In political science , a political system means the form of political organization that can be observed, recognised or otherwise declared by a society or state .
177-408: Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties , disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science , totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism , wherein all socio-political power
354-526: A corporatist system of "National Councils" of experts, selected from professionals and tradespeople, elected to represent and hold legislative power over their respective areas, including labour, industry, transportation, public health, and communications, among others; and abolition of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy . The Fascist Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers,
531-600: A cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance -policing of public places; and state terrorism . In the essay "Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers" (1994) the American political scientist Rudolph Rummel said that: There
708-590: A holistic -national radical Third Way ", while Walter Laqueur sees the core tenets of fascism as "self-evident: nationalism; social Darwinism ; racialism, the need for leadership, a new aristocracy, and obedience; and the negation of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution." Historian Emilio Gentile has defined fascism thusly: [A] modern political phenomenon, revolutionary , anti-liberal , and anti-Marxist , organized in
885-431: A master race which blended with some variant of racism or discrimination against a demonized " Other ", such as Jews , homosexuals , transgender people , ethnic minorities , or immigrants . These ideas have motivated fascist regimes to commit massacres , forced sterilizations , deportations , and genocides . During World War II , the genocidal and imperialist ambitions of the fascist Axis powers resulted in
1062-410: A military junta and by the socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country. Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian. Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective);
1239-460: A minimum wage , worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganization of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics, and revision of military contracts to allow
1416-424: A revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the mass mobilization of society erased the distinction between civilians and combatants. A military citizenship arose, in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner. The war resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on
1593-465: A "proletarian nation" that needed to pursue imperialism in order to challenge the " plutocratic " French and British. Corradini's views were part of a wider set of perceptions within the right-wing Italian Nationalist Association (ANI), which claimed that Italy's economic backwardness was caused by corruption in its political class, liberalism, and division caused by "ignoble socialism". The ANI held ties and influence among conservatives , Catholics, and
1770-542: A 'police state' and suppressed the media, as a forerunner of fascism. According to David Thomson , the Italian Risorgimento of 1871 led to the 'nemesis of fascism'. William L Shirer sees a continuity from the views of Fichte and Hegel , through Bismarck , to Hitler; Robert Gerwarth speaks of a 'direct line' from Bismarck to Hitler. Julian Dierkes sees fascism as a 'particularly violent form of imperialism '. Marcus Garvey , founder and leader of
1947-601: A constant struggle in which only the strongest would survive. Futurism was both an artistic-cultural movement and initially a political movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who founded the Manifesto of Futurism (1908), that championed the causes of modernism, action, and political violence as necessary elements of politics while denouncing liberalism and parliamentary politics. Marinetti rejected conventional democracy based on majority rule and egalitarianism, for
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#17327911412642124-447: A critical part in economic production for the war effort and thus arose a "military citizenship" in which all citizens were involved to the military in some manner during the war. World War I had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines or provide economic production and logistics to support those on the front lines, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in
2301-759: A defining characteristic of those ideologies. They refer to the combination of populism, authoritarianism and ultranationalism as "a marriage of convenience". Robert Paxton says: [Fascism is] a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Roger Eatwell defines fascism as "an ideology that strives to forge social rebirth based on
2478-575: A government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship. The Taliban is a totalitarian Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and returned to power in 2021 , controlling
2655-546: A high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Domenico Losurdo , totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and
2832-435: A military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian worldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of ethnic conflict , of
3009-399: A militia party with a totalitarian conception of politics and the state, an activist and anti-theoretical ideology, with a mythical, virilistic and anti-hedonistic foundation, sacralized as a secular religion, which affirms the absolute primacy of the nation, understood as an ethnically homogeneous organic community, hierarchically organized in a corporate state , with a bellicose vocation to
3186-494: A mythos of national rebirth from decadence. Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who drew upon both left-wing organizational tactics and right-wing political views. Italian fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s. A major element of fascist ideology that has been deemed to be far right is its stated goal to promote the right of a supposedly superior people to dominate, while purging society of supposedly inferior elements. In
3363-509: A new form of democracy, promoting what he described in his work "The Futurist Conception of Democracy" as the following: "We are therefore able to give the directions to create and to dismantle to numbers, to quantity, to the mass, for with us number, quantity and mass will never be—as they are in Germany and Russia—the number, quantity and mass of mediocre men, incapable and indecisive." Futurism influenced fascism in its emphasis on recognizing
3540-645: A new version of Tsar Nicholas II . After World War I, fascists commonly campaigned on anti-Marxist agendas. Liberal opponents of both fascism and the Bolsheviks argue that there are various similarities between the two, including that they believed in the necessity of a vanguard leadership, showed contempt for bourgeois values, and had totalitarian ambitions. In practice, both have commonly emphasized revolutionary action, proletarian nation theories, one-party states, and party-armies; however, both draw clear distinctions from each other both in aims and tactics, with
3717-589: A numerical sum of atomized individuals. They condemned the rationalistic, liberal individualism of society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society. The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinian biology, Gesamtkunstwerk , Arthur de Gobineau 's racialism, Gustave Le Bon 's psychology , and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche , Fyodor Dostoyevsky , and Henri Bergson . Social Darwinism , which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life, and viewed
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#17327911412643894-432: A political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both the public sphere and in the private sphere . In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from
4071-669: A pro-interventionist fascio called the Revolutionary Fasces of International Action in October 1914. Benito Mussolini upon being expelled from his position as chief editor of the PSI's newspaper Avanti! for his anti-German stance, joined the interventionist cause in a separate fascio . The term "fascism" was first used in 1915 by members of Mussolini's movement, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action. The first meeting of
