baehr_p_richter_m_dictatorship_in_history_and_theory_bonapar

socialism. He did ask Charles Robert to investigate worker profit-sharing, which anticipated schemes favored by left-wing Gaullists a century later. However, although a Gaullist leader such as Philippe Seguin´ wrote a book to explain his joint admiration for Louis-Napoleon and de Gaulle,60 this linkage did not commend itself to his Rassemblement Pour la Republique´

(RPR) members or, more generally, to the French people.

To assess the enduring standing of Bonapartism and Gaullism in contemporary France, comparison must be made between Napoleon and de Gaulle. In a public opinion poll conducted in 1990 to coincide with an international conference on “De Gaulle en son Siecle,`” respondents were asked to name the most important people in French history. Among those named in first place, de Gaulle (18%) came second to Charlemagne (20%), with Napoleon a close third (17%). Taking the respondents’ top three choices together, de Gaulle came first (51%), with Napoleon second (46%), and Charlemagne third (37%).61 Another poll of lycee´ students in 1988 showed that setting aside primarily nonpolitical figures like Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur, de Gaulle outclassed Napoleon, whose support significantly is much greater on the right and extreme right of the political spectrum of support.62

De Gaulle did not achieve his goal of becoming a supra-partisan leader, but he came closer than Napoleon had.63 As a heroic leader, de Gaulle was able to survive his role as crisis leader to become the founding father of an enduring regime that combined assured republican authority and relative constitutional stability with dirigiste economic modernization. None of these achievements is immune to the impact of persisting internal dissension and external competitive pressures that make it more difficult for France to preserve its treasured identity despite its habitual inclination to inertia. The increasing tendency toward “cohabitension” suggests that the French preference for parliamentary rather than presidential government

60Philippe Seguin,´ Louis Napoleon´ le Grand (Paris, 1990), a title chosen to play off Victor Hugo’s Napoleon´ le Petit of 1852. In the third of his letters on the French coup d’etat´ of 1851 published by the Inquirer and dated from Paris, January 15, 1852, Walter Bagehot drew the contrast between “Napoleon the Great” and “Napoleon the Little.” See Bagehot’s Historical Essays, ed. N. St John-Stevas (London, 1971), 398.

61Institut Charles de Gaulle, De Gaulle en son siecle`. Sondages et enquetesˆ d’opinion (Paris, 1992), 33, poll of 1,500 interviews conducted by SOFRES.

62Annick Percheron, “Le gen´ eral´ de Gaulle vu par les lyceens:´ un personnage entre memoire´ et histoire” in Institut Charles de Gaulle, De Gaulle en son siecle`, I (Paris, 1992), 382–90. A sample of 2,641 lyceens´ were interviewed.

63Tony Judt in his review of the abridged English edition of Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory (New York, 1998) criticized the absence of any entries for Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, or Bonapartism, asserting that “France is suffused with the legacy of Bonapartism” and “the spirit of Napoleon is still with us.” “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998, 54.

is reasserting itself. The scope for assertive leadership capable of imparting impetus is being reduced as the administration of things increasingly supersedes the government of men. France has returned to a humdrum era in which the electors do not wish to be disturbed by the heroics of a de Gaulle, still less of a Napoleon. They can be safely lodged in the pantheon of dead heroes, without confusing the man of Eighteenth Brumaire with the man of Eighteenth June.

regime of Napoleon Bonaparte.6 His explosively powerful combination of personal dictatorship and popular mobilization led many to draw parallels with the rule of Julius Caesar, apparently implying that there was nothing really novel here. Developments later in the nineteenth century, particularly the establishment by Louis Bonaparte of the second Bonapartist regime, prompted commentators not only to draw parallels with the end of the Roman Republic but to speculate on new features of European society. For it seemed that modern politics harbored the potential for an unfamiliar form of repressive rule, one that was no more acceptable to conservative monarchists than it was to progressive liberals. As Peter Baehr has shown,7 accounts and diagnoses of the new “Caesars” varied a good deal, but key themes recur. Napoleon and his imitators exercised centralized, autocratic rule that lacked constitutional foundation and showed scant respect for legality, but that claimed the legitimacy of popular consent. Established and sustained by force, devoted to military aggrandizement, it was confirmed by the acclamation of a populace dazzled by the vision of national glory. By way of explanation, analysts of “Caesarist” dictatorship regularly pointed to the new influence in European politics of “the masses”: ignorant, irrational, and easily manipulated.

