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The Dictator and Totalitarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert C. Tucker
Robert C. Tucker
Affiliation:
Faculty Associate of the Center of International Studies
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Extract

Significantly, we have few if any studies of the totalitarian O dictator as a personality type. It may be that we are little closer to a working psychological model of him than Plato took us with his brilliant sketch of the ideal type of the “tyrant” in The Republic. The contemporary literature on totalitarianism does, of course, contain materials that are relevant to the problem of characterization of the totalitarian dictator. Yet no frontal attack appears to have been made upon the problem. The purpose of the present article is to argue the need for one, and to do this in the context of a critical reexamination of the theory of totalitarianism. In the course of it I shall put forward some ideas of possible use in developing a conception of the dictator as a personality type.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , July 1965 , pp. 555 - 583
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1965

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References

1 See, for example, Gilbert, G. M., The Psychology of Dictatorship (New York 1950)Google Scholar; Neumann, Sigmund, Permanent Revolution (New York 1942)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Friedrich, C. J. and Brzezinski, Z., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)Google Scholar, chap. 2; and Inkeles, A., “The Totalitarian Mystique,” in Friedrich, C. J., ed., Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1954)Google Scholar.

2 The important earlier contributions include Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution; Lederer, Emil, State of the Masses (New York 1940)Google Scholar; Neumann, Franz, Behemoth (New York 1942)Google Scholar; and Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1951)Google Scholar.

3 The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 391.

4 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (rev. edn., New York 1962), 375Google Scholar.

5 Psychopathology and Politics (New York 1960), 173, 186Google Scholar.

6 See, in particular, Fainsod, Merle, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Z., The Permanent Purge (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism; and Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.

7 State of the Masses, 45. See also Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chap. 10, and Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe 1959)Google Scholar. Franz Neumann, while agreeing that the transformation of men into “mass-men” is completed under totalitarianism, disagreed with the position of Lederer according to which the totalitarian state is a state of the masses. On this point, see Behemoth, 365–67.

8 Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 19.

9 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 245. For Franz Neumann's view, see Behemoth, 372–73. He writes there that “National Socialism must carry to an extreme the one process that characterizes the structure of modern society, bureaucratization.” The thesis about the “radical efficiency” of totalitarian as distinguished from traditional bureaucracy appears to have been conclusively disproved in the light of what is now known about both the Nazi and the Stalinist bureaucracies. Bullock's investigations have led him to the conclusion, for example, that “The boasted totalitarian organization of the National Socialist State was in practice riddled with corruption and inefficiency under the patronage of the Nazi bosses. … At every level there were conflicts of authority, a fight for power and loot, and the familiar accompaniments of gangster rule, ‘protection,’ graft, and the ‘rake-off’” (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, 676). In The German Occupation of Russia (New York 1957)Google Scholar, Alexander Dallin reaches a similar conclusion with regard to Nazi administration of the occupied territories. The speeches of Nikita Khrushchev and other official Soviet sources of the post-Stalin period provide a mass of illuminating detail on the inefficiency of the Stalinist totalitarian bureaucracy.

10 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 315, 335. This distinction appears to be of use in explaining why Mussolini's Italy was only marginally a totalitarian state: the terror was of the “dictatorial” rather than of the “totalitarian” variety.

11 Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge, 27. Brzezinski adds, in support of a view expressed by Arendt, that “terror within the totalitarian system actually must increase both in scope and in brutality with the growing stability of the regime,” and further: “It is also a constant and pervading process of mass coercion, a continuum which persists throughout the totalitarian era” (ibid.).

12 Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, 1st edn., 354.

13 Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 132. They add: “The total scope and the pervasive and sustained character of totalitarian terror are … its unique qualities” (ibid., 137).

14 The Permanent Purge, 30, 36. Brzezinski's argument here appears to be, in part, an elaboration of the suggestion by Arendt that the Stalinist purge, as distinguished from earlier Bolshevik purges, was a means of maintaining a “permanent instability” in Soviet society, such instability being interpreted in turn as a functional requisite of totalitarianism as a system (The Origins oj Totalitarianism, 376n.).

