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than it was in Berlin. Mussolini's totalitarianism never got very far
beyond the use of the word, and Franco's fascism increasingly
turned into that hybrid, a modern autocracy, which has since
become so frequent in Latin America and elsewhere. Mao Tse-tung
had a huge country to deal with; yet he went a long way in the
totalitarian direction. On a smaller, but no less cruel scale, Pol Pot,
Idi Amin, and a number of postwar rulers come to mind.
Hitler is dead, and so is Stalin. The question is whether it can
happen again . It is two questions really. One is whether total–
itarianism can visit the same country twice.
If
the analysis suggested
here is correct, it cannot. Once a totalitarian regime has run its
destructive course, the conditions for its emergence are gone forever.
Of course, the analysis may not be correct. It certainly has implica–
tions which need to be spelled out. One of them leads back to my
book,
Society and Democracy in Germany.
There I argued that National
Socialism completed in a cruel and partly unintended way the revo–
lution of modernity for German society. Contrary to elements of its
romantic ideology, it destroyed most remnants of premodern Ger–
many. The
tabula rasa
of 1945 was above all a social
tabula rasa.
This
thesis has come to be widely accepted, but it has also been severely
criticized. Recently, a former student of mine, Jens Alber, has
pointed out (in an inaugural lecture in Mannheim) that statistical
evidence does not bear out the modernizing effect of the Nazi
regime. But then, the regime was so short-lived that one would
hardly expect its effect to be discernible in the statistics of the time.
Others have argued that my thesis presupposes an Anglo-Saxon
view of civil society which itself may well represent a
Sonderweg
rather
than a yardstick for others. This I have found hard to refute.
So far as the Soviet Union is concerned, the implication of my
analysis is that its post-Stalin regime is not totalitarian. This im–
plication is intended. I know of course that some find it useful for
their paranoic view of the world to retain an imagery which trans–
forms reality into metaphysics. But if one is used to more precise
language, it is clear that while totalitarianism is evil, not every
regime that is undesirable, or even evil, is also totalitarian. The
bureaucracy of a heavy
nomenklatura
is one of the worst forms of
modern power. Max Weber had visions, nightmares rather, of it,
and in one respect it is worse than the totalitarian scourge, because it
can last for a very long time. Contrary to totalitarianism it does not
contain the seed of its own destruction. But whatever the miseries of
the "cage of bondage" of bureaucracy, they are different from total-
