The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe

Abstract

Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s, responding to Carl Schmitt's turn to the “total state” in 1931. In this essay I explore the notion's formation and circulation through the Catholic public sphere in both France and Austria, where “antitotalitarianism” was born as a new form of the traditional Catholic animus against the nation state project.

‘The snake biting its own tail’: Karl Barth on the modern promise of politics

“…Barth's genealogy of political modernity explores -and here it is a Protestant complement, if not predecessor, to what has recently been pointed out as the originally Catholic totalitarianism theory of the 1930s 12 -the undercurrents of Europe's twentieth-century political barbarisms. Barth set the beginning of his narrative in the context of the eighteenth-century recognition that Copernicus and Galileo had been right in that 'the theatre of (man's) deeds was not the centre of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe.'…”

“…Thirdly, I will show Barth's focus on the totalizing concept of the state in his genealogy of political modernity resonates with recent scholarly accounts of the Catholic origins of theories of totalitarianism. While today the image of totalitarian politics is largely evoked in terms of fundamentalist religious regimes, and theoretical critiques of totalitarianism have been understood as operating and originating from within a profoundly secular framework, these theories have been shown to have first emerged among interwar Catholic thinkers as a critique of twentieth-century secular regimes 9 . By highlighting some concurring elements of a similar critique in Barth's work, I can here only indicate that similar narrative lines were also present in interwar Protestant political thought.…”

Christian Europe Redux

“…Avoiding the pitfalls of materialism then required ‘the decentering of sovereignty away from the nation state and towards a cluster of legitimate, nonpolitical institutions: notably the family, the profession, and the Church’ (Chappel, 2011, p. 565). In the context of European integration, it additionally required diffusing power to supranational bodies as well as to sub‐national regions, applying the principle of subsidiarity as codified in the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (Invernizzi‐Accetti, 2019, pp.…”

Catholic Power and the Irish City: Modernity, Religion, and Planning in Galway, 1944–1949

“…In a more abstract sense, he considered a strong state a danger to a free (and Catholic) society-views that closely aligned with the anti-totalitarianism ideas of many leading continental Catholic intellectuals in the 1930s. 47 Browne's correspondence with the Office of Public Works in 1940 gives a sense of his skepticism: he ridiculed their selection of a site for a new rural school in his diocese near Gort, writing "Your officials did select a nice soft swamp." 48 However, at the same time, he chaired the government's Commission on Vocational Organisation, which published its final report in August 1944.…”