https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator. This figure controls the national politics and peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and state-aligned private mass communications media.

The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, sciences, and private morality of its citizens. In the exercise of socio-political power, the difference between a totalitarian regime of government and an authoritarian regime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview, authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power. The authoritarian dictator is supported, either jointly or individually, by a military junta and by the socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country.

The term totalitarianism emerged in politics of the interwar period; in the early years of the Cold War, it arose from comparison of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler as a theoretical concept of Western political science, achieving hegemony in explaining the nature of Fascist and Communist states, and later entered the Western historiography of Communism, the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution; in the 21st century, it became applied to Islamist movements and their governments. The concept of totalitarianism has been challenged and criticized by some historians of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR. When defined as exemplary cases of totalitarianism, on the grounds that the main characteristics of the concept – total control over society, total mobilization of the masses, and a monolithic centralized character of the regime – were never achieved by the dictatorships called totalitarian. To support this claim, the historians argue that the political structures of these states were disorganized and chaotic, and that despite the supposed external similarities between Nazism and Stalinism, their internal logic and structure were substantially different. The applicability of the concept to Islamism has also been criticized.

The concept of totalitarianism has also been applied to historical states that existed prior to the 20th century or even belonged to the period of Ancient history, such as the Mauryan dynasty of India, the Qin dynasty of China, and others.