The Origins of Totalitarianism

Summary

The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time). A second, enlarged edition of 1958 added the chapter Ideology and Terror, and the editions of the later 1960s added new prefaces to each of the three parts. The book is under copyright; the library describes it and gives two short quotations but does not include its text. Part One, Antisemitism, asks why hatred of the Jews became the catalytic agent of a political movement. Arendt traces the place of Jewish bankers and court Jews in the rise of the European nation-state, the social world of assimilated Jews as exceptions and parvenus (with portraits of Disraeli and of Proust's salons), and the political antisemitism of the late 19th century. She closes the part with the Dreyfus Affair in France as a dress rehearsal for later events. Part Two, Imperialism, covers the decades from about 1884 to 1914. Arendt argues that the bourgeoisie's demand for the endless expansion of power and money, whose philosopher she finds in Hobbes, broke the limits of the nation-state. She examines race-thinking from Gobineau onward, the experience of the Boers in South Africa, the bureaucratic rule of figures such as Lord Cromer, and the secret agents of the Great Game, reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Kipling as witnesses. The pan-German and pan-Slav movements carried these habits into continental Europe. The part ends with the collapse of the nation-state after the First World War and the millions of refugees and stateless people who, having lost membership in any political community, found that the rights of man protected no one. Part Three, Totalitarianism, describes the masses of isolated, atomized individuals that the movements organized, the temporary alliance between the mob and an intellectual elite, and the methods of the movements: propaganda that builds a consistent fictional world, front organizations arranged in layers around a hard core, and the leader's absolute authority. In power, totalitarian regimes keep the state apparatus as a facade while real authority shifts constantly; the secret police pursue objective enemies rather than actual opponents; and the concentration and extermination camps serve as laboratories in which total domination tries to destroy first the legal person, then the moral person, then individuality itself. The final chapter argues that ideology, the logic of an idea, and terror together crush the space between people and leave them in a loneliness that prepares them for domination. It closes with Augustine's claim that man was created so that there might be a beginning.

Plot or Argument

• Part One, chs. 1–2: antisemitism and the nation-state

  Arendt rejects the views that antisemitism is a mere eternal prejudice or that the Jews were an accidental scapegoat. She traces how Jewish financiers served the absolute monarchies and early nation-states, enjoyed protection without political power, and lost their function as the state no longer needed them, so that wealth without power made them a target. She surveys the antisemitic parties of Germany and Austria and in France.

• Part One, chs. 3–4: the Jews and society; the Dreyfus Affair

  Assimilated Jews were admitted to society as exceptions, valued for their exoticism, and divided into the parvenu who sought acceptance and the conscious pariah who did not. Disraeli and the salons of Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain serve as examples. The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), with the mob, the army, the Church and the press ranged against one Jewish officer, is presented as a preview of 20th-century politics.

• Part Two, chs. 5–6: expansion and race-thinking

  From the 1880s the bourgeoisie, seeking investment abroad, demanded that the state follow money with power, adopting expansion for its own sake as a political principle; Arendt reads Hobbes's Leviathan as the philosophy of this outlook. Race-thinking, which had many sources (Boulainvilliers, Gobineau, the English stress on inherited rights), became a political weapon only when joined to this expansion.

• Part Two, ch. 7: race and bureaucracy

  Two devices of overseas rule are examined: race as the principle of the Boer society in South Africa, and bureaucracy as government by decree and report, represented by Lord Cromer in Egypt. Arendt discusses Cecil Rhodes, the gold and diamond rushes, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Kipling's Kim, and the legend of the imperial agent playing the Great Game.

• Part Two, chs. 8–9: pan-movements and the end of the rights of man

  The pan-German and pan-Slav movements brought tribal nationalism and contempt for law to central and eastern Europe. After 1918 the peace treaties created minorities and the war and revolutions created millions of stateless persons. Arendt argues that the rights of man, supposedly inalienable, proved unenforceable for anyone who belonged to no state, and that what the stateless had lost was a place in the world and a right to have rights.