4248-614: A right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts, thus, the revisionist school dismiss traditionalist historians as the being the politically reactionary faculty of the HUAC school of scholarship about the Communist Party USA . In 1980, in a book review of How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979), by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of
4425-436: A society". Political system refers broadly to the process by which laws are made and public resources allocated in a society, and to the relationships among those involved in making these decisions. Social anthropologists generally recognize several kinds of political systems, often differentiating between ones that they consider uncentralized and ones they consider centralized. The sociological interest in political systems
4602-777: A standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three. Scholars generally refer to a dictatorship as either a form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism. A monarchy is a form of government in which a person, the monarch , reigns as head of state for life or until abdication . The extent of the authority of the monarch may vary from restricted and largely symbolic ( constitutional monarchy ), to fully autocratic ( absolute monarchy ), and may have representational , executive , legislative , and judicial functions. The succession of monarchs has mostly been hereditary , often building dynasties . However, monarchies can also be elective and self-proclaimed . Aristocrats , though not inherent to monarchies, often function as
4779-483: A strict interpretation of Sharia law. Francoist Spain (1936–1975), under the dictator Francisco Franco , has been characterized as a totalitarian state until at least the 1950s by scholars. Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of Catholicism , the declared state religion . Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by
4956-692: A struggle against Communism. Throughout the European interwar period (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians to demonize the Communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of secular materialism and [as] a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order". That throughout Europe, the Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived Communism and communist régimes of government as an existential threat to
5133-608: A system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." Historian John Lukacs argues that there is no such thing as generic fascism. He claims that Nazism and communism are essentially manifestations of populism , and that states such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are more different from each other than they are similar. In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly: [A] cult of
5310-416: A thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups. Their arguments have been criticised by other scholars due to their partiality and anachronism. Juan Francisco Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an " invented tradition " and he believes that
5487-526: A time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War . 19th-century German-born philosopher Karl Marx analysed that the political systems of "all" state-societies are the dictatorship of one social class , vying for its interests against that of another one; with which class oppressing which other class being, in essence, determined by the developmental level of that society, and its repercussions implicated thereof, as
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5664-402: A totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way of collective leadership . The American historian Walter Laqueur agreed that Bracher's totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski. In Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968)
5841-549: A vanguard party that advanced socialist revolution , such as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962), Syrian Arab Republic (1963), and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978). In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government (1922–1943), the anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as a régime of government wherein
6018-411: A well made glove fits a beautiful hand." The fusion of Maurrassian nationalism and Sorelian syndicalism influenced radical Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini . Corradini spoke of the need for a nationalist-syndicalist movement, led by elitist aristocrats and anti-democrats who shared a revolutionary syndicalist commitment to direct action and a willingness to fight. Corradini spoke of Italy as being
6195-454: Is "a radical variant of fascism"—on the political right by explaining: "The more a person deems absolute equality among all people to be a desirable condition, the further left he or she will be on the ideological spectrum. The more a person considers inequality to be unavoidable or even desirable, the further to the right he or she will be." Fascism's origins are complex and include many seemingly contradictory viewpoints, ultimately centered on
6372-458: Is a very simplified view of a much more complex system of categories involving the questions of who should have authority and what the government influence on its people and economy should be. Along with a basic sociological and socio-anthropological classification, political systems can be classified on a social-cultural axis relative to the liberal values prevalent in the Western world , where
6549-476: Is better seen as an elitist ideology. They cite in particular its exaltation of the Leader, the race, and the state, rather than the people. They see populism as a "thin-centered ideology" with a "restricted morphology" that necessarily becomes attached to "thick-centered" ideologies such as fascism, liberalism, or socialism. Thus populism can be found as an aspect of many specific ideologies, without necessarily being
6726-419: Is dead" because of the "decomposition of Marxism". Sorel became a supporter of reactionary Maurrassian nationalism beginning in 1909 that influenced his works. Maurras held interest in merging his nationalist ideals with Sorelian syndicalism , known as Sorelianism , as a means to confront democracy. Maurras stated that "a socialism liberated from the democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism well as
6903-596: Is everywhere unmistakable" in the decolonising countries of Eurasia . That revolutionary Marxism–Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's rapid industrialisation (1929–1941) and the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of the Communist bloc only
7080-420: Is figuring out who holds power within the relationship between the government and its people and how the government’s power is used. According to Yale professor Juan José Linz , there are three main types of political systems today: democracies , totalitarian regimes and, sitting between these two, authoritarian regimes (with hybrid regimes ). Another modern classification system includes monarchies as
7257-406: Is held by a dictator , who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media . The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, the sciences, and
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7434-527: Is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilised and law-abiding society. Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian. North Korea is the only country in East Asia to survive totalitarianism after the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and handed over to his son Kim Jong-il and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011, as of today in
7611-609: Is more aristocratic than democracy." By 1909, after the failure of a syndicalist general strike in France, Sorel and his supporters left the radical left and went to the radical right, where they sought to merge militant Catholicism and French patriotism with their views—advocating anti-republican Christian French patriots as ideal revolutionaries. Initially, Sorel had officially been a revisionist of Marxism, but by 1910 announced his abandonment of socialist literature and claimed in 1914, using an aphorism of Benedetto Croce that "socialism
