View source for Totalitarian democracy

{{short description|Dictatorship based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a perfectionist ideology}}
{{merge|Inverted totalitarianism|discuss=Talk:Inverted totalitarianism#Merge proposal|date=October 2025}}
{{Forms of government}}
{{Politics}}
{{Democracy}}
'''Totalitarian democracy''' is a [[dictatorship]] based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a [[Perfectionism_(philosophy)|perfectionist]] ideology.<ref name=macpherson>Macpherson, C. B. (1952). [Review of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, by J. L. Talmon]. Past & Present, 2, 55–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650125</ref> The conflict between the state and the individual should not exist in a totalitarian democracy, and in the event of such a conflict, the state has the moral duty to coerce the individual to obey.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Legutko |first1=Ryszard |title=The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies |date=26 June 2018 |publisher=Encounter Books |isbn=978-1-59403-992-8 |page=60 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LQpDDwAAQBAJ |language=en}}</ref> This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to [[liberal democracy]], which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern.<ref name=":0">Talmon, J. L. ''[https://archive.org/details/originsoftotalit0000talm/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy].'' Britain: Secker & Warburg, 1968.</ref>

==Etymology==
The term was popularized by Israeli historian [[Jacob Talmon|Jacob Leib Talmon]].<ref name=macpherson/> It had previously been used by [[Bertrand de Jouvenel]]<ref>de Juvenel, Bertrand. ''[https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1320669W/Du_pouvoir?edition=key%3A/books/OL24630643M On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth],'' Salt Lake City: Hutchinson, 1948.</ref> and [[E. H. Carr]],<ref>Carr, Edward Hallett. ''The Soviet Impact on the Western World''. New York: MacMillan Company, 1947.</ref> and subsequently by [[F. William Engdahl]]<ref>Engdahl, F. William. ''Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.'' Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009, {{ISBN|978-0-9795608-6-6}}.</ref> and [[Sheldon S. Wolin]].<ref>Wolin, Sheldon S. ''Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.'' Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.</ref>

==Definition==
{{anchor|Messianic democracy}}
{{anchor|Political messianism}}

In his 1952 book ''The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,'' Talmon argued that the totalitarian and liberal types of democracy emerged from the same premises during the eighteenth century. He regarded the conflict between these two types of democracy as of world-historical importance:

:Indeed, from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century the history of the last hundred and fifty years looks like a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of to-day consists.

The [[political neologism]] '''messianic democracy'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> (also '''political messianism'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->)<ref>J. L. Talmon, ''[https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4476072W/Political_Messianism?edition=key%3A/books/OL5800726M Political Messianism – The Romantic Phase]'', 1960.</ref> also derives from Talmon's introduction to this work.

==Differences with liberal democracy==

Talmon identified the following differences between totalitarian and liberal democracy:<ref name=":0" />

* The totalitarian approach is based on the assumption of a total and exclusive truth in politics. It postulates a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which people are irresistibly driven and at which they are bound to arrive (see [[historical determinism]]). 

* The liberal approach assumes politics to be a matter of trial and error. It regards political systems as pragmatic contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. The totalitarian approach views politics as an integral part of an all-embracing and coherent philosophy. It defines politics as the art of applying this philosophy to the organisation of society, and the final purpose of politics is only achieved when this philosophy reigns supreme over all fields of life.  

* The liberal approach recognises a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavour, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics. The totalitarian approach recognises only one plane of existence, the political. It widens the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence. It treats all human thought and action as having social significance, and therefore as falling within the orbit of political action. 

* The liberal approach finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion. The totalitarian approach believes freedom to be only realised in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose.

==Historical development==

Talmon argue that totalitarian democracy arose in three stages:<ref name=":0" />
# [[Philosophes|Intellectual developments in eighteenth-century France]] spurred by the collapse of feudal and ecclesiastical authority in the early modern era. 
# The development of single-party dictatorship during the [[Reign of Terror]] and the use of [[political terror|terror]] as a political instrument, based on a doctrine of total popular sovereignty. 
# The extension of totalitarian logic to [[property]], leading to [[Communism]].

== Further interpretations ==
Engdahl and Wolin have added some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarian democracy. 

In his 2009 book ''Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order,'' Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global [[hegemony]] through military and economic means. According to him, U.S. state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: "[it is] a power establishment that over the course of the [[Cold War]] has spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of [[nuclear war]] by miscalculation"<ref>Engdahl, ''Full Spectrum Dominance,'' 2009, pg. viii.</ref>

Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the ''tendency'' of what he calls "[[inverted totalitarianism]]":

<blockquote>While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, [inverted totalitarianism] gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern [[business corporation]]. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their respective identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of [[corporate power]].<ref>Wolin, ''Democracy Incorporated,'' pg. xxi.</ref></blockquote>

Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism"<ref name=":1">Wolin, Sheldon S. [http://www.thenation.com/article/inverted-totalitarianism "Inverted Totalitarianism"]. ''The Nation'' magazine, May 19th, 2003.</ref> Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government. Corporate influence, he argues, is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, he contends that many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: "[With] the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."<ref name=":1" />

[[Slavoj Žižek]], in his 2002 book of essays ''[[Welcome to the Desert of the Real]]'', comes to similar conclusions. He argues that the [[war on terror]] served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the US, while the promise of democracy and freedom was spread abroad as the justification for invading [[Iraq]] and [[Afghanistan]]. Since Western democracies are always justifying [[state of exception|states of exception]], he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency.<ref>Žižek, Slavoj. ''Welcome to the Desert of the Real'', London and New York: Verso, 2002</ref>

== See also ==
*[[Anti-democratic thought]]
*[[Authoritarianism]]
*[[Autocracy]]
*[[Dictatorship of the proletariat]]
*[[Electocracy]]
*[[Falangism]]
*[[Guided democracy]]
*[[Illiberal democracy]]
*[[National Anarchism|National anarchism]]
*[[Neocameralism]]
*[[Outline of democracy]]
*[[People's democratic dictatorship]]
*[[Post-democracy]]
*[[Ruscism]]
*[[Soft despotism]]
*[[Sovereign democracy]] 
*[[Tyranny of the majority]]

== Notes ==
{{Reflist|30em}}

{{Authoritarian types of rule}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Totalitarian Democracy}}
[[Category:Historiography]]
[[Category:Philosophy of history]]
[[Category:Totalitarianism]]
[[Category:Dictatorship]]
[[Category:Works about totalitarianism]]
[[Category:Democratic backsliding]]