“Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal.”
Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 396
Context: Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal. This is why I maintain that no state in the modern world is legitimate. No present-day authority can claim to be instructed by God, for all authority is set in the framework of a totalitarian state. This is why I decide for anarchy.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Jacques Ellul 125
French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarch… 1912–1994Related quotes
Quote, First State of the Union Address (1865)
Context: Certainly the Government of the United States is a limited government, and so is every State government a limited government. With us this idea of limitation spreads through every form of administration — general, State, and municipal — and rests on the great distinguishing principle of the recognition of the rights of man. The ancient republics absorbed the individual in the state — prescribed his religion and controlled his activity. The American system rests on the assertion of the equal right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of conscience, to the culture and exercise of all his faculties. As a consequence the State government is limited — as to the General Government in the interest of union, as to the individual citizen in the interest of freedom.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.
Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 18
Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 110
"Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," Policy Review, Fall 1987, by Michael Johns: In the former Soviet Union, we face an 'Evil Empire'.
[Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism, https://books.google.com/books?id=B36vxZZ4cLcC, June 2003, University of Chicago Press, 978-0-226-21304-0] (quote from p. 157)
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
interview on WBAI, January 1992 http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199201--.htm.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994
Variant: Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Source: Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Context: Harold Laswell … explained a couple of years after this in the early 1930s that we should not succumb to what he called democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.… In what's nowadays called a totalitarian state, military state or something, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, but as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear—propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state….
Context: Walter Lippmann … described what he called “the manufacture of consent” as “a revolution” in “the practice of democracy”... And he said this was useful and necessary because “the common interests” - the general concerns of all people - “elude” the public. The public just isn't up to dealing with them. And they have to be the domain of what he called a "specialized class" … [Reinhold Niebuhr]'s view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith. And this naive faith requires necessary illusion, and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth-maker to keep the ordinary person on course. It's not the case, as the naive might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy. Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes, it is the essence of democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter because you've got a bludgeon over their heads and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem—it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule [Clement Walker, 1661], and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda, manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusion. Various ways of either marginalizing the public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.
