First, it should be understood that totalitarianism is not a theory or philosophy. It’s a practice.
The goal was not to force people to serve a new political system. The goal was to produce a new kind of human being, a human being who would not need to be forced to serve the system. The creation of that new human being was the end that justified every means…
The term originated in Italy. According to Abbott Gleason, in his standard history of the concept, “Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War” (1995), it was first used, in 1923, by an opponent of Benito Mussolini, who referred critically to the Fascist government as a “sistema totalitaria.” Mussolini didn’t mind at all. By 1925, he was referring proudly to “la nostra feroce volontà totalitaria”—“our fierce totalitarian will.” By “totalitarian,” he meant a politics that aimed at the total transformation of society.
In Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, the agent of this transformation was not the state. It was the party. The state, especially the judiciary, was simply the party’s bureaucratic dummy. This was because the purpose of totalitarian transformation was not mere efficiency—“making the trains run on time,” as people used to say of Fascist Italy. Nor was it the enjoyment of power for power’s sake, as many representations of totalitarian regimes, such as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four,” suggested. The purpose was the realization of a law of historical development, the correct understanding of which was a monopoly of the party. In Hitler’s Germany, life was transformed in the name of a single goal: racial purity. (“The state is only a vessel,” Hitler wrote, in “Mein Kampf,” “and the race is what it contains.”) In the Soviet Union, it was done in the name of the classless society and the workers’ state.
The authority of these chiliastic ideologies is what made totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia different from traditional dictatorships, and what made them terrifying. They were not just static systems of hyper-control. They were dynamic and dangerously unstable. They regarded the present as a temporary stage in history’s unfolding, and the fantastic unrealizability of what was to be—pure Germanness, or the classless society—made what merely was something only to be destroyed or overcome. Everything was expendable.