Dana lives in a country that follows right-wing totalitarianism. therefore, it is most likely that:

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Abstract

What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theories of civil society suggest that totalitarianism can create civil societies while authoritarianism is unlikely to. This article argues that both these perspectives suffer from a one-dimensional understanding of civil society that conflates strength and autonomy. Accordingly we distinguish these two dimensions and argue that totalitarian dictatorships tend to create organizationally strong but heteronomous civil societies, while authoritarian ones tend to create relatively autonomous but organizationally weak civil societies. We then test this conceptualization by closely examining the historical connection between dictatorship and civil society development in Italy (a posttotalitarian case) and Spain (a postauthoritarian one). Our article concludes by reflecting on the implications of our argument for democratic theory, civil society theory, and theories of regime variation.

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Abstract

The notion of totalitarianism as a singular event in the twentieth century, beginning with his philosophical and political analysis of contradictions and ways of transformation into the contemporary era of the end of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The most significant political theorists of the twentieth century, such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Neumann, and Carl J. Friedrich, start from the uncanny event of the absolute novelty concerning the phenomenon of total rule in modern times. But it could be a real problem. If totalitarianism transgresses the traditional notions of political philosophy, such as were forms of governments blended in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the New era—tyranny, dictatorship, despotism, sovereign monarchy—then it might be obvious that the term defines as negative (a) as well as the possibility of non-democratic political order and (b) as the completion of the epochal-historical form in which a modern set of economics, politics, and culture appears.

Keywords

• Political philosophy
• Singular event
• Global order
• Total state
• A society of control
• The end of sovereignty
• Corporatism

Notes

1. 1.

   The terms totalitarianism, total state, and total governance are primarily related to national socialism as the ideology and Nazi politics of Germany since the 1920s as a movement to the end and the defeat in the Second World War in 1945. Italian fascism is referred to as the corporate state, which does not mean that the totality of the rule does not accompany this movement with the same principles of one leader and ideologies. But the difference is that the Nazis from the very beginning have a radical idea of geopolitical conquest of Europe and the world, whereby Italy in this regard relies on the mythical projection of the Roman Empire. In the use of the concepts of totalitarianism, the total governance, and the total state, the case of Stalinism as a paradigmatic way of constructing socialism based on the ideology of Lenin and Stalin shows that it is the same thing. So, the total state cannot be based on terror over racial-national minorities, but on the terror against the bourgeois class and the “enemy” of the new social order. The problem with terminological use refers to the real problem of equivalence and the difference between the three types of totalitarian rule in the twentieth century. It will be not unusual, however, to consider that communism and socialist types of totalitarianism were sufficiently condemned in the twentieth century from 1945 to 1989 in the world. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression seeks to show in the name of the symmetry of crimes committed in totalitarian systems of real Socialism that crimes of communism were greater than fascism, because the totalitarian rule in the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, the People’s Republic of Korea, and the whole of Eastern Europe has secured victory over fascism in the Second World War. As a key argument, it continues to take the view of historian Ernst Nolte that fascism has been a reaction to communism established in Russia in 1917 (Nolte 2008 and Evans 1991).

2. 2.

   The emergence of total rule in the twentieth century in modern Europe is undoubtedly an ambivalent process. On the one hand, it is about accounting with liberalism in economics and politics, indicating that the totalitarian order in its effectiveness is the most radical change in the history of modernity from the French Revolution until the end of the First World War. On the other hand, the strange, total rule would be impossible without a corporate system of economics. Its fundamental task of generating benefits in the traditional notion of the market and surplus value is socialized by making the formal condition a subject of political control of the economy (Germany and Italy), or as in Stalinism, the collapse of civil society and the capitalist economy becomes the means of establishing a total rule of command policy in form permanent terror over the subject of the “revolution”—the proletarian class and the peasantry. In researching the genealogy of total rule in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt regarding the pathology of modern in imperialist demonstrations of European states and the destruction of public freedom, Danna Villa derives from the underlying assumption of the “postmodern turn” in understanding the political origin of Hannah Arendt: that, in other words, totalitarianism was not a necessity, but only one of the possibilities of the historical development of European modern politics (Villa 2008, 212).

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Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

   Žarko Paić

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Paić, Ž. (2022). Totalitarianism Without Subject: The End of the Total State and the “Ideology” of the Corporatism. In: The Return of Totalitarianism . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18942-5_2

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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18942-5_2

• Published: 08 December 2022

• Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

• Print ISBN: 978-3-031-18941-8

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