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Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. By Juan J. Linz. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. 343pp.
Juan Linz, Sterling Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University, wrote the section on totalitarian and authoritarian regimes for the Handbook of Political Science (edited by Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, and published by Addison-Wesley in 1975). That section has been published as a monograph with a new first chapter. This is a welcome appearance, since the Handbook has long been out of print. Linz's contribution built upon earlier work by Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), and Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy). A quarter of a century later, Linz's work remains valid and sufficiently important to warrant re-publication.
The new first chapter reviews the work on authoritarian regimes since 1975 in the light of real world developments. Linz felt that his original writing could remain with this new introduction. As a consequence, most of the comments in this review are directed to his new remarks. The original material has been available for comments for the last quarter of a century.
Linz's orientation has been taxonomic from the start. He categorizes, catalogues, and groups regimes into typologies. These typologies, in turn, explain critical institutional features of non-democratic regimes (for example, totalitarian regimes have a monistic centre of power, an ideology, and large-scale mobilization of the citizenry [p. 70). Linz acknowledges the principal difficulties that his typologies have encountered in the past quarter century. First and foremost, the world has changed. Totalitarian governments have, for the most part, vanished. New types of non-democratic regimes, like Iran's theocracy, do not fit into Linz's 1975 typology. Linz recognizes these difficulties, but...