7788-524: Is much confusion about what is meant by totalitarian in the literature, including the denial that such [political] systems even exist. I define a totalitarian state as one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either] constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic secret and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including
7965-434: Is the result. In exercising the power of government upon a society, the application of an official dominant ideology differentiates the worldview of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty." Having no ideology to propagate,
8142-571: The fin-de-siècle generation. Bergson's claim of the existence of an élan vital , or vital instinct, centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism; this challenged Marxism. In his work The Ruling Class (1896), Gaetano Mosca developed the theory that claims that in all societies an "organized minority" would dominate and rule over an "disorganized majority", stating that there are only two classes in society, "the governing" (the organized minority) and "the governed" (the disorganized majority). He claims that
8319-425: The nomenklatura , the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of
8496-499: The 2020–2022 United States racial unrest , have substantiated his concern about how fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world. Roger Griffin describes fascism as "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism ." Without palingenetic ultranationalism, there is no "genuine fascism" according to Griffin. Griffin further describes fascism as having three core components: "(i)
8673-402: The Cold War and shifts in fascist organizing techniques, a number of scholars have moved toward the minimalist 'new consensus' refined by Roger Griffin: 'the mythic core' of fascism is 'a populist form of palingenetic ultranationalism .' That means that fascism is an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for
8850-687: The Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, which became the National Fascist Party two years later. The fascists came to associate the term with the ancient Roman fasces or fascio littorio , a bundle of rods tied around an axe, an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate , carried by his lictors . The symbolism of
9027-457: The Iraqi insurgency , under the name " Islamic State of Iraq ". Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , the organization later changed its name to the "Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" in 2013. The group espouses a totalitarian ideology that is a fundamentalist hybrid of Global Jihadism , Wahhabism , and Qutbism . Following its territorial expansion in 2014 , the group renamed itself as
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#17327911412649204-608: The Spirit of 1914 manifested itself in the concept of the People's League of National Socialism. This National Socialism was a form of state socialism that rejected the "idea of boundless freedom" and promoted an economy that would serve the whole of Germany under the leadership of the state. This National Socialism was opposed to capitalism because of the components that were against "the national interest" of Germany but insisted that National Socialism would strive for greater efficiency in
9381-509: The Universal Negro Improvement Association , insisted that he and his organisation "were the first fascists". In 1938, C. L. R. James wrote "all the things that Hitler was to do so well later, Marcus Garvey was doing in 1920 and 1921". The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time. The theme
9558-646: The University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times". Fascist is sometimes applied to post-World War II organizations and ways of thinking that academics more commonly term neo-fascist . Despite fascist movements' history of anti-communism , Communist states have sometimes been referred to as fascist , typically as an insult. It has been applied to Marxist–Leninist regimes in Cuba under Fidel Castro and Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh . Chinese Marxists used
9735-405: The anthropocentrist proposition that: "Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to Nature, society, and history", which excludes the intervention of supernatural beings to earthly politics of government. American historian William Rubinstein wrote that: The 'Age of Totalitarianism' included nearly all the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by
9912-553: The legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader . After the Second World War (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) and the terms totalitarian , totalitarianism , and totalitarian model . In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit the anti-fascism of the Second World War as misguided foreign policy , McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism
10089-519: The overthrow of the Shah in 1978–79 has been totalitarian—here totalitarianism was married to Muslim fundamentalism . In short, totalitarianism is the ideology of absolute power. State socialism, Communism , Nazism, fascism , and Muslim fundamentalism have been some of its recent raiments. Totalitarian governments have been its agency. The state, with its international legal sovereignty and independence, has been its base. As will be pointed out, mortacracy
10266-423: The totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state version of Communist Russia . The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects of politburo policies upon Soviet society, civil and military. Despite the limitations of police-state historiography, revisionist Kremlinologists said that
10443-516: The totalitarian model of the USSR as a police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader Stalin , who heads a monolithic, centralised hierarchy of government. The study of the internal politics of the politburo crafting policy at the Kremlin produced two schools of historiographic interpretation of Cold War history: (i) traditionalist Kremlinology and (ii) revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for
10620-643: The "Islamic State" and declared itself as a caliphate that sought domination over the Muslim world and established what has been described as a " political-religious totalitarian regime ". The quasi-state held significant territory in Iraq and Syria during the course of the Third Iraq War and the Syrian civil war from 2013 to 2019 under the dictatorship of its first Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , who imposed
10797-407: The "blind and incurable" ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the political scientist Hannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate Nazism and soviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of
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#173279114126410974-432: The 'new man. ' " Griffin himself explored this 'mythic' or 'eliminable' core of fascism with his concept of post-fascism to explore the continuation of Nazism in the modern era. Additionally, other historians have applied this minimalist core to explore proto-fascist movements. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser argue that although fascism "flirted with populism ... in an attempt to generate mass support", it
11151-617: The 1920s was sometimes called fascist . Historian Peter Amann states that, "Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental ... [the KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system." Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism have been dated back to ancient Greece . The political culture of ancient Greece and specifically
11328-423: The 1920s, Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile described their ideology as right-wing in the political essay The Doctrine of Fascism , stating: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right,' a fascist century." Mussolini stated that fascism's position on the political spectrum was not a serious issue for fascists: "[F]ascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on
11505-511: The 1929 Lateran Treaty , under the leadership of Pope Pius XI (1922–1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International , in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label totalitarian