• Part Three, chs. 10–11: masses, mob and movement

  Totalitarian movements recruited the masses, people without class interests or political ties, made superfluous by the breakdown of the class system. They attracted the mob and, for a time, intellectuals drawn by the destruction of respectability. Propaganda gave the masses a consistent fictional world; organization arranged sympathizers, members, elite formations and the leader in concentric layers, each shielding the next from reality.

• Part Three, ch. 12: totalitarianism in power

  Once in power the movements multiplied offices and kept authority shifting, so that only the leader's will was fixed. The secret police hunted categories of objective enemies defined by ideology. The camps, in Arendt's analysis, aimed at total domination: killing the juridical person by placing prisoners outside law, the moral person by making conscience useless, and finally individuality. She calls the result radical evil, a crime that cannot be punished or forgiven in ordinary terms.

• Part Three, ch. 13: ideology and terror

  Added in 1958, the concluding chapter defines totalitarianism by the union of ideology, the claim to deduce all history from a single idea of nature or history, and terror, which executes that law of movement. Terror presses people together and destroys the space of freedom between them; ideology replaces experience with logic. The condition that prepares people for this is loneliness, the experience of not belonging to the world at all. Against it Arendt sets the human capacity to begin anew, citing Augustine.

Characters

• Alfred Dreyfus, historical subject

  The Jewish French army captain falsely convicted of treason in 1894, whose case Arendt treats as a rehearsal of later mass politics.

• Benjamin Disraeli, historical subject

  British prime minister of Jewish birth, studied in Part One as the exceptional Jew who made his origin into a romantic advantage.

• Thomas Hobbes, philosopher interpreted

  Read in Part Two as the thinker whose account of power as the endless accumulation of power anticipated the bourgeois outlook of expansion.

• Cecil Rhodes, historical subject

  South African mining magnate and politician whose remark about annexing the planets Arendt uses to characterize expansion for its own sake.

• Lord Cromer, historical subject

  British consul-general in Egypt, presented as the model of rule by bureaucracy behind the scenes.

• Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, historical subjects

  The leaders of the two regimes Arendt classes as totalitarian, analyzed through their movements, propaganda and methods of rule.

Lessons

• A new form of government needs new categories

  Arendt insists that totalitarianism is not simply tyranny or dictatorship carried further. Tyranny rules by fear for the ruler's interest; totalitarian rule tries to make human beings fit an ideological law of nature or history and to dominate them entirely. Understanding it, she says, means facing reality without reaching for comfortable precedents.

  • What differences does Arendt draw between a tyranny and a totalitarian regime?
  • Why does she pair the Nazi and Soviet regimes, and what distinctions between them does she keep?
  • Why might historical analogies make a new danger harder to see?

• Rights need a political home

  In the chapter on statelessness, Arendt observes that refugees after 1918 had every human right on paper and none in practice, because no government would guarantee them. She concludes that the most basic right is to belong to a political community where one's actions and opinions count.

  • What happened to stateless persons between the wars, according to Arendt?
  • Why does she say a criminal was sometimes better off than a stateless person?
  • What does it mean to have a right to have rights?

• Loneliness as a political condition

  Arendt locates the ground of totalitarian movements not in poverty or wickedness alone but in masses of people cut off from one another, from class and party and common world. Isolation in public life and loneliness in private life prepared people to accept a fictional world that explained everything.

  • How does Arendt distinguish solitude, isolation and loneliness?
  • Why did consistent propaganda appeal to people who had lost a common world?
  • What kinds of associations and friendships protect people from the loneliness Arendt describes?

• Every end contains a beginning

  After the darkest pages of the book, Arendt closes with Augustine: each human birth is a new beginning, and the capacity to begin is the root of freedom. Total domination aims precisely at destroying spontaneity, so the persistence of new persons is a kind of hope.

  • Why does Arendt end with a theologian's sentence about creation?
  • How does the capacity to begin stand opposed to the logic of ideology described in the last chapter?
  • Where in history have ordinary people made unexpected new beginnings under pressure?

