The Qualities of the Totalitarian State
Introduction
The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.
There are many people today comparing our contemporary times to those of the 1930s. Even if there are apt comparisons to be made I have trouble seeing the similarities clearly. Much more relevant to me seems to be the many crises leading up to the first world war; the long period of change created more and more cracks in the established systems of managing relations that at last proved too great to overcome. Once the stresses had reached a certain level it all came falling down once someone started shooting in the streets of Sarajevo. It still feels relevant to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci1 however:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
As those who have by chance been born into this interregnum it is our duty to understand the developments that have lead us to these events so that we can do our best to shape the future trajectory of the world, and to make sure that the new that we create is better than that which came before.
Early Developments and the Dictatorship
We must differentiate between three words that are often seen as synonymous, that being the dictatorial, authoritarian, and totalitarian states. The authoritarian state is a state that demands that it possess ultimate authority of that which it claims, and that expects that authority to be unquestionably followed. All states are authoritarian in some degree, to the point that the use and employment of authority must be included in the definition of the state. This is what Weber famously did in his formulation of the state as the possessor of the monopoly of violence. An authoritarian state does not have to be a particularly powerful state, and in fact the reverse is oftentimes the case. A powerful state can instead offer some degree of leeway when it comes to organizing its possessions since it does not have to risk the diminishing of its power.
The dictatorial state is closely related to the authoritarian one, since the application of authority requires dictating one’s wishes. The dictatorship, as an institution, has its origins in the office of the dictator in the republic along the Tiber, and any study of the dictator specifically should incorporate its formulation. In its roman form the the dictator was role temporarily appointed to solve a specific problem, but in the late republic it became a much more over political tool — used most prominently by Sulla and then subsequently by Caesar.
The narrow focus of the dictator showcases an important element; the dictatorship can only exist in a state that is in an earlier form of historical development. The dictator, as an individual, must be involved in the decisions of the state — who become incalculable in number as historical development continues. We will soon examine the nature of this trajectory, but permit me to remain on the subject of the dictator.
The centralisation of decision-making is a core aspect of the evolution of Ellulian technique, and because of that is has been instrumental in the development of the state. A weak state, as all early ones were, necessarily requires a strong authority to impose its will and maintain its existence (as we have already described). The early state is forced to centralize, if not its limited resources then at least its political power, to get anything done. It did so initially through the institution of kingship (as Lewis Mumford examines in the first volume of his book The Myth of the Machine). This initial collectivisation enabled the construction of vast irrigation systems — that in turn contributed to an increased degree of the division of labour and therefore the development of things like mathematics and astronomy — as well as of vast monuments such as the pyramids of Giza.
The dictator (in the form of the monarch) remains at all times a touch-point figure, like how the pharoses of Egypt were intimately involved in agriculture through their role in the periodic flooding of the Nile. The invention of writing served an important role in the extension of the dictator’s power, they could now project their presence across both space and time, and thus organize labour on a much grander scale. But this development also created something else that is of interest to our study — a permanent, literate, bureaucracy whose role would become not just the communications of the dictator’s wishes, but the carrying out of the actions of state, whose existence first now can be outlined.
The state is usually dated firmly to the peace of Westphalia, when the principle of a sovereign right emerged,2 but as we have established its structural roots go all the way back to the origins of kings. This of course continued, and the stretches of land that monarchs laid claim to increased as their powers did – to almost the level of caricature like in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. In France, one of clearest examples of early centralisation, Louis XIV famously proclaimed that the he and the state were one and the same3, but the growth of the bureaucracy required for absolutism meant that on his deathbed in 1715 he is said to have uttered “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours”.4 These are not contradictory statements as they might appear on first appearance. Absolutism meant that the monarch, in every capacity in which [he] was able to intervene, was the embodiment of the state. But to maintain this capability demanded the maintenance of a massive political machine that would necessarily have to survive the monarch.
Absolutism is the end of the form of the dictator. While it survives, and in some places even reëmerges in the world today, it can no longer be the source of historical progress. Instead it must leave the reins to the burgeoning bureaucracy that it helped create.
The Totalitarian State
I must ask the reader to try to vanquish any pretences over the idea of totalitarianism that one may have. The goal here is not to study a specific group of states that have existed in the past, present, and are postulated to exist in the future, but instead to inspect qualities that exist in all states of a sufficiently developed historical nature. The detailed implementation of this totalitarianism has been extensively debated for almost 250 years. During this debate there have been many proposals that have been discarded, but they are nevertheless of interest to us in the study of their shared qualities.