11682-414: The 1950s, the political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich said that Communist states , such as Soviet Russia and Red China , were countries systematically controlled with the five features of the totalitarian model of government by a supreme leader: (i) an official dominant ideology that includes a cult of personality about the leader, (ii) control of all civil and military weapons, (iii) control of
11859-422: The 21st century. Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include brain-reading , contact tracing , and various applications of artificial intelligence . Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent world government , and in turn the establishment of such
12036-463: The Bolsheviks emphasizing the need for an organized participatory democracy ( Soviet democracy ) and an egalitarian , internationalist vision for society based on proletarian internationalism , while fascists emphasized hyper-nationalism and open hostility towards democracy, envisioning a hierarchical social structure as essential to their aims. With the antagonism between anti-interventionist Marxists and pro- interventionist fascists complete by
12213-488: The Church, along with divorces. Divorce, contraception and abortions were forbidden. According to historian Stanley G. Payne , Franco had more day-to-day power than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne,
12390-414: The Fasces of Revolutionary Action was held on 24 January 1915 when Mussolini declared that it was necessary for Europe to resolve its national problems—including national borders—of Italy and elsewhere "for the ideals of justice and liberty for which oppressed peoples must acquire the right to belong to those national communities from which they descended." Attempts to hold mass meetings were ineffective and
12567-537: The Government of the USSR to adjust public policy to the actual political economy of a Soviet society composed of pre–War and post–War generations of people with different perceptions of the utility of Communist economics for all the Russias. Hence, Russian modern history had outdated the totalitarian model that was the post– Stalinist perception of the police-state USSR of the 1950s. The historiography of
12744-468: The Italian Fasces of Combat ". The Fascist Manifesto was presented on 6 June 1919 in the fascist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia and supported the creation of universal suffrage , including women's suffrage (the latter being realized only partly in late 1925, with all opposition parties banned or disbanded); proportional representation on a regional basis; government representation through
12921-751: The Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy (1922–1943) the representative Totalitarian State : "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Likewise, in The Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish
13098-616: The Jewish Holocaust , but also comprising the mass murders and purges of the Communist world , other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I , without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in
13275-519: The Nature of Mass Movements (1951), Eric Hoffer said that political mass movements, such as Italian Fascism (1922–1943), German Nazism (1933–1945), and Russian Stalinism (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as culturally superior to the morally decadent societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That such mass psychology indicates that participating in and then joining
13452-522: The Right stands for the maintenance of an economic structure, albeit an unjust one, while the Left stands for the attempt to subvert that economic structure, even though the subversion thereof would entail the destruction of much that was worthwhile." The term fascist has been used as a pejorative , regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that
13629-577: The Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack "Stalinist anti-totalitarianism." Into the 21st century, Enzo Traverso has attacked the creators of the concept of totalitarianism as having invented it to designate the enemies of the West. According to some scholars, calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian has been asserted to be
13806-517: The Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of
13983-401: The Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research. Political system It defines the process for making official government decisions. It usually comprizes the governmental legal and economic system , social and cultural system , and other state and government specific systems. However, this
14160-518: The Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti–Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward social mobility for the post–War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the Russian Revolution (1917–1924). That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became Stalinists loyal to
14337-410: The USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography. Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism inherent to Marxism , to Communism , and to the political nature of Communist states , such as
14514-435: The USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy. The historian of Nazi Germany, Karl Dietrich Bracher said that the totalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising
14691-421: The USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a banana republic country. As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that
14868-482: The USSR. Moreover, traditionalist historians criticise the politically liberal bias they perceive in the predominance of revisionist historians in academic publishing, and claim that revisionist-school historians also over-populate the faculties of colleges, universities, and think tanks . Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history, and so produce anti-communist history biased towards
15045-414: The USSR. Revisionist Kremlinologists, such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola , transcended the interpretational limitations of the totalitarian model by recognising and reporting that the Soviet government, the communist party, and the civil society of the USSR had greatly changed upon the death of Stalin. The revisionist social history indicated that the social forces of Soviet society had compelled
15222-500: The USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism. In the case of East Germany , (0000) Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. Writing in 1987, Walter Laqueur posited that
15399-548: The USSR]." In a book review of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), by Ahmed Saladdin, Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR after Stalin was her attempt to intellectually distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]" as anti-Communist propaganda. In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010),
15576-452: The ancient Greek city state of Sparta under Lycurgus , with its emphasis on militarism and racial purity, were admired by the Nazis. Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler emphasized that Germany should adhere to Hellenic values and culture – particularly that of ancient Sparta. Georges Valois , founder of the first non-Italian fascist party Faisceau , claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from
15753-459: The business community. Italian national syndicalists held a common set of principles: the rejection of bourgeois values, democracy, liberalism, Marxism , internationalism , and pacifism , and the promotion of heroism , vitalism, and violence. The ANI claimed that liberal democracy was no longer compatible with the modern world, and advocated a strong state and imperialism. They believed that humans are naturally predatory, and that nations are in
15930-477: The class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone". Saladdin posited that while Chile under Pinochet had no "official ideology", there was one man who ruled Chile from "behind the scenes", "none other than Milton Friedman , the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago Boys , was Pinochet's adviser". In this sense, Saladdin criticised the totalitarian concept because it
