Atlas / Claim checks / Were the Jacobins totalitarian
Were the Jacobins totalitarian? The claim, measured
“The Jacobins were the first totalitarians.”
Measured against Jacobins and Bolsheviks
Distance is measured across six independent axes, each running from −10 to +10, out of a maximum separation of 49.0. How the scoring works →
Strongest case for the claim
The constitution was ratified and immediately suspended, all powers were vested in a committee, the Law of 22 Prairial removed defence counsel and limited verdicts to acquittal or death, and terror was defended as an emanation of virtue rather than as an emergency expedient.
Strongest case against
The regime lasted eleven months, held no monopoly of communication or organisation, had no party in the modern sense, no secret police apparatus of any scale, and no ambition to remake private life. Historians of totalitarianism generally treat the twentieth-century combination of mass party, ideology and technology as the defining one.
What the coordinates show. The Jacobins score +08 on authority, +09 on scale and +10 on method — within a point of the Bolsheviks on all three. On economics they are ten points apart: +01 against −09, because the Terror controlled prices and never abolished property. Distance 10.3. This is the origin case for the atlas's central claim that means and content are different measurements.
The six measurements
| Axis | The Mountain | RSDLP(b) | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC · Economic organisation | +01 | −09 | 10 |
| CU · Social and cultural order | −06 | −05 | 1 |
| AU · Organisation of power | +08 | +08 | 0 |
| SC · Scale of decision | +09 | +07 | 2 |
| ID · Rule of membership | −06 | −07 | 1 |
| CH · Method and tempo | +09 | +10 | 1 |
Both cases are stated because the atlas does not settle arguments by assertion. Where the underlying dispute is conceptual rather than factual, that is said plainly rather than resolved.
Full comparisonCheck it yourself
The interactive atlas holds 319 organisations on six independent axes with the evidence for every score. Paste any claim that equates two political things and it will find them and report the measurement.