TOTALITARIANISM. - It is a neologism, coined from the adjective "total" (totus), to indicate that form of regime and that political doctrine which absorbs everything into the State and subordinates everything to its aims of power. In a particular way it refers to the most modern dictatorships, such as Fascism, National Socialism and Bolshevism, which, although starting from different conceptions, arrived at the establishment of a capillary absolutism, from which no aspect of human life and activity, private or public, escapes. Totalitarianism, before being a regime, was a sentimental movement, onto which the ideological one was later grafted, born in reaction to the liberal State, held incapable of solving the modern social problems, rendered more acute by the political and economic crisis caused by the First World War. These causes, however, cannot be extended to Russian totalitarianism, whose origin must be traced back to the conception of Marxist communism, which, after the overthrow of the bourgeois State, foresees a period of dictatorship of the proletariat, as a preparatory phase to the pure and simple disappearance of the State. While the two historical forms of totalitarianism now set have arisen in dialectical opposition to the liberal State, the one still existing arose from the struggle against the bourgeois State, which in practice then comes to coincide with the former, so that between them one may assert the existence of an identity in the objective to be struck.
The liberal or bourgeois State had been erected on the presupposition of the democratic conception disseminated by the French Revolution, in which to the atomistic composition of society was joined an extreme individualism, expressed in the theory of popular sovereignty, in the consequent parliamentary regime, established with the mechanism of the majority through universal suffrage, and in the proclamation and protection of the rights of liberty, which became part of modern constitutions after the first French one. Totalitarianism has denied each and every one of these principles of political organization. Accusing liberalism of having opened an insuperable rift between the individual and the State, it claimed to heal it by suppressing the former, so as to make the State alone tower, perfectly autonomous. To the atomistic conception it opposed the monistic and organic one and, forgetting the analogy implicit in the organism, it carried it to the excess of identification, conceiving the individual as a cell of the organism of the State, which receives life, dignity and rights from the State, and outside of it is a nothing. To popular sovereignty it substituted the unitary sovereignty of the State, conceived as absolute and unlimited power, not subject to any restriction deriving from a law autonomous from its will or from rights pre-existing in the human person. Parliamentarism, as participation of the people in the administration of public affairs, through representatives freely chosen in regular and periodic consultations, was reformed with the appointment of chambers chosen by the single party recognized and permitted by a determination coming from above. The rights of the human person were conceived as an emanation of the State and its benevolent concession, as in general for all law no other source was recognized than its autonomous will.
With this overturning of positions with respect to the liberal State, undoubtedly deserving of criticism, one arrived at the establishment of dictatorships, whose dominant note can be summed up in the classic formula of Mussolini: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State," whence then the name of totalitarianism. As the expression of Louis XIV: "The State is I" can be considered as a summary of the characteristics of the absolute State (ancient regime), so the one cited can be held to be the essence of the totalitarian conception. The State is everything and penetrates everywhere, without any aspect of human life escaping its empire: private activity, family life, births and education of offspring, thought and currents of thought, art, literature, philosophy, science, the press, in short everything remains submerged in the State, to which it belongs to regulate it in a discretionary manner. One must also say that this monstrous hypertrophy of the State had already been prepared by the social and juridical doctrines elaborated during the period of liberalism and by convinced liberals. The concept of the absolute sovereignty of the State and the monistic one, which served it as a support, go back to the 19th century: totalitarianism has done nothing but assume them and put them into practice, deducing all their consequences.
Fascist totalitarianism was inspired by the nationalist myth, making of the nation a perennial entity, which encloses in itself all past, present and future generations and has ends of its own distinct from those of the individuals, who remain entirely subordinate to it. National Socialist totalitarianism placed at the foundation of its conceptions race, as the supreme value, and the biological bond of blood, as the bearer of racial elements, in whose preservation and purity it placed the supreme end of man. Russian totalitarianism, on the other hand, leverages the concept of class, of which every individual is an element totally devoted to its aims of struggle. A note common to all is the idolatry of the head of State, to whom all capacities have been attributed, so as to transform him into an infallible superman in his every decision, whence then the mystifying degenerations, with an evident revival of the apotheosis of the living man, which occurred in decadent paganism.
On the international plane totalitarianism has distinguished itself by its policy of power and conquering expansion. Conceiving relations between peoples as relations of pure force, it formulated a theory of its own on international organization, composed of dominating messianism, of arbitrary distinctions between young and old peoples, between peoples destined to serve and peoples by nature destined to lead, between bourgeois and proletarians, all fused within an imperialistic mentality, of which the theory of large spaces was an expression. Only Russian imperialism has partly achieved its expansionist aims; the others have been swept away by the Second World War.
From the moral and juridical aspect totalitarianism is at the antipodes of the Christian and Catholic conception of social life, of the State and of international relations.