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This essay is about a political phenomenon that has a still imperfectly understood psychological, or psychopathological dimension, one that may lie at the heart of it. This phenomenon is conventionally called totalitarianism. Everything about it, starting with the name, is problematic.
Whoever invented it, the name was put into currency by Mussolini when he published an article in the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1932 in which he proclaimed himself a “totalitarian” and called the Italian fascist state lo stato totalitario. That claim is widely taken by historians as more of a boast than a description of Italian fascist reality.
In the later 1930's and after, the word was picked up by scholars, some of them refugees from the real, Nazi version of the phenomenon that took over in Germany in 1933. These refugee scholars and others who wrote tracts about totalitarianism, of which Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is the best known and most influential, saw Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia as the two indubitable historical cases of the totalitarian phenomenon. Arendt wrote that 1929, the year of Stalin's advent to supreme power, was “the first year of clear-cut totalitarian dictatorship in Russia.” Under his predecessor, Lenin,