In the last decade, we have witnessed the return of one of the most controversial terms in the political lexicon: totalitarianism. What are we talking about when we define a totalitarian political and social situation? When did we start using the word as both adjective and noun? And, what totalitarian ghosts haunt the present? Philosopher Simona Forti seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing not only the genealogy of the concept, but also by clarifying its motives, misunderstandings, and the (...) controversies that have animated its current resurgence. Taking into account political theories and historical discussions, Totalitarianism especially focuses on philosophical reflections, from the question of totalitarian biopolitics to the alleged totalitarian drifts of neoliberalism. The work invites the relentless formulation of a radical question about democratic age: the possibilities it has opened up, the voids it leaves behind, the mechanisms it activates, and the "voluntary servitude" it produces. Forti argues that totalitarianism cannot be considered an external threat to democracy, but rather, one of the possible answers to those questions posed by modernity which democracies have not been able to solve. Her investigation of the uses and abuses of totalitarianism as one of the fundamental categories of 20th and 21st centuries promises to provoke much-needed discussion and debate among those in philosophy, politics, ethics, and beyond. (shrink)

By taking into account dissident/political and art historical interpretations of Soviet art, I analyze how polemics about totalitarianism in the West, which generally corresponded with Cold War debates and Eastern European dissident thought, shaped the post-Soviet evaluations of national artistic legacies. It is argued that the political relationship with the totalitarian past, like in many post-socialist areas where the immediate past was subjected to radical re-evaluation, affected Lithuanian artists’ and critics’ attitude towards local Soviet art. Because of an obvious (...) lack of underground art in Soviet Lithuania, however, the retrospective usage of political categories here became problematic. Especially in international representations, the complexities of artists’ relationship with officialdom came to be routinely assigned to the phenomenon of non-conformism; this eventually obfuscated the differences between the Lithuanian Soviet art context as somewhat different from the Russian case. (shrink)

In 1952, Waldemar Gurian, founding editor of The Review of Politics, commissioned Eric Voegelin, then a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, to review Hannah Arendt’s recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism . She was given the right to reply; Voegelin would furnish a concluding note. Preceding this dialogue, Voegelin wrote a letter to Arendt anticipating aspects of his review; she responded in kind. Arendt’s letter to Voegelin on totalitarianism, written in German, has never appeared in (...) print before. She wrote two drafts of it, the first and longest being the more interesting. It contained an early reference to her thinking about the relationship among plurality, politics, and philosophy. It also invoked her notion of the compelling “logic” of totalitarian ideology. But this was not the letter Voegelin received. Because of this, he misunderstood significant parts of her argument. Below, the two versions of Arendt’s letter are translated. They are prefaced by a translation of Voegelin’s initial message to Arendt. An introduction compares Arendt’s letters, offers context, and provides a snapshot of Arendt’s and Voegelin’s perceptions of each other. Their views of political religion and human nature are also highlighted. Keyed to Arendt and Voegelin’s letters are pertinent aspects of the debate in The Review of Politics that followed their epistolary exchange. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to show that Hannah Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism is indebted to the analysis of National Socialism elaborated by Franz Neumann in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. It is argued that Arendt adopted the central thesis of Neumann according to which Nazi Germany is a ‘non-state’ and that this thesis as well as its presuppositions are discernible in her overall approach, developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

This article recovers Claude Lefort’s engagement with the issue of populism, which was inspired by the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a major figure in French politics during the late 1980s. I show how Lefort developed both an analysis of populism as a pathology of modern politics and a new vision of representative democracy as the alternative to populism. In doing so, Lefort drew upon his more familiar theory of democracy and totalitarianism, his study of the history of (...) French political thought, and his partnership with Pierre Ronsanvallon, who was also developing an analysis of populism in response to Le Pen. Lefort’s approach to populism has outlived the context in which he first expressed it. Over the last decade, a number of prominent political theorists have drawn on Lefortian themes to formulate their own accounts of populism and democracy. In many cases, their arguments are quite similar to those that Lefort was expressing in the late 1980s and 1990s. A particular version of Lefortianism, which was foreshadowed in the writings of Lefort himself, has become one of the defining democratic theories of our political moment. (shrink)

