5 - Totalitarian Man

Summary

I’m finished. I trust no-one, not even myself.

Joseph Stalin in 1952

Totalitarian ideas do not appear first on the streets; rather their appearance on the streets results from their prior appearance in print. What burgeons around some ‘ivory tower’ may wither unseen by the wider world; escaped, however, into the public domain, it ceases to be of purely ‘academic’ interest – and once on the streets and disclosing its source may be revised in any number of variants by publicists and demagogues. This is what happened with ideas we call ‘totalitarian’ and which we proceed to chronicle as they developed in Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth.