Totalitarian Minimum:

1. "official, chiliastic ideology"
2. "a single political party"
3. "a centrally directed economy (generally right wing) that were friendly to American interests and dictatorial regimes (generally left wing) opposed to those interests"
4. "party control of mass communications"
5. "party control of the military"
6. "a secret police"

[Louis Menand, "The Devil's Disciples", The New Yorker, July 28, 2003, pg 83. Menand is citing from Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy]

Friedrich did not see totalitarianism as a more repressive form of authoritarianism but its very opposite: "In a totalitarian society true authority is is altogether destroyed." As Menand puts it: "a key feature of totalitarian societies is the absence of any reliable legal or political system. Totalitarian rule is experienced as arbitrary rule: the citizen never knows when the knock on the door may come. Another name for this is 'terror'" (83).

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1945) notes, as Menand writes, that terror "may be experienced as arbitary, but it is not arbitary and it is not lawless. Every despot exercises power arbitarily; all dictators are outside the law. The distinctive feature of totalitarian societies is that everyone, including (in theory, anyway) the dictator, can be sacrificed in the name of a superhuman law, a law of nature or a law of history [...] In Nazism, everyone is subordinate to the race war" (84).

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