’une revolution (The fate of revolution, 1937) that the Soviet totalitarian State was an unprecedented concentration of political, cultural and economic power: the result of the Second Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin’s seizure of power. We have already seen, although very briefly, the emergence of the concept of totalitarianism between the 1920s and the 1930s. This is not a course of history of historiography, so we need to move fast, because the heart of the matter is the thinking of the authors. Before we get to that, I would like to present three important interpretations of totalitarianism developed during and shortly after the end of WWII. Now, these interpretations were not made by politicians or political militants. They seem very significant to me, because they demonstrate how difficult it has always been for scholars to clearly define the relationship between totalitarianism and modernity. The first interpretation is that of Simone Weil. Weil, as you probably well know, was a great philosopher who died very young. In her life – very short but at the same time very full – she reflected in particular on the theoretical and political trends of Marxism. Weil, who elaborated a point of view very close to that of anarchists, noted that the Russian revolution didn’t really change the structure of Czarist State. The Bolsheviks indeed not only left it standing, but also perfected repressive institutions of the old regime. For Weil, in other words, totalitarian regimes didn’t seem qualitatively so different from the authoritarian States of the past. They distinguish themselves only for their increasingly repressive policies. Totalitarian States are only a subtype of modern State, which is, in turn, the modern form of the domination of man over man. The second interpretation that I want to introduce is that of Raymond Aron, because it is, in a way, opposite to that of Weil. Aron was a great French sociologist and one of the most important liberal thinkers of the 20th Century. According to him, totalitarianism is a kind of power which is radically different from the past. Totalitarian States are indeed the expression of messianic ideologies and secular religions, which arise in two different forms. As a matter of fact, Marxism is based on a rationalistic philosophy, while Nazism and Fascism express an irrational tendency. The third and last interpretation is that of Hannah Arendt, who wrote perhaps the most famous – and one of the most important – books on this topic, The origins of totalitarianism (1952). Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism has some things in common both with Weil’s and with Aron’s point of view. Like Weil, she thinks that totalitarianism is a form of domination related to the structure of the modern State. The modern State indeed is based on the concept of nation, which excludes ethnic minorities and stateless persons. On the other hand, Arendt argues that the totalitarian State – Stalinism and Nazism – is something completely new in history, that it is unprecedented. Its ideological project is founded on two pillars: terror and consensus. The ideology that inspires the totalitarian State is unprecedented, as is the most horrific expression of the repressive policies of totalitarianism: the concentration camps. This represents the ultimate truth of totalitarian ideologies: the laboratory in which to experiment and put into practice their values and worldview. Well, this is where I end. It wasn’t my intention to present the whole history of the concept and interpretation of totalitarianism, but only to give a clear enough picture of the matter. In the next lecture, we will analyze the 19th Century ideological and cultural premises of totalitarianism.