Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word

Despite our best efforts, we never get beyond totalitarianism. The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. As Michael Geyer notes in his thought-provoking introduction, it was the word preferred by dissidents. 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 the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It 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 with its five (or was it six?) characteristics defining all such regimes. As a coherent framework that might account for development across space and time, totalitarianism has been dead for decades.¹ I was surprised to see authors in this volume citing Friedrich and Brzezinski as though they still needed to be refuted, or claiming that no one had thought to test empirically Hannah Arendt's notion of atomization.² Debates continue to smolder across the former Soviet satellites, however, not on whether but rather how to use the word "totalitarian." One East German historian friend made the point well in a letter written in October 2007:

Tomorrow we will have belonged to the Federal Republic for 17 years. The media are talking less about unification and more about three main points concerning the GDR: the dictatorship of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the practices of the Stasi, and people shot dead at the Wall. Those are certainly important subjects. But several million human beings lived and worked in this system for over 40 years. What was accomplished for human beings, and how it was accomplished, is ignored completely.³

His point is not that the words "dictatorship" or "totalitarian" should not be used, but that they can block comprehension of two connected things: how the system functioned, and how it was experienced. These are connected because people's subjective sense of contributing to and benefiting from state socialism made it more or less stable. For almost two decades, social historians in Germany have been testing the "boundaries of dictatorship" in the GDR to determine how society functioned with, against, and independently of the state's will.⁴ At the same time, their critics have noted that "millions of human beings" also suffered under communist dictatorships, believing the lives they led behind the Wall were half-lived lives, because they were denied essential conditions for realizing their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

I understand the contribution of Beyond Totalitarianism not so much "beyond" as "beneath" totalitarianism: that is, as an effort at peeling away the surface to reveal internal mechanisms and dynamics of politics, the "energization" of everyday life, techniques of inclusion and exclusion, the transformative effects of violence. Such are the chapter headings. The point is not that these themes have never been explored, but that historians have tended to see them in single national contexts. This book is an exercise in comparative history.

And that exacts high standards. The point is not simply to place two "case studies" next to each other in a kind of "show and tell," so that Hans Mommsen learns basic facts about Stalinism and Sheila Fitzpatrick gets pointers on the Nazi regime; rather the point is to achieve what Michael Geyer calls "value added." In the end, Mommsen should know more about Nazi Germany by looking at the Soviet Union, Fitzpatrick more about the Soviet Union by looking at Nazi Germany. Comparison can focus attention on constitutive elements of historical contexts that are...