Totalitarian, totalitarianism are twentieth‐century words. They are used to describe states, ideologies, leaders and political parties that aim at total transformation and control of their own societies or, at least, at total control of everything that is actually or potentially politically significant within those societies. More positively, ‘totalitarians’ may see themselves as promoting a total conception of life and an organically cohesive state and community. They have been accused of aiming, inevitably, at a total transformation of the world. Applied (...) to a whole society, ‘totalitarian’ is, quixotically, a success word – to call a society totalitarian is to suggest the ruler's control measures up to this programme. (shrink)

The Shadow of Totalitarianism develops a new way to think about the problem of evil in politics. Beginning with the commonplace idea that the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century marked the emergence of a new form of evil, Javier Burdman finds early seeds of thinking about this form in Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. Far from being an isolated object of inquiry, evil, Burdman argues, has long shaped and been central to philosophical understandings of political action and (...) judgment. Systematically analyzing the relationship between evil, action, and judgment in the work of Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, The Shadow of Totalitarianism aligns evil in politics with a desire for moral certainty, hence the emphasis on the need to accept and affirm uncertainty in current ethical theories. The careful philosophical analysis through which Burdman develops this inquiry contributes to a better understanding of some of the theoretical complexities involved in the problem of evil and provides conceptual tools with which to approach it. (shrink)

[Excerpted From Editor's Introduction] Matthew Crippen takes this up in a Marcusian critique of Wittgenstein that attends, among other things, to the place of silence in that discourse. Referring to Horkheimer’s citation of the Latin aphorism that silence is consent, Crippen is critical of Wittgenstein’s admonition that we must pass over in silence those matters of which we cannot speak. This raises fascinating questions for critical theory that Crippen explores particularly with reference to Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality. To the extent (...) that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is “therapeutic,” it may effectively contain dissent by “helping” dissenters become “well-adjusted.” Marcuse, of course, was particularly concerned with the power of Total States— and particularly those engendered by advanced industrial capitalism—to contain dissent precisely by using therapeutic techniques to maintain adjustment. Bringing Marcuse and Wittgenstein together here has particularly explosive possibilities. In the context of a Total State, transformation depends on the possibility of calling the State into question from the inside (since “total” States systematically eliminate “outsides”). This is the point at which Wittgenstein’s silence becomes most intriguing. What is it, we must ask, that we cannot say? Silence may be (as Martin Luther King, Jr. said) more than consent: there comes a time when silence is betrayal. But this is one of many places where it pays to look at what is done as much as what is said. What game, we might ask, is Wittgenstein playing? And, more to the point, what is the field of play that joins Wittgenstein and Marcuse? John Cage famously said “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it...” Crippen begins a process (via Wittgenstein) of putting poetry into play that has important implications for the public work of philosophers. (shrink)

A study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her ...

These thirteen articles provide theoretical and historically informed analyses of thepowerful currents that are shaping the late twentieth-century political and culturallandscape.

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but rather a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fundamental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or (...) historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moralizing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totalitarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject. (shrink)

Totalitarianism is perhaps unanimously regarded as one of the greatest political evils of the last century and has been the grounds for much of Anglo-American political theory since. Confucianism, meanwhile, has been gaining credibility in the past decades among sympathizers of democratic theory in spite of criticisms of it being anti-democratic or authoritarian. I consider how certain key concepts in the classical Confucian texts of the Mencius and the Xunzi might or might not be appropriated for ‘legitimising’ totalitarian regimes. (...) Under an Arendtian approach to understanding totalitarianism, it is precisely an unproblematised relation to a normative History and Nature that underlies the potential compatibility or incompatibility. I argue against a longstanding prejudice that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it would have to be Xunzian. Against this, I hope to show that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it might well be a naturalistic Mencian Confucianism instead of a constructivist Xunzian one. (shrink)

Totalitarianism Totalitarianism is best understood as any system of political ideas that is both thoroughly dictatorial and utopian. It is an ideal type of governing notion, and as such, it cannot be realised perfectly. Faced with the brutal reality of paradigmatic cases like Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germany, philosophers, political theorists and social scientists have … Continue reading Totalitarianism →.

Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s, responding to Carl Schmitt's turn to the in 1931. In this essay I explore the notion's formation (...) and circulation through the Catholic public sphere in both France and Austria, where was born as a new form of the traditional Catholic animus against the nation state project. (shrink)

We are now, after some delay, beginning actively to discuss a theme—or is it still a problem?—that has become traditional for Western sociology and political science—namely, totalitarianism. If we start from the firmly established view that construes totalitarianism as a social structure in which the state devours and exercises maximum control over all spheres of the social life of individuals, i.e., a structure based on maximum coercion , we can, it would seem, simply make concrete extrapolations of the (...) existing theoretical model to the countries and regions we have chosen to study. But it seems to me that there are still a number of not fully worked out aspects in the methodology employed to study totalitarianism, and in applied studies this leads either to a pan-totalitarian view of history or to the localization of totalitarianism in a few countries . I think that this situation cannot be "harmonized" in the traditional manner by distinguishing between a "broad" and a "narrow" meaning of the term ‘totalitarianism.’ Hence, rather than trying to "not notice" the methodological problem, I propose dealing with it in all theoretical seriousness. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Claude Lefort, La Complication: Retour Sur Communisme.

This paper examines Hannah Arendt's notion of citizenship with reference to her account of loneliness in the modern age. Whereas recent scholarship has emphasized Arendt's notion of the “right to have rights” in order to advance her conception of citizenship in the context of global democratic theory, I maintain that this discourse threatens to overshadow the depth of her critical relation to the liberal tradition. By turning to loneliness, I aim to show that Arendt's understanding of citizenship guides a prescient (...) critique of the basic assumptions that underlie notions of citizenship within liberal political theory. On her view, these forms of citizenship do not secure liberty, but instead reproduce the very loneliness that has made modern individuals susceptible to totalitarian domination. With this, I argue that Arendt poses her notion of citizenship as an antidote to loneliness and, thus, to the vulnerability of modern political life to totalitarianism. (shrink)

The first political theory of post-Communism examines its implications for understanding liberty, rights, transitional justice, property rights, privatization, rule of law, centrally planned public institutions, and the legacies of totalitarian thought in language and discourse. The transition to post-totalitarianism was the spontaneous adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interest. Post-totalitarian governments faced severe scarcity in the supply of justice. Rough justice punished the perpetrators and compensated their victims. Historical theories of property rights became radical, and (...) consequentialist theories, conservative. Totalitarianism in Europe disintegrated but did not end. The legacies of totalitarianism in higher education met New Public Management, totalitarian central planning under a new label. Totalitarianism divorced language from reality through the use of dialectics that identified opposites and the use of logical fallacies to argue for ideological conclusions. This book illustrates these legacies in the writings of Habermas, Derrida, and Žižek about democracy, personal responsibility, dissidence, and totalitarianism. (shrink)

My reflections will have more of an interrogative than an affirmative character. And the questions will be posed not only to others but also to myself. At the outset let me broach two questions. First, why is this work ethic needed; and second, who needs it? And at the same time I should like to translate some of the general ideological and cultural problems that have been discussed here into the language of political economy and sociology. This should, it seems (...) to me, enable us more quickly to find the common language between our emotionally colored discussions about Russia and the "Western" understanding of it. Otherwise, regardless of whether we discuss our Russian situation from a Slavophile or a Westernizing point of view, what one always gets in the final analysis is that Russia cannot be understood with the intellect. And if that is so, then why all this "intellectual noise". (shrink)

ExcerptNow that the Bush administration has left the White House, several questions emerge, not the least of which is the crucial question about its place in the longue durée of the American polity. A corollary of this question, which is perhaps even more vexing, regards the lasting effect of these years on the United States' political form. Not that versions of this question have not been posed. Books on the so-called new American empire, to be sure, have flooded the North (...) Atlantic publishing industry since 2003. In addition, midway through the Bush presidency pundits, journalists, and even academics mulled over…. (shrink)

By the fourth decade of the twentieth century... the earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. George OrwellThe subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.Hannah Arendt.

Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Tzvetan Todorov; David Bellos The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia by Richard Overy Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared by Henry Rousso; Lucy B. Golsan Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison by Ian Kershaw; Moshe Lewin Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the use of a Notion by Slavoj Zizek.

Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading up to its demise. Arendt's analyses of totalitarianism, natality (...) and the public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations of its citizens. Deleuze's reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of the term ‘people’ sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests against the so-called people's republic of the DDR: something else was at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another. (shrink)

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes the unexpected statement that totalitarian violence "is expressed much more frighteningly in the organization of its followers than in the physical liquidation of its opponents." Of course, her intention is not to deny the radical physical violence of totalitarianism but rather to understand the distinctive features of totalitarian terror. In order to fully understand the importance of what Arendt is describing, we should compare this first moment of the analysis with (...) another assertion that seems just as paradoxical and that is also in The Origins of Totalitarianism: noting totalitarianism's contempt for facts and reality, Arendt remarks that the propaganda of totalitarian movements is "invariably as frank as it is mendacious." Totalitarian propaganda does not just lie about the aims and real actions of totalitarian movements or regimes: it also gives itself the organization required to change the real world and make it "true" to its assertions, though they be utterly absurd and utterly monstrous. Through totalitarian organization the natural bonds of solidarity and communication are broken; they are replaced by distrust and informing. The objective is to pervert human plurality into a mass of fragmented individuals, to suppress the common world and substitute it with alienation from the world, from others, and from oneself. From then on, everything is blurred for the outside observer who would still like to distinguish between adherence to the regime out of conviction and submission through terror, organization, and indoctrination. The issue of knowing whether this enthusiasm is forced or sincere loses much of its pertinence. Let us keep this important point in mind when we pass judgment too rapidly on the "fanaticism" of Islamic crowds streaming down the streets of Teheran or any other totalitarian theocracy. (shrink)

In ‘The Open Society and its Enemies,’ Karl Popper contrasts closed and open societies. He evaluates irrationalism and the different kinds of rationalism and he argues that critical rationalism is superior. Living in an open society bestows great benefits but involves a strain that may in some people engender a longing to return to a closed society of tribal submission and an attraction for irrationalism. Attempts to recreate a closed society lead to totalitarianism. In the light of Popper’s arguments (...) I criticise contemporary identity politics and I show that identity politics is irrationalist and tends to totalitarianism. (shrink)

This brief paper is a polemical response to Mikhail Epstein’s review of the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought, and especially to his claim that the widely acknowledged tendency of Russian philosophy towards holistic thinking is akin to political totalitarianism, not to say its underlying cause. My argument is that philosophical and political or ideological thought are fundamentally different in their nature and purpose, and cannot be usefully identified with one another as Epstein does. Epstein’s claim is, I argue, a (...) manifestation of the modern outlook at large, incapable of grasping the difference and, worse, offering precisely the opposite of a solution to the problems posed by totalitarianism. (shrink)

_Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism_ provides rich new insights into the history of political thought and clinical knowledge. In these chapters, internationally renowned historians and cultural theorists discuss landmark debates about the uses and abuses of ‘the talking cure’ and map the diverse psychologies and therapeutic practices that have featured in and against tyrannical, modern regimes. These essays show both how the Freudian movement responded to and was transformed by the rise of fascism and communism, the Second World War, (...) and the Cold War, and how powerful new ideas about aggression, destructiveness, control, obedience and psychological freedom were taken up in the investigation of politics. They identify important intersections between clinical debate, political analysis, and theories of minds and groups, and trace influential ideas about totalitarianism that took root in modern culture after 1918, and still resonate in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they suggest how the emergent discourses of ‘totalitarian’ society were permeated by visions of the unconscious. Topics include: the psychoanalytic theorizations of anti-Semitism; the psychological origins and impact of Nazism; the post-war struggle to rebuild liberal democracy; state-funded experiments in mind control in Cold War America; coercive ‘re-education’ programmes in Eastern Europe, and the role of psychoanalysis in the politics of decolonization. A concluding trio of chapters argues, in various ways, for the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis, and of these mid-century debates over the psychology of power, submission and freedom in modern mass society. Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism will prove compelling for both specialists and readers with a general interest in modern psychology, politics, culture and society, and in psychoanalysis. The material is relevant for academics and post-graduate students in the human, social and political sciences, the clinical professions, the historical profession and the humanities more widely. (shrink)

In recent decades, historians have probed the kinds of narratives that they tell in constructing the past. In the process, we have devoted too little attention to the ways that historical actors themselves translate beliefs and ideologies into narratives of events, which themselves become causal factors of great importance. In this essay, and the longer work from which it is drawn, I examine this translation as it emerged in Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns during World War II and the Holocaust. (...) In so doing, I argue that the concept of totalitarianism, when applied to the Nazi dictatorship, remains an indispensable…. (shrink)