What Is Totalitarianism?

The totalitarian state attempts to turn all its subjects into accomplices in its great lie.
—Václav Benda

Everyone is familiar with small lies—the white lies told to save someone’s feelings, the justifications used for morally ambiguous choices—and with larger lies, as when we find out that an institution’s actions have been ruthlessly deceptive. The Great Lie is something else entirely: an all-encompassing ideology that begins as political but extends far beyond politics, penetrating into all aspects of experience. It attempts to reconstruct the very nature of the human person, and to undermine reason. Hence, it is a falsification of reality itself, well captured in Mussolini’s famous dictum, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”[1] —a diabolical inversion of I Corinthians 15:28, where God is all in all.

The totalitarianism that arose in the 20th century is not a modern and corrupt form of tyranny, but something new in history, as the essays in The Great Lie make clear. Hannah Arendt insists that it is beyond even the “unprecedented,” exploding all possible alternatives. Tyrants rule by fear, and that fear is concentrated in an external threat coming from a specific direction; the Big Lie engenders internalized self-coercion and self-repression motivated by a miasma of dread that cannot be dispelled by reason. This is by design: those in power act in unpredictable ways, a feature of terrorism that instills a pathological anxiety in its subjects, resulting in servile obedience. The State lies, and the people living under its maleficence must themselves lie in concert in order to protect their life and livelihood. Solzhenitsyn notes that “the permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence.”

It is impossible to do justice in a short review to this monumental volume of essays on the Great Lie. It comprises thirty-six articles written from 1941 to 2001, many by well-known authors (Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Arendt, Miłosz, Manent, Voegelin, Strauss, Besançon) and others whose names might be unfamiliar to the English-speaking world. It is divided into six sections: Concepts (how totalitarianism differs from tyranny); Nature (the essential logic and features that arise, even in very different circumstances); Origins (the philosophic conditions that allowed for the rise of such a modern novelty); Seduction (how these regimes captured so many people); Dissent (its possibilities, how it is manifested, and what this tells us about the nature, novelty, and limits of totalitarianism); and Lessons (the totalitarian experience and what it means for the future).

Although we may not have a malevolent police-state apparatus with a multitude of informers, we have incomparable methods of digital surveillance and control that would make the KGB envious.

Many topics will be familiar, but there are several claims in the book that for some readers might seem unlikely. One would be Taylor’s contention, referencing among others Voegelin, Aron, and Arendt, that Soviet Communism and Nazism were not in fact representative of the extremes of left and right but were essentially two species of one genus. On a more current topic, Chantal Delsol notes that Western societies, like totalitarian ones, “also attempt, and for the very same reasons, methodically to reconstruct cultural reality.” The rejection of the rosy view of liberal democracy as a bulwark against totalitarianism seems counterintuitive, for surely it is the very antithesis of the all-encompassing State, with its public/private distinction, system of checks and balances, and more. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn was excoriated after his 1978 Harvard Commencement Address for implying that the differences between the totalitarian East and the liberal democracies of the west were “less terrifying than the similarity of the disease” afflicting both.

The notion that an incipient totalitarianism has been present in the liberal West has not been readily acknowledged. Totalitarianism takes on various configurations: as certain plants send out rhizomes and can appear differently in different places due to disparities in soil composition and climate, so totalitarianism sends its poisonous shoots into very diverse sets of circumstances, mutating its distinctive DNA to adapt to the conditions. Content is mistaken for form: totalitarianism does not necessarily require repressive physical violence like nighttime raids, bullets in the back of the head, and gulags. Although we may not have a malevolent police-state apparatus with a multitude of civilian and familial informers, we have incomparable methods of digital surveillance and control that would make the KGB envious. Worse, we have a populace who too often needs no external constraint but rather has been conditioned to embrace the desiderata of the State apparatus as if they were personal choices. These points make the book of more than historical interest. Events straight out of Orwell’s 1984 make the news daily, from arrests for praying silently inside one’s head, to re-education classes for expressing a belief that has been held for millennia, to the corruption of language into Orwellian “newspeak” and the inversion of the truth, where violence becomes “protected speech” and reasonable speech is equated with violence. The totalitarian desire to control the very conscience, as in the climax of 1984, is pervasive, making the book chillingly astute about the present and prescient about the future.

The penultimate paragraph of book reviews is often the locus of criticism. I find nothing to criticize, but given the above, one suggestion I might make is that future editions include something by more writers, such as Augusto del Noce as well as D.C. Schindler. Schindler’s article “America and the Inversion of Tyranny,” in New Polity (Winter 2024) is particularly timely as it illuminates our present situation: totalitarianism without tyranny in the classic sense —and inspires us: “Our resistance has to begin with a recollection of politics in its original purpose: the formation of order, open above and below, that arises from a recovery of the relationship to reality, in all of its created goodness, truth, and beauty at the foundation of human community.”

Reading The Great Lie elicits startling moments of recognition and, due to the immensity and weight of truth told at a price, the awareness that the writers are bearing witness. To quote Delsol again, “The authentic subject is neither a fanatic nor a nihilist, but a witness.” That should be true of the readers as well. Solzhenitsyn exhorts us to open our eyes to that which demands “the total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie…. Do not lie. Do not take part in the lie. Do not support the lie.”[2]

[1] B. Mussolini, Discorsi del 1925 (Milan: 1926), 192. “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.”

[2] “Participation and the Lie” in I Must Speak Out: The Best of the Voluntaryist 1982–1999, ed. Carl Watner (San Francisco: Fox & Wilke, 1999).