Chapter 2
A Defence of Politics against Ideology

That not all forms of government are political, and that politics is a more precise concept than is often thought, are truths which become very clear by contrast to totalitarian rule and its reliance on the theory of ideology. Totalitarian rule marks the sharpest contrast imaginable with political rule, and ideological thinking is an explicit and direct challenge to political thinking. The totalitarian believes that everything is relevant to government and that the task of government is to reconstruct society utterly according to the goals of an ideology. This ideology will offer a criticism of existing society and a prophecy – on the basis of a single ‘key to history’ – of a final, perfectly just, and perfectly stable stage of society. So to appreciate the unique character of totalitarian rule and the unique aspirations of totalitarian ideology should help us to understand more fully the peculiar importance of some aspects of politics. We shall find there a direct attack on the idea of a diversity of semi-independent groups in society and on the idea of the affirmative individual, so strong as to convince us that the totalitarian at least knows that these two things are at the heart of what makes politics possible. And we will find ourselves disabused about the importance of some other things.

Such a comparison will, at least, destroy any easy identification of political freedom with ‘democracy’. The contrast of democratic and undemocratic régimes, so that free régimes become simply those based on willing and active consent, breaks down completely in the light of totalitarian régimes. As Hannah Arendt has written in her great Origins of Totalitarianism: ‘it is painful to realize that they are always preceded by mass movements and that they “command and rest upon mass support” up to the end.’ To deny this basis of mass support to the Soviet Union and to Communist China – as once some denied it to Nazi Germany – may be a comfortable belief, but it is a false and dangerous one, a symptom of how thoroughly many of us good liberals are in the grip of a false theory of government: that the consent of the people necessarily creates freedom. Mill’s essay On Liberty was premised on the need to defend liberty against even democracy, to give democrats a respect for liberty. Representative government, he saw, was no guarantee of liberty – if all posts were filled by men of the same mind. But somehow the point rarely sinks in. People continue to try to characterize ‘free politics’ in terms of democracy and can never see why, in the history of the rise of democratic institutions (which is not the same as the history of toleration), the Communist claim to be democratic is equally plausible. Totalitarian régimes, indeed, are a product of a democratic age. They depend upon mass support, and they have found a way of treating society as if it were, or were about to be, a single mass. Even opposition with more bark than bite will be destroyed, not because it offends the pride of an autocrat, but because its very existence challenges the theories of a totalitarian ideologist. No more may even sleeping dogs lie, as under autocracy. They must be whipped into action until they begin to enjoy it.

For totalitarianism is not merely an intensive word of abuse applied to old authoritarian practices ‘new writ large’ by modern technological opportunities. Modern technology has not just expanded opportunities for the exploitation of office, but has helped to create a new style of ideological thought of such sweeping ambition that the mere passive obedience with which most former autocrats were content has now given way to the need for an active and perpetual enthusiasm. The autocrat wanted to govern in pleasure and peace – he might have military ambitions, but even they were limited to the pleasure he could conceivably get out of them in his own life span; but the totalitarian leader aspires to ‘remake this sorry scheme of things entire’ and tries to think in terms of whole epochs, not just of human generations. Himmler claimed that his S.S. men were not interested in ‘everyday problems’ but only ‘in ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries. . . .’ The enjoyment of office and the perpetuation of a régime or dynasty have become secondary to the achievement by a single party of the goals of an ideology. Thus we have broken, with little warning, from the bounds of those Greek classifications of types of government which for so long seemed adequate, since they all presumed that government served limited purposes, that the State, while being the predominant social institution, yet was not omnipotent.

For the aim of totalitarian rule is not simply intense autocracy. Autocrats, once a state grew too large and complex for every group interest to be dominated by a Palace Guard, could solve the problem of power only by sharing power. Limited government (however limited), government by consultation (however one-sided), became an administrative necessity to some degree (however shallow). Mass consent, when the masses became important as towns grew and industry spread, could be gained only by mass participation in politics. For as Rousseau said in one of those flashes of empirical clarity that make up for so much else: ‘the strongest is never strong enough to be always master, unless he transforms strength into right and obedience into duty.’ But totalitarian ideology has provided this basis of right and duty in a plausible, intelligible, and revolutionary form. It has provided what Napoleon once said would be the politics of the future: ‘the organization of willing masses for sacrifice for an ideal.’ To the totalitarian régime, then, nothing is irrelevant to the government, everything is possible. The masses must be changed, or orchestrated, towards a single future harmony. It is at least clear that such a style of thought can be called, with agreement from both ideologist and politician, anti-political.

