The Origins of Totalitarianism
Richard Bernstein
During the summer of 1950, when Hannah Arendt was on vacation, she was reading proofs for The Origins of Totalitarianism.1 In a letter to her mentor and beloved friend, Karl Jaspers, she wrote:
A lot of work here, of course, but also swimming and walks. Reading proofs is awful, that is boring. I’ve taken a different epigraph from Logik from the one I mentioned to you before: “Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the future. The important thing is to remain wholly in the present.” That sentence struck me right in the heart, so I’m entitled to have it.2
We know just how deeply that sentence struck Arendt, because she not only used it as the epigraph for The Origins of Totalitarianism, she also adopted a variation of it for one of her most important collections of political essays, Between Past and Future. In the preface to that collection, she gives an extraordinarily imaginative interpretation of a Kafka parable, a parable intended to illuminate “the gap between past and future”—the gap for exercise in political thinking—the gap in which we gain experience in how to think. This is the “place” where Arendt located all genuine thinking, and it has special significance for this symposium, “Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism—Fifty Years Later.” There is a temptation on such occasions to look back, to praise (or criticize) what she said then—to show the ways in which she was perhaps insightful and/or misguided in her understanding of the phenomenon she was struggling to comprehend: totalitarianism. I hope to resist this temptation, to view the book not as a past document but as an aid in our own present thinking, in our own attempt to live in the gap between past and future. I know from personal experience that this is the way in which she would have wanted her work discussed. I had the good fortune to participate in what, I believe, was the first conference that was exclusively devoted to her thought. It took place in Toronto almost 30 years ago, and Hannah Arendt was present. Characteristically, she was not at all interested in honorific speeches. She wanted to discuss the issues, and she actively engaged in discussion and argument with all the speakers.
But let me remind you that in her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, she already indicated that this is the way in which she wanted the book to be read. She concluded the preface by declaring, “all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”3 Perhaps the most grim, disturbing, but realistic sentence in the entire book 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.”4 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 is painfully aware of how strong and ever present these temptations are.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is a difficult, complex, disjointed book. At times it reads more like a series of independent essays loosely related to each other. It ranges over the most diverse topics, from observations about various aspects of anti-Semitism to a discussion of nineteenth-century British imperialism, from the nature of rights to the decline of the nation-state and the logic of total domination. Some of her claims appear to be outrageous and perverse. For example, she tells us that anti-Semitism, “a secular nineteenth-century ideology,” did not exist prior to the 1870s. Or again, she asserts that the notorious forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” served the Nazis “as a textbook for global conquest.” The Origins of Totalitarianism defies any simple attempt to state a key thesis or argument, and it is difficult to find coherence among its various parts. Arendt admitted that the title itself is misleading insofar it suggests that she was primarily concerned with discovering the key historical causes of totalitarianism. She explicitly stated that was not her intention. It is even difficult to determine just what she means by totalitarianism and its distinguishing characteristics. The difficulties are compounded because of the different layers of scholarship and analysis—like archaeological strata—some dating back to her study of European anti-Semitism in the 1930s, when she was living in Paris. Even as she was writing the book, she frequently changed her mind about its structure. She originally thought of it as her “imperialism” book. It was only when she was close to finishing it that she decided to include an explicit discussion of totalitarianism. Yet the book—like the classic that it is—is extraordinarily rich and, in the best Arendtian sense, thought provoking. It makes us think! Arendt believed that the only way to communicate thinking is to infect others with the perplexities that stimulate one’s own thinking. It is in this spirit that I want to probe some themes—some fragments—that are still relevant for us for our exercises in political thinking today.
Let me begin by citing a claim she makes in her preface. Like an ominous specter, it hovers over the entire book, and it still haunts us today. She writes, “And if it is true that in the fina l stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears . . . it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of evil.”5 But what is the “truly radical nature of evil”? We gain a clue from an exchange of letters with Jaspers. Arendt sent one of the first copies of her book to Jaspers in order to arrive in time for his birthday in February 1951. After quickly reading the preface and the conclusion, he sent a short letter expressing his gratitude, and he concluded his letter with a cryptic question “Hasn’t Jahwe faded too far out of sight?”6 In her reply, Arendt wrote that his question “has been on my mind for weeks now without my being able to come up with an answer to it.”7 But Jaspers’ question did provoke the following reflections about radical evil.
