The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1948.
Practical philosophies emerge out of necessity.[1] When Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book carried with it a sense of urgency. It stays relevant as a reminder of how easily we can be led astray by following the crowd. She teaches us to look at history as the result of unique and complex conditions. Arendt wants the reader to reflect on the circumstances that have created their views, acknowledge their own fallibility, and to open to the possibility of having it all wrong. Her book is a warning of our tendency to choose simple narratives when other ideas may seem daunting or implicate us somehow. Arendt does not divide the world so neatly into ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’. Instead, she invites readers to a path of redemption.
The subterranean stream of Western history finally came to the surface and usurped the dignity of western tradition. That subterranean stream of western civilization includes slavery, the suppression of women, anti-Semitism, communism, fascism, colonialism, and imperialism.
In its early chapters, she reminds the reader that the atrocities of the twentieth century had not ended with the war. Although there may be a temptation to see the Nazis as an isolated phenomenon, the product of a few ‘bad apples’, Arendt reminds us how easy it was for many European populations to adopt the mob mentality that gave rise to extremism. Her concern is that history tends to repeat itself when we absolve ourselves of personal responsibility. If we believe that we would not have been complicit (or even active) in these movements, we may allow our own social behavior to go unchecked. Arendt demands from her reader a personal investment in unlocking the true narratives behind Nazism and Stalinism. By reducing the complex history behind these movements to oversimplified excuses such as ignorance, we fail to be accountable for the past.
So, the book is structured into three essays. Since we are all fallible, she seems to be saying, it is proper to think critically and constructively about our history, avoiding the temptation of simply looking down on those who got it wrong.
First, on antisemitism, she traces the development of anti-Semitism in the 18th and 19th century. She asks if a culture of racism set the terms of Nazi rule, where did it come from? In her description of the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi Party, Arendt is admirable for her humanization of those with whom she contends. Anti-Semitism in Europe arose in the context of the rise of capitalism, which brought about a decline of Jews in government power and wealth.
q The Jewish leadership naively thought they could make friends with power, and did not need to make friends with the people. They had faith in the political state.
q The Rothchild family exerted its influence, and also declined in influence.
q The Jewish family preserved its traditions.
q Aristocratic anti-Semitism grew as Jewish alliance with the state grew.
q Banking scandals of 1880 to 1900 turned leftist lower classes against them.
q Europe developed several anti-Semitic parties.
Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around anti-Semitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and uprootedness of the survivors, made the Jewish question so prominent in our everyday political life. What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their discovery and their chief interest have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.
Her conclusions here offended some communities by its implication that Jewish leaders had been partly complicit in the Holocaust through their complacency. Commentators found Arendt’s conclusions to be dismissive of those who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and had faced impossible choices. Only six years after the end of the war these wounds were still very raw. Similarly, in 1963, her essay ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, published as a series in the New Yorker, resulted in her near-total exclusion from social and academic circles for her claims about ‘the banality of evil’. People wanted to believe that the Nazis were a monstrous aberration who could never come again. She suggested that most were ordinary conformists and followers; the kind of people we can find all too easily in any time.
Second, on imperialism, imperialist policies have brought about the decline of Europe. She discusses the emergence of racism and imperialism in the 19th and 20th century up to National Socialism. Here she argues that imperialism prepared the ground for totalitarianism and provided the preconditions and precedents for its perpetrators I conceive this book in the context of both Nazi and Bolshevik variety of totalitarianism. Imperialism grew from 1884 to 1914. It could not have occurred without the enthusiastic involvement of the middle class. Her discussion of imperialism tries to really understand the motivations and incentives that legitimized each new system of oppression and exploitation.
q Political awakening of the bourgeois.
q French use of colonies for national defense.
q British allowed the conquered people to keep culture and religion.
q It was caused by overproduction of capital and superfluous money.
q It represented a movement from production to speculation.
q Money went first to the foreign lands, and then power.
q Hobbes is the philosophical foundation of this economic foundation. Since power is only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through the process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from the outside; otherwise, it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. Hobbes embodies the necessity of power accumulation in the theory of the state of nature, the condition of perpetual war of all against all, in which the various single states remain in relationship with each other like their individual subjects before they submitted to the authority of a Commonwealth. This ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power at the expense of other states. Hobbes based his position on the proposition that the never-ending accumulation of property must be based on a never-ending accumulation of power.
q Alliance between capital and mob was necessary to carry this off.
q Germany had growth around revolutionary workers.
q Race is not the beginning of humanity politically, but it is its end.
q Race motivated imperialism, race-thinking, and decidedly not class-thinking. Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when the French have assumed the role of commanders of a special force, when the English have turned into white people, when Germans become Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western civilization. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of humanity but its unnatural death.
q Bureaucracy implemented imperialism.
q Rudyard Kipling built the legends of imperialism.
q Evolutionary thought of Spencer provided the background for imperial effort.
q Nazi was pan-German movement; Bolshevism was a pan-Slavic movement. Both were imperialistic, with tribal theories of chosenness. Both had conflicts with Judaism.
q Burke said that rights come from within the nation versus the abstraction of the rights of humanity that, he said, could only to lead savagery. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.
