Totalitarian government is not monolithic but a shapeless dual authority of party and state

Evidence

What strikes the observer of the totalitarian state is certainly not its monolithic structure. On the contrary, all serious students of the subject agree at least on the co-existence (or the conflict) of a dual authority, the party and the state. Many, moreover, have stressed the peculiar “shapelessness” of the totalitarian government. Thomas Masaryk saw early that “the so-called Bolshevik system has never been anything but a complete absence of system”; and it is perfectly true that “even an expert would be driven mad if he tried to unravel the relationships between Party and State” in the Third Reich. It has also been frequently observed that the relationship between the two sources of authority, between state and party, is one of ostensible and real authority, so that the government machine is usually pictured as the powerless façade which hides and protects the real power of the party. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 903

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core scaffold concept of totalitarian government as dual authority (party/state) with the state as a powerless facade behind real party power.
• XREF: This dual-authority structure resonates with Arendt’s later use in this chapter and with concepts like the state as superstructure masking real power — bridges to Gramsci’s hegemony and Marxian base/superstructure readings common in critical theory.