TOTALITARISMO. – This is a neologism, coined from the adjective “total” (totus), to designate that form of regime and that political doctrine which absorbs everything into the State and subordinates everything to its purposes of power. In particular, it refers to the most modern dictatorships, such as fascism, National Socialism, and Bolshevism, which, although proceeding from different conceptions, arrived at the establishment of a pervasive absolutism from which no aspect of human life and activity, private or public, is exempt. T., before becoming a regime, was a sentimental movement, to which the ideological movement was subsequently grafted; the latter arose in reaction to the liberal State, deemed incapable of resolving modern social problems, made more acute by the political and economic crisis caused by the First World War. These causes, however, cannot be extended to Russian t., whose origin must be traced to the conception of Marxist communism, which, after the overthrow of the bourgeois State, envisages a period of dictatorship of the proletariat as a preparatory phase for the simple disappearance of the State. Whereas the two historical forms of t. now vanished arose in dialectical opposition to the liberal State, the one still existing arose from the struggle against the bourgeois State, which in practice then came to coincide with the former, so that one may assert the existence between them of an identity in the objective to be attacked.
The liberal or bourgeois State had been erected upon the premise of the democratic conception disseminated by the French Revolution, in which an extreme individualism was joined to the atomistic composition of society, expressed in the theory of popular sovereignty, in the consequent parliamentary regime, established through the mechanism of the greater number by means of universal suffrage, and in the proclamation and protection of the rights of freedom, which entered into modern constitutions after the first French one. T. denied each and every one of these principles of political organization. Accusing liberalism of having opened an unbridgeable rift between the individual and the State, it claimed to heal it by suppressing the former, so that the State alone, perfectly autonomous, might tower above all. It opposed the monistic and organic conception to the atomistic one and, forgetting the analogy implicit in the organism, carried it to the excess of identification, conceiving the individual as a cell of the organism of the State, from which the individual receives life, dignity, and rights, and outside of which he is nothing. It replaced popular sovereignty with the unitary sovereignty of the State, conceived as an absolute and unlimited power, subject to no restriction deriving from a law autonomous of its will or from rights pre-existing in the human person. Parliamentarianism, as the participation of the people in the administration of public affairs through representatives freely chosen in regular and periodic consultations, was reformed by the appointment of chambers chosen by the recognized single party and permitted through a determination proceeding from above. The rights of the human person were conceived as an emanation of the State and its benevolent concession; in general, no other source of all law was recognized than its autonomous will.
With this reversal of positions vis-à-vis the liberal State, which was undoubtedly deserving of criticism, dictatorships were established, whose dominant feature may be summarized in Mussolini’s classic formula: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State,” whence the designation t. The expression of Louis XIV, “The State is me,” may be considered a summary of the characteristics of the absolute State (ancien régime); likewise, the expression just cited may be regarded as the essence of the totalitarian conception. The State is everything and penetrates everywhere, with no aspect of human life escaping its dominion: private activity, family life, births and the education of offspring, thought and currents of thought, art, literature, philosophy, science, the press—in short, everything remains submerged in the State, which has the right to regulate it at its discretion. It must also be said 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 concept that served as its support date back to the nineteenth century: t. did nothing more than take them up and put them into practice, deducing all their consequences.
Fascist t. was inspired by the nationalist myth, making the nation a perennial entity that encompasses within itself all past, present, and future generations and has purposes of its own, distinct from those of individuals, who remain wholly subordinate to II. National Socialist t. placed race, as the supreme value, and the biological bond of blood, as the bearer of racial elements, at the foundation of its conceptions, locating the supreme purpose of man in their preservation and purity. Russian t., on the other hand, relies upon the concept of class, of which every individual is an element wholly devoted to its purposes of struggle. A feature common to all is the idolatry of the head of State, to whom every capacity has been attributed, thus transforming him into an infallible superman in each of his decisions, whence the ensuing mystical degenerations, with an evident revival of the apotheosis of the living man that had occurred in decadent paganism.
On the international plane, t. distinguished itself by its policy of power and conquering expansion. Conceiving relations among peoples as relations of pure force, it formulated its own theory of international organization, composed of domineering messianism, arbitrary distinctions between young and old peoples, between peoples destined to serve and peoples by nature destined to direct, and between bourgeois and proletarians—all fused within an imperialistic mentality, of which the theory of great spaces was an expression. Only Russian imperialism partly achieved its expansionist aims; the others were swept away by the Second World War.
From the moral and juridical standpoint, t. is diametrically opposed to the Christian and Catholic conception of social life, the State, and international relations.