The chiliastic claims of both Nazism and Communism have been generally remarked – whatever have been their temporary compromises in practice: what was once a religious heresy, to achieve the holy reign of the saints on earth, has become in our times a secular orthodoxy held with religious intensity. There was a fanatic rejection of the compromises of mere ‘politics’ by the Nazis, something which challenged the conventional belief of the bureaucracy and the officer corps that they could live beside and yet avoid ‘politics’, could dwell in some aloof but dutiful Überparteilichkeit. The belief that race and race alone was the sole determinant of social action gave rise to the belief of the Nazi élite in a ‘Final Solution’. Few denied that the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ would not become a gross political liability, even in Germany, when it became widely known; but the system had swept beyond mere politics. Racial purity was offered to the masses as being infallibly able to ensure the subjection or transformation of the two great demons of the old liberal systems, those two things of great dread which, after 1914, had seemingly proved uncontrollable in the rational liberal world: war and mass-unemployment. War was transformed from something to be excused politically into something to be glorified racially; and unemployment was banished by attempting to put the whole economy on a permanent war-footing. Politics became anti-politics, as when Hitler wrote: ‘Politics is the art of carrying out the life struggle of a nation for its earthly existence. Foreign politics is the art of ensuring for a nation its living space in size and wealth whenever and however necessary. Domestic politics is the art of maintaining for a nation the power necessary for this aim in the form of its racial equality and size of population.’¹

If the idea that class struggle is the sole determinant of social action appears at least more plausible than that of racial struggle, it also gave rise to killings and cruelties so great that comparisons of more or less become themselves inhuman. One trembles with horror at the person who thinks either that one should count heads, or that any distinction between a Nazi ‘irrational’ terror and a Communist ‘rational’ terror would help one to set oneself up as a judge who must – strangely and terribly – pardon one or the other. For the Communist too, terror and ‘mass-resettlement’ is done in the name of an advance to a final stage of history. Time and time again the real interests of Communist Parties which were involved in political situations, in China during the 1920s, in Weimar Germany, in France and Britain during the 1930s, were sacrificed for the needs of the whole ideology (and even if these needs of the whole ideology became at times suspiciously close to a traditional Russian self-interest, the fact remains that Communists abroad were willing to take this on trust and to sacrifice their own obvious immediate interests). The activity of politics itself, both in Nazi and Communist doctrine, was only a transitional stage in history. The element of diplomacy in international relations was itself irksome; it fortified the universalism and world-shaping aspirations of the ideology. Both the Communists and the Nazis took part in politics only as a temporary means to a higher – permanent – end.

To say that doctrine is of unique importance in totalitarian régimes is to misunderstand how precisely and uniquely doctrine is viewed as ideology. Ideology has now become one of the most loosely used words in the vocabulary of power. Publicists and journalists have debased it into a mere term of abuse, a synonym for fervid impracticality – or, more occasionally, a useful moral armament which the other side has got and which we lack. We are in danger of forgetting its precise significance as a theory of human action. The word was first coined by a philosopher, Destutt de Tracy, in 1795 as the name for a ‘science’ which would explain the relationship between sensations and ideas and would remove all ambiguity from language. This was to be an official project of the revolutionary government’s Institut National des Sciences et Arts. Shortly afterwards Napoleon gave the word greater currency, using it to mock all abstract and literary schemes concocted by philosophers or publicists. The word became well established, with this invidious meaning, in the writings of French and English conservatives. But Marx, in his polemic The German Ideology, though he began by using the term in this way, ended by generalizing from it to create a new and precise theoretical meaning. It expressed a new and vastly influential concept – which marked the birth from the same womb of both the intellectual justification for totalitarianism and the modern study of sociology. To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance. All thought whatever is ideological. Contrary to the belief of many who have not read the book, Marx did not waste much space on chapter and verse of how precisely the German philosophers were serving as tame lackeys of the State, of how the Hegelian ‘idealists’ were in fact instruments of material class interests. The argument set down was completely general: any philosophy can only serve the interests of the class who control the means of production. ‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.’ The theory of ideology sees even ‘knowledge’ and ‘reason’, let alone ethics and custom, as mere expressions of the total structure of society, as things relative and functional to a particular social system.

Now, to examine the function of ideas as social products (rather than for their truth or falsity) is obviously a proper, interesting, and enlightening subject of inquiry; it is one way, at least, of understanding human society. Marx was indeed the virtual inventor of sociology – itself, obviously, sociology with a purpose, a theory developed to achieve an end. The old oppressive and ‘self-contradictory’ political order was to be replaced by a new and highly unified social order (politics and philosophy were to be exposed and surpassed by sociology). He was the precursor of the modern study of the ‘sociology of knowledge’. This study has not always assumed that all ideas are ideology; and when it has done so, it has often been in the mood of abstract supposition, or of scientific hypothesis: to see what can be explained on the assumption that such a view is true. But it has had a characteristic danger (though danger is no excuse for abandoning learning – as some genteel critics of sociology would have us do). The danger is that man is dissolved away into his social circumstances; the tough-spiritedness of human will and the inventiveness of human intellect become lost in a swamp of circumstantial detail. (It is sadly interesting that Max Weber’s writings contain both some of the profoundest modern scholarship and some of the deepest pessimism about the stability and survival of free politics.) But in Marx himself, right from the beginning, the theory of ideology furnished a plan of action aimed at a total change of society, not simply an academic means of understanding society as it was. For if all thought was ideology, then the only final and stable ideology would be that of the ultimate class to come to control the means of production.