Cecil Rhodes said: expansion is everything, these stars, these vast worlds that we can never each. I would annex the planets if I could. Others sought solace in political parties. The slogan “above the parties, and the appeal to people of all parties, and the boast that they would stand far removed from the strife of parties and represent only a national purpose was equally characteristic of all imperialistic groups, where it appeared as a natural consequence of their exclusive interest in foreign policy in which the nation was supposed to act as a whole in any event, independent of classes and parties. The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were regarded as savages and, afraid that they might end by being considered beasts, they insisted on their nationality, the last sign of their former citizenship, as their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of natural rights, their preference for national rights, comes precisely from their realization that natural rights are granted even to savages. Burke had already feared that natural inalienable rights would confirm only the right of the naked savage, and therefore reduce civilized nations to the status of savagery. Because only savages have nothing more to fall back upon than the more desperately when they have lost the rights and protection that such nationality once gave them. Only their past with its entailed inheritance seems to attest to the fact that they still belong to the civilized world. If a human being loses political status, he or she should fall under the protection of abstract rights of humanity. The opposite is the case. It seems that to lose political rights means to lose rights of being human. They have lost those parts of the world and all those aspects of human existence that are the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice.
Third, and finally, on totalitarianism. In analyzing antisemitism, imperialism, and racism, Arendt did not want to provide a causal explanation for totalitarianism, but rather a historical investigation of the elements that “crystallized into totalitarianism.” Totalitarianism is a party in power, based on lies, must now try to rule with facts; it does not succeed. The leaders regard the wealth of the nation as their personal loot, as in imperialism. Union of party and state is common. Iron Curtain is madness and unreality. It destroys sense of justice, morality, and individuality. People become superfluous. Common experience of isolation prepares the way for totalitarianism.
What does Arendt understand by the term?[2] Emphasizing its “horrible originality,” Arendt understood totalitarianism to be an entirely new political phenomenon that differed “essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship” (OT, 460) and thus broke with all political and legal tradition. In the 14 chapters of the third part, Arendt analyzes the conditions and features of this “novel form of government” (OT, 460). According to her, crucial factors that made totalitarianism possible included collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war. While the leaders of the movements belonged to the “mob” (OT, 326), their many supporters were recruited from these rootless and lonely “masses” (OT, 311) through propaganda (OT, 341): “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (OT, 474).
Thus, totalitarianism is based on a secular, pseudo-scientific ideology that reduces the complexity of reality to the logic of one idea pretending to be able to explain everything. In its self-understanding, the movement is merely carrying out the alleged laws of nature or history outlined by the ideology. It is quintessential, however, that this “central fiction” a totalitarian system rests upon, is translated into a “functioning reality” (OT, 364) by a “completely new” form of “totalitarian organization” (OT, 364): Characteristically, the state is not a monolithic, strictly ordered system, but has a deliberately chaotic, fluid and shapeless structure with competing institutions and a “fluctuating hierarchy” (OT, 369), which makes predictability, trust and accountability impossible. Above this “maze”, however, “lies the power nucleus of the country, the superefficient and supercompetent services of the secret police” (OT, 420). Thus, the organization combines deliberate chaos with the “iron band” (OT, 466) of total control through extreme coercion and terror.
While the regime openly claims unlimited power and aims at world domination, their “real secret” (OT, 436) are the concentration and extermination camps as their “true central institution” (OT, 438). According to Arendt, the camps “serve as laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified.” (OT, 437). The total terror in the camps is the “essence of totalitarian government” (OT, 466), because here total domination reaches its abysmal goal: To reduce “the infinite plurality” of human beings into one interchangeable “bundle of reactions” and thus eliminate “spontaneity itself” (OT, 438). It seemed as if the real mission of the totalitarian apparatus was to “to make men superfluous” (OT, 445). Therefore, the “hurricane of nihilism” (Canovan 2000, 30) unleashed by the totalitarian regime cannot create an new world order, but ultimately leads to nothing but unprecedented destruction: It even “bears the germ of its own destruction.” (OT, 478).
What makes totalitarianism difficult to understand is not only the gigantic scale of atrocities committed by it, but its senselessness. Arendt maintained that totalitarianism defy common sense understanding, because their crimes cannot be explained by self-interested or utilitarian motives or ends (cf. OT, 440). The camps did not serve evil, but useful purposes like forced labor or slavery, but showed that an “absolute” (OT, viii-ix) and “radical evil” is possible (OT, 443; cf. section 6).
Understanding totalitarianism despite this, is of the utmost political importance, because insight into its structures and mode of operation provides “the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.” (OT, 442)
Arendt discusses the transformation of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the non-totalitarian world, and the use of terror, essential to this form of government. Totalitarian movements are fundamentally different from autocratic regimes, as far as autocratic regimes seek only to gain absolute political power and to outlaw opposition, while totalitarian regimes seek to dominate every aspect of everyone's life as a prelude to world domination.
... Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Arendt wrestled with the truth because the alternative was to allow reality to become blurred by what is comfortable. In such blurring, totalitarian movements thrive. For Arendt, a key feature of totalitarianism - in contrast to other forms of tyranny or dictatorship – is the toying with truth, deliberate confusion of fiction and reality, and incessant use of mass media to manipulate the way millions of people experience the world. In our era of fake news, targeted messaging and ‘cancel culture’, there is still something profound in this warning. Arendt is alerting us to the use of propaganda and conspiracy to change the perceived structure of reality on a whim.
A central worry is that these conditions emerge by our own hand. It is the failure to engage critically with our own ideas that draws us into an echo chamber of isolation, detached from the world, and so paving the way for radical ideology.
Such scholars as Jürgen Habermas have supported Arendt in her 20th-century criticism of totalitarian readings of Marxism. That commentary on Marxism has indicated concerns with the limits of totalitarian perspectives often associated with Marx's apparent over-estimation of the emancipatory potential of the forces of production. Habermas extends that critique in his writings on functional reductionism. The theory of communicative action understands language as the foundational component of society and is an attempt to update Marxism by "drawing on Systems theory (Luhmann), developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Mead, etc.)"
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