The best books about totalitarianism 📚

Arendt’s three-part masterwork had the same US editor as 1984 and can be read as the non-fiction equivalent. While scholars have subsequently questioned aspects of her grand theory of totalitarianism, much of it holds up. Her commanding, aphoristic prose has made this one of the most widely quoted books of recent years, especially on the subject of power creating its own alternate reality: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time… think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

This is the only novel on the list. Completed in 1948 (Orwell reversed the last two numerals to get his book’s title), it was meant not as a prediction but as a warning of the dangers of totalitarianism. Although Stalin’s Soviet Union was very much in Orwell’s mind, he illuminates more general features of totalitarian rule. These include control over the concepts and language within which people think, the deliberate destruction of historical evidence, comprehensive censorship, and the surveillance and brutality of the ubiquitous political police. Several of the terms Orwell coined to describe the methods of control – ‘doublethink’,… show more.

Juan Linz (1926-2013) was one of the most insightful political analysts of the past hundred years. He was especially noted for his studies of how democracies can degenerate into authoritarianism and on the characteristics and types of authoritarian and totalitarian rule. The greater part of this work first appeared in 1975 (in a multi-volume Handbook of Political Science), but with its publication as a separate book a quarter of a century later, Linz added almost fifty pages of valuable ‘Further Reflections’. Authoritarian systems embrace a wide variety of non-democratic polities, among them absolute monarchy, military dictatorship, ‘sultanistic’ regimes, and theocracies.… show more.

Written in 1953, this dystopian novel is as relevant as ever. It images a world without books of any kind, where firemen don’t put out blazes, they ignite them — destroying books and the homes of people who own them. Bradbury wrote this long before digital technology capable of monitoring our behavior was in place. His nightmarish novel is a gripping cautionary tale about censorship, totalitarian control, and the importance of freedom of speech.