Evil has proved to be more radical than expected. In objective terms, modern crimes are not provided for in the Ten Commandments. Or: the Western Tradition is suffering from the preconception that the most evil things human beings can do arise from the vice of selfishness. Yet we know that the greatest evils or radical evil has nothing to do anymore with such humanly understandable, sinful motives. What radical evil really is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as means to an end, which leaves their essence as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather, making them superfluous as human beings). This happens as soon as all unpredictability—which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity—is eliminated. And all this in turn arises from—or, better goes along with—the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply with the lust for power) of an individual man. If an individual man qua man were omnipotent, then there is no reason why men in the plural should exist at all.8
She reinforces this understanding of absolute or radical evil, when she declares in Origins:
Difficult as it is to conceive of an absolute [radical] evil even in the face of its factual existence, it seems to be closely connected with the invention of a system in which all men are equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.9
I completed this paper before September 11, 2001, but after that infamous day, I reread The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Arendt’s uncanny prescience and relevance struck me. Let me remind you of a few key themes. She had a profound sense of the contingency and unpredictability of catastrophic events. She believed that the twentieth century represented a complete break with tradition. This demands that we rethink the very concepts and categories with which we try to comprehend unprecedented events. We must learn to think without banisters (Denken ohne Geländer). Typically, one’s immediate response—after the initial shock and confusion—is to appeal to what is familiar—demonizing the “enemy”—rather than seeking to comprehend what is new and novel. But this is a temptation that must be resisted. The words from her 1951 preface might have been written today.
The conviction that everything that happens must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed upon us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.10
When Arendt explores the connection between radical evil and the phenomenon of superfluousness, she warns us that fanatics believe in their own superfluousness. They are committed to a movement that transcends the life or death of any individual. This is why she thought that the appeal to conventional utilitarian categories or appeals to common sense were completely inadequate to account for the phenomenon of radical evil.
Even more important, although Arendt thought that the problem of evil was the major intellectual problem after the Second World War, and returned over and over again to explore the intricacies of both radical evil and the banality of evil, she also warned how dangerous the concept of evil is when it enters into politics and political discourse. Politics requires judgment, discrimination, and compromise. But “evil” has an absolutistic aura. When used to demonize an enemy, it allows for no compromise. The only response to evil is to eradicate and destroy it. It is frightening the way in which the emotional and rhetorical appeal to “evil” is now being used to manipulate public policy.
I also believe that Arendt—if she were still alive—might well have endorsed the claim made by Jorge Semprum when he returned to Buchenwald in 1992. Semprum, who had been imprisoned and tortured at the camp during the Second World War, spoke of Buchenwald as the “place in the world where totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Nazism and Bolshevism, have together left their mark.” He then declared, “Islamic fundamentalism will wreak incredible havoc in the next century if we do not pursue a politics of reform and justice throughout the world.”11
Superfluousness is one of the most pervasive and intriguing leitmotifs that run through Origins, and it appears in many places in the book. I want to focus on two important aspects of it that are especially relevant for Arendt’s understanding of politics, and what she considered the source of the most troubling, intractable political problems of the twentieth century—problems that loom even larger as we enter the twenty-first century. The fi rst directly concerns what she means by radical evil. The second recognizes that the most significant political events of the twentieth century have resulted in the creation of masses of homeless, violently displaced populations—populations which are treated as if they were superfluous.
* * *
When Arendt explicitly turns her attention to the phenomenon of totalitarianism, the heart of her discussion focuses on “total domination.” Total domination, as she understands it,
strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual. . . . The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only “freedom” would consist in “preserving the species.” Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror in the camps.12
The concentration and extermination camps epitomize this “logic of total domination”; they are the laboratories in which the ideological conviction that “everything is possible” is tested:
The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog, which, as we know was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal.13
Arendt sketches a three-stage analytical model of the logic of total domination. The first stage is the killing of the juridical person in human beings. What she has in mind is something that began long before the death camps were organized and has been graphically portrayed in the remarkable diaries of Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness (1998). It is the arbitrary yet systematic way in which groups of individuals are stripped of any and all juridical rights. In the camps no inmates have any rights. The second stage is the murder of the moral person in human beings. Here the SS were diabolically ingenious in seeking to corrupt human solidarity, and undermining the exercise of moral conscience.
Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her children should be killed?14
But the murder of the juridical person and the moral person is not yet the worst. It is the third stage in this analytical model of total domination that brings us closest to radical evil—to making human beings as human beings superfluous. This third stage is the attempt to destroy any vestige of human individuality, unpredictability, plurality, and spontaneity.
To destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react.15
Consider Arendt’s chilling description of the aim of this logic of total domination:
What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly “scientific” standards: it is the concern of all men.16
Making human beings superfluous as human beings—the epitome of radical evil—takes on much more ominous meaning in this logic of total domination. The manipulators of this system seek to rival an omnipotent God and prove that everything is possible—including making human beings into something that is other than and less than human. In the camps there is a systematic attempt to annihilate individuality, plurality, natality, spontaneity, and freedom—to create “living corpses.” These are the very characteristics that Arendt thematized in The Human Condition. They constitute the core of our humanity. Contrary to the fashionable but misguided reading of Arendt that claims her understanding of action and politics is derived from an idealized and nostalgic conception of the Athenian polis, the truth is quite different. It was by looking deeply into the abyss of the practices of total domination—by dwelling on its horrors—that led her to appreciate what is distinctive about our humanity— individuality, natality, plurality, spontaneity, and freedom. Margaret Canovan is emphatically right when she says—and shows in detail—“that responses to the most dramatic events of her time lie at the center of Arendt’s thought,” and that “virtually the entire agenda of Arendt’s political thought was set by her reflections on the political catastrophes of the mid-century.”17
Arendt argued that the violent emergence of totalitarianism was unprecedented, something entirely new, which is not to be confused with or assimilated to tyranny or dictatorship. “What is unprecedented in totalitarianism is not primarily its ideological content, but the event of totalitarian domination itself.”18 The event of totalitarianism explodes our categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment. “Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality . . . its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions.”19 And as Margaret Canovan perceptively notes:
In other words, totalitarianism illustrated the human capacity to begin, that power to think and act in ways that are new, contingent, and unpredictable that looms so large in her mature political theory. But the paradox of totalitarian novelty was that it represented an assault on that very ability to act and think as a unique individual.20
But it might be said that with the passing of totalitarian regimes and its aim of total domination, the threat of the elimination of human plurality, natality, and spontaneity has also passed—and the threat that human beings are being made superfluous. But this is not the way Arendt understood our situation in the twentieth century. There are less dramatically violent, but no less effective ways of distorting, repressing, and eliminating these characteristics of human life.
I, along with many other critics of Arendt, think that she over-draws the distinction between “the social” and “the political,” a distinction elaborated in The Human Condition and developed even more harshly in On Revolution. Indeed, her thesis that “the social” is engulfing, distorting, and repressing the last vestiges of genuine action and public freedom underlies her analysis of the pernicious forces at work in modernity. But I also think that she was struggling with a very real fundamental problem that is still with us. She was properly worried about the powerfully effective subterranean forces at work that undermine, distort, and seek to eliminate the conditions required for genuine action and public freedom. Her understanding of modern bureaucracy was shaped more by Kafka than by Weber. It is the “rule of nobodies” that she most feared. At times, she despaired about what is happening to public life, about the disappearance of those public spaces where human beings can argue and debate with each other and can form, exchange, and refine the opinions that are the very stuff of political life. Frankly, when we honestly face the hollowness of what “political life” has become today, it is hard not to share her despair. But Arendt refused to become a prophet of doom. In the preface to Origins, she emphatically declares: “This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”21
* * *
But let me return to the leitmotif of superfluousness, and to the second aspect that I want to discuss. What Hannah Arendt wrote 50 years ago might just as well as been written today.
Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence had been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics. Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the First World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of law.22
The phenomenon she describes here has become even more global and acute in our time. In the Middle East, Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and indeed throughout the world, there has been the sudden creation of masses of stateless, homeless people who are treated as if they were superfluous. And there seems to be little hope of stopping this potentially explosive political occurrence. In this regard, Arendt’s comments about rights—and especially the fundamental “right to have rights”—have a striking contemporary relevance.