15 Totalitarianism, 55.

16 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 431–32.

17 Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism, 88, 91, 95–96. It may be noted that Inkeles views the “mystique” as a way of characterizing the totalitarian leader as a “psychological type.” However, he seems to mean by “totalitarian leader” not solely the dictator but the whole higher leadership or ruling elite. And he explicitly discounts the need to penetrate beyond the ideological “mystique” into the psychology of the dictator as an individual. Indeed, he describes any attempt to trace the dictator's actions “to caprice, to paranoia, or some similar deviant personality manifestation” as a “residual category” type of explanation that can and should be avoided, e.g., by the “mystique” hypothesis (ibid., 93).

18 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 132, 137.

19 Behemoth, 366, 469.

20 In “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” Franz Neumann found five essential factors in the modern totalitarian dictatorship: a police state, concentration of power, a monopolistic state party, totalitarian social controls, and reliance upon terror (The Democratic and Authoritarian State [Glencoe 1957], 244–45)Google Scholar. In 1953 C. J. Friedrich proposed the following five features: an official ideology, a single mass party (“usually under a single leader”), a near-complete monopoly of control of all means of effective armed combat, similar control of all means of mass communication, and a system of terroristic police control (Totalitarianism, 52–53). In Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (pp. 9–10) a sixth feature—central control and direction of the economy—was added to the “syndrome.”

21 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 17, 18, 26.

22 Permanent Revolution, 43; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 361, 392.

23 Ibid., 374. She writes further that “the Leader is irreplaceable because the whole complicated structure of the movement would lose its raison d'être without his commands” (ibid., 362).

24 For the concept of a “rationalist totalitarianism,” see Z. Brzezinski, “Totalitarianism and Rationality,” American Political Science Review, L (September 1956), 751–63. Examples of recent criticisms of the concept of totalitarianism are A. J. Groth, “The ‘Isms’ in Totalitarianism,” ibid., LVIII (December 1964), 888–901; and this writer's “Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes,” ibid, LV (June 1961), 281–89.

25 Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, 703. On Hitler's hysterical outburst on the eve of the war about annihilating his enemies, see Dahlerus, Birger, The Last Attempt (London 1948)Google Scholar, chap. 6; also Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, 301. For a full account of Hitler's actions and reactions during the entire crucial period of the war's beginning, see Bullock, chap. 9, esp. 536–59. Also of interest in this general connection is Ivone Kirkpatrick's account of the psychological motivations underlying Mussolini's decision to embark upon the Abyssinian war (Mussolini: A Study in Power [New York 1964], 320)Google Scholar.

26 For a detailed elaboration of this argument, along with an analysis of the ideology of the purge trials in terms of the analogy with a paranoid system, see the introduction to Tucker, R. C. and Cohen, S. F., eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York 1965)Google Scholar. It is significant that the conspiracy themes that Stalin incorporated into the MarxistLeninist ideology have largely lapsed or subsided in post-Stalin Russia.

27 Khrushchev, Nikita, Crimes of the Stalin Era (New York 1956), 48Google Scholar.

28 The menace of the paranoid in the nuclear age has been strongly emphasized by Lasswell. Pointing out that “All mankind might be destroyed by a single paranoid in a position of power who could imagine no grander exit than using the globe as a gigantic funeral pyre,” he goes on: “Even a modicum of security under present-day conditions calls for the discovery, neutralization and eventual prevention of the paranoid. And this calls for the overhauling of our whole inheritance of social institutions for the purpose of disclosing and eliminating the social factors that create these destructive types” (Power and Personality [New York 1948], 184)Google Scholar. My own remarks above are meant to suggest that, pending the requisite systematic attack upon the problem, it may be possible to devise interim means of dealing with developing situations of this kind before it is too late.

29 Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York 1962), 80, 88–89Google Scholar. Fainsod, who in the 1953 first edition of his study of Soviet government had called terror the “linchpin of modern totalitarianism,” in the 1963 edition revises this sentence to read: “Every totalitarian regime makes some place for terror in its system of controls” (How Russia Is Ruled, 2nd edn., 421). See also Kassof, Allen, “The Administered Society: Totalitarianism Without Terror,” World Politics, XVI (July 1964), 558–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 See, for example, “Was Stalin Really Necessary?” in Nove, Alec, Economic Rationality and Soviet Politics (New York 1964)Google Scholar. Soviet second thoughts have been expressed, albeit very cautiously, in the form of criticism of unnecessary “excesses” in the implementation of the collectivization policy by Stalin.

