In spite of endless obituaries, totalitarianism remains a major analytical tool in our efforts to understand modern political experiments inspired by ideological schemes meant to transform not only society but human nature as well. In the 1930s, antitotalitarian thought (liberal democrats, social democrats, conservatives, Christian democrats) was concerned with the rise of the charismatic mass movements and their possible catastrophic consequences. Among those who understood the mystical, or even magical, underlying components of the totalitarian project were Russian thinkers (Mensheviks, but also Christian existentialists like Nikolai Berdyaev), French liberals like Elie Halevy and his admirer, the young Raymond Aron, and German, later American, political philosophers Waldemar Gurian and Eric Voegelin. This line of thought led to the post-World War II rise of the totalitarian concept as a main explanatory paradigm meant to make sense of the apparent senselessness of Nazism and Stalinism. Hannah Arendt did not share the fascination with the religious approach to the totalitarian twins, yet she emphasized the centrality of ideological hubris for the utopian-revolutionary, neochiliastic movements she examined in her classic Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
Later, in the 1960s, a revisionist wave gathered momentum, and younger historians, political scientists, and sociologists started to fundamentally question the totalitarian approach as static, unable to explain the inner dynamics of those regimented societies and the possibilities of transcending, via endogenous developments, the ideocratic monopolistic regimes. New concepts were developed, both East and West, among them that of posttotalitarianism. East European dissidents, primarily Vaclav Havel, Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, and George Konrad, spelled out strategies of resistance centered on the concept and practice of civil society as a corrosive social force capable of subverting the apparently immutable party domination and restoring civic dignity.
A. James Gregor, a highly respected student of Marxism, Bolshevism, Italian fascism, and national socialism, has written books—immensely erudite and superbly documented—that have influenced generations of historians and political scientists. This new one is a synthesis of his previous contributions and an effort to connect them to the ongoing discussion on political religion as the intellectual and moral substratum of totalitarianism. Gregor is at his best when he revisits the origins of Italian fascism, the statolatry and ultranationalism championed by Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, whom Benito Mussolini managed to annex to the fascist regime and convert into one of its apologists. How it was possible for such a sophisticated philosopher to endorse a repressive, antihumanist, and viscerally anti-individualist regime remains a most disturbing part of a larger story of intellectual self-hypnotization or, in other words, intoxication with liberticide regimes. Gentile and Carl Schmitt from the radical Right and Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács from the radical Left are just the most famous examples of this inebriation with totalistic, totalizing, and totalitarian dogmas. They all shared what political philosopher Mark Lilla defines as a “tyrannophyle mindset.”
In Totalitarianism and Political Religion, Gregor revisits some paradigmatic chapters of intellectual history meant to explain the quasi-religious content of the totalitarian ideologies. Students of radical ideas will find insightful analyses of the political visions and the search for an immanent redemption in the writings of Hegel, Moses Hess, Feuerbach, Marx, Richard Wagner, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg and other lesser-known figures. In this respect, the book is an excellent guide to an archeology of totalitarian ideas and the yearning for a socially or ethnoracially purified community. It is however surprising that Gregor does not engage in a dialogue with some of the main authors who have written on the same subject, from Peter Viereck (whose superb Metapolitics [1965] is one of the most penetrating explorations of the roots of the Nazi mind) to Voegelin, Aron, Norman Cohn, and the whole analytical direction associated with the search for the millenarian, chiliastic, and eschatological undercurrents of political movements trying to unleash social and anthropological revolutions. These “party-movements,” as Robert C. Tucker, the great student of Stalinism, named them, secularized religious experience, used and abused the human need for the sacred, and sanctified violence in the name of a promised earthly paradise. This is the thrust of Andrzej Walicki's superb book on Marxism published in 1995, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom. Unfortunately, Gregor's interpretation of Marxism as a political religion is oblivious to Walicki's writings, as well as to Leszek Kolakowski's cardinal trilogy (Main Currents of Marxism [1978]).
Examining Hegel and Feuerbach as proponents of self-styled political religions is a questionable approach. Yes, they foreshadowed the worshipping of human history, the celebration of organic unity, the cult of the state, the race, or the party. But they were not involved in mass political movements. In this respect, I would recommend the masterful book by Jacob L. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of the Revolution (1981), or, more recently, the superb analysis of political religions by Italian political philosopher Emilio Gentile (whom Gregor quotes).
One of the best chapters of the book deals with Leninism. Even here, however, the reader would benefit from unmentioned contributions, such as Ken Jowitt's concept of charismatic impersonalism, which explains the Bolsheviks' boundless, quasi-ecstatic adoration of the Party as a Messianic agent destined to fulfill History's commandments. I would have expected a longer and deeper discussion of Georges Sorel as an intellectual source for both left and right revolutionary frenzy. I really do not see the need for the extensive examination, within this context, of the Khmer Rouge genocidal experiment. This was a grotesque catastrophe resulting in frightening human losses that, like the Gulag and the Holocaust, defy representation. Still, there is no Khmer Rouge ideological construct comparable to those that mobilized the Soviet and Nazi experiments. Furthermore, Pol Pot and his comrades constituted a very strange band of ideological thugs, with little connections to the systematic dogmas of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Castro-Guevarism, and so on.
A missing dimension of totalitarianism in this altogether provocative and illuminating book is an account of the personalities that embodied the totalitarian impulse, the prophetic leaders and their cults. In a recent book, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (2012), historian Jan Plamper impressively deconstructs the institutional and psychological mechanisms used by the Soviet system to achieve the complete submission of the individual to party authority and the internalization of cultic rituals. The reader interested in a refreshingly new interpretation of Stalin's role in codifying the mythological creed of Bolshevism at the time of the Great Purge will appreciate David Brandenberger's admirable Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 (2012).
Strictly supervised, carefully edited, and in part authored by Stalin himself, the Short Course of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the Bolshevik counterpart to Mein Kampf, a collection of obsessions, mendacities, and self-serving shibboleths. It acquired the same sacrosanct status as Hitler's book. The whole propaganda system revolved around it as the revealed truth and, until Stalin's death in 1953, functioned as the alpha and omega of the Soviet political religion.
Understanding the relationship between totalitarianism and political religion means fathoming the nature of the official texts, demystifying them, and explaining how they managed to become the equivalent of the Gospels in the political and moral imagination of millions. It also means revisiting not only the moments of blind fanaticism of Bolshevism and national socialism as “temptations” (to use historian's Fritz Stern's term) but also the role of awakening, heretical propensities, and ultimate apostasies. In fact, therein lies a major challenge for the political philosopher interested in the totalitarian conundrum: why there were so many heretics in the communist “church” and so few in the fascist one? Maybe the answer is precisely in the ideological matrix, in that ambivalent “paleo-symbolic structure” (a term proposed by Alvin W. Gouldner) that Aron called the “opium of the intellectuals.”