So Nazi and Communist ideology became not just a uniquely effective and widecast body of doctrine, only differing in degree from previous political doctrines; for each made an explicit claim to be the necessary and exclusive outcome of the total relationships of every aspect of society – and therefore, in theory at least, claimed to be able to predict and explain everything. An ideology, thus, can be stable, final, and free of any and all internal contradictions only when society as a whole frees itself, or is freed, from those divisive elements of property ownership or racial impurity which impede its fullest possible coherence, generality, and unity. To the totalitarian mind, the limited function of ‘mere’ politics is both a fallacy and a deceit, a trick of the State to prevent the reign of Society. The Communist Manifesto itself spoke of depriving ‘the public power’ of ‘its political character’.² The distinction drawn in different ways by every political doctrine between a realm of public affairs and some areas – always some – of privacy (whether that assertive privacy called ‘personality’ or the negative privacy that there are simply some things irrelevant to politics), was deliberately obliterated by the theorists of ideology. Some recognition of privacy or of spheres of irrelevance is one of the reasons why even those who once pushed the power of the state to the utmost then imaginable, say Hobbes, say Hegel, say Papal theorists at different times, cannot sensibly be regarded as totalitarian. Totalitarianism surpasses autocracy. To the totalitarian not merely the machinery of government and the economic institutions of society, but also all education, industry, art, even domesticity and private affections, all these, both in work and leisure, are part of a completely interrelated social system, all are forces which must be accountable to the ideology. To leave any of these uncontrolled would be, in a practical sense, to leave dangerous lacunae of liberty and means of personal escape from complete dedication to public purposes; would be, in a scientific sense, to refute the claim of the theory of ideology that all aspects of society, including thought itself, are dependent on each other and are moving, or can be released, in a known and given direction. Even things which to the conventional tyrant and politician would be quite irrelevant to the needs of government – how men paint and make music, or the shape of the roof of a house – become, on this theory, relevant and are therefore either progressive or decadent, never subjects of indifference to the ruler or ruling party.

‘The whole framework of our social life is very closely knit together, comrades’, so the Soviet critic, Olesha, once cleverly put this point in publicly recanting his misguided admiration for the ‘formalist’ music of Shostakovich: ‘In the life and activity of our State nothing moves or develops independently. . . . If I do not agree with the Party in a single point, the whole picture of life must be dimmed for me, because all parts, all details of the picture are bound together and arise out of each other, therefore there can be no single false line anywhere. . . .’³ Thus a plausible sense of the complete involvement of all men and all things, which has anthropological significance in defining the distinctively human condition and which may have spiritual meaning – ‘do thyself no harm; for we are all here’ – attempts translation into political terms, but immediately becomes totalitarian. True politics cannot treat everything in political terms. The Marxist attempt to politicize all social relations is, in fact, the attempt to eliminate politics. For politics is concerned with limited purposes. Art, for example, cannot be politicized while remaining art. Love cannot be politicized while remaining love. If we are asked to love our country or our party more than our family or our friends (so that if necessary we would lay down our life not for another, but for the cause), we should know that we are being called to sacrifice life for ideology. And a situation will seem to demand such desperate actions only through the failure or neglect of political remedies.

The uniqueness of totalitarianism (which so vividly demonstrates, in the limitlessness of its aspirations, the uniqueness of politics) is further demonstrated in the attack on the concept of the State which was made in the name of Society. Both Nazi and Communist theorists and publicists composed to this theme. Consider the attack in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme on the idea of the ‘Free State’. He tried to show the erring Social Democrats that ‘Freedom consists in converting the State from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinated to it.’ Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: ‘The State is a means to an end. Its end is the preservation and promotion of a community of physically and psychically equal living beings . . . we must sharply distinguish between the State as a vessel and the race as the content.’ If society were one pure element, or even a stable solution and not just a compound of differing elements, then the State-as-coercive-power would not, indeed, be needed.

The conventional bourgeois state, precisely because its political, conciliatory function had recognized widely differing ideologies within the same territory, came to be regarded by the modern totalitarians as a mere transitory historical device which it was the purpose of the Party finally to resolve and remove. The bourgeois state, Marx said, contains ‘inner contradictions’ (indeed it does, that is what it is all about); but these contradictions are, for many high-sounding reasons, ultimately not to be tolerated; they were not, to the Nazis, a sign of civilization but of decadence, a failure to think clearly, to put first things first, a failure of nerve and a weakness of will. In order to achieve final justice, Society as a whole, treated as a unity, had to supplant the State. When the divisive elements in decadent society were removed, there would be only a single, all-embracing ideology, state and society would be at one, and an end be made to all the travail of the body politic. When the lowest class of all conquered, then class war would no longer be fundamental, and ideology would be clear and unambiguous. When the nation would be able to remove all biologically inferior and contaminatory strains, the path of triumph of the Volksgemeinschaft would be unimpeded, society would be one family, one brothers’ band under an inspired father and leader. In both cases the triumph of Society over the State would restore a shattered sense of belonging: the masses would have become a community (just as, in the transitional stage, the mob had been given a uniform).⁴

The similarity of Nazi and Communist styles of thought can also be seen in their common stress on violence. Violence is to totalitarianism as conciliation is to political systems – something creative. Precisely because thought and action are so determined by the superstructure of traditional society, and because the elements of this structure are so inter-dependent and interlocked, society can only, with very few exceptions – entirely tactical – be smashed, broken, overturned, shattered, seldom if ever converted or persuaded peacefully. The habits of the bourgeois State are so deeply rooted that it takes class war or national war to uproot them. Revolution, not just the taking over of power, is necessary, to break up the old strata of society, to prevent ‘contradictions’ or ‘bourgeois deviations’ from lingering on into the new era. Machiavelli saw the logic of this, or rather the sociology, when he argued that a Prince who comes to power, whether by conquest or inheritance, in a new territory which has known its own laws, has two choices open to him: either he must rule according to these laws; or he must break and smash them up utterly with great violence and destroy all potential opposition even, in one night of long knives. This is not a mere matter of intimidation of individuals; Machiavelli was trying to get at the social structure itself, the differing laws or customs which make opposition possible. But in Machiavelli this is really a purely theoretical discovery. The Prince cannot then solve the problem of perpetuating his rule except by spreading and sharing power: Princes to save or create states, Republics to maintain them. His Prince lacked an ideology which gives a public purpose for power and at least appears to solve, in the presence of the modern Party, the problem of succession which has been the bane of autocracies. The regenerating Prince is no longer a lonely hero, but has the massive capability behind him of a modern militant party. If the Prince must be a demi-god, yet his son may be depressingly mortal. But nowadays, the Party goes on for ever as the priesthood of the ideology. So long as people can recognize one man or a group of men (like Hobbes we need not always be fussy as to whether Leviathan is one or several men) as the authoritative expounder of the ideology, they will continue to bind themselves in willing subjection.

Totalitarian ideology not merely purports to explain everything, but it offers a belief in necessary progress. This belief is akin to the enervating liberal belief in progress, but it far surpasses it in the precision and passion of its claim to know with certainty the iron laws of historical development, the path to the final solution of the unwanted problem of politics. Obviously this combination of ideology and prophecy raises a formidable problem: if all thought is ideology, a product of circumstance, how can a clear vision be gained of that one ideology which will be the final ideology of the ultimate condition of society (which ‘vision’ is supposed to be the operative ideology of totalitarian government)? The practical answer that emerged, in the persons of Hitler and Stalin, was, of course, the peculiar position of the leader: the Machiavellian demi-god Prince who alone could transcend immediate necessity. The leader himself is, it cannot be denied, inspired: if not a god, he is at least a different sort of man from you or me. The new type of leader is, indeed, no mere politician of conciliation, nor yet a tyrant with immediate sensuous enjoyments, but a dedicated master-builder: the fauve artist and the social scientist dialectically fused for the creation of the best and the most efficient final society. His authority derives largely from passionate popular superstition that he understands best the laws of progressive history. What right has any man to resist the ideology of society as a whole and the tactical necessities of the unfolding laws of history?

Precise knowledge about how these historical laws are discovered has, of course, never been made as public as the broad goals of the ideology. So much of so much importance is taken on trust. Our times have seen a practical revival of the Renaissance concept of the arcana imperii, the craft, the skill, the ‘art’, the ‘mystery’, the hidden techniques of domination known only to the leader. But mere survival of the State was a fairly clear standard of judgement in public policy compared with vast schemes to remake mankind: raison d’état is of crystal clarity compared to raison de parti. The actions of the party leader are accepted as consistent with the real goals of the unfolding ideology, even when there are substantial contradictions in the world of mere appearances.

