The Origins of Totalitarianism

Summary: A work tracing the rise of totalitarian governments in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to their origins in racism and class warfare, reactions to imperialism, and the mechanics that distinguish totalitarian states from other kinds of states.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is on my "Ten Books I Want to Read Before I Die" list. After over a month of reading, I can check this book off the list, but I can't dismiss it from my thoughts. It is long, the prose is demanding, and the ideas are critically important to our times. I certainly will not do the book justice in a blog-length review. But I hope I can give you a sense of what it is about and why I think the book is worth the effort.

The book is written in three parts. Many focus show more on the third, "Totalitarianism" and neglect the first two, on "Antisemitism" and Imperialism." The first part describe the rise of race thinking, particularly in the context of the nation-state, and how the Jews, as stateless persons were particularly vulnerable to racist attacks. This was epitomized in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, of Jewish descent, was wrongly accused of treason and convicted, arousing latent fears about Jews in France, indeed fears about the motives of Jews in other European countries.

Imperialism arose, in Arendt's analysis as economic expansion came up against national limits. Arendt writes:

“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.”

In turn, a form of continental imperialism arose, as an alternative to the existing parties characterized as "pan-Slav" or "pan-German." This played into ideologies that led to decline of the parliamentary nation states, institutionalizing either anti-Semitism, or anti-bourgeois sentiment (even after the bourgeoisie in Russia was eliminated).

The third part describes the methodology of totalitarian movements eventuating in totalitarian states. Such movements substitute masses for classes, kept in subjection by an inner ring of secret police using methods of terror to keep people in line, using camps and gulags to destroy real and projected enemies. Propaganda plays a critical role in creating an alternate reality that followers of the totalitarian leader prefer to truth, particularly in engendering fear of an "other" who threatens the state. Arendt writes,

“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.”

Arendt's book concludes, in its revised edition, with a chapter discussing how loneliness and isolation of individuals serve as pre-conditions for totalitarianism.

The one thing I missed in her analysis was a discussion of how the disruption of World War I and global economic depression contributed to the conditions giving rise to Stalinism and Nazism. It seems to me that these conditions offered fertile ground for the use of racist and classist attacks, widespread dissatisfaction with the existing nation-state (which she does touch on), and the appeal of a strong leader.

This book has gone through a resurgence of interest in light of current political developments in the US. The language of tyranny and totalitarianism has been thrown around, but in reality we are a long way from Arendt's description of governments that dominate every aspect of a person's life through government-sponsored terror, secret police, and concentration camps (apart from the temporary interning of undocumented refugees and their children).

Nevertheless, there are concerning trends that Arendt observes in these totalitarian societies that are present in American society:

--Nationalist organizations affirming one's racial identity while portraying other "races" as a threat to the nation's greatness.

--Deep dissatisfaction with established political parties and systems.

--The blurring of distinctions between fact and fiction, of truth and falsehood to uphold particular narratives of reality and the questioning of motives of any who challenge those narratives.

--The increasing isolation and loneliness of growing numbers of people, confined to echo chambers of virtual communities, instead of being surrounded by robust local communities.

--A growing focus on national political leadership, and particularly on finding strong figures who "get things done" as the critical element to a thriving national life, as opposed to local forms of government, voluntary associations, and private enterprise.

None of these of themselves eventuate in the totalitarian state of which Arendt writes. But these conditions could be exploited by leaders unafraid of using methods of totalitarian control to transform a democratic republic to a government that dominates every aspect of the human existence of its citizens.

I suspect the people of Czarist Russia and of early 1930's Germany believed that a totalitarian state "couldn't happen here." Perhaps that assumption is the most dangerous of all. Arendt's massive work traces how it did, and could. It persuaded me that it can happen here, and of the vital work each of us need to embrace in bridging rather than accentuating our divides, in protecting the institutions that help us separate fact from fiction, in renewing our neighborhoods and local communities, and in exercising deliberate care in those we elect to positions of power and trust. show less

By the title, I might have gotten the impression that this might have been a full history and treatise on all Totalitarian regimes, but I'm not at all unhappy to see how the author narrowed it down to the full wealth of circumstances that gave rise to Nazi Germany and, to a lesser degree, Stalin's Russia.

More than that, Hannah Arendt proves to be an erudite master at breaking down huge subjects and many causes into easily digestible chunks.

