Engdahl, Wolin and Žižek
Engdahl and Wolin add some new dimensions to the analysis of totalitarianism.
In his 2009 book Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy and the New World Order, Engdahl portrays America as driving to achieve global hegemony through military and economic means. According to him, U.S. state objectives have led to internal conditions that resemble totalitarianism: "[it is] a power establishment that over the course of the Cold War has spun out of control and now threatens not only the fundamental institutions of democracy, but even of life on the planet through the growing risk of nuclear war by miscalculation" [7]
Wolin, too, analyzes the symbiosis of business and public interests that emerged in the Cold War to form the tendency of what he calls "inverted totalitarianism":
While exploiting the authority and resources of the state, [inverted totalitarianism] gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their respective identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power. [8]
Elsewhere, in a 2003 article entitled "Inverted Totalitarianism" [9] Wolin cites phenomena such as the lack of involvement of citizens in a narrow political framework (due to the influence of money), the privatization of social security, and massive increases in military spending and spending on surveillance as examples of the push away from public and towards private-controlled government. Corporate influence, he argues, is explicit through the media, and implicit through the privatization of the university. Furthermore, he contends that many political think-tanks have abetted this process by spreading conservative ideology. Wolin states: "[With] the elements all in place...what is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century." [9]
Slavoj Žižek, in his 2002 book of essays Welcome to the Desert of the Real , comes to similar conclusions. Here he argues that the war on terror served as a justification for the suspension of civil liberties in the US, while the promise of democracy and freedom was spread abroad as the justification for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Since Western democracies are always justifying states of exception, he argues, they are failing as sites of political agency. [10]
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, outlaws and disregards the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and so controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the most extreme form of authoritarianism, because all socio-political power usually is held by the dictator who controls the national politics and the nation with continual propaganda campaigns broadcast by state-controlled and private mass communications media.
Autocracy is a system of government in which absolute power is held by the ruler, known as an autocrat. It includes most forms of monarchy and dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and feudalism. Various definitions of autocracy exist. They may restrict autocracy to a single individual, or they may also apply autocracy to a group of rulers who wield absolute power. The autocrat has total control over the exercise of civil liberties within the autocracy, choosing under what circumstances they may be exercised, if at all. Governments may also blend elements of autocracy and democracy, forming an anocracy. The concept of autocracy has been recognized in political philosophy since ancient times.
An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use treats the term as mainly condemnatory.
Full-spectrum dominance also known as full-spectrum superiority, is a military entity's achievement of control over all dimensions of the battlespace, effectively possessing an overwhelming diversity of resources in such areas as terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, extraterrestrial, psychological, and bio- or cyber-technological warfare.
The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Neue Slowenische Kunst is a political art collective that formed in Slovenia in 1984, when the Socialist Republic of Slovenia was part of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NSK's name was chosen to reflect the theme in its works of the complicated relationship Slovenes have had with Germans. The name of NSK's music wing, Laibach, is also the German name of the Slovene capital Ljubljana. The name created controversy because some felt it evoked memories of the Nazi annexation of Slovenia during the Second World War. It also refers to Slovenia's previous seven centuries as part of the Habsburg monarchy.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
In political science, a political system means the type of political organization that can be recognized, observed or otherwise declared by a state.
Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, social behavior, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral and cultural questions, and the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, natural law, human rights, gender equity and global justice.
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
In political philosophy, the general will is the will of the people as a whole. The term was made famous by 18th-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Jacob Leib Talmon was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
Guided democracy, also called managed democracy, is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto authoritarian government or, in some cases, as an autocratic government. Such hybrid regimes are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals. The concept is also related to semi-democracy, also known as anocracy.
A secular religion is a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly, or material, entities. Among systems that have been characterized as secular religions are liberalism, anarchism, communism, nazism, fascism, jacobinism, Juche, Maoism, Religion of Humanity, the Cult of Personality, the Cult of Reason and Cult of the Supreme Being.
Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought is a work of political theory by Princeton Emeritus Professor Sheldon S. Wolin. Part One, consisting of ten chapters and first published in 1960, distinguishes political philosophy from philosophy in general and traces political philosophy from its Platonic origins to modern day. Part Two, consisting of seven chapters and published in a 2004 expanded edition, traces the development of political thought from Marx, Nietzsche, and others up to the late 20th century. Wolin left Part One unaltered in the expanded edition, confining the expressions of his changes in thought about political theory to those sections of Part Two that overlap with Part One.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political plurality. It involves the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military. States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have some times been characterized as "hybrid democracies", "hybrid regimes" or "competitive authoritarian" states.
Inverted totalitarianism is a system where economic powers like corporations exert subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Over time, this theory predicts a sense of powerlessness and political apathy, continuing a slide away from political egalitarianism.
A hybrid regime is a type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete democratic transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Hybrid regimes are categorized as having a combination of autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states. Although these regimes experience civil unrest, they may be relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War.
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