ABSTRACT
Every totalitarian movement during the last two hundred years of Western history has grown out of the Liberalism of its time. There is a straight line from Rousseau to Hitler—a line that takes in Robespierre, Marx, and Stalin. The great discovery of the Enlightenment was that human reason is absolute. During the Enlightenment it was Rousseau who made the fatal step from rationalism and pretended rationality to openly irrational and antirational totalitarianism. It is true that Rousseau insisted upon the small unit of the city-state with its direct, nonrepresentative democracy as the only perfect form of government. The one great difference between Hitler's conversion of rationalist liberalism into totalitarianism and the work of his predecessors, Rousseau and Karl Marx, lies in the open elevation of the one Master over organized society. Both the Marxist and the rationalist liberal add to the strength of the revolutionary totalitarianism, however sincerely they oppose it.
