'Totalitarian' was a word Italian Fascists proudly applied to themselves
The term totalitarian first appeared in the early 1920s to describe Mussolini's government, and Fascists embraced it. In The Doctrine of Fascism, a 1932 essay co-written with Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile called the Fascist state a synthesis of all values that develops the whole life of a people. Cold War scholars later turned it on Stalin and Hitler.
Mussolini presented Fascist Italy, which lasted from 1922 to 1943, as the model totalitarian state, one in which everything belonged inside the state and nothing could stand outside or against it. In Germany the jurist Carl Schmitt used der Totalstaat, the total state, in his 1927 book The Concept of the Political to justify a German version. The historian Enzo Traverso traces the idea further back, to the notion of total war that contemporaries used for the First World War, which accustomed a generation to the methodical destruction of an enemy through modern technology.
Political science now sets totalitarianism apart from ordinary authoritarianism by degree and by purpose. An authoritarian ruler may want only power and leave society some liberty so long as that power goes unchallenged. A totalitarian regime pursues an official ideology and tries to control economy, education, arts, science and private morality, using a banned opposition, a personality cult around the leader, censorship of all media and mass surveillance.
During the early Cold War the concept was built on comparisons between Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, and it dominated Anglo-American discussion through the work of Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich. In Italy and France, where communists had led much of the anti-fascist resistance, those works were often ignored; West Germany was the exception in continental Europe. Historians still argue over whether Lenin founded the first totalitarian state; revisionists and Arendt herself disagreed.
Some historians of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union doubt the model altogether, arguing that neither regime ever achieved total control, total mobilisation or a truly monolithic government, since both were internally disorganised. Karl Popper's attempt to trace totalitarian thinking back to Plato, Hegel and Marx has also drawn criticism as ahistorical, not least because Plato did not invent the modern state.
Source: Totalitarianism
