ABSTRACT
Totalitarianism is one of the oldest political philosophies in the world. For a state to be deemed totalitarian it is sufficient that the functions of the state and society be the same. The nation is integrated into the state, so that elements of choice or divergence disappear, be they moral, political, economic or religious. Plato’s greatest contribution to the theory of totalitarianism was, perhaps, made in the discussion on the unity of the state. The doctrines of subjugation of the individual and the glorification of the state as a biological entity reached their apogee not in Germany but in Sweden. Georg Hegel’s confusion and debasement of reason is partly necessary as a means to this end, partly a more accidental but very natural expression of his state of mind.’ In the middle of the seventeenth century Hobbes threw off the last shackles of the medieval approach to political analysis of the form of the state.
