yeah, so? If you can vote whether Hitler or Himmler should be the fuehrer of the year, does that make you a free man while living under the Nazi regime? All the more so given that you don’t get to vote for the SOB of an officer who is your immediate superior.
Does being a member of “aristocracy” under the Nazis prevent you from living under a totalitarian regime? You have more privileges than the helots and the concentration camp inmates, but it’s still not a free country in any sense.
there are no human societies without some form of “hierarchy”. It’s one thing to have a hierarchy of social classes like in Athens, it’s another to have a hierarchy of military officers telling you what to do, what to eat and when you can go visit your wife. Feel the difference? In Athens the slave owner could do that to his (not another man’s!) slaves. In Sparta the officers of the State could do that to their fellow citizens on a regular basis.
As far as Socrates goes, like they say, shit happens. People survive in Auschwitz and people get killed by lightning in Iowa. Exceptions do not prove the rule.
The important thing to note about the Krypteia was that it allegedly operated against the Helots. It was, in short, a tool of the Spartiate class, used in effect to cull the helots.
One can certainly argue that any slave-owning or helot-based society is, in part, totalitarian - from the slave’s perspective. I think that it is reasonable to make a distinction between such societies and ‘totalitarianism’.
I don’t think it counts, though - it’s totalitarian in the same sense that a family is totalitarian (parents demand the love and obedience of their spawn), but it isn’t a state. It’s in the nature of families to be totalitarian (though usually in a benign fashion) - it’s unusual for states.
If the Inca qualifies, presumably Sumer and Akkad and Egypt do as well?
Must the structures of the state be force-backed, per se, to be totalitarian? What if there is not much need of force because social roles are so well-defined, and obedience so habitual? As in the ancient priest-king civilizations.
Egyptian government was pretty heavy, and the pharaoh was a god and technically owned all the land, but I don’t think it micromanaged the economy or the people’s lives quite as thoroughly as the Inca Empire did.
As for Sumer or Akkad, I don’t think their governments were nearly well-organized enough to be totalitarian, even to the Egyptian standard; and the Sumerian civilization was at most periods a group of independent city-states, like Greece in the age of Pericles.