The focus begins on the actual origins of racial targeting and the somewhat interesting disconnect between real grievances and a targeted terror movement starting early with the Rothschild banking, 19th century propaganda, and political climates including the Dreyfus account. (Very interesting stuff show more here.)

It leads, naturally enough, into MORE of the same charges and racially-charged Us/Them mentalities and exactly how the machinations of a few could inculcate a whole nation. The trick is to slowly, surely, make everyone guilty of the same kind of injustice, formalize it and redirect all culpability toward the Leader and wash your hands of the reality, and then hold on for dear life as everyone else you know is forced into looking over their shoulders to see if they might be next on the chopping block.

It's perfectly understandable. Totalitarianism is the utter eradication of self and self-destiny under the auspices of a single, irrepressible force. It runs on fear and distrust. Everyone under Hitler was in an untenable position and knew they could lose favor at any time.

Stalin worked the same way. The results were almost always similar as a whole. Many people died, and no one knew how to go on except by hanging on to the system that brought them there.

Ideology didn't really matter. Terror was the driving force, carried along by a fierce logical insistence that they were always right. Not even dissent mattered. The logical progression, taken to its extremes, was always used as the ultimate rationality.

This book showed us a wealth of information in every step. Starting out with imperialism and ending with totalitarianism, this book also gives us some other very important insights.

Believe it or not, they're insights that apply as equal now as they did then, and not as a pithy or ironic commentary on this or that politician we hate.

Mostly, it starts out as finding an Other to hate. It could just be any Us versus Them. Dehumanize them. Blame all your problems on them. And then make your supporters do something horrible. Turn your whole nation into people who are already guilty. Make sure they remain confused and uncertain. And then turn up the heat, making them all do worse things, progressively, until they see no way out but forward. Give them no other choice.

Easy blueprint.

Who is next? Women versus men? Another Race s**tstorm? Blue Vs Red? Rich versus the poor?

Quite sobering to see how we're pushing ourselves closer and closer to Totalitarianism all the time. All we need is one single Leader who can blackmail us all into doing his bidding, and here we go! show less

Well, this was eons in the reading for me. I somehow managed to get through two degrees in Modern German history and the Holocaust without ever reading this, and now 10+ years after finishing my masters, I finally did it. And honestly I feel like I would never have gotten through the whole thing without the deep foundation of knowledge my degrees gave me.

This book is DENSE. I feel like this is an understatement. Arendt's writing is long, ponderous, and she is fond of tangents and footnotes. I rewound my audiobook many times just to truly grasp what some of these sentences were getting at. Arendt's mind is also very philosophical. There is a lot of intellectual analysis in this book, trying to get at why humanity works the way it does. show more She makes strong attempts at divining out the reasoning behind the processes that led to the actions of the Nazis (and the Soviets in Russia, though this book was clearly initially written about the Nazis specifically and then later expanded to include Stalin's Russia). It's clear why her writing was long considered required reading for people in my field.

However, now that I've read it, I can also see why I never encountered it in my own studies, half a century after she wrote it. It's outdated. Arendt's grasp on the non-European parts of the world is sketchy and sometimes relies on stereotype and misconception. And there are more than a few places where Arendt's assertions imply at least a modicum of blame on the part of the victims of the atrocities. Without a doubt she has a solid and compelling case when looking at the events of WWII through a macro lens but when it comes to the micro, her views don't really stand the test of time the way her broader arguments do. So it doesn't surprise me whatsoever that more modern studies of the era have supplanted this book in classrooms and curricula.

I will say that I'm glad I read it. It's a valuable book to have read. But it's good to have perspective about what time does to people's views and how it can age a text, because this is a clear example of effective and important writing that is still eroding a bit as time wears against it. The root of it is good. The chaff's falling away. show less

Easy enough to read, for an academic text, but certainly not an easy read. As others have commented, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is somewhat uneven. Arendt's history of the societal role of Jews in Europe probably won't interest everyone, nor will her take on the Dreyfus affair, but it allows her to ask why the Holocaust focused on the Jews rather than another racial group. Similarly, while I'm not sure that her analysis will completely convince everyone, she draws some interesting connections between the imperialist mindset and the rise of fascism, which helps explain a lot of the seemingly strange stylistic parallels between both of these systems. Her look at the pan-German and pan-Slavic movements is perhaps more directly show more related to the question of how fascism came about: a description of how the Nazis systematically erased modern nationalistic concepts of what it was to be German with more loosely defined racial and tribal definitions.