31 Schapiro, Leonard, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York 1959), 428–29Google Scholar. Marshall D. Shulman goes farther and questions “how far ‘the system’ can be absolved of responsibility for Stalinism, whatever may have been the condition of Stalin himself.” He continues: “Perhaps ‘the system’ bore the main brunt of policy formation. It is reasonable to suppose that, even in a dictatorial society, much of what is done in the name of a leader is necessarily the product of a bureaucracy, and may imply any degree of responsibility from his active guidance to his inattention” (Stalin's Foreign Policy Reconsidered [Cambridge, Mass., 1963], 261)Google Scholar. This is to disregard the factual evidence from post-Stalin Soviet sources, including Khrushchev's secret report, on the actualities of decision-making in Stalin's final years. The evidence may, of course, be incomplete and faulty, but it cannot simply be dismissed.

32 Verba, Sidney, “Assumptions of Rationality and Non-Rationality in Models of the International System,” World Politics, XVI (October 1961), 105Google Scholar. “Non-logical explanations” are here defined as those referring to unconscious psychological pressures in the decision-making individuals.

33 Kaplan, Morton A., “Old Realities and New Myths,” World Politics, XVI (January 1965). 359Google Scholar.

34 This is one of the themes, for example, of Arnold Rogow's important study of the career of James Forrestal as an instance of an emotionally disturbed personality rising close to the pinnacle of power. Rogow writes that beyond a certain point counterpressures were generated inside the military establishment that Forrestal headed: “As Forrestal's behavior became more and more tense, he was consulted less by his associates and involved less in decisions.” As part of the explanation for this, Rogow states: “Bureaucracies, whether governmental, corporate, or academic, do not welcome in their ranks those who are odd, deviant, or excessively nonconformist in behavior, and the military bureaucracy was no exception” (James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy [New York 1963], 350)Google Scholar.

35 “Political Constitution and Character,” Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Review, XLVI, No. 4 (Winter 1960), 16Google Scholar.

36 “The Selective Effect of Personality on Political Participation,” in R. Christie and M. Jahoda, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Glencoe 1964), 223. See also in this volume the essay by E. A. Shils, who argues that American “nativist leaders,” generally characterized by “strong paranoid tendencies,” are unable to develop “the flexible self-control required to build the administrative machinery in their organizations” and for this and other personality-associated reasons have had a “hard row to hoe” (ibid., 46).

37 The official handbook of the American Psychiatric Association describes paranoia as “characterized by an intricate, complex, and slowly developing paranoid system, often logically elaborated after a false interpretation of an actual occurrence,” and adds: “The paranoid system is particularly isolated from much of the normal stream of consciousness, without hallucinations and with relative intactness and preservation of the remainder of the personality, in spite of a chronic and prolonged course” (Mental Disorders [Washington, D. C, 1952], 28)Google Scholar.

38 For a public formulation of reasoning to this effect, see, in particular, the beginning of Malenkov's address of November 6, 1949 (Pravda, November 7, 1949).

39 Crimes of the Stalin Era, S49. The evidence for the interpretation that has been offered here of the division over foreign policy at the close of Stalin's lifetime, and of the political meaning of die affair of the Kremlin doctors, has been presented in greater detail and with documentation in my (Soviet Political Mind (New York 1963)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

40 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, 548. A similar view is presented by H. R. TrevorRoper, who writes also that Nazi Germany's leading politicians “were not a government but a court—a court as negligible in its power of ruling, as incalculable in its capacity for intrigue, as any oriental sultanate” The Last Days of Hitler [New York 1947], 1)Google Scholar.

41 This description of the situation under Stalin is based on Khrushchev, Crimes of the Stalin Era, S61-S62. See also the note by Boris Nicolaevsky, ibid., S61.