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Norman Mailer and American Totalitarianism in the 1960s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2020
Abstract
This article investigates Norman Mailer's appropriation and Americanization of the concept of totalitarianism as an internal critique of US society and culture in the 1960s. Dominant understandings of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s focused on external threats and were wedded to notions of pervasive state control of all aspects of life. Mailer's crucial intervention offered an alternative theory which viewed totalitarianism as an internal threat to the United States and de-emphasized the centrality of the state. His theory of cultural totalitarianism focused on internal psychological manipulation rather than external political coercion. Mailer's focus on the United States was symptomatic of a broader intellectual trend towards the study of non-statist forms of totalitarianism which has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. This article thus illuminates new dimensions of the totalitarianism debate in American political thought and provides a fuller picture of Mailer's significance as a social critic.
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References
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114 Ibid., 188.
115 In a typical criticism, Christopher Lasch wrote that Mailer had “steadily enlarged [the meaning of totalitarianism]—as he ha[d] enlarged so many things, the length of his sentences, the heat of his indignation, the scope of his literary ambitions—until it includes everything he finds in the slightest degree distasteful.” Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 334.
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