It is thus no accident that the two great totalitarian régimes of our time have both enshrined one man as head. Once the State tries to reduce the in fact diverse elements of society to a single composition, once society is viewed as a completely integrated work of art, whether Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘artificial animal’ of Hobbes’s Leviathan, then there is need for an artist. Once statecraft is seen as arcana, then there is need for a charlatan-magician, as superbly shown in Thomas Mann’s parable of Fascism in the story Mario and the Magician. There must be at least one man who can see clearly the way ahead through the inhibitions and limitations of the conventional, which otherwise determines all thought and action; one man who can substitute some trickery, cunning, or magic for what otherwise might seem unbroken vistas of the violence needed to fuse together social forces so naturally apart. And this type of ‘the leader’ seems to be emerging as a typical institution of ultra-nationalism – wherever nationalism has fallen into a pseudo-racial theory of history, one of the two thresholds of totalitarian ideology. The irrationalities and contradictions in such theories are hardly conducive to their being expounded and operated by the free discussion of even a small élite; there is a practical need for such theories to include some final irrational source of authority. If the Führer says that a (necessary) Jew is not a (Jewish) Jew, then he is not a Jew. If Khrushchev says that Marxism shows that Communist victory is inevitable and that co-existence is possible, then the faithful will applaud and the gullible be reassured. And the monopoly of truth which President Nasser held on the intricate question of ‘what is an Arab?’ seems too much of a kind with Prime Minister Verwoerd’s assurance that God had given him the means to distinguish the progeny of Ham from those of Shem and Japhet.

The academic sociologists of knowledge, notably Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, became involved in a similar difficulty. Even when using the theory of ideology purely explanatorily, not as a weapon of social change, how can even the scholar, let alone the highly moralistic Marx, achieve ‘objectivity’? Am I just bound to be a product of my own ideology, interpreting all other ideologies simply as my own would condition me to do? The answer became, of course, that certain scholars could do it because they were very peculiar types of person, the ‘unattached intellectuals’ who had succeeded in cultivating a ‘detached perspective’ – obviously a quite attractive view to intellectuals. Thus thought was at least allowed an element of transcendence over circumstance, but only to furnish the grounds for the first postulate of a ‘value-free’ and total social theory. Let us, indeed, assume that any social theory which aims to be fully comprehensive must be allowed one initial jump, one free move to begin the game. But perhaps if the sociologists of knowledge had been writing in the first full generation of totalitarian rule, and not a decade before, they would have adopted some ethical first assumption to prevent a theory of understanding from being ‘perverted’ as a plan of action. For the viewpoint of ‘ethical relativism’ implied in this science, while a buttress for tolerance when applied to ideologies within a political régime, yet appears quite inadequate to explain the novelty – and to condemn the cruelty – of totalitarianism as a positive theory of ideology. There are some things, as Leo Strauss has said of the concentration camps, of which a purely objective description would seem like a satire on mankind.

Mannheim does point out that his ‘concept “ideology” is being used . . . not as a negative value-judgement, in the sense of insinuating a conscious political lie, but is intended to designate the outlook inevitably associated with a given historical and social situation. . . . This meaning of the term . . . must be sharply differentiated from the other meaning.’⁵ But Mannheim failed to see that once it is believed that the logic and imperative of ideas is seen as purely ideological, as simply the mirroring and maintenance of that status quo which is the existing social order, then his ‘Utopians’ (perversely unaware that they are purely culture bound – which they are probably not) will have to see any progress as dependent upon a complete shattering and a total transformation of the entire social system: ideologies as ‘political lies’, or plans for a complete new future, will then become necessary. The philosophical foundation of totalitarian ideology rests upon the sociology of knowledge. Both underestimate the complexity of advanced industrial societies, the coexistence, clash, and overlap between several, even many, different ideologies within a given state, the number of ‘cross-cultural pressures’ to which any individual is subject – a state of affairs which can be sensibly regarded as fairly normal and, in the variety of experience it allows, reasonably delightful. Politics is a response to this very type of situation, and politics does not set itself the impossible tasks of creating a unified social theory before it thinks any government can justify itself, or of finding a single equation or a final reduction. But politics is not simply a restatement of the status quo, for things never are fixed: the conservative perpetually underestimates the amount of deliberate political innovation and invention, and of reasonably well understood social change and adaptation, which is going on at any time. Just as Mannheim, and even Weber, tends to underestimate the creativity of politics, so he underestimates greatly the plausibility and coherency of that use of ‘ideology’ which he calls a ‘political lie’. Totalitarianism is obviously far more rooted in social thought and structure than a mere ‘political lie’. And politics itself is a concept which stands outside the admitted relativity of particular political aspirations and doctrines: to that degree it is autonomous and creative.

Totalitarian ideology presents a clear contrast to politics; and even the academic theory of ideology represents a false, and even dangerous, attempt to reduce all political to sociological theory. Choices are made and have to be made, and one can never describe them in such a way that they are necessarily determined. Indeed the contrast points to two characteristics of political activity: one, the importance of a diversity of group interests, explicit in the argument so far; the other, some concern with personal identity, implicit.

