could overwhelm the others. Despite the name the PRI came to repre-
sent a coalition of established local political machines often with
strong bureaucratic, military, agricultural and labour links.Totalitarian governments
We saw that Crick defined totalitarianism largely in terms of its all-
encompassing role in contrast to modern republican (or liberal demo-
cratic) regimes which leave a much greater area to private initiative
and control. The category of ‘totalitarian’ state has been criticised as
too tightly drawn to contain, or at least usefully describe, any modern
states. ‘Totalitarian’ state was not a term coined by Crick, nor do all
authors using the term emphasise those elements of Crick’s treat-
ment which have been highlighted here.
Other writers (e.g. Arendt, 1967; Friedrich, 1964) have stressed
not only the scope of the activities of the totalitarian state but the
similarity of the methods employed by them to control the popu-
lation. The totalitarian state is seen as one which employs modern
technology and techniques of organisation to enforce total control
over the lives of the population of a large modern industrialised state.
Thus both Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union employed a
single mass party to generate and enforce enthusiasm on the part of
the population. Modern communication methods such as news-
papers, cinema and radio were monopolised by the regime and used
to propagate a ‘cult of personality’ around the leader. The use of
terror – the employment of torture, and the mass extermination of
whole segments of the population – is also seen as characteristic of
such regimes. Although historic dictatorships have also used such
methods, this has not usually been on such a scale and so systema-
tically. Certainly from a liberal perspective the differences in the
ostensible purposes of these regimes – establishing a classless or a
racially pure society – seem less significant than the horrific reality of
their excesses.
Critics of such an approach to the analysis of modern states have
variously argued that it seeks to tar all progressive socialist regimes
with the Hitler/Stalin brush; that the post-Stalin Soviet Union was a
conservative bureaucratic society rather than one based on terror; or
even that the concept ‘totalitarian’ control is better applied to the
activities of modern capitalism in creating a consumer society. Thus150 STATES