The Road to Totalitarianism by Henry Hazlitt In spite of the
obvious ultimate objective of the masters of Russia to communize
and conquer the world, and in spite of the frightful power which
such weapons as guided missiles and atomic and hydrogen bombs
may put in their hands, the greatest threat to American liberty
today comes from within. It is the threat of a growing and
spreading totalitarian ideology. Totalitarianism in its final
form is the doctrine that the government, the state, must
exercise total control over the individual. The American College
Dictionary, closely following Webster's Collegiate, defines
totalitarianism as "pertaining to a centralized form of
government in which those in control grant neither recognition
nor tolerance to parties of different opinion." Now I should
describe this failure to grant tolerance to other parties not as
the essence of totalitarianism, but rather as one of its
consequences or corollaries. The essence of totalitarianism is
that the group in power must exercise