I have argued that we are much beholden to the great Aristotle for recognizing the political relationship as one that harmonizes and tries to elevate those differences of opinion and interest which naturally exist within any known State. This is the basic proposition of political theory. And in almost nothing is totalitarian doctrine more remarkable than in its hatred of diversifying groups and institutions. The first theoretical basis for totalitarianism was the unintended creation of the first ‘armed bohemian’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when he replaced reason with will and argued: ‘If then the general will is to be truly expressed, it is essential that there should be no subsidiary groups within the State. . . . It was the magnificent achievement of Lycurgus to have established the only State of this kind ever known.’ But what just made sense in Rousseau’s romantic misunderstanding of the nature of the polis, and in the parlourrealism of his preferring Sparta to Athens, makes a very different kind of sense when applied to the great scale of the modern State, and even to the France of 1789. That his stress on the infallibility of the general will makes nonsense of his equally passionate individualism, is an old criticism, but a good one; although a better one might be that the danger, to both individualism and politics, stems from believing in such an entity at all. The ‘malignant imagination’ (in Sir Lewis Namier’s words) of Edmund Burke was, alas, right, and the all too human Jean-Jacques wrong, when Burke saw that rights to have any meaning must adhere to particular institutions: the rights of Englishmen are, indeed, necessarily more secure than the Rights of Man. The theory of democratic-centralism robbed men more and more of any intimacy with institutions small enough to be known, worked, and loved. Industrialism threatened to complete the rout of Burke’s ‘small platoon’, and only for an ineffective moment did the rising socialist movement pause to look at the small group as the natural unit, before plunging after a liberalized conservatism into mild or strong forms of Étatism.

The totalitarian destruction of intermediary groups only points to the relative naturalness of some of these groups. The totalitarian manufacture of a multiplicity of party or party-front organizations only points to the importance to them of providing controlled substitutes for the natural wealth of corporate life. But these controlled groups are ersatz, are just not-so-good substitutes, for they are made to have as little organic relevance to any non-political function as possible. No possible refuge for publicly opting out into purely private preoccupations is allowed; even the groups that there are will be periodically reshuffled, examined, or purged to prevent not just actual, but even possible, opposition forming. The sovereignty of the totalitarian general will, if it is to be made real, can allow of no competition or even flight to alternative activities. Contrary to the habits of traditional autocracies, sleeping dogs must be kicked into life, but not out of principle – out of theory. For everything in society, according to the operative theory, is either progressive or corrosive; there are no areas of privacy or federal divisions of authority. Hobbes unwittingly showed how the ground could be prepared for totalitarianism when he denounced all ‘Corporations’ as ‘worms within the entrails of the body politic’, although his whole theory was in fact meant to be a defence of the absolute self-identity of each and every individual against any possible group or even general interest.

The picture of the ‘need’ for totalitarian rule has had, alas, many helpful touches added to it in utter innocence by good liberals too consumed with dislike for ‘peculiar institutions’ which separate individuals from the State, which seem to create or leave pockets of irrational inequity in society. Any theory of political obligation must react to totalitarian ideology by a far greater stress on the pluralistic and federalistic nature of authority than has been the fashion of late. There is something, after all, to be said for continuing to venerate the great platitude of politics, perhaps as formulated by the young Harold Laski: ‘We shall make the basis of our state consent to disagreement. Therein we shall ensure its deepest harmony.’

The second more specific characteristic of political activity which emerges in contrast to totalitarian rule is, I have claimed, some concern with personal identity – its assertion and its preservation. This seems, in an at first sight curious manner, to be not just a contrast but the antithesis to the totalitarian stress on violence. Here is not just the all too obvious matter that totalitarian régimes have put a very low value on human life, both of opponents and of their own people; they both take and waste life easily compared to any known political régime. The contrast is deeper than that. Violence, as we have argued, plays a creative role for the totalitarian régime in smashing up the old structure of society. But it is also constantly demanded, in the form of self-violence, of sacrifice, from the individual.

