Totalitarian democracy
A dictatorship based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a perfectionist ideology / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon to refer to a dictatorship based on the mass enthusiasm generated by a perfectionist ideology.[1]
This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to liberal democracy which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern.[2]
The phrase had previously been used by Bertrand de Jouvenel[3] and E. H. Carr,[4] and subsequently by F. William Engdahl[5] and Sheldon S. Wolin.[6]