Totalitarian movements pursue permanent motion rather than any final political goal

Evidence

Neither National Socialism nor Bolshevism has ever proclaimed a new form of government or asserted that its goals were reached with the seizure of power and the control of the state machinery. Their idea of domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion: namely, the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life. The seizure of power through the means of violence is never an end in itself but only the means to an end, and the seizure of power in any given country is only a welcome transitory stage but never the end of the movement. The practical goal of the movement is to organize as many people as possible within its framework and to set and keep them in motion; a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 774

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: The movement-as-perpetual-motion concept — a key Arendtian term distinguishing Nazism/Bolshevism from earlier tyrannies.
• XREF: Links to the ongoing-movement idea that recurs in Arendt’s account and resonates with the ‘imagined community’ literature of the nation as always in formation.

Related

• Totalitarian domination aims at perpetual individual control, never completion (similarity 0.91)
• Totalitarian movements require permanent motion and cannot survive stabilization. (similarity 0.86)
• Totalitarian movements, unlike Fascism, must never achieve definite goals (similarity 0.85)
• Movements outlast parties because perpetual motion replaces fixed goals and programs (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian movements are propelled by direction rather than structure (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian movements subordinate the nation’s institutions to the movement itself (similarity 0.83)
• Totalitarian ideology transforms stabilizing law into law as motion (similarity 0.82)
• Total domination functionally requires permanent instability rather than material strength. (similarity 0.81)
• Totalitarianism transforms classes into masses and creates entirely new political institutions (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian rule substitutes insight into the law of movement for principles of action (similarity 0.80)
• Movements aim to destroy the state, not merely seize its machine (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian movements stay in power by perpetual motion and near-total historical discontinuity (similarity 0.79)
• The absoluteness of movements dissolves individual conscience and ends-means distinctions (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian movements organize masses by sheer numbers rather than classes or citizen-opinion. (similarity 0.79)
• Totalitarian rule obeys suprapositive laws of Nature or History while defying all positive laws. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian rule operates as perpetual movement, not as settled government #corroborates (0.95) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 951