Carl Friedrich’s Path to “Totalitarianism”

Carl Friedrich produced a list of characteristics of totalitarianism that for nearly a decade was influential as a “theory of totalitarianism” and a point of reference afterward. It was the product of Friedrich’s long and complex intellectual engagement with the theory of the modern state, beginning with his defense of the use of Article 48 in 1930, and his developing thinking as he became an activist in the “defense of democracy” and a war advocate, and later as a participant in the American occupation. Friedrich’s political theory, however, reflected sources and problematics in the German tradition that led him in the direction of the discretionary but “rational” bureaucratic state, and against the standard American understanding of law and constitutional order. His thinking reflected his hostility to Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, and other Continental liberals, and a strong belief that the modern state required a bureaucracy free from supervision and operated by a “responsible elite” rather than governed by direct democratic controls or parliamentary supervision. He was criticized by Herbert Finer in a long-running controversy for the anti-democratic character of his views, as well as by Joseph Dorfman, who pointed out his twisting of political language. His commitments to his view of the state blocked him from criticizing the new regimes of National Socialism and Stalinism in the conventional terms of lack of freedom, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and constitutional literalism which defined the American vernacular conception of politics, all of which he had debunked. Instead, he treated the differences with these new “totalitarian” orders as exaggerations of features of normal democratic regimes which together, and together with new technologies, constituted a historically novel political form. He thus clashed with Harold Lasswell, whose concept of a Garrison State was a rival conception that he differed from by arguing that party control of the state apparatus was an essential feature of totalitarian societies.