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that is, the extent to which they embodied that which is distinctively
new in the totalitarian ethos. That no actual society behaved quite
like the one Arendt described or Orwell imagined is hardly a cogent
criticism of their books, for the value of a model depends partly on
its not pretending to take into account fluctuations of local events.
If
I now suggest that a possible conclusion from the recent
Russian changes is that this model of totalitarianism-let us agree
to call it the political model-is no longer sufficient, I do not mean
to suggest that it has lost its usefulness. There is a sense in which
the very difficulties encountered on the analytic plane require that we
stress all the more strongly the moral premises that were often the
stimulant toward constructing this model. Yet it does begin to seem
that the political model of totalitarianism needs to be supplemented,
and drawn into a tension, with more traditional forms of socio–
economic analysis.
The implicit assumption of Arendt, Orwell, and other such
writers is that totalitarianism is a society which h:lS achieved a kind
of stasis, even if one of systematized chaos; a society that has estab–
lished an equilibrium between the flow of terror that is essential to
its existence and the energies that make possible the permanence
of this terror. In this respect, however, Orwell may have been shrewd–
er than Arendt, since he anticipated a gradual slackening of both
ideological and social hysteria in the totalitarian unfuture, a diminu–
tion of that ferocious intensity which has until now characterized all
of totalitarian society and which Arendt so dramatically seized upon as
a dominant factor of its existence. But while Orwell anticipated a
gradual decline from fanaticism into torpor, he did not suppose that
the decline might affect the continued employment of active terror.
He did not consider that the energies making for terror might gradu–
ally run down and that, partly because of the consequences of forced
industrialization, the practice of terror might be replaced by a
policy of terror in reserve.
Similarly, the political model did not adequately prepare us for
the possibility of the rise, not of a new bourgeoisie (for if the term is
used with any exactness, there is no bourgeoisie in Russia), but of
habits of life that we generally associate with the bourgeoisie. Terror,
since it cannot safely be confined to a chosen sector of the population,
must frighten the rulers too, and more, it must weary them.
In
