Totalitarian democracy

Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon to refer to a dictatorship based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a perfectionist ideology.

This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to liberal democracy which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern.

The phrase had previously been used by Bertrand de Jouvenel and E. H. Carr, and subsequently by F. William Engdahl and Sheldon S. Wolin.

J. L. Talmon

In his 1952 book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy Talmon argued that the totalitarian and liberal types of democracy emerged from the same premises during the eighteenth century. He regarded the conflict between these two types of democracy as of world-historical importance:

Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.

The political neologism messianic democracy (also political Messianism) also derives from Talmon's introduction to this work.

Differences between totalitarian democracy and liberal democracy

Talmon identified the following differences between totalitarian and liberal democracy:

• The totalitarian approach is based on the assumption of a total and exclusive truth in politics. It postulates a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven and at which they are bound to arrive (see historical determinism).

• The liberal approach assumes politics to be a matter of trial and error. It regards political systems as pragmatic contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. The totalitarian approach views politics as an integral part of an all-embracing and coherent philosophy. It defines politics as the art of applying this philosophy to the organisation of society, and the final purpose of politics is only achieved when this philosophy reigns supreme over all fields of life.

• The liberal approach recognises a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics. The totalitarian approach recognises only one plane of existence, the political. It widens the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence. It treats all human thought and action as having social significance, and therefore as falling within the orbit of political action.

• The liberal approach finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion. The totalitarian approach believes freedom to be only realised in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose.

Historical development

Talmon argued that totalitarian democracy arose in three stages:

1. The eighteenth century postulate: the intellectual developments in eighteenth century France spurred by the collapse of feudal and ecclesiastical authority in the early modern era. Key figures: Morelly, Helvetius, Mably, Rousseau.
2. The Jacobin improvisation: the development during the Reign of Terror of single-party dictatorship and the use of terror as a political instrument, based on a doctrine of total popular sovereignty. Key figures: Sieyes, Saint-Just, Robespierre.
3. The Babouvist crystalisation: the extension of totalitarian logic to property, leading to Communism.

Engdahl, Wolin and Žižek

Engdahl and Wolin add some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarianism.

In his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order, Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global hegemony through military and economic means. According to him, U.S. state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: "[it is] a power establishment that over the course of the Cold War has spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of nuclear war by miscalculation"

Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the tendency of what he calls "inverted totalitarianism":

While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, [inverted totalitarianism] gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their respective identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.

Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism" Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government. Corporate influence, he argues, is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, he contends that many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: "[With] the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."

Slavoj Žižek, in his 2002 book of essays Welcome to the Desert of the Real, comes to similar conclusions. Here he argues that the war on terror served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the US, while the promise of democracy and freedom was spread abroad as the justification for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Since Western democracies are always justifying states of exception, he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency.

See also

• Anti-democratic thought
• Authoritarianism
• Autocracy
• Electocracy
• Falangism
• Guided democracy
• Illiberal democracy
• National anarchism
• Neocameralism
• Outline of democracy
• Post-democracy
• Ruscism
• Soft despotism
• Sovereign democracy
• Tyranny of the majority