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PARTISAN REVIEW
world conquest."
It
is worth pondering this statement not only with
respect to Hitler and Stalin, but also to post-totalitarian Soviet Rus–
sia and China's "cultural revolution."
If
the observation is correct, it
also means that totalitarianism is in fact not a viable form of govern–
ment; it is not built to last. Instead it deserves Franz Neumann's
description of the National Socialist
Behemoth
which is at first sight so
unlikely: "an unstate, a chaos , a condition of lawlessness, of
rebellion and of anarchy."
The totalitarian condition is that of a society which seems
unable to go either forward to civil society or back to more tradi–
tional patterns . The totalitarian process resolves the dilemma by de–
stroying all surviving traditional or authoritarian structures . But it
does not put anything durable in their place . It accomplishes the
negative part of modernization without creating its positive counter–
part . Totalitarianism is pure destruction . This is why the temptation
is great to look at it in terms of psychopathology . Manes Sperber has
pointed out, in his careful and subtle analysis which was first pub–
lished in 1938, that this must be the pathology of the leaders as well
as of those who allow themselves to be misled. In a little-noticed ,
remarkable article entitled, "Mourir
a
Jonestown ," published in
1979, the French sociologist Jean Beechler hardly mentions Hitler
but demonstrates by the example of the "Reverend" Jones and his
flock how the horribly inflated ego of a leader can make him involve
a whole people in his suicide, and the brittleness of the people can
make them follow the leader to Guyana and into taking the fatal poi–
son . Totalitarian leaders take their nations to collective suicide, hav–
ing murdered others on the way. Less metaphorically put , the per–
manent revolution is also a permanent state of emergency; in fact , it
is that more than a revolution . Such a state cannot be maintained
forever. It either slides into some form of routinization, thus to that
stability which "would surely liquidate the movement itself," or it
leads to catastrophe which is most likely to mean war.
Totalitarianism is thus an extreme possibility of the organiza–
tion of disorganization, a regime of anarchy. One may wonder
whether it ever existed anywhere . Nazi Germany during the war
probably got fairly close to being totalitarian , but the intrinsically
totalitarian trends of wartime government had to be added to what
the Nazis had done in six brief prewar years . Stalin too was helped
by the war in cementing his rule of terror , which in some ways was
even more perfect than that of the Nazis, because it was less predict–
able in Moscow who would be the next to hear the knock on the door
