 The 1951 edition | |
| Author | Hannah Arendt |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Nazism, Stalinism, totalitarianism |
| Publisher | Schocken Books |
Publication date | 1951 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 477 |
| OCLC | 1163364 |
| 320.53 22 | |
| LC Class | JC480 .A74 2004 |
The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century.
The Origins of Totalitarianism [1] was first published in English in 1951. [note 1] A German translation was published in 1955 as Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft ("Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Rule"). A second, enlarged edition was published in 1958, and contained two additional chapters, replacing her original "Concluding Remarks". [2] Chapter Thirteen was titled "Ideology and Terror: A novel form of government", which she had published separately in 1953. [3] Chapter Fourteen dealt with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, entitled "Epilogue: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution". Subsequent editions omitted this chapter, which was published separately in English ("Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution") [4] and German (Die ungarische Revolution und der totalitäre Imperialismus) [5] in 1958. [6]
Like many of Arendt's books, The Origins of Totalitarianism is structured as three essays: "Antisemitism", "Imperialism" and "Totalitarianism". The book describes the various preconditions and subsequent rise of anti-Semitism in central, eastern, and western Europe in the early-to-mid 19th century; then examines the New Imperialism, from 1884 to the start of the First World War (1914–18); then traces the emergence of racism as an ideology, and its modern application as an “ideological weapon for imperialism”, by the Boers during the Great Trek in the early 19th century (1830s–40s). In this book, Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," that "differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship" [7] in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries. [1] [8] Further, Arendt states that, owing to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in its apparatus of coercion, "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within" [9] She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy. That totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only. [10] [8] A key concept arising from this book was the application of Kant's phrase "Radical Evil", [11] which she applied to the men who created and carried out such tyranny and their depiction of their victims as "Superfluous People". [12] [13]
Arendt begins the book with an analysis of the rise of antisemitism in Europe and particularly focused on the Dreyfus affair. [10] In particular, Arendt traces the social movement of the Jewry in Europe since their emancipation by the French edict of 1792, their special role in supporting and maintaining the nation-state and their failure to assimilate into the European class society. [14] European Jewry's association with the nation-state meant that their destinies were to an extent tied. As Arendt observed, "modern anti-semitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed." [15] Nazi Germany would later exploit that antisemitism and targeted the Jewry, which was construed, among other things, as a proxy for the nation-state. In so doing, Nazism sought, among other reasons, to organize the masses to bring about the disintegration of the nation-state system and to advance the totalitarian project, which was global in its orientation. [16]
She then discusses scientific racism and its role in colonialist imperialism, which was itself characterized by unlimited territorial and economic expansion. [10] That unlimited expansion necessarily opposed itself and was hostile to the territorially-delimited nation-state. Arendt traces the roots of modern imperialism to the accumulation of excess capital in European nation-states during the 19th century. This capital required overseas investments outside of Europe to be productive and political control had to be expanded overseas to protect the investments. She then examines "continental imperialism" (pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism) and the emergence of "movements" substituting themselves to the political parties. Those movements are hostile to the state and antiparliamentarist and gradually institutionalize anti-Semitism and other kinds of racism.
Arendt concludes that while Italian fascism was a nationalist authoritarian movement, Nazism and Stalinism were totalitarian movements that sought to eliminate all restraints upon the power of the movement. She attributes the difference, in part, to a minimum necessary population:
[T]otalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations.... [E]ven Mussolini, who was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule. [17]
The book's final section is devoted to describing the mechanics of totalitarian movements by focusing on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Here, 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, says Arendt, insofar 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. She states:
... 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. [18]
Hannah Arendt considers the Soviet and Nazi regimes alongside European colonies in Africa and Asia, as their later and gruesome transformation due to the effect of imperial boomerang. She analyzes Russian pan-Slavism as a stage in the development of racism and totalitarianism. Her analysis was continued by Alexander Etkind in the book "Internal colonization: Russia's imperial experience". [19]
Arendt discusses the use of front organizations, fake governmental agencies, and esoteric doctrines as a means of concealing the radical nature of totalitarian aims from the non-totalitarian world. Near the end of the book, Arendt writes that loneliness is a precondition for totalitarian domination, with people who are socially isolated being more likely to be attracted to totalitarian ideology and movements. [20]
Le Monde placed the book among the 100 best books of any kind of the 20th century, and the National Review ranked it #15 on its list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. [21] The Intercollegiate Studies Institute listed it among the 50 best non-fiction books of the century. [22] The book made a major impact on Norman Podhoretz, who compared the pleasure of reading it to that of reading a great poem or novel. [23]
The book has also attracted criticism, among them a piece in the Times Literary Supplement in 2009 by University of Chicago Professor Bernard Wasserstein. [24] Wasserstein cited Arendt's systematic internalization of the various anti-Semitic and Nazi sources and books she was familiar with, which led to the use of many of these sources as authorities in the book. [25] On the other hand, Gershom Scholem criticized Eichmann in Jerusalem but still praised the Origins of Totalitarianism. [26] In several other places, Scholem mentions that he learned from Ernst Bloch [27] that much Jewish literature and testimony in respect of some historical periods is not available due to pogroms, leaving antisemitic sources as the only surviving references for those periods. [28]