16107-627: The concept to "a Communist or a Nazi tyranny." José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones , the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary party called the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA), declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity" and went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it." General Francisco Franco
16284-427: The democratic mystification of the popular will that created an impersonal collective subject. He claimed that a powerful monarch was a personified sovereign who could exercise authority to unite a nation's people. Maurras' integral nationalism was idealized by fascists, but modified into a modernized revolutionary form that was devoid of Maurras' monarchism. French revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel promoted
16461-493: The destruction of rival political parties, organisations, and independent centres of socio-political power. Moreover, the unitary functioning of the characteristics of totalitarianism allow a totalitarian government to perdure against economic crises (internal and external), large-scale failures of policy, mass social-discontent, and political pressure from other countries. Some totalitarian one-party states were established through coups orchestrated by military officers loyal to
16638-483: The development of fascism. Leon Trotsky would later formulate a theory of fascism based on a dialectical interpretation of events to analyze the manifestation of Italian fascism and the early emergence of Nazi Germany from 1930 to 1933. In 1917, Mussolini, as leader of the Fasces of Revolutionary Action , praised the October Revolution, but later he became unimpressed with Lenin, regarding him as merely
16815-492: The economy and advance the interests of workers and the common people. The "fascist right" included members of the paramilitary Blackshirts and former members of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI). The Blackshirts wanted to establish fascism as a complete dictatorship, while the former ANI members, including Alfredo Rocco , sought to institute an authoritarian corporatist state to replace
16992-405: The economy. Plenge advocated an authoritarian rational ruling elite to develop National Socialism through a hierarchical technocratic state. Fascists viewed World War I as bringing revolutionary changes in the nature of war, society, the state and technology, as the advent of total war and mass mobilization had broken down the distinction between civilian and combatant, as civilians had become
17169-530: The end of the Cold War". In the 1990s, François Furet made a comparative analysis and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism. Eric Hobsbawm criticised Furet for his temptation to stress the existence of a common ground between two systems with different ideological roots. In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion , Žižek wrote that "[t]he liberating effect" of General Augusto Pinochet 's arrest "was exceptional", as "the fear of Pinochet dissipated,
17346-546: The end of the war, the two sides became irreconcilable. The fascists presented themselves as anti-communists and as especially opposed to the Marxists . In 1919, Mussolini consolidated control over the fascist movement, known as Sansepolcrismo , with the founding of the Italian Fasces of Combat . In 1919, Alceste De Ambris and futurist movement leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti created " The Manifesto of
17523-414: The entirety of Afghanistan. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of Pashtunwali culture of the majority Pashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive violations of women's rights . The Islamic State is a Salafi-Jihadist militant group that was established in 2006 by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi during
17700-666: The family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships. Under Stalin , the Soviet Union was thus totalitarian, as was Mao 's China , Pol Pot 's Cambodia , Hitler 's Germany , and U Ne Win 's Burma . Totalitarianism is, then, a political ideology for which a totalitarian government is the agency for realizing its ends. Thus, totalitarianism characterizes such ideologies as state socialism (as in Burma ), Marxism–Leninism as in former East Germany , and Nazism . Even revolutionary Muslim Iran , since
17877-456: The far-right. Historian Stanley G. Payne 's definition is frequently cited as standard by notable scholars , such as Roger Griffin , Randall Schweller , Bo Rothstein , Federico Finchelstein , and Stephen D. Shenfield , His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts: Umberto Eco lists fourteen "features that are typical of what [he] would like to call 'Ur-Fascism', or 'Eternal Fascism'. These features cannot be organized into
18054-730: The fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break. Similar symbols were developed by different fascist movements; for example, the symbol of Falangism is five arrows joined by a yoke. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall." Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascists—especially when they're in power—have historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from
18231-402: The foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the totalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for Kremlinology , the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of the politburo crafting policy (national and foreign) yielded strategic intelligence for dealing with
18408-408: The framework of materialism . Fascism Fascism ( / ˈ f æ ʃ ɪ z əm / FASH -iz-əm ) is a far-right , authoritarian , and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy , militarism , forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy , subordination of individual interests for
18585-446: The front lines, providing logistics to support them, and having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens. Fascism rejects the view that violence is inherently negative or pointless but rather views imperialism , political violence , and war as means to national rejuvenation. Fascists often advocate for the establishment of a totalitarian one-party state , and for a dirigiste economy (a market economy in which
18762-621: The historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of
18939-522: The historiographic accuracy of Popper's 20th-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because the ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent the modern State . In the early 20th century, Giovanni Gentile proposed Italian Fascism as a political ideology with a philosophy that is "totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates
19116-527: The historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into
19293-467: The human condition as being an unceasing struggle to achieve the survival of the fittest . It challenged positivism's claim of deliberate and rational choice as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race, and environment. Its emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered the legitimacy and appeal of nationalism. New theories of social and political psychology also rejected
19470-420: The ideal German society as a Volksgemeinschaft , a racially unified and hierarchically organized body in which the interests of individuals would be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk." Kershaw noted that common factors of fascism included "the 'cleansing' of all those deemed not to belong—foreigners, ethnic minorities, 'undesirables ' " and belief in its own nation's superiority, even if it
19647-425: The ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defence of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term totalitario to identify and describe the ideological nature of the societal structures (government, social, economic, political) and the practical goals (economic, geopolitical, social) of
19824-406: The imperial future, Italian totalitarianism must politicise human existence into subservience to the state, which Mussolini summarised with the epigram: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism , contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of
20001-505: The isolationist Falangist movement . This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the " Spanish miracle ". This is comparable to De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, where Francoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree of economic freedom . The city of Geneva under John Calvin 's leadership has also been characterised as totalitarian by scholars. The death of Stalin in 1953 voided
