Totalitarian Regimes

The most common definition of totalitarian regimes, categorized generally under the concept of “totalitarianism,” refers to modern antiliberal and antidemocratic regimes based on the monopolization of power by a revolutionary single party led by a charismatic leader and dominating over the state and society by means of terror and propaganda. Totalitarian regimes carry out their policy using a variety of institutions controlled by the single party: a highly centralized bureaucracy, an official and secret police, a party militia, the manipulation of culture and public opinion through the monopoly of mass media, and a network of organizations set up all over the country under the control of the single party, whose tasks are to regiment, indoctrinate, and mobilize permanently the individual and the masses.

More specifically, some scholars consider mass extermination as a necessary feature whose presence makes a regime truly totalitarian; other scholars argue that there can be totalitarianism without [Page 2628]terror, or they emphasize the role of the charismatic leader or the mobilization of the masses as an essential characteristic of totalitarian regimes. However, all scholars, whatever their definitions of totalitarian regimes, agree that these are new types of antidemocratic political systems that differ substantially from traditional dictatorships and civil or military modern authoritarian states, whose concentration of power is based mainly on repression but does not require a revolutionary single party, an all-encompassing ideology, or a network of collective organizations for the mobilization of the masses.

The definition of totalitarian regimes has been a matter of endless debate, with highly ideological and political implications. Hence, any definition of totalitarian regimes necessarily implies a survey of the origins and development of the concept of totalitarianism. This will be done in the following sections of the entry, complemented by an analysis of this type of regime in the Cold War. Next, the entry examines the eclipse of the concept of totalitarianism in political science from the middle of the 20th century through the 1970s. The entry concludes by examining the renewed interest in this concept that began in the 1980s and has led to new interpretations of it.