The Origins of Totalitarianism
by Hannah Arendt

In a recent interview, Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, made reference to Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and recommended it highly for reading. I can see why. It not only provides insight into what Hitler and Stalin created, but it describes part of the future that we are living in. As I read the book I kept stopping because I would recognize our current political world in her words. This is essential reading. I'm also very interested where Chris Hedges went with this in his book. And I wonder what Hanah Arendt would think seeing some of the same things she wrote about happening in Israel?

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

A political theorist with a flair for grand historical generalization, Hannah Arendt exhibited the conceptual brio of a cultivated intellectual, the conscientious learning of a German-trained scholar, and the undaunted spirit of an exile who had confronted some of the worst horrors of European tyranny. Her life was enriched by innovative thought and ennobled by friendship and love. Although her books addressed a general audience from the standpoint of disinterested universalism, Jewishness was an irrepressible feature of her experience as well as a condition that she never sought to repudiate.

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Totalitarianism: The Inversion of Politics

When Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, World War II had ended and Hitler was dead, but Stalin lived and ruled. Arendt wanted to give her readers a sense of the phenomenal reality of totalitarianism, of its appearance in the world as a terrifying and completely new form of government. In the first two parts of the book she excavated hidden elements in modern anti-Semitism and European imperialism that coalesced in totalitarian movements; in the third part she explored the organization of those movements, dissected the structure of Nazism and Stalinist Bolshevism in power, and scrutinized the "double claim" of those regimes "to total domination and global rule." Her focus, to be sure, is mainly on Nazism, not only because more information concerning it was available at the time, but also because Arendt was more familiar with Germany and hence with the origins of totalitarianism there than in Russia. She knew, of course, that those origins differed substantially in the two countries and later, in different writings, would undertake to right the imbalance in her earlier discussion (see "Project: Totalitarian Elements in Marxism").

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excerpts from The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

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