Totalitarian régimes, to say something very obvious, try hard to gain willing sacrifice from their inhabitants, even to the death, even in quite normal tasks. Few Communists have shared the humanism of Brecht’s Mother Courage who remarks that only bad generals need brave soldiers. Rather, the ideal man is the man who will sacrifice himself for his cause, whether on the military or the industrial front (and even, as some of the great State trials of the 1930s in Russia showed, on the political front). Now this kind of pleasant appeal is not unknown even in political régimes; but there it is usually clap-trap more than effective policy, except in time of war. No one would be so silly as to applaud one for working oneself to death building a road for the Ross and Cromarty County Council – however badly they need roads; or even if one took a huge and fatal risk in trying to exceed production norms in the great mission of the State itself to electrify the Highlands of Scotland. Totalitarian régimes, however, encourage just such an absurd ethic of sacrifice at all times – for again, all times are emergency times. But this is absurd only to the free man. The true believer thinks himself happy to sacrifice himself for the future of the cause – or at least to run the risk. He does not think that he sacrifices freedom; he comes to think that sacrifice is freedom. ‘Oh God, . . . whose service is perfect freedom’ – the emotion is familiar but the confusion between heaven and earth is vastly novel. If there are spiritual truths, they are clearly only perverted by being treated as political truths; if there are states of mind in which we feel not just free, perhaps not free at all, but ‘liberated’, then we could imagine them extended to the whole of society – if society were indeed one mind. The Christian ‘service’ is, of course, far too other-worldly and humble for the totalitarian true believer. If Christianity to Nietzsche was a ‘slave morality’, by the same token it could not command true sacrifice on a vast scale. Sacrifice is not a characteristic of slaves, slaves are sacrificed; only the free man can sacrifice himself. So, if one has no capacity for enjoying real freedom, one sacrifices oneself to prove that one is free, or one tries to command the sacrifices of others to the end of the great and final cause – the last fight (which is perennial). Violence in the service of the cause is thus self-liberating: it liberates one from oneself and fuses one with the great collectivity:

They but thrust their buried men

Back in the human mind again.

You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,

‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’

Know that when all words are said

And a man is fighting mad,

Something drops from eyes long blind,

He completes his partial mind,

For an instant stands at ease,

Laughs aloud his heart at peace.

Yeats obviously reaches more deeply into the psychology of Fascism and Nazism than of Communism, but some such terrible perversion of human instinct marches alongside every attempt to sacrifice the present generation so that the future can lay down all burdens. The destination of such fanaticisms may be vague, but this may actually strengthen the joy in the march itself. ‘A man never goes so far,’ said Oliver Cromwell, ‘as when he does not know whither he is going.’ Politics ‘in contrast’ is obviously both prudential and prudent. A political state does not call on its citizens to risk their lives except in the defence of the realm in time of emergency. But there is more to the antithesis than this. There is a seeming irrational violence in totalitarian régimes which is in fact rationally aimed at destroying a belief essential to politics.

Let us consider one of the strangest and most characteristic institutions of totalitarian régimes, probably one of the most horrible inventions in human history: the Concentration Camp. ‘The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.’ For mass extermination or incarceration can be, after all, very obvious practical solutions to the administrative problems represented by political diversity – this need not be denied. One searches for heightened language because it is clear that the actual practices of the camps went beyond all such criteria of the utility of power. Witness after witness has paid tribute to the lengths to which the Nazi camps especially would go, not merely to work their inmates to death rather than work them efficiently, but to smash their spirit utterly before they died. They had not merely to be killed, but to be degraded utterly. If it was said that the Jews were Untermenschen, then they had to be made Untermenschen. David Rousset wrote in Les Jours de Notre Mort: ‘The triumph of the S.S. demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity.’⁶ It seemed as if the guards were probing, blindly but surely, to expose an essence of personality that many would not expect to find even, or particularly, in themselves, so as to degrade it and render it passive before death. It is as if they were trying to prove hollow even the comfort offered in: ‘Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.’

These deep-thrusting cruelties have been part of the regular administration of totalitarian régimes, something far beyond the occasional ecstasies of sadists. These practices seem of profound importance to the totalitarian pattern of controls. Rousset has seen in this degradation of the prisoners not just the attempt by the S.S. to exalt their own belief in their spiritual superiority, but also a proof that to the totalitarian ‘everything is possible’, an assertion that ordinary men, who do not or will not know of these things, cannot believe – for even to know of them can begin to create an intolerable burden. The same refined attack on human personality took place in the Soviet Camps. Certainly it was less immediately deliberate in Communist hands. Communist forethought in these matters was usually more selective and was more often reserved for the punishment of specific political prisoners and the ‘reconstruction’ of exemplary victims for the State Trials. The mass cruelty and death in the Soviet camps mainly arose from the vast inertia and indifference to human life of the bureaucracies in charge of the camps. The Nazis invented new ways to kill and degrade people, the Soviets left them to rot. But the inertia and indifference is itself directly attributable to ideological thinking. Men who do not act and believe as the ideology says they should are no longer men.

