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Totalitarian


Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible, without any respect for human rights. Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through such techniques as propaganda, state control of the mass media and educational system, control over the economy, political repression, capital punishment, restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and the establishment of internment or forced labour camps. A distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is an "elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction to the whole society", often involving a one-party state, a dictator and a personality cult.

The concept of totalitarianism was first developed in the 1920s by the Weimar German jurist, and later Nazi academic, Carl Schmitt, and Italian fascists. Schmitt used the term, Totalstaat, in his influential work on the legal basis of an all-powerful state, The Concept of the Political (1927). The concept became prominent in Western political discourse as a concept that highlights similarities between Fascist states and the Soviet Union.


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