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Arendt s Concept
and Description of
Totalitarianism
JL HE enorm ous complexity of H annah Arend t's
he
rigins
of
Totalitarianism arises in large measure from its interweaving of a
concept of totalitarianism with a description of the totalitarian
regimes of Hitler and Stalin.^ Today, after the disappearance of
those regimes, the former concern may seem the more impor-
tant; yet to neglect the reason that Arendt wrote her bookthe
fact that Nazism and Stalinism appeared in the world in the sec-
ond quarter of the twentieth century as events without historical
precedentis to risk conceptual emptiness.'^ The intertwining
and overlapping of concept and description have given rise to dif-
ficult questions and genuine confusion. Was Arendt crediting
Hitler and Stalin, let alone any of the ir henc hm en , with an aware-
ness ofACT-conceptof totalitarianism? Indeed, how likely is it that
these nonp ersons and nonentities, as she called them both,
were conceptually guided at all? Or, on the contrary, was Arendt
herself aware that her concept of totalitarianism could become
fully meaningful only after the regimes she described had come
to an end? What I hope to suggest in this essay is the relevance of
Arendt's writing on totalitarianism for politics today, especially
her understanding of the status of the totalitarian crime against
hum anity and he r concomitant notion of the right to have rights.
I think tha i many of us have hea rd enou gh about an evil
em pire and more recently about an axis of evil to question in
those expressions, and in those who employ them, what precisely
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622 SOC IAL RESEARC H
radical evii in ways that have become increasingly cogent and
alarming. She gives her readers no comfort at all, either in trac-
ing the conditions of that evil, or in delineating the sort of person
who is capable today and in the future, and anywhere on earth , of
performing crimes against humanity. Nor does she shrink from
the task of spelling out how the recurrence of such crimes can be
prevented, which would entail the urgent but extremely prob-
lematic enforcement byal nations ofthe right to have rights, the
right of llhuman beings "to act together concerning things that
are of equal concem to each." Some of these considerations will
lead beyond
Origins
to several parts of
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on
the
B anality of Evil
and to one passage from
The Human
Condition
but the primary focus of this paper wil l remain on the
earlier work.
I:
TheInversion of Politics
The scope of Arendt's conceptual objectives, in
rigins
and
related works from the same period generally, may be summa-
rized as follows. First, as she insists again and again, totalitarian-
ism made clear once and for all the uselessness of causality as a
category of historical thought, as it also exploded our standards
of political ju dg m en t insofar as they are grounded in traditional
moral and legal principles. Thus for her the
difficulty
of under-
standing totalitarianism conceptually was from the beginning
inherent in totalitarian phenomena. Second, the conceptual
background of her thought is the different kinds of govemment
as first formulated by Plato and, after many centuries, Mon-
tesquieu's addition to that formulation of each kind of govern-
ment's principle of action, along with the human experiences in
which those principles are embedded. Third, Arendt makes three
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624 SOCIAL RESEARCH
few scruples over slaughtering the indigenous inhabitants of the
phantom world of the dark continent to obtain it. Th e subject
matter of Conrad's work, in which the story told by the always
ambiguous Marlow is recounted by a shadowy narrator, is the
encounter of Africans by superfluous Europeans spat out of
their societies. As the author of the whole tale as well as the story
within the tale, Conrad was intent
not
to hint however subtly or
tentatively at
n ltern tivefr meofreference
by which we may judg e
the actions and opinions of his characters. ^ Marlow, a character
doubly distanced from the reader, in fact realizes that the con-
quest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from
those who have a different complexion or slighdy flatter noses
than ourselves, is no t a pretty thing. It is in the person of the
remarkab le and eloquent Mr. Kurtz tha t Marlow seeks the
idea thatwillreconcile him to the conquest: An idea at the back
of it, not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish
belief in the idea.
As Marlow's steamer penetrates deepe r and deep er into the
heart of darkness in search of Kurtz's remote trading station,
Africa becomes increasingly impenetrable to hum an thought.
In a crucial passage cited yArendt, Marlow observes the Africans
on the shore:
Th e prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcom-
ing uswho could tell? We. . .glided past like phantoms,
wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be,
before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could
not understand because we were too far and could not
remember, because we were traveling in the night of the
flrstages,of those ages that a re go ne leaving hardly a sign
and no memories. . . . The earth seemed unearthly. . .and
the men were. . .No, they were not inhuman. Well, you
know, that was the worst of itthis suspicion of their not
being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 62 5
thrilled you was just the thoug ht of their bumanity like
yoursthe thought of your remote kinship with this wild
an d passionate uproa r {Conrad, 1988: 37-38).
