The Logical Form of Totalitarianism
Theories of social behavior include some notion of cooperation. In light of large social institutions such as government, a paradox ensues in cases where the institution in question is oppressive and not enjoyed by the collective of individuals inhabiting
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The Logical Form of Totalitarianism Jennifer Hudin
Abstract Theories of social behavior include some notion of cooperation. In light of large social institutions such as government, a paradox ensues in cases where the institution in question is oppressive and not enjoyed by the collective of individuals inhabiting such an institution: How is it possible to cooperate unwillingly yet intentionally? Are such individuals complicity reinforcing the regimes that oppress them? This chapter addresses despotic regimes in general and totalitarian regimes in particular by examining the notion of cooperation within these regimes. An analysis of cooperation is offered in which individual behavior in collectives is logically preceded by perception of the social group as either a set with which the individual identifies or does not. In each case, social identification operates over an individual’s social behavior as a reinforcement of the group with which he identifies, or an erosive element of the institution that he finds alien and oppressive.
1 Introduction A logical account of society considers features that are necessary for societies to exist. Some logical accounts are marked by a particular essential feature, that of cooperation. This essential feature is one which determines how a society will develop through time thereby creating a kind of vertical or horizontal axis through the temporal space of evolutionary social development. Accounts that form a vertical axis are social structures that begin as a matter of simple cooperative behavior among the members of a group and eventually develop into more complex social behaviors. Given a species’ capacity for cooperative behavior, there is a simple algorithm for society building according to this type of vertical analysis: if a species
J. Hudin () Department of Philosophy, University of Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Konzelmann Ziv and H.B. Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 2, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2 5, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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or a group has the feature of cooperation, it is possible for it to have some sort of social structure. If the group or a species lacks the feature of cooperation, it is not possible for it to have social structures. A benefit of an account based solely on observable behavior that appears to be cooperative is that it can be applied in principle to both linguistic and non-linguistic social groups to explain how their social structures evolved.1 In contrast to the vertical account, in which society gradually evolves out of cooperative behavior, is a horizontal account in which the basis of society exists the evolutionary moment certain intellectual capacities appear in a species. Although the complexity of social structures do and can evolve on this account, social behavior itself is already a sophisticated activity as soon as the appropriate mechanisms are present. What sort of social cognitive mechanisms are foun
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