For a critique of the category of totalitarianism

Abstract

In 1951, by the time Hanna Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, the debate over totalitarianism had been raging for a decade. However, the meaning of the term was not yet well defined. How to find your way around what, at first glance, appears like a labyrinth? Here, I abstract from the occurrences in which the adjective “totalitarian”, even more than the noun, has a positive connotation, concerning the capacity attributed to a religion or to any ideology or vision of the world to respond to all the multiple problems resulting of a dramatic crisis situation and the very questions about the meaning of life, which involve man as a whole. Still in 1958, although rejecting “legal totalitarianism”, that is, imposed by law, Barth celebrated in the following terms the universalist dynamic and omniscient effectiveness of the Christian “message”: “Totalitarian, insofar as it aims at the whole, in which requires each
man and demands it completely for himself, is also the free grace of the gospel.”