Michael Oakeshott might seem at first glance to have little to say about totalitarianism and therefore to be an unlikely contributor to either the theory or the practice of cold war liberalism. The word does not feature in any significant sense in his very extensive writings. If he noted the term totalitarian at all he would have mentally classed it with all those other words like nation-state and popular sovereignty which litter modern political discourse and in his view are best avoided by serious students of politics. Such ideas are derived from rationalist political doctrines and therefore belong to ideological politics. An ideology is an ‘abstract principle or set of related abstract principles which has been independently premeditated’. Oakeshott believed that ideologies confuse more than they elucidate because they are based on a very superficial view of what politics is about, and prevent clear thinking about its nature.

The concept of totalitarianism

The concept of totalitarianism was originally used by writers sympathetic to Italian fascism to describe their political and ideological revolution against liberalism. But its meaning changed when it began to be used by supporters of liberal democracy to denote the character of the regimes which fascism and communism had created in Europe, and to contrast them unfavourably with western liberal regimes. The term became pejorative, denoting societies in which state control had become all-pervasive, over the minds as well as the bodies of its citizens, and all the intermediate institutions and associations between the individual and the state had been destroyed. The state was allpowerful and highly centralised, while individuals had become atomised and dependent, and no longer capable of acting autonomously. The idea of totalitarianism embracing both Nazism and communism, even though the two were deadly rivals, became an important current after the war, although it was already in use in the 1930s, as the regimes of Hitler and Stalin consolidated their grip. After 1945 the Soviet Union and the satellite states under its control were seen as the main instance of totalitarianism, although the concept was extended backwards in time to include the fascist and Nazi regimes of Europe which had been destroyed in the Second World War.