THE MONSTROSITY WHICH BEARS THE NAME OF
the totalitarian state has at last succeeded in reminding us that
there are not only primal rights of individuals and of commu-
nities, but that there is a just and unjust order of the state itself.
The totalitarian state is not, like a dictatorship, a form of the
state. It is the absorption of all institutions and all rights by the
state. The totalitarian state is the inevitable consequence of the
view that the state is sovereign, that it is not subject to law, but
that it can establish as law whatever it likes and approves, and
that all rights obtaining among the people issue from the state.
The totalitarian state must of necessity come into being wherever
political thought is centralistic, and all organization is regarded
as issuing from above, from a state centre, wherever federalism,
the building up of the community from below, has vanished.
Indeed, it is already potentially present where the state is held
to be the supreme value. Hence its antithesis is not democracy
but the federally organized commonwealth of nation or state.
The bulwark against the totalitarian state is not democracy, but
federalism.

Federalism is the just order of the state, and federalism is the
state built up from below. That is the order of creation. All
institutions exist for the sake of man; man never exists for the
sake of institutions. Hence the primary datum is the individual
human being. That is the view of things entailed by the Chris-
tian belief in creation. The call of God goes to the individual.
Only the individual can hear it, only the individual has a con-
science, only he is, in the true sense of the word, a responsible
person. Whenever people speak seriously of "collective per-

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