The Origins of Totalitarianism

Citation

Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (Original work published 1951).

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Arendt's first major work appeared in 1951, in the aftermath of Nazism and in the early years of the Cold War. It studies the Nazi and Stalinist regimes and insists that they were something new: a "novel form of government" that differs in kind from despotism, tyranny and dictatorship, because it uses terror against whole populations and not only against opponents. She does not offer a causal explanation. The book traces the elements that, in her phrase, "crystallized" into totalitarianism, and it is organised in three parts that were originally distinct essays: Antisemitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. This edition has thirteen chapters and includes the prefaces that Arendt wrote in 1967 for each of the three parts. An earlier, enlarged edition had included a chapter on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which later editions dropped.

Part One: Antisemitism (Chapters 1–4)

Part One follows the position of European Jews from emancipation onward. It covers "Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense" (the title in the Penguin Classics edition), "The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth of Antisemitism", "The Jews and Society" and "The Dreyfus Affair". Arendt argues that the Jews were closely tied to the nation-state, which they served and supported but did not assimilate into class society, and that modern antisemitism grew as traditional nationalism declined. The Dreyfus Affair is the central case study.

Part Two: Imperialism (Chapters 5–9)

Part Two turns to the age of imperial expansion from the 1880s to the First World War. The chapters are "The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie", "Race-Thinking before Racism", "Race and Bureaucracy", "Continental Imperialism: The Pan-Movements" and "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man". Arendt links imperialism to surplus capital seeking investment abroad and to the political control needed to protect it, traces the growth of race-thinking into a political ideology, and describes the Pan-German and Pan-Slav "movements" that replaced parties and were hostile to the state. She argues that imperialism provided preconditions and precedents for the totalitarian regimes.

Part Three: Totalitarianism (Chapters 10–13)

Part Three analyses the regimes themselves, mainly Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. "A Classless Society" describes how classes dissolved into atomised masses and how the leaders came from the "mob". "The Totalitarian Movement" deals with propaganda, front organisations and the organisation of the movement. "Totalitarianism in Power" examines the deliberately shapeless structure of the state, the secret police and the concentration and extermination camps, which Arendt treats as the central institution where the belief that everything is possible is tested. "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government" sums up the argument: ideology supplies a single explanation of history, and terror carries it out by destroying the spontaneity and plurality of human beings.

Key Concepts

Part One and Part Two

• Nation-state and its decline: the framework within which Jewish emancipation and antisemitism are explained, and whose decline opens Part Two's end.
• Race-thinking and bureaucracy: the ideological and administrative preparations for domination found in imperial rule.
• Pan-movements: movements that claimed to speak for a people across borders and displaced the party system.

Part Three

• Mob and masses: the declassed leaders and the isolated, uprooted followers on whom the movements relied.
• Ideology and terror: a one-idea explanation of history, and terror used as an end in itself rather than as a means.
• Loneliness and superfluousness: the condition of isolated people, and the aim of making human beings superfluous.
• Radical evil: Arendt's term for crimes that cannot be explained by self-interest or ordinary motives.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A framework for what was new. Arendt separates totalitarianism from older forms of oppression, and her analysis of terror, ideology and the camps still shapes discussion of the subject.
• Long historical reach. By tracing antisemitism, imperialism and race-thinking before the regimes, the book explains how elements from different periods combined.
• Distinct concepts. The mob, the masses, loneliness and superfluousness give analysts terms that are widely used even where her wider argument is contested.

Limitations

• Contested history. Historians have questioned parts of the sources and argument. Bernard Wasserstein criticised her reliance on antisemitic and Nazi sources, and Emmanuelle Saada doubts that scientific racism was central to colonial justification. John Lukacs called the book flawed and found its treatment of the Soviet Union superficial.
• Uneven parts. The three parts differ in subject and method, and the connection between them is an argument about elements and preconditions, not a causal account.
• Scope. The analysis centres on Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union and on Europe, so the wider range of non-democratic regimes has to be sought in comparative studies such as Linz's.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the course mates, the book is a work of political theory and history rather than a modern comparative study. Linz's Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes distinguishes totalitarian from authoritarian systems and develops a typology of authoritarian regimes, and Frantz's Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know is a short primer on how authoritarian rule works today. Dahl's Polyarchy and the textbook Democratization approach regime change through conditions and measurement, and Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die studies how elected leaders erode democracy from within, which is a different process from the one Arendt describes.

Reading Arendt first gives the historical and conceptual background for all of these. Reading the comparative books first can help in judging how well her categories travel.

How to Use This Book

The book is long and demanding, and it assumes some knowledge of modern European history. A good route for a first reading is the prefaces, Part Three in full (Chapters 10–13), and then Part Two, Chapter 9, and Part One, Chapters 2 and 4, for the background. Part Two, Chapters 6–8, can be read more quickly, or after Part Three, for the histories of race-thinking and imperial administration.

When reading, keep two lists: what Arendt says was new about the regimes, and what she says was inherited from earlier periods. Check each claim about Nazism or Stalinism against a modern history of the period, and use Linz or Frantz to see how later scholars have used or revised the term. Chapter 13, which was first published as a separate essay in 1953, can be read on its own as a summary of the argument.