Context

Arendt wrote in the years just after the Second World War, when the scale of the Nazi extermination camps had become known and the Soviet labor camps were being documented by former prisoners and defectors. She herself had been a refugee and stateless person from 1933 to 1951. The word totalitarian had been used since the 1920s, first by Italian Fascists of their own state; Arendt gave it a sustained historical and philosophical account. She drew on memoirs, Nazi documents released at Nuremberg, and testimony from both camp systems.

Composition

Arendt began work on the book in the mid-1940s and completed it in 1949. Harcourt, Brace published it in New York in 1951; Secker & Warburg published it in London as The Burden of Our Time. The 1958 second edition added Ideology and Terror and an epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (later dropped). The 1966 and later editions added prefaces to each part and incorporated new material, and the parts were also published separately.

Reception

The book established Arendt's reputation and became a founding text of the study of totalitarianism during the Cold War. Reviewers and later scholars debated its pairing of Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union, the connection it draws between overseas imperialism and later European regimes, and its account of antisemitism. Its chapter on statelessness has been widely cited in discussions of human rights and refugees. Arendt developed its themes in The Human Condition and in Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose phrase about the banality of evil prompted controversy over whether she had revised the earlier idea of radical evil, a question scholars still discuss.

Comparisons

• hayek-the-road-to-serfdom

  Hayek in 1944 traced totalitarianism to central economic planning; Arendt, seven years later, traces it to antisemitism, overseas expansion, the decay of the nation-state and the rise of atomized masses, and treats economics as secondary.

• solzhenitsyn-the-gulag-archipelago

  Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the Soviet camps gives from the inside much of what Arendt analyzes from outside in ch. 12: arrests of whole categories of people and camps as the center of the regime.

• leviathan

  Arendt devotes part of ch. 5 to Hobbes, reading his account of power and the commonwealth as the philosophy of a bourgeoisie that wanted the state to accumulate power without limit.

• heart-of-darkness

  Arendt reads Conrad's novella in ch. 7 as a portrait of the men who went to Africa in the age of expansion and of what became of law and conscience there.

• mans-search-for-meaning

  Frankl's account of the inner freedom some prisoners kept in the camps offers a witness's answer to Arendt's analysis of camps designed to destroy spontaneity and individuality.

• city-of-god

  Arendt, who wrote her dissertation on Augustine, ends the book with his teaching in City of God that man was created so that a beginning might be made.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Dreyfus Affair at the end of Part One, and how the mob, the army, the press and the courts each behave.
• Arendt's reading of Hobbes in Part Two, ch. 5, where power is described as something that must keep growing.
• Ch. 9 on refugees and the stateless, and the moment Arendt asks what rights are worth to someone no state will protect.
• The onion-like structure of the movements in ch. 11, with sympathizers outside and the leader at the center.
• The last pages of ch. 13, where Arendt turns from terror to loneliness and then to Augustine on new beginnings.

Key terms and names

Totalitarianism

In Arendt's account, a new form of government, realized in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, that uses ideology and terror to dominate every part of human life.

Statelessness

The condition of persons who belong to no state, which Arendt studied in the refugees of interwar Europe and knew from her own life.

Masses

Arendt's term for people who belong to no class, party or interest group and are held together by no common world; the movements organized them.

Objective enemy

A person persecuted not for anything done but because ideology assigns his category (race or class) to the enemies of history or nature.

Ideology

In ch. 13, a system that claims to explain all of history by deducing it from one premise, so that logic replaces experience.

Radical evil

Arendt's name in this book for the attempt to make human beings superfluous, a crime beyond the categories of punishment and forgiveness.

