Although autocratic rule--tyranny, despotism, dictatorship--is an age-old type of government, a distinctive form emerged in the 20th century, to which Benito Mussolini, one of its practitioners, gave the name totalitarianism. The chief characteristic of totalitarianism is its attempt to control every aspect of the life of its subjects, viewing any sign of independence as treasonous. Although despotically controlled by one figure, a totalitarian state operates through a centralized party, which becomes the instrument of policy, supplanting the older legal, educational, religious, and social institutions with new ones. It also involves a radical reshaping of the country's economy. Among its other distinguishing features is a secret police organization, whose aim is to root out any form of dissidence.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of totalitarianism is its perversion of the democratic ideal by insisting on the active participation, not just the submission, of all citizens in support of its policies. Critical to this goal is a pervasive government propaganda campaign, designed to recruit everyone into the role of informer. At its extreme, this effort extends into the most fundamental and tenacious of the old institutions, the family. In a pure totalitarian system, spying on one's family becomes the sacred obligation of the citizen. All of this produces a climate of purposeless fear--purposeless since fear offers no safeguard against the terror the totalitarian government randomly employs. In Joseph Stalin's Great Terror, for example, today's executioner frequently became tomorrow's victim.

Although Mussolini's Italy represents the first example of a 20th century totalitarian society, it never quite reached its desired goal. The two complete forms of totalitarianism in the 20th century have been Adolf Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Many would add to this list Mao Zedong's China during the period of the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's Cambodia during and after the Cambodian genocide. All of these governments came to power in the aftermath of historical catastrophes, which led to despair on the part of the general population, rendering them vulnerable to a false utopian vision of the just society.

In her masterly analysis of the Hitler and Stalin versions of totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that Nazism founded its justification on the law of nature, while communism appealed to the law of history. But underlying both principles is the idea of development, or process. That is, the Nazis appealed to "race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man," just as the Communists looked to "class-struggle as the expression of the law of history." Both beliefs rest upon the Darwinian principle of "survival of the fittest," and both translated this developmental process into the "law" of killing or terror: "In the body politic of totalitarian government, the place of positive laws is taken by total terror, which is designed to translate into reality the law of the movement of history or nature." Thus terror is the essence of totalitarian government. For terror to thrive, there must be isolation, loneliness, the feeling of not belonging. Modern alienation has thus provided fertile ground for the growth of totalitarianism. But, fortunately, totalitarian governments contain the seeds of their own destruction; they are engaged in a battle they cannot win, since every human birth is a new beginning of freedom. Eventually human nature overcomes the so-called law of nature.

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