Democracy and totalitarianism (III)

Aurel Kolnai on the three totalitarianisms

From "Three Riders of the Apocalypse: Communism, Nazism and Progressive Democracy" (circa 1950), in Aurel Kolnai, Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, Ed. Daniel J. Mahoney, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 1999, pp 108–110. (Further edited by Spog.)

"What Nazism and Progressive Democracy have in common is, to put it briefly, the character of incomplete totalitarianism. . . . CONTINUE So far as ideological "signs" and "emphases" alone are concerned it would seem, admittedly, that our democratic régimes are not totalitarian at all, whereas Nazism is most noisily and definitely so, connoting Socialism too and insisting on State omnipotence not a whit less than does Communism. Again, if instead of judging by the sound of party slogans and the demeanour of terroristic gangsters drunk with power we consider the "insidious" totalitarianism inherent in the trend towards equality, uniformity and administrative "planning for welfare," we might on the contrary find that Progressive Democracy really outstrips the totalitarianism not only of the Nazis but even of the Communists, assimilating as it does (under the deceptive verbal cloak of liberalism and tolerance) the thinking, moods, and wills of everybody to a wholesale standard of the "socialized" mind more organically and perhaps more durably; eliminating all essential opposition to its own pattern by incomparably milder methods but so much the more effectively and irrevocably. However, both these perspectives, though highly relevant to a full assessment of the objects of our study, are one-sided and liable to make us miss the central point of distinction. Neither our horror of Nazi perversity, cruelty and vulgarity nor our disgust at the mediocrity and duplicity, the inner unfreedom, the deadening quack rationality and the sickening pseudo-culture of Progressive Democracy should blind us to the patent and highly important truth that, in contraposition to the Communist régime bent on determining the whole of human reality according to the pattern of an unnatural utopia and reducing every aspect and detail of men's lives to a function of one all-absorbing political Will, both Nazism and Progressive Democracy represent the maimed forms of normal human society, not integrally suppressed but, respectively, overlaid with a fiendish tyranny totalitarian in temper, and infiltrated by the virus of a subversive utopia bound for a totalitarian goal. As regards Progressive Democracy, its essentially curtailed totalitarianism is too obvious to need elaborate treatment. Notwithstanding the subtle expansion of the old concept of political liberty into that of "Freedom from Want" and the surreptitious displacement of citizens' rights by the changeling idol of a "right to security," the elements of the "rights of man" and "the dignity of the individual" cannot be wholly ousted from Progressive Democracy short of a radical overthrow of the system: until that, the bar to keep out tyranny proper continues acting, though there is no denying that the inward logic of the system makes it wear ever thinner and threatens to eat it away altogether. Still, how could a Conservative writer call the democratic régime properly tyrannical or actually totalitarian, so long as he is able to get his very accusations into print?—and without on that score coming to immediate and crushing grief, into the bargain!

"To deny a genuinely totalitarian character to Nazism may sound a little odder, seeing that not only liberal-democratic but also conservative and Christian authors have betrayed a fondness for arguing glibly from Communism to Nazism and conversely, interpreting Nazism as a "Brown" variety of its "Red" model and Bolshevism as nationalism or imperialism under a Red flag, overworking the term "National Socialism," harping on the disciplinarian and allegedly "nationalistic" traits in Russian Bolshevism, subsuming the two evil things under an identical concept of "Neo-Paganism" and placing the Nazi worship of a "superior race" on a level with the Marxian deity (absolutely different as to its logical structure and historical meaning) of the "class struggle." The truth is that the Nazi order never was, nor was intended to be, a socialistic one—in the proper, collectivist sense of that term—; and for that reason alone, which is far from being the deepest, could not amount and could never have attained to true totalitarianism. Despite the terrorism of Nazi dictatorship which bore down severely on the noble and wealthy classes as well as on the broad masses (thus connoting, as it were, a kind of new equalitarianism), it was utterly alien to the Nazi conception of society to do away with class distinctions. Despite the enmity it had sworn to the "Jewish moneylender," Nazism reserved a high place of honor to the "German entrepreneur"; depite its playing ducks and drakes with the economy of the country and countries it had subjugated, Nazism would not dream of effecting incisive structural changes in the economic system, let alone of seeking them for their own sake; despite its wallowing in the ecstasy of "total state-power," Nazism was definitely and consistently hostile to the idea of reducing all social relations of power and dependence to a mere function or expression of that state-power, and in fact ultimately aimed at creating a new type of social aristocracy. To be sure, Nazi tyranny was "unlimited" in the sense that it kicked aside constitutional "checks and balances" and even moral restraints just as scornfully as did Bolshevism, but not at all in the sense of claiming, as Bolshevism does claim, a total determination of the order of human life and relationships on behalf on one exclusive political will as actualized by the rulers; to be sure, it ruthlessly trampled under foot all "opposition" but it did not define from the outset everything not of its own making as "opposition"; to be sure, it would order about capitalists perhaps as harshly as workers, but without for a moment entertaining the idea of "liquidating" the capitalist class (or, for that matter, the peasantry) and of manufacturing Society anew as a homogenous mass of "toilers." It should be added that, if Nazi tyranny was explicitly oppressive and (unlike the old absolutisms at their worst) positively totalitarian in the educational, literary, artistic and similar fields, the intellectual life of Germany under its heel—and of occupied France as well—still compared as a paradise of freedom and spontaneity with the spiritual cemetery which promptly covers every place where the Bolshevik steam-roller has passed. Could any one imagine, in Soviet Russia or one of her dependencies a counterpart to Jünger's Marble Cliffs: a nauseating and at the same time wholly unambiguous vision of Stalin as the incarnation of malicious barbarism, published with impunity—or only published; or, indeed, only written—by, say, a Menshevik university professor or an anarchist Prince of yesterday, disillusioned with the revolution?

"In some respects Progressive Democracy, and in another but not entirely different sense Nazism, might be described as more "progressive," "modern" and "totalitarian" than Communism. Democratic thought is more anxious to be up-to-date and elastic; to scan, to recognize and to put to the test—rather than merely prescribe and enforce—the new states of mind rising, in society, in a kind of perpetual flux; to effect not only but to undergo a constant change, absorbing as it were all aspects of a "world in change" into the very tissue of its own details and formulations. Nazism, in its turn, views man, his nature and history, in a perspective admitting of a greater manifoldness of dimensions, and thus aspires to a totalitarian determination of man by state-power through more numerous channels; through more complex leverage. Biological and eugenic points of view seem to rank higher, not only in Nazi racialism but also in the Progressive Democratic tend towards a medical and psychiatric dictatorship, than in the Communist state-worship with its monomaniac reference to political power and social (in the sense of extra-political) equality. Thus Communism cares less, one might say, about an all-round predetermination of the "human material," including its natural quality, on which Society as represented by its central agency of power expects to work. But, on the other hand, all such lines of determination are of a more partial, haphazard, experimental, uncertain kind than is the direct bending of men's wills by an unrestrained and effectively organized power of Command; moreover, they leave some space for categories of value—specifications of "good" and "bad"—not defined in terms of present governmental decision as such: for measures of judgment that lie beyond the one and indivisible will of man. Communism, then, remains the absolute, classic and insuperable type of totalitarianism proper." (See comment section for my thoughts on this.)