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RALF DAHRENDORF
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modern mass society of atomized individuals. Totalitarianism was
tempting not to atomized modern masses (if such existed or exist
anywhere) but to those who got stuck halfway between old and new,
who had lost one without having found the other and then fell for the
false promise of the best of both. Its ingredients are incomplete
modernity, the treason of intellectuals, and the lure of leadership.
The temptation lay in particular in setting an end to the
discomforts of civil society at a time of uncertain economic growth.
Those tempted were in many cases people - voters - who had lost
their place in an old scheme of things without having found one in a
new order, in that sense "dislocated strata." Many Nazi leaders were
recruited from socially rootless families. Their supporters came from
certain lower-class groups which were "never integrated in
th~
total
society" as well as small businessmen and other self-employed people
who were equally upset about organized capital and organized
labor, white-collar people torn between their aspirations and their
position, and those "conservative and traditionalist elements" who
wanted to preserve a world without modern politics. National So–
cialism expressed the interests of the disoriented products of a
faulted structure of old and new. Their problem was that they were
groups without a home rather than atomized masses of individuals.
Other factors entered the story of European totalitarianism
apart from the dislocations of incomplete modernity, the lure of
leadership, and the treason of intellectuals. There are important dif–
ferences between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. But in im–
portant respects the two were also similar. When Franz Neumann
speaks of "the atomization and isolation of the individual" in connec–
tion with totalitarianism, he actually uses the words transitively.
In
other words, this is what totalitarianism does, not why it has come
about. Totalitarianism as a process-Hannah Arendt would say,
"totalitarianism in power" - atomizes and isolates people, and has to
do so in order to maintain its grip. Totalitarianism is not the result of
an atomized society, but is creating it; it is therefore, in Trotsky's
words, a "permanent revolution." Hannah Arendt makes a point of
great importance in this context when she says that "the totalitarian
ruler is confronted with a dual task which at first appears contradic–
tory to the point of absurdity: he must establish the fictitious world
of the movement as a tangible working reality of everyday life, and
he must, on the other hand, prevent this new world from developing
a new stability; for a stabilization of its laws and institutions would
surely liquidate the movement itself and with it the hope for eventual
