Totalitarian leadership monopolizes responsibility, unlike the tyrant’s distancing from subordinates
Evidence
The Leader represents the movement in a way totally different from all ordinary party leaders; he claims personal responsibility for every action, deed, or misdeed, committed by any member or functionary in his official capacity. This total responsibility is the most important organizational aspect of the so-called Leader principle, according to which every functionary is not only appointed by the Leader but is his walking embodiment, and every order is supposed to emanate from this one ever-present source. This thorough identification of the Leader with every appointed subleader and this monopoly of responsibility for everything which is being done are also the most conspicuous signs of the decisive difference between a totalitarian leader and an ordinary dictator or despot. A tyrant would never identify himself with his subordinates, let alone with every one of their acts; he might use them as scape-goats and gladly have them criticized in order to save himself from the wrath of the people, but he would always maintain an absolute distance from all his subordinates and all his subjects. The Leader, on the contrary, cannot tolerate criticism of his subordinates, since they act always in his name; if he wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried them out; if he wants to blame his mistakes on others, he must kill them. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 868
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the Leader principle by contrast with ordinary dictatorship — the monopoly of responsibility and identity with subordinates is the structural core.
- XREF: Connects to the toolkit concept of how totalitarian organization absorbs individual agency — parallels the machine of command in Arendt’s account of mass exclusion. — connects to: Focusing on obeying subordinates ignores genocidal initiators and degrees of evil — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 2007