Editing Totalitarianism (section)

=== Nazism and Fascism ===
[[File:Gen. Otto Schumann, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Fritz Schmidt (1941, Den Haag).jpg|thumb|upright|[[Otto Schumann]], [[Arthur Seyss-Inquart]] and [[Fritz Schmidt (Generalkommissar)|Fritz Schmidt]] award a sportswoman with a portrait of [[Adolf Hitler]].]]
[[Enzo Traverso]] and Andrew Vincent point out that the "totalitarian approach" or the theoretical concept of totalitarianism, which presented the idea of a monolithic party, no separation between state and society, and total mobilization of the atomized masses and total control over the state, society and economy, is not applicable not only to the USSR, but also to Nazi Germany and Fascist states as well, since it also did not present a monolithic structure exercising total control over society, but on the contrary, that Nazi bureaucracy was highly "chaotic", anomic and disorganized and disunited, and that Adolf Hitler was a "weak dictator" and "[[laissez-faire]] leader", as said by such historians as [[Hans Mommsen]] and [[Ian Kershaw]];<ref name="trav2"/><ref name="san"/> this description of Nazi Germany was first introduced in 1942 by [[Franz Leopold Neumann]] in the work ''[[Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism]]'', where he provocatively presented Hitlerism "a Behemoth, a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy", and later entered historiography of Nazism. In the 1970s, the German historians of [[Functionalism–intentionalism debate|functionalist school]] presented Nazism as a "[[Polycracy|polycratic]]" system grounded on different centers of power – the Nazi party, the army, the economic elites, and the state bureaucracy; to such historians, totalitarian monolithic state and party were just a facade (similarly to Fitzpatrick's assessment of Stalinism).<ref name="trav2"/><ref name="av">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q6XpEAAAQBAJ | title=Modern Political Ideologies | isbn=978-1-119-98165-7 | last1=Vincent | first1=Andrew | date=15 December 2023 | publisher=John Wiley & Sons }}</ref> Historians like Mommsen and [[Ian Kershaw]] were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. Michael Mann wrote that these descriptions doubted theories of totalitarianism, since "anything less like the rigid top-down bureaucracy of totalitarian theory is hard to imagine", but that Stalinism and Nazism "belong together", and that "it is only a question of finding the right family name". According to Mann, "totalitarian theorists depicted an unreal level of coherence for any state. Modern states are a long way short of Hegelian or Weberian rational bureaucracy and they rarely act as singular, coherent actors. Normally regimes are factionalised; in an unpredictable world they stumble along with many foul-ups. Second, we should remember Weber's essential point about bureaucracy: it kept politics out of administration. Political and moral values ('value rationality') were settled outside of bureaucratic administration, which then limited itself to finding efficient means of implementing those values ('formal rationality'). Contrary to totalitarian theory, the twentieth-century states most capable of such formally rational bureaucracy were not the dictatorships but the democracies."<ref name="san"/>

The concept of totalitarianism appeared in the debates among German historians and public intellectuals known as ''[[Historikerstreit]]'', in which one of the parties defended the idea of exceptionalism of Nazism, while their conservative opponents believed that the Third Reich may be explained through comparison with the USSR; at the same time, such conservative historians as [[Karl-Dietrich Bracher]] and [[Klaus Hildebrand]] rejected the notion of Nazism as a branch of generic fascism, on the grounds that the uniqueness of Nazism lay in the person and ideology of Hitler and that Nazism was defined primarily by Hitler's personality and personal beliefs rather than by any external factors.<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/i176/articles/ian-kershaw-the-nazi-state-an-exceptional-state | title=The Nazi State: An Exceptional State? | journal=New Left Review | date=August 1989 | issue=I/176 | pages=47–67 | last1=Kershaw | first1=Ian }}</ref>

[[Stanley Payne]] wrote that indeed, both Mussolini and Hitler failed to achieve full totalitarianism, and of Mussolini it was said that his regime was not totalitarian (excluding "merely fascist" Italy from totalitarian regimes, started by [[Hannah Arendt]] who also thought that Nazism became totalitarian only in 1938–1942, is a not unpopular but contested position in contemporary historiography<ref name="italy">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3urAEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-0-691-22612-5 | title=Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity | date=21 November 2023 | publisher=Princeton University Press|quote=Of course, the exclusion of fascist Italy from the totalitarian family is not a surprising claim today. Those who separate ('merely' fascist) Italy from (properly totalitarian) Germany and Russia are hardly a minority among recent scholars, though their view remains contested.}}</ref>), so Payne concludes that "only a socialist or Communist system can achieve full totalitarianism, since total control requires total institutional revolution that can only be effected by state socialism" (according to Payne, both Lenin and Stalin were totalitarian). Payne writes that "it is easy to argue either that many different kinds of regimes are totalitarian or conversely that none were perfectly total", yet, he writes that the concept "totalitarianism is both valid and useful if defined in the precise and literal sense of a state system that attempts to exercise direct control over all significant aspects of all major national institutions."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x_MeR06xqXAC | title=A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 | isbn=978-0-299-14873-7 | last1=Payne | first1=Stanley G. | date=January 1996 | publisher=University of Wisconsin Pres }}</ref>