Table of Contents for Totalitarianism
Introduction
The danger of a new nuclear threat, the trauma of a planetary pandemic, the crisis of democratic regimes, the refugee problem, these are just some of the events that have called the concept of totalitarianism back to life. Because the term totalitarianism is used vaguely or inappropriately, I provide the reasons why it is necessary to provide a genealogy of it: from the birth of the term during the years of Italian fascism to its current uses in political philosophy.
1.How the Concept "Totalitarianism" Came to Be
This chapter provides a reconstruction of the genesis of the term totalitarianism and its development as concept and category. The first part is devoted to the origin of the neologism within Italian antifascism and fascism, as well as the German debate on the total state that characterized the rise of Nazism. The second part inspects, first, the contribution of some of the main refugees' exponents of the French debate of the 1930s, such as Souvarine, Aron, Bataille, Mounier, and Weil. Then, I analyze the debate that took place in the 1940s among German authors exiled in the US: Fraenkel, Neumann, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm. The conclusive paragraph focuses on Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism as a key turning point of the debate on totalitarianism.
2.From the Construction of Models to the Practice of Dissent
This chapter outlines, first, a conceptual map of the typologies of totalitarian regimes developed by liberal political theories from the 1950s onward. Then, I examine the critiques to such typologies, highlighting their anticommunist ideological premises. Within the debate gradually emerges a distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes; this distinction stresses the novelty of totalitarianism as an unprecedented form of domination. The second part inspects the employment of the concept by the dissident authors from communist Eastern Europe who, unlike liberal political theorists, made totalitarianism a more philosophically oriented notion that overcomes the limits of a mere typological inquiry. Starting from the so-called thaw, a more interdisciplinary intellectual environment will conceive new concepts and notions such as "post-totalitarianism," "cold ideology," and "existential lie."
3.Philosophy in the Face of Extremes
This chapter examines how philosophy reacted in the face of the totalitarian phenomenon. In the first part, I take into account those readings that saw in nihilism and will-to-power the engine of totalitarian domination. In particular, I inspect the works of Jonas, Löwith, Strauss, Voegelin, and Levinas. Then I consider the critics of the "dialectic of reasons": Adorno, Horkheimer, and, although from different perspectives, Popper and Marcuse. I then focus on Arendt's thought and some of her posthumous papers that clarify the link existing, according to her, between metaphysics and totalitarianism. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the Arendtian legacy that somehow persists within the works of Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and others. The concluding sections focus on interpreters (Lefort, Castoriadis) who established a link between democracy and totalitarianism. Within these readings, Foucault represents a peculiar position because he connects biopower to state racism.
4.Specters of Totality
This chapter dwells on contemporary reflections on totalitarianism, from 9/11 to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent critiques to the "hypercontrolled society." First, I reconstruct the resurgence of the concept within the debate on Islamic terrorism. I then turn to Sheldon Wolin's seminal considerations on "inverted totalitarianism": a new form of power combining neoliberal economy and technology. The concept of totalitarianism will recur also in those interpretations that continue the Foucauldian discourse on biopower, in particular in Mbembe's and Butler's reflections on necropower and in Agamben's and Esposito's critiques on the state of exception and the sacralization/absolutization of health. Finally, I take into account the critics of the new forms of society of control, from Zuboff to Han. In the concluding section I focus on the meaning of what I named the "crisis of the real."
Conclusion
In my conclusion I focus on the role of philosophy in keeping the concept of totalitarianism alive. Finally, I propose the distinction between the locution "totalitarian regime" and the word totalitarianism.