20178-417: The key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner mass mobilization , Arendt wrote: "While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations.... [E]ven Mussolini, who
20355-464: The label anti-fascist (often shortened to antifa ) to signify their stance. The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio , meaning 'bundle of sticks', ultimately from the Latin word fasces . This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci , groups similar to guilds or syndicates . According to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini 's own account,
20532-432: The lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco's government "the most purely arbitrary in the world." However, from 1959 to 1974 the " Spanish Miracle " took place under the leadership of technocrats , many of whom were members of Opus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the old Falangist guard. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky , reassigning economic authority from
20709-474: The late 18th century Jacobin movement, seeing in its totalitarian nature a foreshadowing of the fascist state. Historian George Mosse similarly analyzed fascism as an inheritor of the mass ideology and civil religion of the French Revolution , as well as a result of the brutalization of societies in 1914–1918. Historians such as Irene Collins and Howard C Payne see Napoleon III , who ran
20886-477: The leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors. Stanley says recent global events as of 2020 , including the COVID-19 pandemic and
21063-473: The left. The accommodation of the political right into the Italian Fascist movement in the early 1920s created internal factions within the movement. The "fascist left" included Michele Bianchi , Giuseppe Bottai , Angelo Oliviero Olivetti , Sergio Panunzio , and Edmondo Rossoni , who were committed to advancing national syndicalism as a replacement for parliamentary liberalism in order to modernize
21240-446: The legitimacy of political violence in his work Reflections on Violence (1908) and other works in which he advocated radical syndicalist action to achieve a revolution to overthrow capitalism and the bourgeoisie through a general strike . In Reflections on Violence , Sorel emphasized need for a revolutionary political religion . Also in his work The Illusions of Progress , Sorel denounced democracy as reactionary, saying "nothing
21417-475: The liberal state in Italy while retaining the existing elites. Upon accommodating the political right, there arose a group of monarchist fascists who sought to use fascism to create an absolute monarchy under King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy . A number of post-World War II fascist movements described themselves as a Third Position outside the traditional political spectrum. Falange Española de las JONS leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera said: "[B]asically
21594-496: The lives of citizens. Fascists viewed technological developments of weaponry and the state's total mobilization of its population in the war as symbolizing the beginning of a new era fusing state power with mass politics , technology and particularly the mobilizing myth that they contended had triumphed over the myth of progress and the era of liberalism. The October Revolution of 1917, in which Bolshevik communists led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia, greatly influenced
21771-465: The making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Toby Ord believed that George Orwell's fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanent technological dystopia . Ord said that Orwell's writings show that his concern
21948-534: The mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." In the aftermath of the Second World War (1937–1945), in the lecture series (1945) and book (1946) titled The Soviet Impact on the Western World , the British historian E. H. Carr said that "the trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism
22125-504: The millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word] totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s." In Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022),
22302-673: The minds of unknown agitators and crackpots. In the essay "The 'Dark Forces', the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History" (1987), by J.F. Hough, and in the book The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution (2019), by Alexander Riley, the historians said that the Russian Marxist revolutionary Lenin was the first politician to establish a sovereign state of the totalitarian model. As the Duce leading
22479-561: The moral order of their respective societies; and collaborated with Fascists and Nazis in the idealistic hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to their root Christian culture. In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms totalitarianism , totalitarian , and totalitarian model , presented in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in
22656-525: The mountain of the center. ... These words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning: they do have a variable subject to location, time and spirit. We don't give a damn about these empty terminologies and we despise those who are terrorized by these words." Major Italian groups politically on the right, especially rich landowners and big business, feared an uprising by groups on the left, such as sharecroppers and labour unions. They welcomed fascism and supported its violent suppression of opponents on
22833-446: The murder of millions of people. Since the end of World War II in 1945, fascism has been largely disgraced, and few parties have openly described themselves as fascist ; the term is often used pejoratively by political opponents. The descriptions neo-fascist or post-fascist are sometimes applied to contemporary parties with ideologies similar to, or rooted in, 20th-century fascist movements. Some opposition groups have adopted
23010-504: The nation from decadence. Kershaw argues that the difference between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism in the interwar period is that the latter generally aimed "to conserve the existing social order", whereas fascism was "revolutionary", seeking to change society and obtain "total commitment" from the population. In Against the Fascist Creep , Alexander Reid Ross writes regarding Griffin's view: "Following
23187-474: The new Fascist Italy (1922–1943) , which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals." In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian Fascism, Gentile defined and described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology (subservience to the state) determined the public sphere and the private sphere of the lives of the Italian people. That to achieve the Fascist utopia in
23364-535: The notion of "modern despotism " is a "reverse anachronism"; for Fuentes, "the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present". Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to Shoshana Zuboff , the economic pressures of modern surveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at
23541-441: The notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason. Nietzsche's argument that "God is dead" coincided with his attack on the " herd mentality " of Christianity , democracy , and modern collectivism , his concept of the Übermensch , and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct, were major influences upon many of
23718-406: The official texts of the totalitarian ideology. In "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" (2018) the historian Paul Hanebrink said that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism, because for European Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, the new postwar ' culture war ' crystallized as
23895-677: The old image of the Stalinist USSR of the 1950s—a totalitarian state intent upon world domination—was oversimplified and inaccurate, because the death of Stalin changed Soviet society. After the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact , most revisionist Kremlinologists worked the national archives of ex–Communist states, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation about Soviet-period Russia. In