The historian Emmanuelle Saada disputes Arendt's work and the general scholarly consensus that the rise of scientific racism directly correlates with the rise of colonialist imperialism. Saada contests that there is little evidence to support that ideas like those of Arthur de Gobineau, whom Arendt explicitly mentions, hold an important place in the scientific justification of European colonialism. Saada asserts that Arendt overemphasizes the role of scientific racism in forming modern totalitarianism, but in reality, Arendt should attribute blame to the "bureaucratic racism" she discusses elsewhere in the text. [29]
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 in the life-world in his Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason . [30]
Historian John Lukacs was highly critical calling it a "flawed and dishonest book" with "unhistorical and shrilly verbose" and that Arendt coverage of the Soviet Union was superficial. [31] [32]
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is placed on the far right-wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.
Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media.
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Gershom Scholem was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian and university professor, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies (ICES) in La Roche-sur-Yon, and director of a collection specialized in the history of communist movements and communist states.
Karl Dietrich Bracher was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, born in Stuttgart. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950.Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959.
Claude Lefort was a French philosopher and activist.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian, whose main subjects are history of the Soviet Union and history of modern Russia, especially the Stalin era and the Great Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" of Communist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History" is an essay written in early 1940 by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. It is one of Benjamin's best-known, and most controversial works.
Inverted totalitarianism is a system where economic powers like corporations exert subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Over time, this theory predicts a sense of powerlessness and political apathy, continuing a slide away from political egalitarianism.
The Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism was a declaration which was initiated by the Czech government and signed on 3 June 2008 by prominent European politicians, former political prisoners and historians, among them former Czech President Václav Havel and future German President Joachim Gauck, calling for "Europe-wide condemnation of, and education about, the crimes of communism." Much of the content of the declaration reproduced demands formulated by the European People's Party in 2004, and draws heavily on the theory or conception of totalitarianism.
Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two regimes, and why both came to prominence simultaneously. During the 20th century, comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism were made on totalitarianism, ideology, and personality cult. Both regimes were seen in contrast to the liberal democratic Western world, emphasising the similarities between the two.
The Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies is a research institute hosted by Dresden University of Technology and devoted to the comparative analysis of dictatorships. The institute focusses particularly on the structures of Nazism and Communism as well as on the presuppositions and consequences of the two ideological dictatorships. The institute is named after the German-American philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt, whose magnum opus The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is considered across disciplines as one of the most influential works of the 20th century and continues to shape in particular scholarly discussions of totalitarian systems of political domination.
The Seventy Years Declaration was a declaration initiated by the American academic Dovid Katz and the Australian academic Danny Ben-Moshe, and released on 20 January 2012 to protest the policies of several European states and European Union bodies concerning the evaluation, remembrance and prosecution of crimes committed by communist dictatorships in Europe, specifically policies of many European countries and the EU treating the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe as equally criminal. Presented as a response to the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism initiated by the Czech government in 2008 to condemn communism as totalitarian and criminal, it explicitly rejects the idea that the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler are morally equivalent, i.e. the totalitarianism theory that was popularized by academics such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski and became dominant in Western political discourse during the Cold War, and that gained new popularity in many new EU member states after the end of communism, resulting in international resolutions, establishment of research institutes and museums, and the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. The declaration also states that communist regimes did not commit genocides, citing the 1948 Genocide Convention which restricts genocide to mass killings related to ethnicity, race, nationality, or religion. The declaration claims that the Holocaust was unique, a subject of some debate. The declaration was signed by 70, mostly leftist, parliamentarians from Europe. It was released on the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin.
Waldemar Gurian was a Russian-born German-American political scientist, author, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is regarded particularly as a theorist of totalitarianism. He wrote widely on political Catholicism.
On Revolution is a 1963 book by the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who presents a comparison of two of the main 18th-century revolutions: the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
The onion metaphor is a metaphor used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It is used to provide an example of the underlying structure that characterizes the organization of totalitarianism.
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