Everything about totalitarianism, starting with the name, is problematic.
Whoever invented it, the name was put into currency by Be- nit0 Mussolini when he published an article in the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1932 in which he proclaimed himself a "totalitarian" and called the Italian Fascist state lo stato totalitario. That claim is widely taken by historians as more of a boast than a descrip- tion of Italian Fascist reality.
Beginning in the later 1930s, the name was picked up by...