Tbe next sentence consists of one word"Ugly"and tbat
word leads directly to the discovery of Rurtz and his "idea," the
object of Marlow's quest. He reads a report that Kurtz, who exem
plifies the European imperialist ("All Europe contributed to [his]
making"), bas written to the "International Society for the Sup-
pression of Savage Customs." It is a report in the name of
progress, of "good practically unbounded," and it gives Marlow a
sense "of an exotic Immensity ruled by an August Benevolence."
Except that at tbe bottom of the repo rt's last page, "luminous and
terrifying like a flash of lightning in a serene sky," Kurtz has
scrawled "Exterminate all the brutes " Thus no edifying rationale
of the conquest but sheer r cismisrevealed as the "idea" that M ar-
low sought, and the darkness of Kurtz's heart becomes the real
"heart of darkness," rather than the uncivilized but not inhuman
darkness of Africa.
The horrific details follow, the decapitated beads of Africans
stuck on poles, "black, dried, sunken" and "smiling" toward
Kurtz's dwelling, the Company's "Inner Station." Kurtz is an
"extremist," his methods "unsound," and, moreover,
useless
from
the point of view of the Manager, according to whom "Mr. Kurtz
has done more harm than good to the Company." Marlow
attempts to account forKurtz s"lack of restraint": "the
wilderness..
.had
whispered to him things about himself which he did not know," a
whisper that "echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at
the core ." But it is questionab le whether Marlow is m ucb less hol-
low when, at the climax of his story, he is driven to lie about the
last words of the dying Kurtz, words spoken in delirium tbat tell
the plain truth of his exp erience : "The horro r Th e horror " In
"fright" as well as "infinite pity" Marlow supplants those words
with wbat Kurtz's "Intended" wisbes tbem to have been, her own
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626 SOCIAL RESEARC H
As the tale concludes, the indeterminate narrator of Marlow's
story is leit before the heart of an imm ense darkness, and like-
wise,
as the reader apprehends and judges Marlow's story, Con-
rad's indelible image of racism looms in his consciousness.
Because Heart of Darkness is a work of imagination that re-pre-
sents to the reader's mind what is deliberately twice removed
ro
his senses, its illumination of race experience is more
durable and ineluctable than any time-bound chronicle of the
atrocities com mitted in Leopold IFs Congo , from 1890 to 1910,
can ever be.'' Not the subject matter but themeaningof this great
work of art discloses racism as a structural element of a world in
which it seeks to hide its face, the same world in which totalitari-
anism, n ot m any years later, made its appearan ce as a new form of
government.
Arend t, however, is no t saying that racism or any other elem ent
of totalitarianism causedthe regimes of Hitler or Stalin, but rath er
that those hidden elements, which include anti-Semitism, the
dec line o fth e nation-state, expansionism for its own sake, and the
alliance between capital and mob, crystallized in the movements
from whicb those regimes arose. Reflecting on her book when its
second edition ap peared in 1958, Arend t said that he r inten tions
presented themselves to he r in the form of an ever recurrin g
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 presented a problem because she saw it as an impossible
task to write history, no t in ord er to save and conserve and rend er
fit for remembrance, but, on the contrary, in order to destroy.
Thus regardless of her historical analyses it dawned on he r that
rigins wasnot a historical. . .but a political book, in which what-
ever there 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 totalitarian-
ism, shed on it. Th e origins are no t causes; they only becam e
originsantecedents after the event had taken place. Analyz-
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 627
its constituent elemen ts. The impo rtance of this proc edure is
among the fundamental points Arendt made in the chapter writ-
ten in 1953 and added to all subsequent editions of Origins Ide-
ology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government :
If it strue that the elements of totalitarianism can be found
by retracing the history and analyzing the political implica-
tions of what we usually call the crisis of our century, then
the conclusion is unavoidable that this crisis is no mere
threat from the outside, no mere result of some aggressive
foreign policy of either Germany or Russia, and that it will
no more disappear with the deatb of Stalin than it disap-
peared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It may even be that
the true predicaments of our time will assume their authen-
tic formthough not necessarily tbe cruelestonly when
totalitarianism has become a thing ofthe past (1973:460).
According to Aiend t, the disturbing relevance of totalitarian
regimes. . .is that the true problems of our time cannot be under-
stood, let alone solved, without the acknowledgment that totali-
tarianism became this century's curse only because it so
terrifyingly took care of tsproblem s, problem s raised in one way
or another by the existence of superfluous or worldless people.
Her description of the living dead , the inanim ate inmates of
concentration camps who experienced the full force of the total-
itarian solution a solution that altered their natu re as hum an
beingswas and remains at least as shocking as the photographs
of tbe ditches filled with tbe distorted bodies of the already dead.
