ABSTRACT
A totalitarian society implies certain organisational arrangements. The precise nature of these arrangements and more particularly the factors and events which produce them remain matters for debate. Nevertheless certain ideal-typical delineations have been suggested. The following examples may be paralleled to indicate how various authors try to fix the phenomenon in their sights: https://www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/ns/oasis-exchange/table">
Aron
Friedrich and Brzezinski
Kornhauser
1. One party monopolises political activity.
1. An official ideology covering all vital aspects of man's existence. It is characteristically focused and projected towards a perfect final state of mankind.
1. Dictatorship based on mass support.
2. The party confers absolute authority on to its ideology. This becomes the official truth of the state.
2. Single mass party led typically by one man, the dictator. The party has a hard core of members committed to and prepared to spread the party ideology. The party is hierarchically oligarchically organised and typically either superior to or completely intertwined with the bureaucratic government organisation.
2. Elite domination of centralised organisation.
3. The official truth is imposed by the double state monopoly of the means of coercion and the means of persuasion. The means of communication are directed and commanded by the state and its representatives.
3. Terroristic police control supports but also supervises the party and its leaders. It is directed against the ‘enemies’ of the regime and also arbitrarily selected classes of the population.
3. A permanently mobilised mass movement which seeks to control all aspects of life.
4. Economic and professional activities are subject to the state and are coloured by the ‘official truth’.
4. The near-monopoly control of the means of communication are in the hands of the party and its subservient cadres.
4. Dictatorship involves total domination. It is not limited by received laws or codes nor by boundaries of governmental functions since the distinction between state and society is obliterated.
5. Errors in economic and professional activity are defined as ideological faults. At most there is a politicisation of all individual crimes accompanied by police and ideological terrorism.
5. The near-monopoly control of the means of effective armed combat in the hands of the party and its subservient cadres.
6. Central control and direction of the economy through the bureaucratic co-ordination of formerly independent corporate entities.
7. Administrative control of justice and the courts. 1
