ABSTRACT
The power of the state, measured both by the fields it embraces and the amount it can take for taxes and for war, has increased steadily during the last eight or nine centuries. The chief problem of the twentieth century, the historian of the twenty-first is likely to say, was not "socialism versus capitalism" at all, but whether the state could enter into so many fields and so many aspects of social life become "socialized" or statized without the state's becoming total in the process and without liberty vanishing and democracy perishing. Totalitarianism asserts that the state is identical with society and coextensive with it, that all the purposes of the state are identical with the purposes of society and that society can have no purposes that are not state purposes. The totalitarian state has been ably described in a single sentence by Benito Mussolini.
