Hannah Arendt's theory of totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, 1950

The concept of "totalitarianism" at first emerged as a way to more-or-less equate the fascist-type dictatorships like Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the notion of totalitarianism was well-suited to identifying the USSR with Nazi Germany and carrying over the imagery of the "Good War" from Hitler and Germany to Stalin (along with his successors) and the Soviet Union.

Since the Second World War, the United States has never fought anyone but "Hitler". When we get ready to go to war with a country, or when someone is advocating war against a country, we suddenly discover that the leader of that nation is the new "Hitler": a deadly, uncontainable, undeterrable enemy who must be utterly defeated militarily. And the concept of totalitarianism helped greatly to blur various "isms" together so that Soviet Russia or Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam or Mao's China or Saddam's Iraq could become just another version of German Nazism. And not only in propaganda but in serious journalism (we had such a thing once in the US, and not so very long ago!) and serious scholarship.

Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism has been very influential. This summary from a Library of Congress essay The World of Hannah Arendt describes her view:

Arendt believed that the right to citizenship, the right of a plurality of people "to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each," is not only denied by totalitarianism, as it is by every despotism, but stands opposed to the principle that guides the acts of destruction that characterize totalitarian systems (see "On the Nature of Totalitarianism") That principle is an ideology explaining the entire course of human affairs by determining every historical event and all past, present, and future deeds as functions of a universal process. Looking deeper into the phenomenon of totalitarianism Arendt saw that the "idea," the content, of the ideology matters less than its "inherent logicality," which was discovered separately and prized by both Hitler and Stalin. In broad outline ideological logicality operates like a practical syllogism: from the premise of a supposed law of nature that certain races are unfit to live it follows that those races must be eliminated, and from the premise of a supposed law of history that certain classes are on their way to extinction it follows that those classes must be liquidated. Arendt's point is that the untruth of the ideological premises is without consequence: the premises will become self-evidently true in the factitious world created by the murderous acts that flow from them in logical consistency.

In their adherence to the logicality of two utterly distinct ideologies, one that originated on the far right and the other on the far left, Arendt found Nazism and Stalinism to be more or less equivalent totalitarian systems. If the ruined city of Königsberg could speak after having witnessed the terror, the killings by torture and starvation under the regimes of both Hitler and Stalin, it is doubtful that it would point out significant differences between those regimes. To focus on the different content of racist and communist ideologies only blurs what Arendt at first thought of as the "absolute" and "radical" evil they both brought into the world. Her emphasis on the logical deduction of acts from ideological premises, moreover, is linked to her later understanding of evil, stemming from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as "banal," "rootless," and "thought-defying." The logicality of totalitarian movements accounts for their appeal to the atomized and depoliticized masses of mankind without whose support those movements could not have generated their immense power. Thus Hitler's "ice-cold reasoning" and Stalin's "merciless dialectics" contribute to Arendt's uncertainty as to whether any other totalitarian regimes have existed--perhaps in Mao's China, but not in the despotisms of single party or military dictatorships (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Introduction," third edition, 1966). [my emphasis]

I don't like to use the concept because I do think it's too vague. One dictatorship is not just like another.

I also think the word became hopelessly corrupted in the 1980s by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations. She brought the word full circle, you might say. Starting as a way to equate leftwing dictatorship with rightwing ones, she came up with the idea to distinguish "authoritarian" dictatorships from "totalitarian" ones, with "totalitarian" ones being worse and more-or-less equal to leftwing ones. Rightwing ones we could more easily pretend are not so bad.

Kirkpatrick most famously articulated her distinction in Dictatorships & Double Standards, published in the Nov 1979 issue of the neocon flagship journal Commentary.

Ruined the word.

Tags: hannah arendt, jeane kirkpatrick, totalitarianism