Table Of ContentTotalitarianism and Philosophy
When Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin first came to power in the 1930s, their
regimes were considered by many to represent a new and perplexing
phenomenon. They were labelled ‘totalitarian’. But is ‘totalitarianism’
genuinely new, or is the word just another name for something old and
familiar, namely tyranny?
T his is the first question to be addressed by Alan Haworth in this
book, which explores the relevance of philosophy to the understanding
of totalitarianism. In the course of the discussion, definitions are tested.
Is it coherent to think of totalitarianism as the imposition of a ‘total state’,
or of ‘total control’? Could it even be that the idea of totalitarianism is a
‘non-concept’?
E xamining the work of the totalitarian philosophers Giovanni Gentile
and Carl Schmitt, the idea of ‘totalitarianism by other means’ as represented
in dystopian fiction, and the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, T otalitarianism
and Philosophy is essential reading for all students and scholars of political
philosophy.
Alan Haworth is a specialist in political philosophy. He has taught the
subject at all levels, from undergraduate to doctoral. He is the author of
numerous articles and the books U nderstanding the Political Philosophers
(Second Edition 2012), F ree Speech (1998) and A nti-Libertarianism (1994),
all published by Routledge.
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ing interdisciplinarity within philosophy and will be of interest to those in
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Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing
A Third Wave View
Michael D. Kirchhoff and Julian Kiverstein
W hat We Ought and What We Can
Alex King
The Ethics of Whistleblowing
Eric R. Boot
Totalitarianism and Philosophy
Alan Haworth
The Repugnant Conclusion
A Philosophical Inquiry
Christopher Cowie
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Totalitarianism and Philosophy
Alan Haworth
First published 2020
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Haworth, Alan, 1944– author.
Title: Totalitarianism and Philosophy / Alan Haworth.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series:
Routledge Focus on Philosophy | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019039652 (print) | LCCN 2019039653 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367438258 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367438265 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Totalitarianism. | Political science—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JC481 .H363 2020 (print) | LCC JC481 (ebook) |
DDC 320.53—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039652
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039653
ISBN: 978-0-367-43825-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-43826-5 (ebk)
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 ‘Totalitarianism’ or plain tyranny? 4
3 The total state 17
4 Total control 34
5 Dystopia 46
6 Interim 57
7 Arendt: the elements of totalitarianism 60
8 Arendt: from public realm to ‘worldlessness’ 78
9 Conclusion 96
References 98
Index 103
The man who tastes a single piece of human flesh, mixed in with the rest of
the sacrifice, is fated to become a wolf.
Plato
If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods.
Stalin
1 Introduction
As the title states, this book’s twin subjects are totalitarianism and philoso-
phy. Its guiding theme is the ability of the latter to illuminate our under-
standing of the former.
I will begin with the word itself. It is a relative newcomer to the vocabu-
lary. The earliest recorded references to the ‘ethical’ or ‘total’ state occurred
in the 1920s in the work of apologists for Italian fascism such as Giovanni
Gentile, and the dictator Mussolini. The term ‘totalitarianism’ soon acquired
a wider currency, however, and especially in the work of critics whose atti-
tude towards the ideas, the ambitions and, ultimately, the regimes of Musso-
lini and Hitler was far less enthusiastic. The rise of those regimes had been
startling. Hitler, especially, was guilty of extreme brutality, as was Stalin – also
routinely categorised as a ‘totalitarian’ dictator. It is hardly surprising that
a new term should have been coined in order to accommodate these appar-
ently unprecedented manifestations of oppression and cruelty.
Even so, it is important to recognise that the existence of a new word does
not necessarily signify the presence of a new entity, something for which
the word stands. There is, at least, a possibility that ‘totalitarianism’ is just a
new word for something old and familiar – dictatorship or tyranny. Accord-
ingly, one question to which arguments contained in the following pages are
addressed is that of whether totalitarianism – or ‘so-called’ totalitarianism –
is genuinely distinct from the latter phenomena. With that in mind, the sub-
ject of the next chapter – Chapter 2 – is the suitability of totalitarianism as
a subject for what I shall call ‘political taxonomy’; the latter being a way of
categorising political formations that has its roots in the work of Plato and
Aristotle, but that is still assumed in the structure of many an introductory
textbook to political theory. C hapter 3 is devoted to totalitarian philosophy,
mainly as it appears in the work of fascist philosophers such as Gentile and
Carl Schmitt. In Chapter 4 we consider whether the definition of totali-
tarianism as total control of the individual by the state is sufficient to dis-
tinguish it from ‘mere’ dictatorship or tyranny, and in Chapter 5 whether
