Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is any political system in which a citizen is totally subject to state authority in all aspects of day-to-day life. It goes well beyond dictatorship or typical police state measures, and even beyond those measures required to sustain total war with other states. It involves constant indoctrination achieved by propaganda to erase any potential for dissent, by anyone, including most especially the state's agents.Political scientists generally see totalitarianism as the extreme dictatorship.
The term was originally coined by Benito Mussolini to describe his regime in Italy; Italian fascism became fully totalitarian by 1940. It was popularized by Hannah Arendt in order to illustrate the commonalities between Nazism and Stalinism as theories of civics. It has also been used to include all fascist and communist regimes — though some fascist regimes, such as Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy before World War II, and some communist regimes, such as Yugoslavia under Tito and the People's Republic of China under Deng Xiaoping, could be characterized as more authoritarian than totalitarian.
Totalitarian regimes have generally been larger and more powerful than authoritarian ones. State control of television, radio, and other mass media make it relatively easy for totalitarian regimes to make their presence felt, often through campaigns of propaganda or the creation of a vast personality cult. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany built huge empires which came into clash with the free world, and Germany was liberated on V-E Day by Allied forces led by the United States. Arendt in particular draws parallels between fascism and Stalinism. For more information see Fascism#Fascism_and_Stalinism.
The relationship between totalitarianism and authoritarianism is controversial: some see totalitarianism as an extreme form of authoritarianism, while others argue that they are completely different.
Some political analysts, notably neo-conservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, have studied the various distinctions between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. They argue that while both types of governments can be extremely brutal to political opponents, in an authoritarian government the government's efforts are directed mostly at those who are considered political opponents, and the government has neither the will or often the means to control every aspect of an individual's life. In a totalitarian system, the ruling ideology requires that every aspect of an individual's life be subordinate to the state, including occupation, income, and religion. Personal survival is tied to the regime's survival, and thus the concept of the state and the people are merged. This is also called the carceral state - like a prison.
In political theories such as libertarianism, totalitarianism is regarded as the most extreme form of statism. However, other political philosophers disagree with this analysis as it implies that totalitarianism can come into being through a slow and gradual increase from an operational government, while totalitarian regimes almost uniformly come into being as a result of a revolution which replaces what is generally regarded as an ineffective government.
It has been argued that totalitarianism requires a cult of personality around a charismatic "great leader" who is glorified as the legitimator of the regime. Many totalitarian societies fit this model - for example, those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Il-Sung. This is one of the reasons some scholars were reluctant to consider the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and most of the Warsaw Pact nations totalitarian. When those governments fell, however, the majority of the populations and intellectuals of the countries argued that what they had experienced was indeed totalitarianism. This has made more popular the belief that a charismatic leader is a frequent but not a necessary characteristic of totalitarianism.Totalitarian regimes
Theories of totalitarianism