She made her readers realize that there are torments worse than
de ath , which she evokes in terms ofth e long ing for dea th by those
who in former times were thought to bave been condemned to
the eternal punishments of hell. Sbe meant her vision of hell to
be taken literally and not allegorically, for now hell bad been
established, no t by divine ju dgm en t in an afterlife, b ut he re on
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628 SOC IAL RESEARC H
But her further point is that the rejection of the totalitarian
solution per se provides no answer to the problem that arises
when raceor religious belief or ethnicityis considered the
source of human diversity. Hider and Stalin's annihilation of
superfluous peop le, of naturally dete rm ined inferior races and
historically de term ine d dying classes, leaves us today, on an
overcrowded and shrinking planet, with the great and unsolved
political perplexity of how human plurality c n be conceived, of
how groups of human beings, historically and culturally distinct
from one another, c n live together and share a common world.
Arendt's read ers are left with both tbe trembling insight that
hum an natu re is not unchangeable and tbe perhaps slightly more
enc ouraging knowledge that far more is possible than we ha d
ever thought.
Arendt adds totalitarianism to the kinds of government previ-
ously known: monarchy (the rule of one) and its perversion in
tyranny; aristocracy (the rule of tbe best) and its corruption in oli-
garchy or the rule of cliques; and democracy (the rule of many)
and its distortion in ochlocracy or mob rule. The hallmark of
totalitarianism, a form of rule
supportedhy
uprooted masses who
ironically and also tragically sought a world in which they would
enjoy public recognition, was the appearance of wbat Arendt, in
Origins
called radical and absolute evil. In tha t sense totali-
tarian regimes are not the opposite of any previously realized
kind of government, or only of the vain attempts made through-
ou t the long centuries of Christian belieft realize the city of God
as a dwelling place for human beings. The lack of any actual
opposite, which if there were one would establish the place of
totalitarianism within a new categorical schem e, may be the surest
way of seeing it as a novel form of government, and as such tbe
central event not only ofth e twentieth century but o fthe present,
post-totalitarian world as well.
When Arendt noted that causality, the explanation of an event
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 629
to it, is an altoge ther alien and falsifying category in the histori-
cal sciences, she mean t that no historical event is ever pre-
dictable. Although with hindsight it is possible to discern a
sequence of events, there is always a grotesque disparity between
that sequence and a particular event's
meaning.
What the princi-
ple of causality ignores or denies is the contingency of human
affairs; that is, the human capacity
to begin something new,
and
therefore not only the meaning but also the existence of what it
seeks to explain. It is no t the objective historical scientist bu t the
impartial judgethe Hotneric
histor,
the original historian, was a
judge^for whom the existence and meaning of events are deci-
sive.Only then the antecedents of those events can be told in sto-
ries,
whose beginnings are never causes and whose conclusions a re
never determ ined in advan ce.'
Her rejection of causality and insistence on contingent factors
in th e course of history inform Arend t's jud gm en t of totalitarian
crimes against humanity as unpredictable, unpardonable, and in
the end ungraspable by the human mind. Regarding such crimes
the old saying
tout
comprendrec est
tout pardonnei'
as if to under-
stand an offense, say by its psychological motive, were to excuse
itdoubly misrepresents the reconciliation that understanding
does in fact seek. What may be possible is reconciliation
to the
world in which totalitarian crimes were committed, which is one
reason that in
rigins
and thereafter Arendt expended so much
effort in trying to understand that world. But it is important not
to forget that Arendt's outrage at totalitarianism is not a subjec-
tive em otiona l reaction foisted on a purportedly value free sci-
entific analysis;^ her anger is inherent in her judgment of form
of government that defaced the human world on whose behalf
she sought to expose Nazism and Stalinism for what they were and
what they did.
Yet as usual in Arendt, there is another side to that project.
Even before she wrote riginsshe spoke of the desperate need to
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630 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Not only because these facts have changed and poisoned
the very air we breathe, not only because they now inhabit
our dreams at night and permeate our thoughts during the
daybut also because they have become the basic experi-
ence and tbe basic misery of ou r times. Only from this foun-
dation, on which a new knowledge of man will rest, can our
new insights, our new m emories, ou r new deeds, take the ir
poin t of de pa rture (1994: 200).
The beginning called for here, if there is to be one, will arise
from the jud gm en t and actions of m en an d women who know the
na ture of totalitarianism and agree tbat, for the sake o fth e world,
it
must
not occur again not only in the specific forms in which it
has already occurred, which may be unlikely, but in any form
whatsoever. The significance of the story Arendt tells in riginsis
political, no t only because she wanted to destroy what history con-
serves, bu t also because her method of storytelling goes against
the grain of social scientists who purport to explain totalitarian-
ism objectively, that is, in terms that for Arendt explain away its
meaning.^ Reflecting some 20 years later on the moment in 1943
when she first learned about Auschwitz, Arendt said:
This
ought
not to
havehappened. Tha t ought is not based in transc end ent
moral values but rather constitutes as strong as possible a state-
ment that there was something irremissibly wrong with the world
in which Auschwitz could and did happen, and that that wrong
must be righted.
