The leader principle is totalitarian only through its organizational function.

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. It is only from the position in which the totalitarian movement, thanks to its unique organization, places the leader—only from his functional importance for the movement—that the leader principle develops its totalitarian character. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 852

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Key conceptual distinction: hierarchy is stabilizing and nontotalitarian; the ‘will of the Fuehrer’ as supreme law is totalitarian.
• XREF: Bureaucratic rationality vs. totalitarian will — the ‘supreme law’ that is not an order relates to how adjudicative categories evade fixity.

Related

• Hierarchical structures resist totalitarian power and therefore do not constitute it. (similarity 0.95)
• Totalitarian rule removes all reliable mediating levels between ruler and ruled (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian leadership monopolizes responsibility, unlike the tyrant’s distancing from subordinates (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian elites treat ideology as content-free organizational function (similarity 0.83)
• Appointment from above matters more than unlimited authority for totalitarian stability (similarity 0.81)
• The movement’s onion-like layered structure is retained unchanged in the totalitarian state (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian rule is not monolithic but deliberately overlapping, held by a Führer-principle (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarian hierarchy depends on top-down appointment, not elected authority (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian loyalty rests on organizational infallibility, not the Leader’s (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian leaders rise through intrigue and personnel control, not violence or bureaucracy (similarity 0.80)
• The Leader’s infallibility structures the movement, not the truth of his words (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian leaders differ from despots in being genuinely unconstrained (similarity 0.78)
• The front-organization structure recurs at every level inside the movement (similarity 0.78)