Over time, however, historians started to discover consensus where once they saw only terror. For Fascist Italy, the historiographical shift came relatively early, prompted by Renzo de Felice’s path‐breaking work in the late 1960s, claiming Fascism had enjoyed widespread consent. At the same time the discovery of Palmiro Togliatti’s prewar notes revealed his reading of Fascism as a reactionary régime of the masses rather than a ruthless imposition from above.
For Nazi Germany, the move has been more piecemeal and, as we will see, has responded to a different intellectual and moral framework, but now the idea that the Nazis created a genuine “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and represented a “dictatorship by acclamation” (Zustimmungsdiktatur) has become a dominant motif among a new generation of German historians of the Third Reich. Even Stalin’s Russia now appears to have been anything but the top‐down monolith of classic totalitarian theory.
[…]
Some Italian historians, true enough, were conscious that Mussolini himself had presented his state as “totalitarian” and now asked how far his ambitions had been realized. But according to Alberto Aquarone, Mussolini’s totalitarian objective of “the complete integration of society into the State” was never fully attained. De Felice, too, felt that the Italian case could not be subsumed under totalitarianism and described Fascism as a “missed totalitarianism,” based on the régime’s own definition of a totalitarian state.
Overall, the term ‘totalitarian’ and its derivatives are simply too vague and subjective to be useful. Only rarely did the Fascists refer to theirselves as ‘totalitarian’, and the infamous ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’ quote was just a slogan, not an observation. People take it too seriously.
I’ve discussed this before. Discarding the ‘totalitarian’ caricature doesn’t mean praising Fascism—quite the contrary. Having an image of Fascism that’s more mundane can prepare us for neofascism.
(Emphasis added. More here.)
Overall, the term ‘totalitarian’ and its derivatives are simply too vague and subjective to be useful. Only rarely did the Fascists refer to theirselves as ‘totalitarian’, and the infamous ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’ quote was just a slogan, not an observation. People take it too seriously.
I’ve discussed this before. Discarding the ‘totalitarian’ caricature doesn’t mean praising Fascism—quite the contrary. Having an image of Fascism that’s more mundane can prepare us for neofascism.