Arendt always believed that all genuine thinking is rooted in one’s lived experience. Let us not forget her own story, her own living experience as a stateless person. In 1933, shortly after she was arrested and interrogated for eight days in Berlin because she was doing research at the Prussian State Library on Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda for her Zionist friends, she fled from Germany, and eventually made her way to Paris. In 1940, like many other German-Jewish illegal émigrés, she was sent to the internment camp, Gurs, as an “alien enemy.” It was only in the chaos of the first days when the Nazis invaded France that she escaped from Gurs. She rejoined her husband, Heinrich Blücher, and eventually they surreptitiously managed to cross the Spanish border and make their way to Lisbon where they sailed for New York. For 18 years she had lived as a stateless person until she finally became an American citizen. She never forgot this experience of living as a stateless Jew. In one of the first articles written after she arrived in New York, she said: “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”23
This experience of statelessness is one reason why Arendt was so skeptical about abstract appeals to human rights. “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them”:24
The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but [that] they no longer belong to any community what soever. Their plight is not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly “superfluous,” if nobody can be found to “claim” them, may their lives be in danger.25
And she epitomizes this need to belong to a community—to a polity—where rights can be exercised and protected when she declares:
Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all the so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as a man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.26
This is why, according to Arendt, the most fundamental right is the right to have rights, the right to belong to a polity—a community that can guarantee and protect an individual’s rights. It is the loss of a polity that expels one from humanity. Once again, by following Arendt’s thought trains, we come back to her primary concern: the need to cultivate and institutionalize public freedom, and the creation of those public spaces where rights become concrete and effective.
Arendt’s acute observations about the right to have rights and to live within a community that protects these rights is also relevant in confronting the dangerous excesses of unrestrained nationalism. In 1946, even before the publication of Origins, Arendt warned about the “racism of modern nationalism.”27 She held controversial and idiosyncratic views about the modern nation-state. Although she was right in thinking that, with the First World War, the nation-state, as it had existed in the nineteenth century, had been destroyed, she sometimes wrote as if the very idea of the nation-state was no longer relevant for twentieth-century politics. But despite the inadequacies of her understanding of nationalism and the fate of the nation-state, she was extremely insightful about a key problem that is still very much with us today—one that has become especially urgent. She detected the implicit and potentially explosive conflict between state and nation. This is the conflict between the rights of citizens and the rights of sovereign nations—a conflict that was already present in the very formation of modern nation-states. She tells us, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on, Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of law.”28 These rights were understood to be inalienable, ahistorical, universal rights that were to be upheld even against the sovereignty of the state. But how were these rights to be guaranteed and protected? Presumably by the sovereign nation to which one belonged.
A people becomes a nation when “it takes [consciousness] of itself according to its history”; as such it is attached to the soil which is the product of past labor and where history has left its traces. It represents the “milieu” into which man is born, a closed society to which one belongs by right of birth. The state on the other hand is an open society, ruling over a territory where its power protects and makes law. As a legal institution, the state knows only citizens no matter what nationality; its legal order is open to all who happen to live on its territory.29
As long as the nineteenth-century fiction that all Europeans were members of a nation and belonged to “the family of nations” existed, the unstable tension between the declaration of universal rights and the declaration of territorial national sovereignty— whereby one belongs to a culturally identifiable nation that secures and protects these rights—could be ignored. But with the demise of this delicate balance, the rise of nineteenth-century imperialism, and eruption the First World War, this myth of a stable nation-state was exploded.
Nationalism signifies essentially the conquest of the state through the nation. . . . The result of the XIX century identification of nation and state is twofold: while the state as a legal institution has declared and must protect the rights of men, its identification with the nation implied the identification of the national and the citizen and thereby resulted in the confusions of the Rights of Men with the rights of nationals or national rights. Furthermore, insofar as the state is an “enterprise of power,” aggressive and inclining to expansion, the nation through its identification with the state acquires all these qualities and claims expansion now as a national right, as a necessity for the sake of the nation.30
Unfortunately, the conflict between the demands of the “rights” of the nation and the “rights” of citizens have not disappeared. They have a hyper-reality today when we witness the forms of ethnic and religious “cleansing” that seek to eliminate those populations who are not considered to be “legitimate” members of a territorial nation. In its extreme form it inflames violent chauvinist nationalisms. But the same unstable conflict is evidenced in more “civilized” and restrained nation-states. I have recently returned from a year in Europe where I followed the German debates about Leitkultur (leading or dominant culture), and discussions throughout all Europe about how to deal with “foreigners”—including those who have lived within a nation for several generations. Underlying these debates, and the attempts to formulate policies for dealing with immigrants and foreigners, is the implicit conflict between the alleged rights of a nation and the rights of individual citizens residing in a territorial state. Extreme rightist groups are demanding that these unwelcome “foreigners” be excluded. More restrained conservative voices demand that these “foreigners” should be assimilated to the “dominant” culture. And those committed to more flexible democratic policies, who believe that all individuals living in a country deserve full legal and political rights, are apprehensive when “foreigners” are violently attacked and murdered. They are rightly haunted by the specter of the early days of Nazi violence.
