Totalitarian democracy

Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon to refer to a dictatorship based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a perfectionist ideology.[1]

This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to liberal democracy which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern.[2]

The phrase had previously been used by Bertrand de Jouvenel[3] and E. H. Carr,[4] and subsequently by F. William Engdahl[5] and Sheldon S. Wolin.[6]

  1. ^ Macpherson, C. B. (1952). [Review of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, by J. L. Talmon]. Past & Present, 2, 55–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650125
  2. ^ Talmon, J. L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Britain: Secker & Warburg, 1968.
  3. ^ de Juvenel, Bertrand. On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth, Salt Lake City: Hutchinson, 1948.
  4. ^ Carr, Edward Hallett. The Soviet Impact on the Western World. New York: MacMillan Company, 1947.
  5. ^ Engdahl, F. William. Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9795608-6-6.
  6. ^ Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

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