Perhaps twenty-five years into a new century is sufficient time to reflect on the previous one with more accuracy. Conventional wisdom, borrowing from Henry Luce, characterizes the twentieth century as the “American Century,” reflecting the rise of the United States as an economic, military, and geopolitical superpower and the spread of American culture throughout the world. But it would be more accurate to describe the previous century as the “Totalitarian Century” because of the ubiquity of the immense growth of the power of the state vis-à-vis the individual. And no writer explained that phenomenon with greater insight than the late British historian Paul Johnson in his marvelous book Modern Times.

Johnson, who made the intellectual journey from left to right in the 1960s and 1970s, was a remarkably prolific writer, a staunch Roman Catholic, and a keen interpreter of history. He edited the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and wrote both big and small books, including biographies of Socrates, Jesus Christ, John Paul II, Elizabeth I, Edward III, Mozart, Darwin, Picasso, Eisenhower, Churchill, Napoleon, and George Washington; assessments of creators, intellectuals, and heroes; histories of Ancient Egypt, Ireland, the Renaissance, Christianity, and the Jews; a massive history of art; and most relevant to this essay, The Birth of the Modern and Modern Times.

In The Birth of the Modern, Johnson surveyed the post-Napoleonic world, as the United States expanded to the west and south, and Andrew Jackson introduced populism into American politics; the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance tried to bring geopolitical stability to Europe while simultaneously discouraging revolutionary movements; and the industrial revolution brought advances in travel and communications. Johnson summarized it as follows:

[A]t this birth of the modern world, roamed by predatory men armed with increasingly effective means of killing and traveling at speeds which accelerated each year, most assaults on nature went unheeded, and crimes against humanity remained unpunished. The world was becoming one, the wilderness was being drawn into a single world commercial system . . .

There were scientific and technological breakthroughs as well as advances in medicine that made life easier for even the commoners and the poor. Art and culture spread. There were small wars and small revolutions, and later big revolutions (1830, 1848). And, Johnson noted, there were intellectuals (Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Auguste Comte, Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham) who “suffered from the totalitarian itch,” believing they had “discovered the keys to utopia but whose ideas had totalitarian overtones that were to find concrete expression in the horrific state systems of the twentieth century.” These intellectuals planted the seeds that led to the decline of the religious impulse and its replacement by secular ideologies, like Marxism and Fascism.  

In Modern Times, Johnson brilliantly explores the totalitarian twentieth century. He begins the book with a summary of Einstein’s scientific Theory of Relativity and shows how it was transformed by “secular priests” with a “will to power” into a “relativistic world” in which “there were no longer any absolutes . . . of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value.” Relativity, Johnson wrote, “formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.”

This was happening at the same time that the European great powers, later joined by the United States—Churchill in The World Crisis called them the “mighty educated states”—fought the First World War, and the crucial fact about that war was the enormous growth of the state in each belligerent country. “The effect of the Great War,” Johnson wrote, “was enormously to increase the size, and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of the state.” As Randolph Bourne accurately noted at the time, “War is the health of the state.” It was an experiment in what Johnson described as “state collectivism,” and it survived the war.

The American diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan rightly called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. He believed that in studying the geopolitics of the twentieth century all the lines of inquiry led back to the Great War. Johnson’s Modern Times confirmed Kennan’s thesis. The consequences of the Great War included the fall of four empires and the rise to power of communist and fascist states—what Johnson called the “first despotic utopias.” Lenin and Mussolini led the way, but they were later outdone by Stalin and Hitler, and still later by Mao Zedong. In Johnson’s words, “The Devils had taken over.”

Johnson noted that the two totalitarian regimes of the 1930s in Russia and Germany engaged in “a human slaughter on a scale no earlier tyranny had possessed the physical means, let alone the wish to bring about.” The Nazi Holocaust claimed some 12 million victims, half of them Jews. Stalin’s state-induced famine, purges, and expansion of the Gulag produced many millions more. And the war that the two of them started claimed about 60 million lives. The bloodletting spilled over into the Far East as the militaristic bushido-inspired Japanese leadership inflicted tens of millions of casualties in China and elsewhere. After the war, the horrors continued in Russia, Eastern Europe, and especially in China where Mao’s totalitarian communists outdid even Hitler and Stalin in state mass murder.

Johnson noted that throughout the rest of the century, totalitarian despots in smaller countries—Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia—added to the toll of totalitarian victims: The Black Book of Communism estimated the total at more than 100 million. None of this would have been possible without the growth of state power, which normalized a machinery of death. But state power grew in all of the major powers, including the United States, which had its own utopian intellectuals, including one who became President—Woodrow Wilson. Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was awash with utopian dreamers who saw the state as the answer to all of America’s problems. With the onset of the Cold War, America’s leaders created the national security state which led to the growth of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” and after that the “best and the brightest” of the Lyndon Johnson administration claimed greater domestic power and control with the Great Society. What Jean-François Revel called the “totalitarian temptation” affected the democracies, too.

During the twentieth century, the United States and its allies defeated two of the great totalitarian powers, but the third great totalitarian power—China—survived and is now attempting to make the twenty-first century the Chinese century. If China succeeds, the twenty-first century could be another totalitarian century.