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RALF DAHRENDORF
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of industrialism, is an inexorable force which determines the prog–
ress of all societies which have been touched, however indirectly, by
the eighteenth-century revolutions. Totalitarianism has no place in
this scheme. For a while, to be sure, a
Marxisant
variant of the
general theory of modernity held sway in some quarters, according
to which fascism is but the latest and probably last stage of capital–
ism, but neither the structure of its support nor the nature of its
policies gave credence to this theory, to say nothing of the fact that
fascism removed the prospects of revolution further than ever. Ex–
plaining totalitarianism requires the assumption of a
Sonderweg
which
in itself conflicts with the methodology of social science.
I was asked to contribute to the discussion in Zurich because
some regard my book,
Society and Democracy in Germany,
as an excep–
tion to the rule . In this book, I argued that there was in fact a social
Sonderweg
for Germany which I described with a geological meta–
phor, as the faulting of old and new, the
Herr im Haus
as industrial
leader, the explosive mixture of feudal remnants and modern
strains. I shall return to this attempt at analysis, but first let us look
at the classical theories of totalitarianism. Even defining the phe–
nomenon is not easy . Carl Friedrich's definition is often quoted:
"an ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic
police, a communications monopoly, and a centrally directed econ–
omy." But is totalitarianism really just another "form of government"
or even "mode of legitimation"? One thinks of Hitler's German Na–
tional Socialism and Stalin's Soviet Communism. Both were full of
contradictions, "blood and soil" but also "total mobilization," em–
phasis on solidarity but also brutal power, romantic antimodernism
but also an architecture of frightening "modernity," sentimental
songs of yesterday and tomorrow in cold military formations. There
were unmistakable differences too. One attracted the traditional
right, the other the traditional left. But underlying all contradictions
and differences the objective of total control by mobilization stands
out. Authoritarian regimes control but also allow large areas of pri–
vacy and apathy; democracy mobilizes but does so in order to diffuse
control. In totalitarian regimes mobilization is the instrument of
centralized control.
For an important group of authors, this observation was the
starting point of a widely accepted, yet curiously implausible ex–
planation of the phenomenon. The core thesis of these authors is that
totalitarianism is the result of the replacement of older social struc–
tures by structureless "mass" societies. "Totalitarianism," wrote Leon-
