The merit of Tocqueville's analysis [in Democracy in America] is that it points directly to the heart of totalitarianism- the masses; the vast aggregates who are never tortured, flogged or imprisoned, or humiliated; who instead are cajoled, flattered, stimulated by the rulers; but who nonetheless are relentlessly destroyed as human beings, ground down into mere shells of humanity. And the genius of his analysis lies in the view of totalitarianism as something not historically "abnormal" but as closely related to the very trends hailed as progressive in the nineteenth century.
-The Quest for Community. (171)
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