The totalitarian state is, like all other states, by necessity authoritarian. Its primary characteristic is that it attempts to envelop all of society; there is no element of social, political, technical, or private life that it does not interest itself in. It can be dictatorial — in the sense that we have just examined — but bit does not have to be, and in fact may often be limited by a dictatorial nature. This is because while the dictatorial form allows for the forcing through of action it does not foster a total commitment to the cause of the state.
The totalitarian state does not have to actually succeed at this goal of being the fulcrum of social life – in fact no state has yet done so completely – but it must strive towards that ideal. Some of the different methods of doing so that have historically been attempted we will generally discuss here, but a complete record would require the examination of almost every society existing today – as well as a great multitude of historical states. We now however live in a time in which this ultimate goal seems to be within reach, and agents of the state (such as autocrats, politicians, and civil servants) are becoming ever more frustrated when met with aspects of the world outside of their control, when they before would have been unthinkable for the state to influence. This frustration will only serve as an accelerant for further increases in state capacity.
Machiavelli, even in advocating for the benefits of a reputation of cruelty, makes clear that one must in all cases avoid being hated — even under the conditions of dictatorship.5 That this is easier said than done is clear to anyone, but is is particularly so in a dictatorship, where the originator of decisions does not immediately feel their consequences. While fear must be employed to maintain rule in a dictatorial system in some degree (as Machiavelli elegantly explains) the point of totalitarianism qua force is not merely to enforce rule — although that is of course in the interest of individual actors within the system.
The first forms of the totalitarian goals of the state emerged out of the French revolution. The imposition of the political will of Paris during the various counter-revolutions across the country (most notably the Guerre de Vendée) was a method for further centralisation and imposition of political will. But most of all it was the Terror that — in the same way as would later occur in the Chinese mainland between 1966 and 1976 — imposed a political purpose onto the whole of society. Political life became intensely relevant, and things like the Levée en masse violently joined the individual’s fate to that of the state.
The numerous modernisations made during the revolution brought state control into an equally numerous number of areas of life. This continued under the reign of Napoleon — whose civil code unified the French judicial system into one coherent whole. It was this dichotomy and bringing together of the individual and the sublime structure of the state that Hegel pointed out at Jena, and that represented the end of History.
Fascism and Totalitarianism
The ideology of fascism is at its heart the ideology of the state as a supreme, all-encompassing entity — and as the final form of the post-1789 developments in state capacity. Combined with the ideas of nationalism, in the strict sense,6 this creates the connection that not only is the state developing and an agent throughout history, but that the nation state is the representation of a the nation’s actions, and the state is therefore responsible to the people in the same way as the people are responsible to the state.
It is a strictly illiberal (in the sense of liberal qua freedom of the individual) idea. If compared to the liberal (European) nationalism of the nineteenth century — where the state’s purpose is merely to act as the collective sphere to enforce the rights and dignities of the nation — it becomes clear how the fascist state is demanding of another degree. The state is not content to merely exist as the arbiter of the status quo, but must act in a new sense upon its environment.
Gentile writes in the Doctrine of Fascism:
Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.
[…]
It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favour of national governments. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.
This is no longer an idea unique to those who publicly consider themselves as fascists, but is widely held across the political spectrum. The state, on the international level, and government, on the domestic one, are seen as the principal agents through which political life should be lived.
That fascism has been the ideology of the reactionary is perhaps primarily because it has served as a progressive7 force against that of communism (that we will soon discuss). It thus quite naturally attracted the interest of capital; the NSDAP was neither socialist nor a worker’s party. The struggle against this expansion of capitalism into fascism has been the central mission of left-wing activism since the end of the second world war. But fascism failed at extracting the power of the state, precisely because it was forced to coöperate with the interests of monarchists and capitalists — just as in the east “the paradox of Russian bolshevism is that it was in reality conservative” led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. One can not maintain the old institutions of feudalism or religion while subsuming everything into the totalitarian state.
Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, paints the picture of his idealised city; the Kallipolis. A common quality to all the techniques that Socrates proposes is the centrality of the state as totally demanding and of highest importance. The rulers and guardians of the Kallipolis would not be allowed to touch gold and would live in simple communal housing so that they would not put their own interests over those of the state.
The platonic ideal of the city is strictly limited, and Plato (as well as his follower Aristotle) believed that the city must maintain a firm boundary and not give in to imperialism. This is in some sense a prenationalist idea; the state exists only to serve those belonging to the nation, and should not be extended to all the ends of the earth.
Socrates describes on page 4238 how a (non-ideal) city is really composed of two cities — that of the rich and that of the poor — who are both at war with one another. Defeating such a city simply means turning one of these inner cities against the other — the rich against the poor, for example — and letting it succumb into infighting. The Kallipolis would be immune from such infighting due to its structured coöperation between classes; a form of primitive corporatism. This is such a central tenet of Socrates’ idea that he defines justice itself as that of different groups or elements performing their assigned tasks, just like how corporatism emphasises the duty of social groups to fulfil their role for the good of the state as a whole. The ideal city must be one city, composed of citizens not advocating for some domestic change.
