mgandi   Currently reading Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin.  He speaks of totalitarianism in a different form as opposed to that described by Hannah Arendt, but of what he terms inverted totalitarianism in which the state is hollowed out to serve corporate interests rather than those of the public.  Thus quote originates from chapter 4 in which two ways in which nations can slip into autocratic rule.

“Tocqueville democrat comfortable with despotism and Hobbes’s free rationalist who opts for absolutism share an elective affinity.  Tocqueville imagines a despotism made possible because citizens have chosen to relinquish participatory politics, which he and singled out as the most remarkable, widespread, and essential element of American political life.  By abandoning their intense involvement with the common affairs of their communities in favor of personal ends, they, like signatories to Hobbes’s contract, have chosen to be apolitical subjects rather than citizens. 

   The contemporary moral to be drawn from our detour through Hobbes and Tocqueville is this: while it may prove possible to mobilize voters around the slogan “Anything to beat Bush!” it take more persistence, more thoughtfulness to dismantle Superpower and to nurture a democratic citizenry.  The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of a Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the “mute button.”

 

– Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated p.80-81.