Etymology

totalitarianism

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Today it means: A system of government in which the people have virtually no authority and the state wields absolute control, for example, a dictatorship. Full definition →

Italian totalitarismo
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The story

  1. Italian · derived fromtotalitarismo
  2. English todaytotalitarianism

1938, from totalitarian + -ism, modeled after Italian totalitarismo (1923, by Giovanni Amendola) and German terms such as Totalstaat (1927, The Concept of the Political, by Carl Schmitt).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.