Socialism
Communism is the state of affairs consisting of a classless, stateless, and moneyless form of society in which all members are able to form free social and economic relations with one another. How to achieve this has historically been a matter of some debate among leftist groups however. Those who have been most successful, not in achieving communism but in achieving absolute power, have almost entirely tried to do so through the path of socialism — state control over the means of production and most commonly the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. We have of course already explained the institution of the dictatorship, and this is the same institution here.
Marxism once again identifies the struggle between what Socrates called “two cities”: the proletariat (who can only sustain themselves by selling their labour) and the bourgeoisie (who live on the extracted surplus labour of the proletariat). “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”; The goal of the socialist revolution is to abolish this class struggle. To do this it aims not at the reconciliation of the classes (like corporatism) but instead to subsume the bourgeoisie — to seise the means of production — into one class whose only relations are to those of the state. That no nation has successfully performed the transition from socialism to communism is due to the power and allure of the state.
Furthermore is the idea that the family, as a fundamental axiomatic unit, should be replaced by the community of the state. This is not unique to Socialism (not even to Marxism as a whole), but it is an especially prevalent idea because of the Marxist focus on how women are exploited as unpaid domestic labour under capitalism. To mention Socrates once again; he proposes that children should not be told who their parents are, and likewise parents should not have any specific ties to their offspring. Instead children should be turned over the state and raised collectively, so that their education is attuned to the best interests of the collective whole. This too is a technique for the state’s increasing control over its population — the elimination of all social relations that are not under the auspices of the state.
The state, as the representative of the common good of the people, should inherently strive to better the conditions of the working class. But at the same time the state requires more and more power and resources, necessitating the increased exploitation of the proletariat — even as they are ostensibly in charge.
Democracy
The democratic system is in many ways the most totalitarian of all. The dictatorial system requires that political power be monopolised by the dictator, but in a democracy the reverse is true. When the people rule it becomes a requirement for each and every citizen to become informed and opinionated regarding the political issues of their time. This is, more so than the technical developments, the primary advancement of the French revolution in regards to totalitarianism.
Because democracy is intended to be shaped by the individuals interests it invites them to try and solve their problems using the power of the state. Thus when Hanisch writes that “the personal is political” she describes how the personal aspects of one’s own life have been extended outward into the public sphere. When all problems are solvable using the state (and more and more problems are correspondingly caused by the state) it becomes more and more important for one’s specific group to take control over the apparatus. This is one of the reasons for the increasing political polarisations of our time — those who covet the command over the state will stop at nothing to obtain it, even if it comes at the price of social unity, because they deem the possible rewards enormously great.
Improvements in technology and in the techniques of propaganda9 have strengthened the ability for dictators to project their will. This development is not new — it was pointed out quite clearly by Speer10 — but it has not stopped; If anything it has accelerated. And yet no technical apparatus can yet match the strength of democracy in this regard. In democratic society all members are part of an intense political discussion, where each individual is at all times a recipient, activist, and censor. The democratic state does therefore not require the same level of authoritarian control as that of the dictatorship as we ourselves maintain the continuity of the state.
We thus, as citizens in democratic states (and not actors in a people-ruled anarchic world), further this extension of totalitarianism. Feminist scholarship has long discussed how societal norms and structures are maintained through our actions, but also our ideas and theoretical abstractions. In just the same way democracy shapes our lives by defining it in our political relations to the state.
Religion
That the state’s power is sublime and dangerous is an idea that has long existed in theological scholarship, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The church itself is an institution that has always existed in parallel to the state, and therefore by definition undermines its power. That the protestant kingdoms colligated the church with the state was one of the causes for why they were first to apply technics on such a broad scale.
The Jewish Pirkei Avot warns against the state, and against its corrupting practices:
הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לָאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹרֶךְ עַצְמָ
Be wary of the government, as they draw close to a person only when they need him for some purpose.
נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בִּשְׁעַת הֲנָאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לָאָדָם בִּשְׁעַת דָּחְקוֹ
They seem like good friends in good times, but they do not stand for a person in his time of trouble. (Pirkei Avot 2:3)
It is clear that what this warns against is the same as that which Gentile wrote, that the state “accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State”, but does not altruistically help the individual “in his time of trouble”. The Jews unfortunately have perhaps more experience of the state’s power when used against oneself than any other group – not just in the horrors of the holocaust but also in the division between Prussia, Austria, and Russia; in Iberia; the destruction of the second temple; and as far back as the Babylonian captivity.
