Hannah Arendt's book appears in 1951 by which time relative interest in totalitarianism already seems to have peaked. There is a further irony lurking here: the term 'totalitarian' is introduced in the context of (Italian) fascism and not always as a term of disapprobation. In her big book, Arendt is adamant that 'fascism' needs to be distinguished from 'totalitarianism.' For her the distinction between the two is roughly (and to simplify) that the former aims to capture the state and is in many ways no different from a military dictatorship that despite its ambitions leaves much alone, whereas the latter actually destroys the state as an independent institution in the service of an all powerful party (or its leader) that aims to control all facets of life.* For, she writes, "the "totalitarian state" is a state in appearance only, and the movement no longer truly identifies itself even with the needs of the people. The Movement by now is above state and people, ready to sacrifice both for the sake of its ideology." (p. 266) While 'fascism' and 'totalitarianism' are relatively new terms, only totalitarianism is something really new, on Arendt's view. What's interesting about the ngam is that it empirically does track a point Arendt makes after the death of Stalin (in later editions) that the USSR has stopped being totalitarian (and has shifted to a more ordinary dictatorship).
Foucault agrees with Arendt (without mentioning her name) in his lecture of 7 March 1979: "I would also like to suggest that the characteristic feature of the state we call totalitarian is far from being the endogenous intensification and extension of the mechanisms of the state; it is not at all the exaltation but rather a limitation, a reduction, and a subordination of the autonomy of the state, of its specificity and specific functioning—but in relation to what? In relation to something else, which is the party." (Birth of Biopolitics, p. 190) In context he is clearly thinking of Nazism and Stalinism.
As an aside, a certain kind of correlational linguistic historicist will deny that a social phenomenon can really exist before the term that describes it has been coined and gained wide circularity. For such a historicist, racism (for example--see the NGRAM below) is really the more modern phenomenon that comes into existence pretty much after the civil rights movement has peaked!
Perhaps we can burry some forms of linguistic idealism? Be that as it may, that totalitarianism is distinctly new is not an agreed upon fact. As I have noted before, in passing (recall), Orwell, who also thought deeply on the matter, claims that Swift is the original theorist of totalitarianism. Orwell writes in 1946:
Swift's greatest contribution to political thought in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State’, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralize popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a quite small part, for the feeble governments of his own day did not give him illustrations ready-made. "Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels"
To be sure, Orwell's wording suggests that in Swift's time the intent to be totalitarian already exists, but the capacity was lacking in a certain sense. And so that leaves an open question when this capacity was first developed. And this also suggests that one can a be a theorist of the future. (Plato's Laws may prompt similar reflections.)
A careful reader may well think there is an important equivocation here. A 'police state' is not identical to what Arendt, and we moderns, means by 'totalitarianism.' And one reason to think that is that a police state is centered on the state whereas totalitarianism seems to efface it. This is, in fact, Foucault's very point in the lecture from the Birth of Biopolitics that I have quoted above, where he goes on to say (inter alia) that "the totalitarian state is not the...the nineteenth century Polizeistaat pushed to the limit." (p. 191)
Even so, it's worth noting that in Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, 'police state' is barely used. One rare occasion is in a footnote to her preface to part III, when she reports it is the term Bukharin is said to use (in 1936) in order to accuse Stalin of having changed Lenin's party. So, if there is a distinction between police state and totalitarianism it's not in terms of actor's categories. (There is a further complication here in that 'police' itself shifts meaning from roughly what we might be inclined to call 'policy' to a particular instrument of 'law enforcement.' However, in both uses wider issues of social control and terror are lurking.)
In the Birth of Biopolitics, at the very point I have been quoting, Foucault promises to develop his ideas. He is recorded to have said, "The party, this quite extraordinary, very curious, and very new organization, this very new governmentality of the party which appeared in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century is probably—well, in any case this is what I may try to show you next year, if I still have these ideas in mind—at the historical origin of something like totalitarian regimes, of something like Nazism, fascism, or Stalinism." By implication, here we are really promised a kind of extended reflection on Arendt's famous book or at least the themes in it.
As scholars of Foucault note, Foucault changed direction and started to explore very different issues in subsequent years. One possible reason for this is that Foucault seems to have changed his mind about the nature of totalitarianism. For he has come to side with Orwell (and Bukharin as reported by Arendt). For, in the second of his Tanner Lectures delivered at Stanford, 16 October 1979, he explicitly describes the police state, and its interventions, as "totalitarian" in character.
I actually think that in the Tanner Lectures Foucault expresses and develops a point he had already started to recognize at the beginning of The Birth of Biopolitics, "The object of police is almost infinite....the absence of a limit in the exercise of government [is characteristic of] the police state." (p. 7; 10 January 1979; 'police' here is closer to our 'policy.') So, that he came to realize that his prying apart of the police state and totalitarianism (as he done later in the Birth of Biopolitics) was on shaky grounds.
There is, of course, a way to resolve these apparent changes of heart and differences among the thinkers discussed. One can claim that the techniques and aims of totalitarianism are already present in the police state and its conceptualizations. But that these are state centered in a way that the ideology of totalitarianism is ultimately not. Somewhat paradoxically, when state capacity develops to use such techniques of control and terror on mass populations, the state's necessary independence simultaneously is fatally undermined by the ideology and people that wish to deploy it. That fact has not changed, yet.
*See, for example:
The difference between the Fascist and the totalitarian movements is best illustrated by their attitude toward the army, that is, toward the national institution par excellence. In contrast to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, who destroyed the spirit of the army by subordinating it to the political commissars or totalitarian elite formations, the Fascists could use such intensely nationalist instruments as the army, with which they identified themselves as they had identified themselves with the state. They wanted a Fascist state and a Fascist army, but still an army and a state; only in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia army and state became subordinated functions of the movement. The Fascist dictator-but neither Hitler nor Stalin-was the only true usurper in the sense of classical political theory, and his one-party rule was in a sense the only one still intimately connected with the multiparty system. He carried out what the imperialist-minded leagues, societies, and "parties above parties" had aimed at, so that it is particularly Italian Fascism that has become the only example of a modern mass movement organized within the framework of an existing state, inspired solely by extreme nationalism...(p. 259)
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