24072-490: The organization was regularly harassed by government authorities and socialists. Similar political ideas arose in Germany after the outbreak of the war. German sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a "National Socialism" in Germany within what he termed the "ideas of 1914" that were a declaration of war against the "ideas of 1789" (the French Revolution). According to Plenge, the "ideas of 1789"—such as
24249-420: The organized nature of the organized minority makes it irresistible to any individual of the disorganized majority. French nationalist and reactionary monarchist Charles Maurras influenced fascism. Maurras promoted what he called integral nationalism , which called for the organic unity of a nation, and insisted that a powerful monarch was an ideal leader of a nation. Maurras distrusted what he considered
24426-462: The outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Italian political left became severely split over its position on the war. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) opposed the war but a number of Italian revolutionary syndicalists supported war against Germany and Austria-Hungary on the grounds that their reactionary regimes had to be defeated to ensure the success of socialism. Angelo Oliviero Olivetti formed
24603-563: The perceived good of the nation or race , and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Opposed to anarchism , democracy , pluralism , egalitarianism , liberalism , socialism , and Marxism , fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum . Fascism rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I , before spreading to other European countries , most notably Germany . Fascism also had adherents outside of Europe. Fascists saw World War I as
24780-409: The placement of national interests above those of the individual. Fascist regimes often advocate for the overthrow of institutions that they view as "liberal decay" while simultaneously promoting traditional values. They believe in the supremacy of certain peoples and use it to justify the persecution of other groups. Fascist leaders often maintain a cult of personality and seek to generate enthusiasm for
24957-428: The political scientist Raymond Aron said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: Laure Neumayer posited that "despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at
25134-443: The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way said that nascent revolutionary régimes usually became totalitarian régimes if not destroyed with a military invasion. Such a revolutionary régime begins as a social revolution independent of the existing social structures of the state (not political succession, election to office, or a military coup d'état ). For example, the Soviet Union and Maoist China were founded after
25311-401: The politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature", whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens", by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a secret police , and monopolistic control of industrial mass society ." From the right-wing perspective,
25488-406: The politics of greatness, power, and conquest aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization. Historian and cultural critic Ruth Ben-Ghiat has described fascism as "the original phase of authoritarianism, along with early communism, when a population has undergone huge dislocations or they perceive that there's been changes in society that are very rapid, too rapid for their taste". Racism
25665-762: The pool of persons from which the monarch is chosen, and to fill the constituting institutions (e.g. diet and court ), giving many monarchies oligarchic elements. A hybrid regime is a type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete democratic transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one (or vice versa). Hybrid regimes are categorized as having a combination of autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections . Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states . Although these regimes experience civil unrest, they may be relatively stable and tenacious for decades at
25842-432: The private-life morality of the citizens. In the exercise of socio-political power, the difference between a totalitarian regime of government and an authoritarian régime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview , authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power, and is supported, either jointly or individually, by
26019-424: The public and the private mass communications media , (iv) the use of state terrorism to police the populace, and (v) a political party of mass membership who perpetually re-elect The Leader. In the 1960s, the revisionist Kremlinologists researched the organisations and studied the policies of the relatively autonomous bureaucracies that influenced the crafting of high-level policy for governing Soviet society in
26196-491: The rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism, and (iii) the myth of decadence." In Griffin's view, fascism is "a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism" built on a complex range of theoretical and cultural influences. He distinguishes an inter-war period in which it manifested itself in elite-led but populist "armed party" politics opposing socialism and liberalism, and promising radical politics to rescue
26373-456: The regime by rallying massive crowds. This contrasts with authoritarian governments, which also centralize power and suppress dissent, but want their subjects to remain passive and demobilized. Scholars place fascism on the far right of the political spectrum . Such scholarship focuses on its social conservatism and its authoritarian means of opposing egalitarianism . Roderick Stackelberg places fascism—including Nazism , which he says
26550-511: The revisionists in the field of Soviet history were guilty of confusing popularity with morality and of making highly embarrassing and not very convincing arguments against the concept of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. Laqueur stated that the revisionists' arguments with regard to Soviet history were highly similar to the arguments made by Ernst Nolte regarding German history. For Laqueur, concepts such as modernisation were inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history while totalitarianism
26727-428: The rights of man, democracy, individualism and liberalism—were being rejected in favor of "the ideas of 1914" that included "German values" of duty, discipline, law and order. Plenge believed that racial solidarity ( Volksgemeinschaft ) would replace class division and that "racial comrades" would unite to create a socialist society in the struggle of "proletarian" Germany against "capitalist" Britain. He believed that
26904-531: The simplistic totalitarian model of the police-state USSR as the epitome of the totalitarian state . A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the reign of Stalin (1927–1953) was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that state terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government. That the citizens of the USSR were not devoid of personal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens psychologically atomised by
27081-545: The social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism , which the philosopher Karl Popper said originated from humanist philosophy ; from the Republic ( res publica ) proposed by Plato in Ancient Greece , from Hegel 's conception of the State as a polity of peoples, and from the political economy of Karl Marx in the 19th century—yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute
27258-455: The society progresses through the passage of time . In capitalist societies, this characterises as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or capitalist class , in which the economic and political system is designed to work in their interests collectively as a class, over those of the proletariat or working class . Marx devised this theory by adapting his forerunner-contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 's notion of dialectics into
