TOTALITARIANISM. — It is a neologism, characterized by the adjective “total” (*totus*), used to denote that form of regime and political doctrine which absorbs everything into the State and subordinates all things to its ends of power. In particular, it refers to the most modern dictatorships, such as Fascism, National Socialism, and Bolshevism, which, though arising from different conceptions, have nonetheless led to the establishment of a capillary absolutism from which no aspect of private or public human life and activity is exempt. Totalitarianism, before being a regime, was a sentimental movement, to which an ideological movement was later grafted, born in reaction to the liberal State, deemed incapable of resolving 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 origins must be traced back 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 to the simple disappearance of the State. While the two historical forms of totalitarianism now extinct arose in dialectical opposition to the liberal State, the one still in existence emerged from the struggle against the bourgeois State, which in practice comes to coincide with the former, so that between them an identity in the objective to be attacked can be asserted.
The liberal or bourgeois State had been erected on the presupposition of the democratic conception disseminated by the French Revolution, in which the atomistic composition of society was joined to an extreme individualism, expressed in the theory of popular sovereignty, in the consequent parliamentary regime, established through the mechanism of the majority by means of universal suffrage, and in the proclamation and protection of liberty rights, which entered into 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 insurmountable rift between the individual and the State, it has sought to heal it by suppressing the former, so as to make the State alone and perfectly autonomous loom large. To the atomistic conception it has opposed the monistic and organic one, and, forgetting the analogy implicit in the organism, has 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 nothing. To popular sovereignty it has 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 pre-existing rights in the human person. Parliamentarism, as the participation of the people in the administration of public affairs through freely chosen representatives in regular and periodic consultations, was reformed by the appointment of chambers selected by the single party recognized and permitted by a determination coming from above. The rights of the human person were conceived as emanations of the State and its benevolent concession, and in general for all law no other source was recognized than its autonomous will.
With this reversal of positions with respect to the liberal State—undoubtedly deserving of criticism—dictatorships were established, whose dominant feature can be summarized in the classic formula of Mus