The inmate of a concentration camp has not just ceased to have any human rights whatever by losing his identity as a citizen, but he must be deprived of his spiritual strength as well, not merely his life, before the full claims of the ideology can be proved. It is ‘proved’ that those who oppose or are indifferent to the ideology have no ultimate defence for any scrap of pride, dignity, or sense of personal identity, once they are removed from normal social relationships. The general theory of totalitarian ideology cannot be proved true while there is the slightest spark of absolute personality alive in its actual or potential opponents. Only when the individual is stripped of all previous social identity and finds that he has nothing else to fall back upon, only then can it be seen that the general theory of ideology is true: that there is nothing in the world but social identity – the individual is independent in nothing. But it should also be proved to us, through the horror of such observations, that there is such an aspect of man which must be independent of social circumstance, that personal identity does not depend entirely on social consciousness; and as the totalitarians seek to destroy this human autonomy, so political régimes hold it to their very hearts. Any normal man who dares to read the perfectly well-known books and documents on the totalitarian use of genocide and terror as regular methods of government (which we – as normal people – find so many excuses not to face), cannot but be filled with compassion and understanding for those isolated individuals who challenge such systems and who are either forced into a life of ‘double-think’ and constant verbal treachery to freedom, or who are broken by them and ‘reconstructed’. The man who is reborn is seldom reborn free. But, equally, this compassion should create a hatred, for the sake of human values, for those in free régimes who seek to find excuses for such things.

There is really little mystery about the importance of group diversity and of the affirmative individual for politics. Aristotle, once again, saw this more clearly than many moderns when he said that a tyrant to rule successfully must forbid above all: ‘. . . common meals, clubs, education, and anything of a like character – or, in other words, a defensive attitude against everything likely to produce the two qualities of mutual confidence and a high spirit.’⁷ Mutual confidence arises from corporate experiences, so these must be destroyed if they do not serve the immediate purposes of the régime. And if the Greek ‘high spirit’ or arete is a moral quality with a specific content not wholly applicable to our times, yet it points to exactly the same dimension of individual experience, the liveliness of men, that the totalitarian must destroy and the modern political man must nurture. A political régime cannot insist upon its citizens in fact asserting themselves in the public realm, even though it will be weaker if they do not; but it will not be a political régime at all if it tries to deny their spirited right to live inside their own privacy or outside in the public realm, as they choose.

If we act so unnaturally as to try for ourselves to merge all our individuality and all our corporate differences in one common enterprise, then that enterprise is inevitably crazy and destructive – like the chase of the white whale Moby Dick, heroic, but inhuman and fatal: ‘They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things oak and maple and pinewood; iron and pitch and hemp – yet all these ran into one another in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valour, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into one mass, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.’

Politics may be a messy, mundane, inconclusive, tangled business, far removed from the passion for certainty and the fascination for world-shaking quests which afflict the totalitarian intellectual; but it does, at least, even in the worst of political circumstances, give a man some choice in what role to play, some variety of corporate experience and some ability to call his soul his own. The most we can believe with certainty about politics is that it is unavoidable – unless a régime goes to great lengths of coercion; and that it is also limited – unless a régime thinks in great terms of ideology; and that within a political community agreement about ‘fundamentals’ is never likely except by force or fraud; the only basic agreement in a political régime is to use political means. Politics is an activity and so cannot be reduced to a system of precise beliefs or to a set of fixed goals. Political thinking is to be contrasted to ideological thinking. Politics cannot furnish us with an ideology; an ideology means an end to politics, though ideologies may combat each other within a political system – if they are weak and the system is strong. ‘Isn’t it high time,’ someone wrote to the London Times, ‘that we in the west (a) realized that it takes an ideology to cope with an ideology; (b) found and lived our own ideology, the ideology of freedom?’ Probably such Buchmanite writers think that ideology means no more than a kind of passionate certainty. Even so, the idea of an ideology of freedom is a contradiction in terms: when everything is knowable, determined, or certain, freedom is impossible. Free actions are always, strictly speaking, unnecessary actions. Ideology cannot be taken up and set down by politicians as a weapon; it devours its manipulators. At least the ideologist knows that political habits are indeed his great enemy. He may make use of politics for a while, but then only to destroy it. The inscription on the base of a statue of President Nkrumah in Accra, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto it’, is in fact a threat to, and a perversion of, true politics.

Politics is not, then, a grasping for the ideal; but neither is it a freezing of tradition. It is an activity – lively, adaptive, flexible, and conciliatory. Politics is the way in which free societies are governed. Politics is politics and other forms of rule are something else.

¹Hitler’s Zweites Buch (Stuttgart 1961, p. 62).

²See pp. 136–37 below, for examples of Marx’s explicit attack on politics.

³From ‘The Discussion of Formalism’, International Literature No. 6 (Moscow 1936), p. 88.

⁴Normally the substance of the two ideologies is recognized as being very different; but it does not exhaust human ingenuity to try to synthesize them, to gain – in rhetoric, at least – the best of both impossible worlds together. Dr Cheddi Jagan, the former Prime Minister of British Guiana, is reported as having said: ‘We believe in race – the working class race of the world.’

⁵See Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London 1936), p. 111.

⁶Quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (London 1958), p. 455. See also Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (New York 1953), especially pp. 414–28, and Eugon Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (London 1950) passim – in German Der S.S. Staat.

⁷Barker’s Politics, p. 244, my italics.