The second and third parts of Arendt's book are perhaps the most useful: they challenge many preconceptions that many people hold about fascism as a system. While many people, including myself, have tended to think of fascism as a state-centric phenomenon, Arendt convincingly argues that it did a great deal to destroy state institutions and modern concepts of statehood. She also takes pains to differentiate between authoritarian systems, in which power tends to flow downward from the top, with totalitarianism and fascism in particular, which are less organized, less self-interested, and generally more chaotic and anti-rational phenomena. This fits nicely with the ideas of historians who've expressed the view that Nazi Germany was a disorganized "polyocracy" rather than a well-regulated dictatorship. Arendt also takes aim at some of the modern periods most cherished ideas: she attacks the concept of "the Rights of Man" as absolutely unenforceable outside of a specifically national context, and her study of the trials of "displaced persons" in Europe after the First World War challenges the idea that nations are themselves naturally and necessarily cohesive entities. She also criticizes ideological thinking of all stripes as necessarily closed and of limited value, drawing, as she does, a useful comparison between Communist views of class warfare and Nazi notions of racial superiority as overarching all-embracing answers for everything.

The most chilling chapters of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" deal with the peculiar and terrible logic of totalitarian systems, in which the distinction between action and inaction and life and death tend to lose their meaning and the enlightenment-era concept of the unique self is hollowed out until people are seen as interchangeable units, or materiel. Finally, the distinctions she draws between men living together, living alone, feeling solitude, and feeling genuinely lonely are extremely affecting and make, in a roundabout way, a good case that these systems were essentially the product of the emotional displacements caused by the changes wrought by modernity. More than a historical analysis, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" also serves as a warning for those looking ahead in our own unstable times. show less

The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt
First published in 1951, Arendt has divided her book into three fairly equal parts; Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism. I found it a difficult read for a number of reasons. It is a fairly academic text and so takes some concentration to follow the arguments, Arendt can approach her arguments from several sides and so there is quite a bit of repetition, which means the text does not flow easily. The first two parts antisemitism and imperialism delve back into history; (after all the title of the book is The Origin's of........) which can make for some turgid stuff depending on your interests. The final difficulty is relating it to the time it was written (after the end of the show more second world war 1948-51) because some of it is so prescient that it could refer to the current world situation and I had to pinch myself at times to remember I was reading a book published initially in 1951. In the preface to the first edition Arendt says:

"Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organise masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives."

In part 1 Arendt discusses what she means by antisemitism and how jewish people fitted into the pre-industrial world; how they remained aloof from society even though near to the seats of power and concentrated on family ties. She goes on to tell of the rise of the jewish financiers and the Rothschilds family in particular. Their aloofness caused suspicion and there became two recognisable groups, the very rich and the masses living in various degrees of poverty. Arendt claims Benjamin Disraeli as the most successful jew. Following the scandal of the Dreyfus affair in France and the shock troops of the accusers appearing on the streets; antisemitism became a major political concept.

In part 2 Imperialism Arendt soon finds herself discussing Hobbs's Leviathan - the so called philosophy of the bourgeoise capitalist. Everyman is valued according to his worth and according to his power over others. Arendt maintains that the process of never ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of never ending accumulation of capital, determined the progressive ideology of the late 19th century and foreshadowed the rise of imperialism. She says racism has been the powerful ideology of imperialistic policies and her case study is the Dutch Boers. She claims that a new breed of jewish financiers found themselves the enemy of the capitalists and the mob. The Nazi's learnt lessons from South Africa as evidence that one could push their own race to be the master race. After the first world war their arose the problem of the stateless people and the curse of the refugees to the new nation states and once equality before the law has broken down then the nation dissolves into an anarchic mess of over and under privileged individuals.

Part 3 is Totalitarianism and Arendt takes as her examples Nazi Germany and the Bolsheviks in Russia. She reminds us that Stalin and Hitler both came to power legally. Would be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and the communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from a mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or stupid for their attention. Totalitarianism most external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. Such loyalty can be expected only from completely isolated human beings who without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances derives his sense of only having a place in the world from his belonging to a movement, his membership of the party. - Informing on others is de-rigour. Arendt says:

"The pronounced activism of totalitarian movements, their preference for terrorism over all other forms of political activity, attracted the intellectual elite and the mob alike, precisely because this terrorism was so utterly different from earlier revolutionary societies. What proved attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of ones existence on the normal strata of society."

