Abstract
It is common to associate totalitarianism with modernity, but this article argues that there is nothing modern about the basic idea of indoctrinating people in an ideology to gain total control over people's thoughts; what is modern is simply the way totalitarianism is implemented. Just as representative democracy in 21th century Europe must function differently than direct democracy in ancient Greece, so must totalitarianism take on different forms throughout different historical epochs.
This article focuses on Spain during the introduction of the Inquisition as an example of a pre-modern attempt at creating a totalitarian society and compares the Spanish Inquisition to the inquisition in France, to explain why the Spanish Inquisition became totalitarian, but not the one in France. It argues that in Spain the Inquisition was part of a state-building process, so it became part of a strategy to homogenize society around a Catholic ideology, while in France it was not part of a state-building process, and thus the Inquisition there only had the limited aim of fighting the Cathar sect.