These nineteenth-century traditions of political experience and analysis seemed to some to offer a framework in which to place the widespread establishment of dictatorships in Europe after the First World War. In so far as the Russian Revolution echoed the French, its culmination in personal dictatorship was only to be expected. Further west, wider popular participation in politics was in many cases followed by militaristic dictatorships of a more or less Caesarist kind. From Bonaparte to Mussolini, and from Mussolini to Hitler, was perhaps not a very big step. It was of course true that both Bolsheviks and Fascists insisted on their own novelty, the latter coining the term “totalitarian” to describe their own regime.8 Widespread adoption of the term in both academic and popular use by the mid–twentieth century implied a perception that there was indeed something novel about twentieth-century dictatorships; nevertheless, the novelty was often thought of as an intensification of previous efforts

6Melvin Richter, “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory 10 (1982), 185–214.

7Peter Baehr, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: a Study in Republicanism and Caesarism (New Brunswick, 1998).

8“For the Fascist all is in the state and nothing human or spiritual exists, or much less has value, outside the state. In this sense fascism is totalitarian.” The Doctrine of Fascism, written by Giovanni Gentile and published under Mussolini’s name in 1932, quoted in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: the Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York, 1969), 223.

at control rather than as something wholly without precedent. Franz Neumann suggested, for example, that whereas a “caesaristic” dictator combined “monopolized coercion and popular backing,” a “totalitarian” dictatorship goes one step further than that, finding it necessary to control education, communication, and the economy in order “to gear the whole of society and the private life of the citizen to the system of political domination.”9 “Total” control of all aspects of life is achieved by organizing the masses into a single party held together by an official ideology. On this view, the mass participation in modern politics that makes democracy possible also provides the conditions for the most intensive form of dictatorship yet achieved.10

This tradition of analysis makes it hard to see at first glance why Arendt put so much stress on the qualitative novelty of totalitarianism, and it is easy to miss the distinctiveness of her own account of it. Many familiar features seem to be present in her book: the personal dictatorship of a leader who has no constitutional legitimacy but enjoys mass support; repression within the state’s borders and aggression without; a mass movement with an ideology. One signal that should warn readers to take note, however, is the care Arendt takes to restrict her use of the term “totalitarian” to two cases only, the regimes of Hitler and Stalin.11 Most of the dictatorships counted as examples of totalitarianism by other writers are in Arendt’s view nothing of the sort. All the post-Stalinist communist regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe, for example, often regarded as classic examples, fall outside her category. Reviewing the situation after Stalin’s death, she observed that totalitarianism had ceased. “The people of the Soviet Union have emerged from the nightmare of totalitarian rule to the manifold hardships, dangers and injustices of one-party dictatorship.”12 All the apparatus of total control was still there: the party, the ideology, the secret police, and the lack of rights, but the system was no longer totalitarian. It is perhaps even more telling that Arendt denied the label to the regime that first proclaimed itself “totalitarian,” Mussolini’s Fascism. In its prime, before Mussolini fell under Hitler’s influence, his regime was in her view “not totalitarian but just an

9 “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in Franz Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, 1957), 236.

10According to the classic theory of Friedrich and Brzezinski, totalitarianism is the type of autocracy that fits modern societies, just as absolute monarchy was characteristic of traditional societies. Carl J. Friedrich amd Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York, 1967).

11“Lenin’s was a revolutionary one-party dictatorship.” Arendt dated the beginning of totalitarianism in the USSR from 1930, and in Germany from 1938. “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding, 347–8.

12Arendt, Origins, xxi.

ordinary nationalist dictatorship,”13 with a leader at the head of a single party in possession of the state.

