THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

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Totalitarianism developed along two tracks: secularization and the centralization of law.

Note for the international edition: i'm italian so i used italian editions of the works quoted as sources for the post. In the majority of cases the sources are classics of philosophy, so you should find a translation in your own language aviabile in book stores if you want to read them.

1) BEFORE TOTALITARIANISM

The ancients, the Romans, and the Middle Ages all agreed in recognizing some form of natural law, which can be indicated by the Latin term lex, an unwritten legislative code that governs human nature itself and acts as a limit to positive, or human, law. Alongside this, there also existed customary law, later replaced by positive civil law, which served to regulate the private sphere of life and was not written by the state, but rather consisted of the customs of a people who were therefore free to govern themselves in their private sphere. The underlying idea, expressed by Thomas Aquinas, who draws on ideas contained in some of Aristotle's works (1, 2), is that the sovereign should imitate the Aristotelian unmoved mover and not act as a coercive power, but rather simply coordinate the development of citizens who, together, forming the political community, pre-existed the sovereign and were characterized by their own individuality and autonomy. This theory also characterized the thought of modern thinkers such as Locke, who believed that government had the sole function of ensuring the protection of private property and the freedom of citizens. Hobbes himself, considered the theorist of absolutism, believed that the sovereign could not prescribe anything contrary to the instinct of self-preservation of his subjects. Also important was the separation of spiritual power from temporal power, where the latter was either supposed, following the Augustinian-Lutheran line, to limit itself to containing human defects, or, according to Catholic thought, to help citizens achieve the good life.

2) TOTALITARIANISM IS BORN WITH POSITIVE LAW

These barriers to sovereign power are gradually eroded throughout history. The first to be destroyed is the separation between temporal and spiritual power, and the most significant date is the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This event established that the king determines the religion within his kingdom, and especially in Protestant countries, it fostered the emergence of state churches, whose ultimate authority is the sovereign. Religion, which has always protected the lex naturale and the lex divina, effectively becomes an instrumentum regni. The second event is the transformation of natural law into natural law (ius), thus moving from objective to subjective. It is no longer nature that imposes limits on the sovereign, but rather the individual who is endowed with rights, which the sovereign can decide whether to respect or not. This damage was done by philosophers of the Enlightenment who were involved in Freemasonry, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire. The final blow was dealt by Rousseau, who no longer conceived of the sovereign as a power separate from the people, but rather understood it as the expression of an abstract general will. By proposing direct democracy and, under the pretext that the people make the law themselves, natural law collapses into positive law, and only the latter remains. With the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, these ideas found practical application: Napoleon gave his territories a single civil code, based on positive law, which standardized and definitively eliminated the various forms of customary law present among the populations. Even after the Restoration, the State became the sole source of law and no longer found limits to its
power.

CONCLUSIONS

For a state to be defined as totalitarian, actual violence against its citizens is not necessary, since a "dormant" totalitarianism is possible that can awaken at will, as it did during the pandemic farce: the absence of external sources of law implies the absence of a check on the arbitrary power of sovereign power.

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EXTRA: I did not quote Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of totalitarianism" because it's marxist and democratic gatekeeping, and i'm also preparing a post to refute it. Basically she argues that if you have a political docrine and you want to build a society according to that doctrine, you're a totalitarian. She also says you should refuse to use formal logic for political decision making, and the entire book is basically the "devil in disguise" tactic of the left: they deny the existence of the left only to try to pass some communist bs as non political and objective fact: the refusal of logic is called cultural marxism, is what Adorno praised in dialectic of illuminism. By arguing that we should not have a political docrtine, she, de facto, opens up the way to the multicultural society aka. let us impose Shari'a while our cops arrest you for a social media post. She's basically the Wittgenstein of politics saying that we can not have a normativity in politics as Wittgenstein refuses logic ad denotative rational language as the only norm for its "language games", but at the same time, just as Wittgenstein, she builds up an explicit political doctrine: multicultural pluralism, the neoliberal progressive stuff we're now used to.

EXTRA 2: I don't think that the republican separation of powers is enough to block a totalitarian State, since there are separations of power that are not external to a State itself. The only true limitation for a State is a limit that is imposed externally, a non-political limit. So constituitions, separation of powers and even international organization such as UN cannot stop a state being totalitarian. Just as the State becomes the only source of Right and Law, the State turnes up totalitarian. We do not need to wait URSS for a totalitarian State, democracies in the 1800 were already totalitarian States. Also democracy is the worst form of totalitarian State because it's the most difficult to overthrow: we have an entire group of people that rule over you in the name of a party and that can be easly substituted if eliminated. Dictatorships as single man totalitarianism are fare easy to overthrow in comparison: most of them last only a few decades because as the leader dies so does the regime. The source of legitimation of power is different. For dictatorships usually we have charismatic leaders with a cult of personality around them. Ideology takes a back seat and it is not strong enough to survive its leader. That's the reason why fascism and nazism are so weak nowadays and why they join the left in the Pro Hamas devastations that they call demostrations. Instead ideologies that can be adapted to a democratic government such as marxism are the most dangerous as we can see today. The system itself avoid entirely to have a one person government and avoids building cult of personalities, that's why satire is a weapon of the system to immunize itself from charismatic leaders. We in Italy had the example of Mario Draghi, a real unelected dictator that was building a cult of personality. For the first time people made up their minds and where almost ready for a liberation civil war: we had only Mario Draghi fanatics or haters. So they eliminated him and replaced him with the a bland and tasteless government of Giorgia Meloni which continues the Draghi agenda without making any noise.