This is similarly warned against in the old testament, specifically in the widely misinterpreted story of Babel in Genesis 11:
וַיֹּאמְר֞וּ הָ֣בָה ׀ נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ עִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙ וְרֹאשׁ֣וֹ בַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וְנַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם פֶּן־נָפ֖וּץ עַל־פְּנֵ֥י כׇל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃
And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”
וַיֵּ֣רֶד יְהֹוָ֔ה לִרְאֹ֥ת אֶת־הָעִ֖יר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּ֑ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֥י הָאָדָֽם׃
GOD came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built,
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֗ה הֵ֣ן עַ֤ם אֶחָד֙ וְשָׂפָ֤ה אַחַת֙ לְכֻלָּ֔ם וְזֶ֖ה הַחִלָּ֣ם לַעֲשׂ֑וֹת וְעַתָּה֙ לֹֽא־יִבָּצֵ֣ר מֵהֶ֔ם כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָזְמ֖וּ לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת׃
and GOD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. […]” (Genesis 11:4–6)
The focus on what humanity built here is not a tower to reach up into the heavens in a literal sense, but instead it is the city itself that is the focus of God’s anger. A city that can support such a massive tower must be a grand one – and it is itself a rejection of God’s natural order and world, and of our duty as guardians and shepherds (Genesis 1:26). The city, as Plato has illuminated for us, is the origin and birthplace of the state. That the Pirkei Avot warns against this more advanced and developed form is therefore not surprising – it is a core aspect of Judeo-Christian theology. That “nothing will be out of [our] reach” refers to how the construction of Mumford’s megamachine will be made possible by the city and its kings, and that such employment of technique will make anything possible for mankind – for it is the goal of technique to encompass all. In the same vein Jesus Christ, in Matthew 4:8–9 (during the temptation), is offered all the kingdoms of the world by the devil – who can only offer them because they are not part of God’s creation.
This intellectual thought still remains with us today, even in the agnostic and atheist parts of our perspective on the world. The work of Kant, the great German philosopher, is largely one of secularising and shaping the ideas of the Judeo-Christian ethics into one befitting the enlightenment. His view on democracy (to be differentiated from republicanism) are in line with this thinking on the state; the tyranny of the masses as employed through the state means that the life of the individual person is necessarily ignored – or deliberately destroyed – when “his interests [do not] coincide with those of the State”. The freedom of classical liberalism therefore has its roots in religious opposition against the state.
Conclusion
The totalitarian state is here, ever present, and only interested in its continued survival and growth. It comes in numerous forms – aristocratic, autocratic, dictatorial, democratic and many more. It will almost assuredly come in an ever greater variety in the future, even as the techniques for maintaining state control become more and more common across the world.
Countering this future seems almost impossible, and yet it must be done to ensure the freedom of the individual. It is in this very struggle between these forces that our time will come to be defined; in how we use the state to reduce \(CO_2\) emissions, maintain the western “way of life”, and finally hold together an increasingly fractured world. The state is necessarily an oppressive construction that can not be used as a tool for freedom. Its power is however so great that the material rewards it has allotted for its citizens is enormous.
Footnotes:
This sentiment of the old dying and the new being born is not unique to Gramsci specifically; One can even quote Goebbels for the same sentiment.
The extent to which this was created at Osnabrück and Münster has been overstated to some degree. The terms of Cuius regio, eius religio were actually decided in the Augsburg Settlement and in any case do not refer to state sovereignty, but merely to religious freedom of constituent HRE states. Instead the major development is perhaps the interpretation of territorial sovereignty that has emerged (and subsequently been codified in the UN Charter).
L’État, c’est moi.
literally “I die, but the state remains”.
See chapter 17 of The Prince.
That is the idea of a nation (a group of people) and distinct national identity whose interests should be represented and cared for by a state.
As in a force for change, not necessarily an improvement.
In the Stephanus pagination.
In the wider sense of advertisement, public information announcements, television, social media, strategic communications, and similar methods of information control.
Through technical devices such as radio and loudspeaker 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man. The telephone, teletype and radio made it possible, for instance, for orders from the highest sources to be transmitted directly to the lowest-ranking units, where, because of the high authority, they were carried out without criticism. Another result was that numerous offices and headquarters were directly attached to the supreme leadership, from which they received their sinister orders directly.
This is the same change that followed the invention of writing, although in this case it is of a far greater magnitude. Still, writing is a more impressive development owing to the general lack of technique compared to today. This is akin to how a small percentage change of a large number is greater than a large percentage change of a small one.
