Totalitarianism: Theory and Critics

The word 'totalitarian' was first used in the early 1920s by Italian critics of Mussolini, and Mussolini then embraced it, proclaiming 'everything within the state, nothing outside the state'. After 1945, scholars used it to compare Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) emphasized ideology, terror and the isolation of individuals. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1956) listed six features: an official ideology, a single mass party led by one leader, a system of terror, a monopoly of communications, a monopoly of weapons, and central control of the economy.

Critics argued the model was too static, overstated the regimes' control, and was used during the Cold War to equate communism with Nazism for political purposes. Later historians found that even these regimes faced resistance, chaos and competing power centres. The concept remains useful, but scholars now treat it as an extreme type rather than a perfect description.