27435-464: The spectrum is represented as a continuum between political systems recognized as democracies , totalitarian regimes and, sitting between these two, authoritarian regimes , with a variety of hybrid regimes ; and monarchies may be also included as a standalone entity or as a hybrid system of the main three. According to David Easton , "A political system can be designated as the interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for
27612-658: The spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself". Saladdin Ahmed cited Hannah Arendt as stating that "the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term after Stalin's death ", writing that "this was the case in General August Pinochet's Chile, yet it would be absurd to exempt it from
27789-563: The state plays a strong directive role through economic interventionist policies), with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency). Fascism's extreme authoritarianism and nationalism centres around the own group, but that can manifest as a belief in Manifest Destiny , revival of historical greatness (like Mussolini seeking to restore the Roman Empire) or in case of Nazism, racial purity or
27966-427: The supreme leader personally exercises total power (political, military, economic, social) as Il Duce of The State. That Italian fascism is a political system with an ideological, utopian worldview unlike the realistic politics of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power. Later, the theoretician of Italian Fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to
28143-611: The survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history of class conflict , of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to historicism (Law of History) or by an appeal to nature , as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus. In The True Believer: Thoughts on
28320-460: The term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, " as used , the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist ' ", and in 1946 wrote that " 'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable." Richard Griffiths of
28497-713: The term to denounce the Soviet Union during the Sino-Soviet split , and the Soviets used the term to denounce Chinese Marxists, in addition to social democracy , coining a new term in social fascism . In the United States, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times asked in 1946: "Should we now place Stalinist Russia in the same category as Hitlerite Germany? Should we say that she is Fascist?" J. Edgar Hoover , longtime FBI director and ardent anti-communist, wrote extensively of red fascism . The Ku Klux Klan in
28674-532: The totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—because "the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose." That the legitimacy of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of
28851-486: The totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government of Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper. Revisionist historians noted
29028-477: The violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State. Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and the Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that
29205-413: The virile nature of violent action and war as being necessities of modern civilization. Marinetti promoted the need of physical training of young men saying that, in male education, gymnastics should take precedence over books. He advocated segregation of the genders because womanly sensibility must not enter men's education, which he claimed must be "lively, bellicose, muscular and violently dynamic." At
29382-653: The whole life of a people". In 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Führerprinzip . In the mid 20th-century, the German academics Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer traced the origin of totalitarianism to the Age of Reason (17th–18th centuries), especially to
29559-403: The years long Russian Civil War (1917-1922) and Chinese Civil War (1927-1936 and 1945-1949), respectively, not merely state succession. They produce totalitarian dictatorships with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesive ruling class comprising the military and the political élites, (ii) a strong and loyal coercive apparatus of police and military forces to suppress dissent, and (iii)
29736-636: Was a key feature of German fascism, for which the Holocaust was a high priority. According to The Historiography of Genocide , "In dealing with the Holocaust, it is the consensus of historians that Nazi Germany targeted Jews as a race, not as a religious group." Several historians, such as Umberto Eco, Kevin Passmore, and Moyra Grant, stress racism as a characteristic component of German fascism. Historian Robert Soucy stated that "Hitler envisioned
29913-535: Was an existential threat to Western civilisation , and so facilitated the creation of the American national security state to execute the anti-communist Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought by client-state proxies of the US and the USSR. During the Russo–American Cold War (1945–1989), the academic field of Kremlinology (analysing politburo policy politics) produced historical and policy analyses dominated by
30090-437: Was based on a revolt against materialism , rationalism , positivism , bourgeois society, and democracy . The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism , irrationalism , subjectivism , and vitalism . They regarded civilization as being in crisis, requiring a massive and total solution. Their intellectual school considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as
30267-888: Was determined not to have competing right-wing parties in Spain and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into exile. Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), in the essay " Why I Write " (1946), the socialist George Orwell said, "the Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism , as I understand it." That future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use
30444-747: Was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four . In 1949, Orwell wrote that "[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently". That same year, Bertrand Russell wrote that "modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states". In 2016, The Economist described China's developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping 's administration , to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian . Opponents of China's ranking system say that it
30621-557: Was not biological racism like in Nazism. Fascist philosophies vary by application, but remain distinct by one theoretical commonality: all traditionally fall into the far-right sector of any political spectrum , catalyzed by afflicted class identities over conventional social inequities. According to the Council on Foreign Relations , many experts see fascism as a mass political movement centered around extreme nationalism, militarism, and
30798-503: Was not. Laqueur's argument has been criticised by modern "revisionist school" historians such as Paul Buhle , who said that Laqueur wrongly equates Cold War revisionism with the German revisionism; the latter reflected a "revanchist, military-minded conservative nationalism." Moreover, Michael Parenti and James Petras have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communists" attacked
30975-475: Was only being applied to "opposing ideologies" and it was not being applied to liberalism. In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten, Vladimir Tismăneanu , and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms in different political systems but all of them focus on utopianism , scientism , or political violence . They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw polymathy as
31152-540: Was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule ." For example, Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a figurehead and helped play a role in the dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Also, the Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in Vatican City per
31329-650: Was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill 's speech of 5 October 1938 before the House of Commons , in opposition to the Munich Agreement , by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland . Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency . In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying
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