ABSTRACT
Since the 1930s, the concept of totalitarian rule that regards it as a specifically modern phenomenon of state and social existence has played a significant, at times even predominate, role in the self-understanding of the Western democracies. Gerhard Leibholz called the total state ‘the political phenomenon of the twentieth century’. The totalitarian experience left its mark on ‘an entire epoch of the comparison of political systems’.1 As a glance at the literature confirms, the concept has entered as a new ‘ism’ into the theory of forms of political rule. In the concept of totalitarian rule an experience had been articulated that was perceived as toppling for Western constitutional thought. With the institution of the Bolshevist, Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships, the relation of state, society and individual was perceived to have entered a qualitatively new phase that would have to be captured conceptually. Previously, certain streams of political thought had regarded questions concerning the political freedom of the individual and the legal and institutional securities that protected him to be the decisive criteria in assessing a state. Now, the potentizing concept of the totalitarian arched above such older concepts of the theory of rule as tyranny, absolutism and dictatorship to become the sign of this new experience of reality. The Fascist revolution-so wrote the professor of legal theory, Hermann Heller, in 1929-had destroyed ‘the legal state, its distribution of powers and its guarantees of fundamental rights’. It had ‘abolished all the legal guarantees that the past centuries of European political history…[had] developed’.2 At the same point in time, Filippo Turati, the Nestor of Italian democratic-socialism who had gone into exile in France, described the same impression:
The example of Italy proves that the Fascist attack, which seemed to have been aimed at socialism at first, now turns against all parties and classes…[it] destroys all appearance and reality of democracy… As soon as it has formed a party, it becomes totalitarian. That is, it ceases being a party in order to become a foreign occupying army against which any rebellion is technically impossible and ineffectual… If Fascism continues to extend and consolidate itself, then it is very well in a position to create a state of continual war in Europe and perhaps beyond… Fascism is the constantly impending war. To fight and destroy Fascism means to work for peace among the nations.3