Natality

A term Arendt developed later for the human capacity to begin something new, grounded in the fact of birth; it appears here in the closing appeal to Augustine.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are the three parts of the book, and what period does each chiefly cover?
2. Comprehension According to ch. 9, what happened to the rights of refugees and stateless people after the First World War?
3. Comprehension What does Arendt mean by the masses, and why were they available to totalitarian movements?
4. Interpretation Why does Arendt think that consistency, rather than truth, made totalitarian propaganda persuasive?
5. Interpretation How do the three stages of total domination in ch. 12 differ from one another, and why does Arendt place them in that order?
6. Interpretation Why does a book about the destruction of freedom end with the idea of beginning?
7. Big Question Are human rights secure without a political community willing to enforce them?
8. Big Question What protects a people from accepting a system that explains everything?

Faith Connections

• Genesis 1:27 (Scripture)

  Arendt does not argue from Scripture, but the doctrine that each person is created in the image of God is one answer to her question of what makes human beings more than members of a category, and to the attempt she describes to make them superfluous.

• Leviticus 19:33-34 (Scripture)

  The command to treat the stranger who dwells among you as the native-born speaks to the problem of the stateless person that Arendt describes in ch. 9.

• Augustine, City of God XII.20 (numbered XII.21 in some editions) (Church Fathers)

  Augustine teaches that man was created as a new beginning in time; Arendt, who had written on Augustine, closes the book with this sentence as the ground of human freedom.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Great Conversation)

  Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison, reflects on folly and on those who surrender independent judgment to slogans, a Christian witness that converses with Arendt's analysis of ideology.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Totalitarianism is a new form of government, not a harsher tyranny. It became possible when antisemitism became a political weapon, when imperial expansion taught Europeans to govern by race and decree, when the nation-state collapsed and left millions without rights, and when atomized masses could be organized by movements offering a total ideology. Combining ideology with terror, such regimes seek total domination, which requires destroying the space of human freedom. Since that freedom rests on the human capacity to begin anew, it can be suppressed but not finally abolished.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. Arendt builds her definitions by contrast: tyranny against totalitarianism, solitude against loneliness, the parvenu against the pariah, the real opponent against the objective enemy, and, at the close, the logic of ideology against the capacity to begin (quote 2).

Debate: Resolved: That loneliness, more than poverty, prepared the masses for totalitarian movements.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using ch. 9, explain why Arendt concludes that the rights of man failed the stateless, and argue whether her conclusion that rights depend on political membership is correct.

Comparison with The Road to Serfdom: Hayek and Arendt both wrote in the 1940s to explain how free societies gave way to total states. Compare the causes each identifies and argue which account better explains one regime they both discuss.

Medical Lens

The book is political history and theory, not medicine, but ch. 12's analysis of the concentration and extermination camps is relevant to the history of trauma. Arendt describes the camps as an attempt to transform human nature through hunger, exhaustion, anonymity and the unpredictability of death, and she draws on survivors' accounts and early psychological studies of prisoners in extreme situations. Her stages of total domination (the destruction of the juridical person, the moral person and the individual) have been read alongside clinical writing on survivors, though she wrote as a political theorist. Her account of loneliness in ch. 13, as the experience of not belonging to the world, has also interested writers on the social conditions of mental suffering; such links are interpretive.

• Part Three, ch. 12, Total Domination

  The camps as laboratories of total domination; the killing of the juridical person, the moral person and individuality.

  Death Dying Starvation Nutrition Trauma Shell Shock
• Part Three, ch. 13, Ideology and Terror

  Loneliness distinguished from isolation and solitude, presented as the ground prepared for total domination.

  Trauma Shell Shock

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Using ch. 9, map the situation of a stateless refugee in 1930s Europe: which offices, borders and laws he would meet, and what protection he could find at each.

• Essay

  Arendt distinguishes solitude, isolation and loneliness in ch. 13. Define each in your own words and argue which of the three a healthy civic life most depends on.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1951 between Arendt and Hayek on what caused totalitarianism, each drawing on the argument of their own book.

Further Reading

• Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

  The standard biography, with a full account of the book's writing.

• The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt

  Her 1958 study of labor, work and action, which develops the idea of natality.

• Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

• Why Arendt Matters, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl