Today I would like to briefly summarize Professor Budil’s interpretation of totalitarianism. What is the purpose of concepts? Each concept carries with it an entire field of associations that enables us to see things in a new light, to analyze them differently, and to notice dimensions that might otherwise escape our attention. But what do we actually gain by labeling Hitler’s regime as “totalitarian”? The answer is—nothing. And therein lies the problem. The word itself is superfluous.
The term has served a role in political conflicts, particularly as a weapon of propaganda. It allowed polemicists to claim that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany belonged to the same category, fundamentally distinct from all other forms of dictatorship, tyranny, or authoritarian rule. Yet as an analytical tool, the concept adds nothing either to our understanding of the Nazi regime or to our analysis of the Soviet one. The two systems cannot be convincingly unified under a single model of behavior.
So where, then, did Nazism come from? Professor Budil argues that there was nothing truly original in Hitler’s system. All of its key ideas—militant antisemitism, the belief in racial struggle, the notion of “living space” for powerful states, the exaltation of the dictator as guardian of order against socialism—had already flourished in England, France, and the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Germans under Hitler simply took these ideas with deadly seriousness.