I do not think that we can turn to Arendt for “solutions” for the complex issues that arise today concerning unrestrained violent nationalism, and the new tensions that arise from the conflict between n ational sovereignty and the rights of individuals living in a nation-state. But I do think she is helpful in specifying and locating one of the primary sources of a leading contemporary political problem that is manifested in different ways throughout the world, and which has become far more acute and trouble-some since 1989.
* * *
Earlier I stated that it is difficult to discern any systematic unity or coherence in the diverse discussions and the different strata that we find in The Origins of Totalitarianism. But I want to add an important caveat to that claim. For there is a pervasive thematic concern that runs through the book—and through all of Arendt’s thinking. Arendt consistently opposed all appeals to historical necessity or inevitability that seduce us into thinking that what has happened must have happened. The philosophy of history—at least those versions that make implicit or explicit appeals to historical necessity—is the deadly enemy of genuine politics. The raison d’être of politics is freedom. Throughout her writings, beginning with, and even preceding The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt stresses the opposition between historical necessity and political freedom. In her critiques of the Enlightenment theories of historical progress, in her quarrels with Hegel and Marx, she constantly returns to rooting out any appeal to historical necessity or inevitability. 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 concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism with a warning and an expression of hope.
There remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on. . . . But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—“that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.31
The underlying thematic current that runs through Origins is a summons to assume our political responsibility. Its most urgent message, as Canovan tells us, is to look after the world and to take responsibility for what is done in our name, to understand the character and the limits of political action, to be aware of what political freedom requires, and to have the courage to make it a reality. Like the “he” in Kafka’s parable who has two antagonists—one pressing from behind and the other blocking the road ahead—we must learn to live in that gap between past and future. This is the gap in which we must learn to think without banisters, and this is the gap in which we must assume our political responsibility.
Let me conclude by allowing Arendt to speak for herself. In 1958, when the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism appeared, she used the occasion to reflect on the book and to clarify her intentions.
What does bother me is that the title suggests, however faintly, a belief in historical causality which I did not hold when I wrote the book and in which I believe even less today. . . . While I was writing the book, these intentions presented themselves to me in the form of an ever-recurring image: I felt as though I dealt with a crystallized structure which I had to break up into its constituent elements in order to destroy it. This image bothered me a great deal, for I thought it an impossible task to write history, not in order to save and conserve and render fit for remembrance, but on the contrary, in order to destroy. Finally, it dawned on me that I was not engaged in writing a historical book, even though large parts of it clearly contain historical analyses, but a political book, in which whatever was of past history not only was seen from the vantage point of the present, but would not have become visible at all without the light which the event, the emergence of totalitarianism, shed on it. In other words, the “origins” in the first and second part of the book are not causes that inevitably lead to certain effects; rather they became origins only after the event had taken place.32
Notes
1 This chapter was first published as Richard Bernstein, “The Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 381–401. We have left in the occasional nature of the article, namely its reference to the conference at which it was presented and the context in which it was written.
2 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926-1969 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1992), 153.
3 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1951), vii.
4 Ibid., 437.
5 Ibid., viii–ix.
6 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 165.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 166.
9 Arendt, Origins, 451.
10 Ibid., 8.
11 Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 288.
12 Arendt, Origins, 438.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 452.
15 Ibid., 455.
16 Ibid., 458.
17 Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7.
18 Hannah Arendt, “Reply to Eric Voegelin,” The Review of Politics 15 (January 1953): 80.
19 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 309.
20 Margaret Canovan, “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism: A Reassessment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27.
21 Arendt, Origins, vii.
22 Ibid., 276–77.
23 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 56.
24 Arendt, Origins, 291–92.
25 Ibid., 295.
26 Ibid., 297.
27 Hannah Arendt, “The Nation,” The Review of Politics 8 (January 1946): 141.
28 Ibid., 290.
29 Ibid., 139.
30 Ibid.
31 Arendt, Origins, 478–79.
32 Ibid., iv. Compare this statement with what she says in her reply to Eric Voegelin:
The problem originally confronting me was simple and baffling at the same time: all historiography is necessarily salvation and frequently justification; it is due to man’s fear that he may forget and to his striving for something which is even more than remembrance. . . . Thus my first problem was how to write about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy. (Arendt, “Reply to Eric Voegelin,” 77.)