- 1極權主義（形容詞 totalitarian 通常譯「極權的」）。注意跟「威權主義」authoritarianism 分開：威權是政府很兇、不准你反對；極權更進一步，連你的思想、生活、娛樂都要管。中文口語罵人「很獨裁」大多對應 dictatorial／authoritarian，不必動用 totalitarianism 這個大字。
Totalitarianism is a way of running a country where the government controls everything, and ordinary people have no power at all. Not just the laws and the police — also the newspapers, the schools, the films, the songs, what you are allowed to say at dinner, sometimes even what you are supposed to believe inside your own head. One party rules, and there is no real way to vote it out. Usually there is one leader whose picture is everywhere.
Students often think it just means "a very strict government", but there is a line worth seeing. Many governments are harsh and lock up people who complain — that is usually called a dictatorship, or authoritarian rule. Totalitarianism is the stronger word: the government does not only want obedience, it wants your whole life inside its system. The old joke is that under an authoritarian government, everything that is not forbidden is allowed; under a totalitarian one, everything that is not ordered is forbidden.
The word is formal and serious. You meet it in history class, in the news, and in books — Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and North Korea are the examples people reach for most. It is a heavy accusation, so be careful using it loosely; in everyday argument people do throw it at any rule they dislike ("this is totalitarianism!" about a school phone ban), and that use is an on purpose. The adjective is *totalitarian*: a totalitarian state, a totalitarian regime.
組成total (whole, all of it) + -itarian (of a system or belief that works this way, as in authoritarian, egalitarian) + -ism (a political system or set of beliefs). So: the "the-whole-of-you" system. The word is young — it grew in the 1920s-30s out of Italian *totalitarismo*, coined while people were watching Mussolini's Italy and looking for a name for what they saw, and English took it up around 1938.
同家族的字
- totalthe same root — the whole amount, all of it
- totallythe same 'total' root, meaning completely
- authoritarianshares the -itarian ending used for naming political systems
- capitalismshares -ism, the ending for a political or economic system
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
totalitarianismnoun
- 1
A system of government in which the people have virtually no authority and the state wields absolute control, for example, a dictatorship.
- And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.
- The film Repentance caused a sensation across the Soviet Union not only because it publicly condemned the evil of totalitarianism but also because it encouraged tens of thousands of Soviet people to reflect upon the source and root cause of the evil.[…]
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。