The Triumph of the State Over the Nation: From Totalitarianism to Interventionism

Abstract

The liberal model of the state allowed the western nation-states to achieve unprecedented levels of economic and technological development, exponentially bolstered by a series of inventions and innovations facilitating the triumph of capitalism. These major advances and burgeoning wealth, however, were not equally shared by society’s different strata. Beneath an extraordinarily rich ruling class, the vast majority of the people struggled just to survive. This growing and glaring contrast between rich and poor generated the “social question”, a conflict addressed by a series of “socialist” thinkers who denounced the exploitation of the working class and proposed a fairer redistribution of wealth. In the wake of the Communist Manifesto (1848), the proletarians intensified their efforts to organize and transform the social order, whether via revolution or the progressive triumph of universal suffrage and other reforms. The trauma of World War I and the triumph of the Russian Revolution knocked the liberal state back on its heels. In some countries, parliamentary democracies were replaced by totalitarian regimes that sought to impose their model around the world, generating tensions that would lead to World War II. Hitler’s defeat paved the way for consolidation of the Communist model in Eastern Europe, and a Western European model of society that afforded the state a greater regulatory role to promote social justice and well-being. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, neoliberalism has favored the concentration of wealth in the hands of a new global oligarchy.