Propaganda from a totalitarian state is directed at the outside world. Inside indoctrination is coupled with terror. Arendt demonstrates how propaganda lies were believed outside and inside the country. In Nazi Germany the lies were centred around the conspiracy of the Jews and in Russia it was the Trotskyites or the 300 families. The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the “first commandment” of the movement: “The Fuehrer is always right,” is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.

Arendt then talks about the trappings of a totalitarian state, the secret police and the concentration and extermination camps. The constant purges where new younger activists replaced more experienced individuals. She says that:

"The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut-off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror enforces oblivion. Here, murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat."

The horrors of Nazi Germany had become common knowledge in 1951 and Arendt reminds her readers how appalling conditions in the camps were, and then compares them with Stalin's Russia, where details of internment camps were just surfacing. Fresh from the memory of failed totalitarian states, she imagines the ultimate totalitarian state, the one that manages to develop to full fruition. This is in keeping with much of her book, where concrete examples lead her to theorise how events lead to situation where totalitarian states could exist.

"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."

Arendt's theories as to how both Stalin and Hitler managed to inflict totalitarian rule on their followers goes some way to explain just what happened. How ordinary people could be persuaded that they are guaranteed unconditional belonging and loyalty to a state that manifests a fictitious world through constant lying and that is hostile to the outside world. It is not the truthfulness of the Leader’s words, but the infallibility of his actions which is the basis for the structure.

I spent some time reading this book which acted like some kind of unpleasant drug. There are country's today that could be considered totalitarian, I am thinking of North Korea and others that have the seeds or early warning signs that they are heading that way: Russia, China, USA and Israel, which all happen to be nuclear armed; Afghanistan and Iran which are not yet members of the nuclear club are also in the frame. It is all pretty depressing. Hannah Arendt in her June 1966 preface said:

"Stalin, like Hitler, died in the midst of a horrifying unfinished business. And when this happened, the story this book has to tell, and the events it tries to understand and to come to terms with, came to an at least provisional end."

That sounds a little too optimistic to me - 4 stars. show less

This is a combination of three volumes, on respectively Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism. Obviously being one of the iconic books by an iconic writer of the twentieth century, it demands respectful attention. Unfortunately the style is very dense and mystifying, many of the sentences do not impart any sense on the first reading, the paragraphs go on without much structure or logical flow, there are huge footnotes in tiny print on most pages, there is an overload of references showcasing the author's erudition more than anything else, and the arguments or theoretical constructs are not always convincing. A very difficult book to read, probably requiring other, more modern, studies to achieve any understanding of these show more complex social-political processes and phenomena in a form that will be relevant to our current situations. show less

Hannah Arendt's book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" is rightly regarded as a classic. But it is not a book for the general reader. The writing, without cant or sophistry, wastes not a word and shows clear, concise and often original thinking in nearly every sentence. Thus it must be approached by a thoughtful reader with mental energy to burn and perhaps be read just several pages at a time.

The book, written in 1951 and updated, focuses on Stalin and Hitler. Totalitarian systems differ in a number of ways from mere dictatorships, such as that of Mussolini and hundreds of others since the dawn of history, and they are new in recent history. A central element is contempt for facts; another, mass terror.

Arendt shows how the regimes of show more Stalin and Hitler evolved as movements and gained, consolidated, and maintained power. There is a sense of the surreal in the incomprehensible cruelty of those two leaders who caused the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people, the prolonged torture likely of yet more, the terrorization of still more, and encouraged millions of good people to do horrible things.

And they fooled an even greater number of people, east and west, and have always had admirers, high and low, down to this day. Thus the enduring importance of this book.

The book is thoroughly researched and footnoted. I did not note a false step anywhere in fact or emphasis.

The history of Jewry as it relates to Nazism was interesting to this blue-eyed reader. Arendt (a secular Jew) concluded that, to the Nazi elite, antisemitic policy was chiefly a political tool. Arendt is concerned with the subjective experiences of victims and villains only to the extent that they influenced power and process in Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany.

Can a totalitarian system arise again? Be wary of every -ism. The world always has totalitarians-in-training, and surely others of us with imperial minds can imagine having a go at enjoying maximum power. show less