One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose, and one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberativeness; one for trail and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern. It is the second view, as J. L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.
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Jacob Talmon is absolutely brilliant on the subject of the French philosophical origins of XXth Century Communism and other totalitarian disorders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Talmon
I highly recommend his works.