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SPRING 2007
Seeds of Tyranny
by Philip Lee Williams

The totalitarian states of the 20th century arose from complex and often counterintuitive sets of circumstances. We must better understand their histories if we are to prevent recurrences both literally and in new and different forms.

Scholars have struggled for decades to find a coherent way to explain why, in the seemingly forward-looking 20th century, such civilized countries as Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union became totalitarian states where absolute power led to the deaths of millions. Historian David D. Roberts has spent much of his research career examining the intellectual foundations of totalitarianism, and he says that while exact replications of those World War II-era tyrannies are extremely unlikely, we have so far learned too little to prevent something comparable in the future.

“People ask me ‘Can it happen again?’” says Roberts, who is Albert Berry Saye Professor of History at UGA. “I answer that we will not have put the possibility behind us until we have learned deeper lessons—beyond moralism and triumphalism—from that experience.”

One problem in understanding the Germany, Italy and Soviet Union of the recent past is that so many people have lumped them together as totalitarian states while ignoring their ample differences and the unique historical contexts that led to each of them. And while most people continue to rate Germany as the “worst” of the fascist states because of the enduring specter of the Holocaust, Roberts argues that such rankings miss the point.

“It’s obvious that something went horribly wrong in these regimes,” he says. “The first step in preventing such evil in the future is understanding where it came from in the first place. We need a deeper look.”

Roberts’s latest book, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics, is the deeper look of which he speaks. His colleagues in Europe and the United States have heaped high praise on the volume and its comparative analysis of what those regimes had in common and how they differed. In short, the issue isn’t whether, in the West, we might get another Adolf Hitler, says Roberts. It “is whether the conditions of possibility have been eliminated.”

If totalitarian governments should exist in the future—say, in Africa or Asia—the structure of those regimes would likely be quite different from the ones in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. As Roberts has learned from his research, totalitarianism appears to rest, ironically, on a prior experience of liberal democracy—something a great many states on those continents have never had before.

And just how our knowledge of historical totalitarianism might relate to current problems in Iraq and Iran is also unclear, because religion is so intertwined with government there. “Totalitarianism has come out of a secular society in every case,” Roberts says. “The dynamic would be quite different for religious states.”

Roberts, who came to UGA in 1988 and served as head of the history department from 1993 to 1998, reminds his students and readers that the totalitarian states of World War II didn’t start with the war. In fact, the Soviet communist regime predated it by 22 years, the Italian fascist regime by 17 years and the German Nazi regime by six years. The Holocaust developed from within the wartime framework, but many of the images that continue to haunt us—of ritualistic spectacle and mind control, jackboots, prison camps—long preceded the war.

People still have a difficult time understanding how the triple threat of fascism, Nazism and Stalinist communism arose and how ordinary—“decent”—citizens allowed purges, concentration camps and wanton slaughter. “Just saying that only evil led to it is trivial,” Roberts says. “The key is to zero in on what was specific to totalitarianism, where it came from, why it emerged when it did and why it was so seductive.”

That last aspect—its seductiveness—may come as a surprise to observers who believe totalitarianism evolves in secret and against the will of the people. Roberts argues that many within the countries’ populations embraced the promises of the ruling parties—a troubling truth that is one reason why we need a “reconceptualization” of how such states began.

The term “totalitarianism” originated in Italy and was made popular by philosopher Giovanni Gentile, himself an enthusiastic fascist, but historians and political scientists since the 1920s have used it to describe states that regulate almost every aspect of society, public and private. The term became part of everyday speech with the 1951 publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism by political theorist Hannah Arendt, a book that is still required reading in some college courses.

In his own book The Totalitarian Experiment, Roberts traces the 19th-century intellectual foundations of totalitarianism, but he concludes that only with World War I did it become possible that the totalitarian direction would actually be taken. “The novel political departures in Russia, Italy and Germany grew directly from that war, to some degree playing off each other as they did so,” he says. And yet each of the regimes followed different paths in “the era of the tyrannies,” from their dramatic ascents to their inevitable collapses.

Historians have always examined the roles of supremely charismatic leaders in creating totalitarian governments. And while Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Germany’s Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) were indeed such leaders, even these men didn’t drive the movements in the beginning. Each regime was born from deep social underpinnings.

“At work was not merely some common desire [among these individuals] for total domination or some common technique of rule,” writes Roberts. “Nor do we find the key in violence, exclusion, terror or some ‘assault on man.’”

What Roberts discovered in his examination of totalitarianism in those regimes was “a very different relationship between the concentration of power and history.” The leaders’ aim was not to deny or transcend history, he says, but to face up to it, be equal to it, and by so doing to make it in a new way. This process required concentrating, expanding and even creating power as never before.

And that could only have happened in the 20th century, says Roberts. “Nobody would have even thought of totalitarianism in the 18th century. Of course they had despotism and absolute monarchies, but you can’t have totalitarianism until people have had a taste of the democratic experience. It’s only at a certain moment in time when people have had enough experience with democracy that totalitarianism becomes possible—as an attempt to go beyond democracy.”

Thus even as they tried to control society, abolishing the distinction between public and private, the totalitarian elites sought to mobilize the population to create a new kind of humanity and a new capacity for collective action. Relentless propa-ganda encouraged compliance, as did surveillance and an activist political police.

Europe rose, decades ago, from World War II and the ruins of totalitarianism. But not far behind the prosperity are the shadows of millions dead and a single haunting but enduring question for people everywhere: Can it happen again? With the Mideast in turmoil and unstable governments dotting the globe, what lessons can we apply from the dark days of 20th-century totalitarianism?

“The totalitarian response entailed a particular, tension-ridden embrace of science, will, spirit and myth that helped produce the disastrous outcomes,” writes Roberts in The Totalitarian Experiment. “And aspects of that whole syndrome remain in place. But… we find, on the basis of a deeper grasp of the human place in history, that we have the wherewithal to minimize the possibility of such negative outcomes in the future.”

He argues that “as we better understand the whole totalitarian trajectory, we can better reassess all that prompted frustration with the modern mainstream in the first place. It was not simply the insecurities of freedom, for example, that led to totalitarianism. From there, we can ponder, in a way more deeply informed by historical experience, the interface between politics and economics and between public and private, the reach of collective responsibility and the modes of collective decision, the relationship between collective action and individual self-realization.”

While Roberts is not pessimistic about the future, neither is he complacent. “Whatever might lie around the corner,” he says, “we best prepare for the future by understanding the most troubling aspects of our modern collective experience so far.”

For more information contact David Roberts at droberts@uga.edu.