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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Part Three, ch. 13, Ideology and Terror

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