What is it, then, that is special about totalitarianism in Arendt’s unusual sense? The essay in which she confronted this question directly, trying to provide a general characterization of this “novel form of government” to add to Montesquieu’s characterizations of “monarchy,” “republic,” and “despotism,” is entitled “Ideology and Terror.” This title seems only to add to the mystery, since ideology and terror in the ordinary senses of the words certainly existed in Mussolini’s Fascism and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. Nor was it the sheer scale of terror that was decisive. “Suffering . . . is not the issue, nor is the number of victims.”14 She insists that totalitarianism is not just more extreme than other forms of political oppression, but that it is essentially different, with special characteristics that show up regardless of the particular national traditions of the country in which it appears or the specific source of its ideology.15 Elsewhere she observes that the Nazi leaders were well aware of this distinctiveness, despising Mussolini’s Fascism but recognizing that Stalin’s regime was akin to their own. In his diary, Goebbels recorded disparaging comments on the superficiality of Fascism compared with Nazi radicalism. Mussolini, he said, “is not a revolutionary like the Fuhrer¨ or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.”16 Together with respectful references by Hitler and other Nazis to the genuinely ideological character of Stalin’s regime (quoted on the same page of The Origins of Totalitarianism), this makes it even harder to see why Arendt thought totalitarianism was such a novelty. For the stress on ideological revolution seems reminiscent of the Jacobin “armed doctrine” so much feared by Burke at the time of the French Revolution and makes totalitarianism sound like a kind of quasi-religious ideological crusade. Yet Arendt continues to insist on the complete lack of precedents for the phenomenon she is concerned with. Totalitarian regimes “operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense categories could any

13Ibid., 257.

14Ibid., 459. The quotation continues, “Human nature as such is at stake.” Cf. Arendt’s essays, “Mankind and Terror,” and “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” both in Essays in Understanding. On the distinctiveness of totalitarianism, see also Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (Cambridge, 1992), Chap. 2, and “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism: a Reassessment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge, 2000).

15“Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government” (1953), included in Arendt, Origins, 460.

16Arendt, Origins, 309.

longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict their course of action.”17

Arendt’s account of what it is that is distinctive about totalitarianism is in fact quite difficult to grasp, for the good reason (she would have said) that she was struggling to articulate phenomena that were themselves well nigh incomprehensible.18 Despite apparent similarities in the use of violence, totalitarianism as she understands it is in some ways the direct opposite of normal repressive regimes, which are characterized by ruthless Machiavellianism. Instead, it is a purposeless, senseless, gigantic mobilization for destruction, in which “terror is no longer a means to frighten and suppress opponents, but, on the contrary, increases with the decrease of opposition.”19 The key point is that totalitarianism is a mass movement: a movement without end, a perpetual motion of destruction.

The totalitarian form of government depends entirely upon the fact that a movement, and not a party, has taken power . . . so that instead of the tyrant’s brutal determination and the dictator’s demagogic ability to keep himself in power at all costs, we find the totalitarian leader’s single-minded attention directed to the acceleration of the movement itself.20

My aim in this chapter is to make use of comparisons with “normal” forms of dictatorship to help fix this elusive phenomenon, focusing attention especially on the peculiarities of totalitarian leadership and its relation to the masses.

THE LEADER

From Machiavelli’s “prince” to Weber’s “charismatic” individual, postclassical theories of dictatorship have been constructed around the figure of the leader: the larger than life man who embodies dominance in his person. Within the nineteenth-century tradition of thinking about Caesarism, the illegitimacy of the dictator’s rule itself testifies to his stature: He is a man who has made himself lord by sheer force of personality, without being able to rely on traditional or institutional support. The figure of Napoleon is paradigmatic. Here is the man of destiny, able to seize the moment, to master his rivals, to dazzle the masses, to dare great enterprises and to crush opposition with an iron hand. Even those who hated him did not deny

17“Ideology and Terror,” 460.

18“Understanding and Politics,” passim. Cf. Margaret Canovan, “Beyond Understanding? Arendt’s Account of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt Newsletter No. 1 (April 1999), 25–30.

19Arendt, “Authority in the Twentieth Century,” Review of Politics 18 (1956), 408.

20Ibid., 408.

his exceptional qualities. In the twentieth century, Fascism transformed this grudging recognition of personal dominance into an ideological justification of dictatorial rule by il Duce, the man who had given practical proof of his ability to lead. If Mussolini showed the way, Hitler and his followers went further, explicitly personalizing his regime so that everything revolved around the Fuhrer¨ , whose will had the force of law.

It is therefore very striking (and puzzling for readers of Origins) that Arendt pays so little attention in her account of totalitarianism to the individual leaders, Hitler and Stalin. It is no part of her thesis to deny their importance – as we have seen, she stresses that it was only under Stalin’s rule that the Soviet Union was totalitarian – but nothing in her treatment of them hints at the Caesarist tradition of world historical individuals or charismatic leaders setting their personal stamp on their times. They are at the center of totalitarianism, but it is a peculiar kind of centrality. Not for nothing does she adopt the metaphorical figure of the onion to describe the totalitarian movement, with the leader inside its enclosed layers, in the space at its center.21 Elsewhere, in a revealing footnote, she comments on the incongruity of treating Hitler and Stalin (“these non-persons”) to “the undeserved honor of definitive biographies” simply “because of their importance for contemporary history.”22 This is not a moral judgment but a comment on the total disproportion between their personal stature and the havoc they wreaked.23 While admitting Hitler’s renowned charisma, she offers a demystifying and un-Weberian explanation of the phenomenon. Reviewing an edition of his table-talk, she notes his dominance over those around him, but maintains that:

The problem of Hitler’s charisma is relatively easy to solve . . . it rested on the wellknown experiential fact that Hitler must have realized early in his life, namely, that modern society in its desperate inability to form judgments will take every individual for what he considers himself and professes himself to be . . . Extraordinary selfconfidence and displays of self-confidence therefore inspire confidence in others; pretensions to genius waken the conviction in others that they are indeed dealing with a genius.

She adds that “Hitler’s real superiority consisted in the fact that under any and all circumstances he had an opinion,” not because he was better informed or had special insight, but simply because of his fanatical consistency.24 Among

21Ibid. Arendt’s metaphor is discussed below.

22Arendt, Men in Dark Times (London, 1970), 33–4.

23Cf. Arendt’s comments on Adolf Eichmann in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London, 1963), 49 and 253.

24Arendt, “At Table with Hitler,” in Essays in Understanding, 291 and 293. Cf. Origins, 305.

people with no firm grasp on reality (which in her view is characteristic of “masses,” as we shall see), sheer certainty is itself convincing, especially when wedded to an ideology, however mad, that provides an instant answer to every question.

Charisma understood in this way bears no relation to the creative genius Weber attributed to those supermen who were able to inspire and dominate the masses. In Arendt’s view, the totalitarian leader is not a towering figure of that kind, nor even “a power-hungry individual imposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will upon his subjects.”25 Rather, his role is to be the center and personification of a mass movement. According to the “leader principle,” everything done within the movement is supposed to emanate from the will of the leader, who claims total responsibility for all its actions.26 Yet Arendt insists that “the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the functionary of the masses he leads.” Leader and masses are mutually dependent: “without him they would lack external representation and remain an amorphous horde; without the masses the leader is a nonentity.”27 Both are caught up and carried along in the momentum of the movement, whose perpetual motion is the essence of totalitarianism.

Aware of the difficulty of grasping and communicating so outlandish a phenomenon, Arendt tries to dislodge from her readers’ minds the familiar image of the tyrant who dominates his subjects and rules by arbitrary decree. In her view, the model of a commander issuing orders to his troops is misleadingly institutional in this context. The source of authority in the Nazi regime was not any specific “order,” but the fluid, perpetually mobile “will” of the Fuhrer¨ .28 Even more bafflingly, however, we should not interpret this will as the arbitrary lawlessness of the traditional tyrant. In her essay on “Ideology and Terror,” Arendt argued that totalitarianism is the reverse of lawlessness, being conceived as obedience to supposed laws of nature or history that are revealed by the movement’s ideology. According to those supposed laws, human beings are swept along in a perpetual motion of struggle and destruction over which the ruler himself has no power, except that his insight into the laws enables him to speed up their execution.29 Neither he nor anyone else benefits from this hurricane of destruction. As Arendt continually insists, to look for utilitarian motives (even of the

27Both quotations are from Arendt, Origins, 325.

28Arendt, “Authority in the Twentieth Century,” 409. Cf. Ian Kershaw, “Working Towards the Fuhrer:¨ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, eds. I. Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge, 1997), 88–106.

29Arendt, Origins, 465.