Historical Perspectives: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: WHAT CAUSED TOTALITARIANISM?

Scholars disagree about why so many totalitarian states, states with complete control over every aspect of public and private life, emerged in the 20th century. While many countries moved toward democracy, Russia, Germany, Italy, and Spain became dictatorships between the two world wars. Scholars often explain the rise of totalitarianism from their own discipline’s viewpoint.

An Economist’s View An Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, argued that totalitarianism had developed gradually and was based on decisions about economic policy. In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek concluded that totalitarianism grew in Western democracies because they had “progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.” He viewed socialism and fascism as two sides of the same coin, since centralized government planning and state power characterized both.

Political Scientists’ View In contrast, the American political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski focused on political and ethnic issues, not economic ones. They contended that the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union had their origins in the upheaval brought about by World War I. The forces of nationalism unleashed by the war, combined with the need to respond politically to the global depression that followed World War I, created fertile ground for strong nationalistic rulers who could rise to political power and address ethnic conflict.

A Historian’s View American historian and journalist William Shirer identified the origins of Nazism in Germany’s distant and distinctive past. He concluded that Germanic nationalism, authoritarianism, and militarism dated back to the Middle Ages. “The course of German history . . . ,” he wrote, “made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man, and put a premium on servility.” No other country developed the same sort of Nazism because no country had Germany’s past.

A Sociologist’s View American sociologist Barrington Moore looked to the past to explain totalitarianism. However, rather than focus on what made each country unique, he searched for patterns in the social structures of groups of countries. In his book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), Moore looked at why Great Britain, France, and the United States evolved into democracies, while Japan, China, Russia, and Germany evolved into dictatorships. For Moore, two vital steps in creating a democracy were developing a middle class and breaking the power of the landed aristocracy. Countries that failed to do these things were more likely to become dictatorships.

Develop an Argument: Evaluate the extent to which historical evidence supports one of the perspectives on totalitarianism.