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Totalitarianism is an extreme form of authoritarianism, in which the state has unlimited power and its control extends beyond political issues. For instance, it might regulate people’s beliefs and religious practices, totally control the media and the economy, create a cult of personality around a leader, and arbitrarily punish or murder anyone it takes to be an opponent. As Hannah Arendt put it, totalitarianism is “the erasure of the difference between private and public life,” in which everything becomes fair game for the government to control and citizens essentially stop having any protected rights at all. Many of the governments Snyder cites (like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) were totalitarian, but others (like present-day Russia) are better described as merely authoritarian.
Totalitarianism Quotes in On Tyranny
The On Tyranny quotes below are all either spoken by Totalitarianism or refer to Totalitarianism. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 14
Quotes
What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life.
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Totalitarianism Term Timeline in On Tyranny
The timeline below shows where the term Totalitarianism appears in On Tyranny. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9: Be kind to our language.
In fact, famous novels about totalitarianism, like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, predicted this strategy: tyrants and their media prevent people from...
(full context)
Chapter 14: Establish a private life.
...that people should be careful about what they put on the internet. Hannah Arendt defined “totalitarianism” as “the erasure of the difference between private and public life,” meaning that citizens cannot...
(full context)
