Atavistic Novelty: Questioning Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Totalitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of totalitarianism as formulated in her magnum opus—The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It argues that, to comprehend totalitarianism, Arendt forged a heterodox method of historical analysis. Employing that method, she conceived totalitarianism as a form of transcendence of historical context. In doing so, however, she ignored crucial historical contexts that were in fact related to the history of totalitarianism. Subverting her interpretation of totalitarianism as transcendence, these elided contexts erupted inadvertently and repeatedly into her analysis—revealing that totalitarianism was solidly embedded in them. The Origins of Totalitarianism thus exhibits a conceptual contradiction that confuses its attempt to understand totalitarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Hannah Arendt
• totalitarianism
• historiography
• anstisemitism
• Nazism

Acknowledgments

The completion of this article was made possible by a sabbatical leave from the United International College. Its manuscript also benefited from the rigorous editorial work of The European Legacy. For its reading of Arendt, I owe my greatest intellectual debt to Harold Mah—whose generous mentorship inspired me to transcend my own thinking on Arendt.

Notes

1. For the history of the concept, see Gleason, Totalitarianism.

2. The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. Arendt revised it in 1958 and then again in 1966, adding new prefaces to the third edition. I am using the third edition, reprinted in 1994, because it contains the most complete version of Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism.

3. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 460–74; hereafter page references are cited in the text.

4. Crick, “On Rereading Origins,” 122, 124–25.

5. Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and Narrative,” 173–74.

6. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 112.

7. Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, 18–20.

8. Whitfield, Into the Dark, 34. For a recent assessment of the “enduring value” of Origins, see Turner, “Arendt and Totalitarianism.”

9. The relationship between philosophy and history in Arendt’s oeuvre is seriously conflicted. As such, it constitutes a significant, but largely unexplored, intellectual problem. For explorations of it, see Jissov, “The Self and History,” and Jissov, “Mysteries.”

10. Aschheim, “Nazism, Culture and Origins,” 118.

11. Arendt, “Social Science Techniques,” 49–50, 62.

12. As Benhabib has argued, Arendt’s interest in ancient Greece was a defining feature of her oeuvre. Her political philosophy, claims Benhabib, shows a distinct antimodernist tendency: inspired by German philosophy, Arendt tried to find an ideal form of politics in Greek Antiquity. Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, xxiv–xxv, 1–61, 102–22. Arendt theorized that politics in her main work of political philosophy, The Human Condition (1958).

13. Arendt, “The Concept of History,” 41–48, 58, 61, 67–68, 74–75.

14. Ibid., 42–43, 61, 63–64, 88.

15. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” 388.

16. Buckler has recently acknowledged that Arendt’s historiographical approach to totalitarianism was influenced by the ancient Greek understanding of history. See Buckler, Arendt and Political Theory, 57–81.

17. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” 388–89.

18. Arendt, “A Reply to Voegelin,” 78.

19. The view that Jews did not speak very well the language of the countries in which they lived was a common antisemitic stereotype in fin-de-siècle Europe. See Gilman, Case of Sigmund Freud, 27–28.

20. For the history of Jewish assimilation in late nineteenth-century France, see Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation. For an analysis of Proust’s representation of the Dreyfus Affair, of antisemitism, and of Jewish identity in Remembrance, see Jissov, “(Mis-)Understanding Anti-Semitism,” 113–87.

21. Arendt did, indeed, come to believe that the entire intellectual tradition of the West collapsed in Europe’s cataclysmic modernity. For an analysis of her understanding of that collapse, see Klusmeyer, “Arendt on Authority.” As Villa has shown in “Totalitarianism, Modernity,” Arendt also thought that totalitarianism was connected to the West’s intellectual tradition. In her view, that tradition contained dictatorial elements that were then radicalized by totalitarianism. For a further analysis of Arendt’s critical views on the Western intellectual tradition and its breakdown, see Buckler, Arendt and Political Theory, 14–36.

22. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.

23. For a detailed analysis of Arendt’s thinking on evil, see Bernstein, Arendt and Jewish Question, 137–78; and Bernstein, Radical Evil, 205–24, 231–33.

24. In a recent essay, Margaret Canovan has noted aptly that, despite her stress on the historical novelty of totalitarianism, Arendt does not show clearly what precisely constituted that newness. Canovan herself argues that, in Arendt’s understanding, the novelty consisted of a mania for “perpetual motion.” In Arendt’s view, Canovan argues, totalitarianism was like a perpetual motion machine—it was a regime that sought relentless change for the sake of relentless change, in all aspects of human society, without a definite purpose. Canovan, “Leader and Masses.” Canovan’s reading of Arendt is well-taken, but needs qualification. While Arendt did, indeed, interpret totalitarianism as maniacally seeking relentless change for its own sake, she also claimed unequivocally that it had two very clear, megalomaniacal, purposes—domination of the world and total domination of all individual human beings. For a less overstated assessment of Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism’s extreme vigor—its “relentless dynamism,” as Canovan calls it—see Canovan, “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism.”

25. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 83–97; Mosse, Crisis of German Ideology, 132, 245; Telman, “Adolf Stoecker,” 93–112.

26. Arendt observed that, in France, the alliance between the aristocracy and the Catholic Church went back to the French Revolution. At that time, she claimed, they turned antisemitic, carping that the Revolution confiscated and sold the Church’s property in order to settle loans owed to Jewish financiers. This way of thinking, moreover, remained “alive” in France all through the nineteenth century. Origins, 46–47.

27. For the history of the Dreyfus Affair, see Bredin, The Affair.

28. Wright, France in Modern Times, 321–22.

29. For the history of antisemitism in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, and especially pages: 4, 9, 106–13, 115–17, 119, 170–74, 179, 188, 197, 205–8, 509–83. For an account of the outbursts of antisemitism in France in 1898, see Birnbaum, Anti-Semitic Moment.

30. For the history of Christian antisemitism, see Poliakov’s History of Anti-Semitism.

31. Arendt noted that the Pan-Germans were “anticlerical and became anti-Christians” (Origins, 233). Opposition to Christianity, however, is part of the history of Christianity.

32. Arendt theorized the human mind in her last work—the philosophical treatise The Life of the Mind. There, she developed fully her concept of human thinking as an internal mental dialogue of oneself with oneself. See Arendt, Life of the Mind, Vol., 1, and especially 17, 19–25, 29, 42–43, 57–59, 62, 64, 69–71, 75–77, 103, 123, 185–87, 199, 204–10. This concept, however, appeared also in Origins.

33. For an analysis of Luther’s antisemitism, see Probst, Demonizing the Jews, 1–15, 39–58.

34. As Baehr has recently argued, Arendt rejected the idea, propounded by European intellectuals of her generation, that totalitarianism was a species of religion—a modern “political religion.” As Baehr also demonstrates, however, Arendt did notice connections between totalitarianism and the history of Christianity. A crucial one was the disappearance of fear of a Last Judgment among the modern masses that we have noted. In addition, in Origins Arendt sometimes described totalitarianism in religious terms, as resembling a religion, and showed that its leadership perceived it in this way as well. Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, 93–123. This article argues, similarly, that Arendt inadvertently represented totalitarianism as connected to—as embedded in—the histories of European religion and of European religious antisemitism.

35. Arendt, “A Reply to Voegelin,” 77–78.

36. Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” 309–10.

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Milen Jissov

Milen Jissov specializes in modern European intellectual and cultural history. He teaches European history at the United International College, in Zhuhai, China. His work on Hannah Arendt has appeared in Left History, the Canadian Journal of History/Annales cannadiennes d’histoire, and the Asian Journal of German and European Studies.