The Totalitarian Puzzle

When Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism appeared in 1951, the West had only recently prevailed over Hitler’s Germany and now faced the menace of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Origins was the first major philosophical effort to deal with totalitarianism, and more than a half-century later it remains perhaps the most significant. But, as several of the 13 scholars who consider Arendt’s magnum opus in Social Research (Summer 2002) observe: Origins is as difficult and disjointed as it is erudite, imaginative, and provocative. The masterwork of the German émigré writer (1906–75) "defies any simple attempt to state a key thesis or argument," notes Richard J. Bernstein, a professor of philosophy at New School University, "and it is difficult to find coherence among its various parts." The book’s title itself is misleading, in that Arendt did not seek to uncover the immediate causes of totalitarianism. "It is even difficult to determine just what she means by totalitarianism and its distinguishing characteristics," says Bernstein.

The explanation for Origins’ confusing structure is simple, according to Roy T. Tsao, a political scientist at Georgetown University. "Arendt arrived at her basic views on totalitarianism only after she had already written nearly all" of the book’s first two parts, on anti-Semitism and imperialism. A third part was to deal with Nazism, which at the time she saw as the direct successor to imperialism. But her views changed sometime around 1947, and she came to regard Nazism and Bolshevism as species of totalitarianism. Arendt simply grafted her new theory onto the trunk of the old, revising the earlier parts only enough to avoid blatant

contradictions. To further complicate matters, in later editions she added a chapter, "Ideology and Terror," that represented a still newer phase in her thinking, "displacing without fully dislodging the arguments of the one before," writes Tsao.

Totalitarianism, in Arendt’s philosophical appraisal, represented a new kind of government, says Jerome Kohn, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at New School University. "The hallmark of totalitarianism, a form of rule supported by uprooted masses who ironically and also tragically sought a world in which they would enjoy public recognition, was the appearance of what [she] called ‘radical’ and ‘absolute’ evil." "Difficult as it is to conceive of an absolute [radical] evil even in the face of its factual existence," Arendt wrote, "it seems to be closely connected with the invention of a system in which all men are equally superfluous," including even, in their own fanatical minds, the "totalitarian murderers" themselves. Carrying out their logic of total domination, they aimed to transform human nature itself.

A theme that runs through all of Arendt’s thinking, says Bernstein, is the opposition between historical necessity and political freedom: "Totalitarianism is not something that had to happen. She rightly abhorred any suggestion that somehow it was the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment, the history of metaphysics, the nature of Western rationalism, modern bureaucracy, or modern technology. Like any disastrous contingent political event, it might have been prevented if individuals had collectively assumed the political responsibility for combating it."

Arendt did not imagine that the totalitarian danger would pass with the demise of the Soviet Union. "Perhaps the most grim, disturbing, but realistic sentence in the entire book," writes Bernstein, "comes near its conclusion, when she says, ‘Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’

"Anyone who has lived through the uses of terror and torture, the massacres, genocides, and ‘ethnic cleansings’ that have occurred all over the world during the past few decades," adds Bernstein, "is painfully aware of how strong and ever present these temptations are."