Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a form of government that claims authority over every aspect of a citizen's life, public and private, and recognises no sphere in which the individual may act on his own judgment. Objectivism treats it not as an aberration but as collectivism carried to its consistent conclusion: once the group is held to be the owner of the individual's life, nothing in principle limits what may be demanded of him.

“There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule, executions without trial or with a mock trial for political offenses, the nationalization or expropriation of private property, and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Collectivized 'Rights'", The Virtue of Selfishness

What makes a state totalitarian

The distinguishing mark is not brutality, which many ordinary tyrannies have in quantity, and not the size of the bureaucracy. It is the absence of a boundary. A traditional despot demanded obedience and taxes and left the rest of a subject's life alone as beneath notice. A totalitarian state claims his work, his associations, his art, his family and his opinions, on the grounds that nothing about him is properly his own.

Four features follow, and Rand named them as the tests:

One-party rule, which removes any lawful route by which the arrangement could be changed.
Punishment without genuine trial, which converts the courts from a check on power into an instrument of it.
Expropriation of private property, which removes the material base of independent action. A man who cannot own anything cannot dissent for long. See Property rights.
Censorship, which is the decisive one, because it attacks the faculty on which every other correction depends. See Free speech.

The philosophical root

Objectivism's account of totalitarianism is not primarily political or economic. Rand held that a system of that kind cannot be imposed on a population that does not already accept its premises, and that the premises are supplied by philosophy.

Two are required. In ethics, altruism: the doctrine that a man's life is not his own and that service to others is the justification of his existence. In metaphysics and politics, collectivism: the doctrine that the group is the real unit and the individual a fragment of it. Given both, the totalitarian conclusion is not extreme; it is what consistency looks like. The objection that "the individual matters too" becomes an appeal for inconsistency rather than a principle.

Rand also held that the abandonment of reason is what makes the rest possible. Where disputes are not settled by evidence they are settled by force, and a culture that has accepted faith, instinct or the will of the group as standards of truth has already conceded the only alternative to compulsion. See Mysticism and Statism.

Left and right

Objectivism denies that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. Both claimed the individual's life for the collective, both abolished independent thought and action, and both were made possible by the same ethics; the difference was in which collective was named — the nation and race in one case, the class in the other.

Rand's related analysis of what she called the new fascism concerns systems that leave property in nominal private hands while the state directs its use. Her argument is that ownership consists of the right of use and disposal, so an owner who may not decide how his property is used is an owner in name only, and the arrangement differs from outright nationalisation in bookkeeping rather than in principle. See Socialism and Communism.

Consequences for foreign policy

Rand drew a conclusion that distinguishes the Objectivist position from conventional views of sovereignty. National rights are derived from individual rights; a government that systematically violates the rights of its own citizens has no rights of its own to invoke, and its claim to sovereignty is a claim by the criminals in charge to be left undisturbed.

A free nation therefore has the right to invade a dictatorship, though not the duty. Whether to do so is a practical question about its own citizens' interests and the cost, not a moral question about the dictatorship's standing. See Foreign policy.

Common misunderstandings

That it requires a dictator. It requires unlimited power, not a single holder of it. A committee, a party or an unlimited majority can exercise the same power. See Democracy.
That popular support makes it legitimate. On the Objectivist view rights are not conferred by a vote and cannot be voted away. How officials are chosen is a separate question from what they may do.
That the welfare state is unrelated. Objectivism treats it as milder in method and identical in premise — that a man's earnings and his life are at the disposal of others by right of their need — and treats the mixed economy as unstable rather than as a stable middle. See Statism.
That it is a purely twentieth-century phenomenon. The specific technology and the ideologies are modern; the premise that the individual belongs to the collective is not, and Rand traced its intellectual defense back through Hegel and Plato.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Collectivized 'Rights'" and "The Nature of Government", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus" and "The Roots of War", Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1966.
Rand, Ayn. We the Living, foreword to the 1959 edition. Random House, 1959.
Peikoff, Leonard. The Ominous Parallels. Stein and Day, 1982.

External links

Dictatorship at the Ayn Rand Lexicon