Introduction

The term “totalitarianism” is an awkward one. First, while the suffix “- ism” suggests an ideology, like liberalism or socialism, few have said “I am a totalitarian” in the way they have said “I am a liberal” or “I am a socialist.” Second, while “totalitarianism” is sometimes treated as the name of an object of inquiry, the adjective “totalitarian” is often used beyond the historical context in which it first arose. Ambiguity surrounds the scope of the term, too: Does it refer to forms of government, to types of state or to whole societies? Do we need it at all? Can we say what needs to be said by making use of other terms such as “tyranny” or “dictatorship”?

Totalitarianism between the Political and the Social

A popular misconception has it that “totalitarianism” is a product of the Cold War. To be sure, for some scholars and politicians it has served as a “counter concept” to “liberalism” or “democracy.” Yet when Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the word “totalitarian” was already more than 25 years old (Gleason 1995). It first appeared in Italy in 1923. Early that year, Mussolini had proposed a change in the Italian electoral law to allow the party with the largest share of the vote, as long as that was more than 25 per cent, to receive two- thirds of the seats in the parliament, and thus be able to change the constitution. On 12 May, the leftist journalist and politician Giovanni Amendola published an article in Il Mundo in which he described this as a recipe for “a totalitarian system” of rule; this he contrasted with two others: “majoritarian” and “minoritarian.” As can often happen in political life, Amendola's term for what he disapproved of was quickly adopted by those it was directed against. Mussolini himself referred to “our radical totalitarian will” and “the totalitarian state,” and in 1925 the Fascist theorist Giovanni Gentile went further and proposed a “total conception of life.” By this he meant that “it is impossible to be fascists in politics and non- fascists in schools, non- fascists in our families, non- fascists in our daily occupations.”