At the beginning it was simply descriptive, used by both opponents and supporters of regimes that aimed to totally transform societies, as did the Soviet, Italian, and later German leaders. In fact, the first person to use the phrase “totalitarian state” may have been Benito Mussolini, in a 1925 speech in which he extolled the virtues of concentrating all of society in a single state entity. At that point, “totalitarian state” was a vision rather than a system, but it was a vision clearly opposed to Western democratic arrangements, which it saw as weak. By implied definition, a totalitarian
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