Hierarchical structures resist totalitarian power and therefore do not constitute it.

Evidence

The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers. Compared to this invention, other typically totalitarian features, such as the appointment of functionaries from above and the eventual monopolization of appointments by one man are secondary in importance. The so-called “leader principle” is in itself not totalitarian; it has borrowed certain features from authoritarianism and military dictatorship which have greatly contributed toward obscuring and belittling the essentially totalitarian phenomenon. If the functionaries appointed from above possessed real authority and responsibility, we would have to do with a hierarchical structure in which authority and power are delegated and governed by laws. Much the same is true for the organization of an army and the military dictatorship established after its model; here, absolute power of command from the top down and absolute obedience from the bottom up correspond to the situation of extreme danger in combat, which is precisely why they are not totalitarian. A hierarchically organized chain of command means that the commander’s power is dependent on the whole hierarchic system in which he operates. Every hierarchy, no matter how authoritarian in its direction, and every chain of command, no matter how arbitrary or dictatorial the content of orders, tends to stabilize and would have restricted the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement. In the language of the Nazis, the never-resting, dynamic “will of the Fuehrer”—and not his orders, a phrase that might imply a fixed and circumscribed authority—becomes the “supreme law” in a totalitarian state. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 852

Categorization

• DEFINE: Essential distinction: hierarchical/military chains of command are NOT totalitarian, because they stabilize and restrict; totalitarian power rests on the Fuehrer’s dynamic will, not fixed authority.
• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding on how ‘modern bureaucratic rationality’ differs from genuinely totalitarian dynamics — key vocabulary for the Islamophobia field.