Totalitarianism vs. Authoritarianism

Every political theorist hopes that his concepts and distinctions will turn, magically, into common currency, so that men and women on the street will talk exactly as he does. And he fears at the same time that his work will be distorted, corrupted, appropriated for partisan uses over which he has no control. Most of the theorists who first worked out the concept of totalitarianism in the late 1940s and the early 1950s lived to see both their hopes and fears fully realized. “Totalitaria...