Reconciliation to the world requires that totalitarianism be
judged,not by subsuming it und er traditional moral, legal, or
political categories, but by recognizing that it had no precedent,
that its elements still persist, and that every indication of its
reem ergence can be resisted. Such judg m en t is possible for
beings whose essence is beg inning, and reconciliation may fol-
low only if new roots are struck in the world. Ju dg m en t is the
oth er side of action and as such the reverse of resignation. It
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 631
cal processes that did not cause but led to its emergence would
remain intact and the bu rde n of ou r time be reaccumulated.^^
A quotation from Karl Jaspe rs that struck Arend t right in the
heart and which she chose as the epigraph for rigins stresses
that what matters is not to give oneself over to the despair of the
past or the Utopian hop e of the future, bu t to rem ain wholly in
the present, the temporal dimension of action. Totalitarianism is
the crisis of our times insofar as the demise of the regimes of
Hitler and Stalin becomes a turnin g point for thepresentworld, a
felt political need for the construction of a new world fit for the
common habitation of all human beings.
The principle condition of the possibility of such a world, the
right of every human being to have rights, will be discussed later
in this essay, but first Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism
needs to be distinguished from its frequent identification as a par-
ticularly brutal form of tyranny or despotism. In a tyrannical polit-
ical realm, which hardly can be called
public
the tyrant and the
people exist in isolation from each other. Due to the lack of
rap-
port or legal communication between the people and the tyrant,
all action in a tyranny manifests a moving princip le of mutua l
fear: the tyrant's fear ofthe people on one side, and the people's
fear of the tyrant, or, as Arendt pu t it, their despair over the
impossibility of jo in ing toge ther to act at all, on the other. It is in
this sense that tyranny is a contradictory and futile form of gov-
ernment, one that generates not power but impotence. Hence,
according to Montesquieu, whose acute observations Arendt drew
on in these matters, it is a form of government that, unlike con-
stitutional republics or monarchies, corrupts
itself
cultivating
within itself the seeds of its own destruction . Therefore, the essen-
tial impotence of a tyrannically ruled state, however fiamboyant
and spectacular its dying throes maybe ,and regardless of the cru-
elty and suffering it may infiict on its peop le, presents no menace
of destruction to the world at large.
In the early revolutionary stages of development and whenever
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632 SOCIAL RESEARCH
employ tyrannical measures of force and violence, but their
nature differs from that of tyrannies precisely in the enormity of
their thre at of world destruction. That threat has often bee n seen
as the total politic liz tionof llphases oflife. But Arend t saw it as
the inversion of the genuinely political: a phenomenon of total
depolitic liz tion
{Entpolitisierung
that appeared for the first time
in the regimes of Stalin after 1929 and Hider after 1938. Totali-
tarianism 's radical atomization ofth e whole of society differs from
the political isolation, or desert as Arendt called it, of
tyranny.
It
eliminates not only free action, which is political by definition,
but also the element of action, of initiating anything at all, from
every human activity. Individual spontaneityin thinking, in
aspiring, and in every creative undertakingwhich sustains and
renews the human world, is obliterated in totalitarianism. Totali-
tarianism destroys every potentiality of human life, including
those of solitude and isolation, which can and frequently bave
flourished in the circumscribed political realm of tyranny.^'
In totalitarian society hum an freedom , private as well as pub lic,
is not even an illusion. Fear is omnipresent but not the source of
suspicion that in tyranny appears iess as an emotion than as tbe
principle of the tyrant's action and the people's nonaction.
Wbereas tyranny, pitting the ruler and his subjects against each
other, is ultimately powerless, totalitarianism generates immense
power. It is a new sort of power, no t only exceeding bu t different
in kind from outward coercive force. In tbe name of ideological
necessity totalitarian terror dominates human beings
fromwithin,
thereby mocking the appearance and also the disappearance, the
lives and the deaths of distinct and potentially free men and
wom en. It mocks the world that only a plurality of free individu-
als can continuously renew and share with one another, and it
mocks the earth as tbe natural home of such beings. Totalitarian-
ism mocks everything that is
given,
everything that the totalitari-
ans do not themselves
make.
The profound paradox that lies
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 63 3
ity, of hum an freedom, of spontaneity and beginning , and the fact
that thepossibility of that eradication is itself something entirely
new, made an d bro ught into the world by human beings, must be
faced, for it lies at the core of Arendt's concept of totalitarianism.
As Arendt understiinds totalitarianism, its nature is the combi-
nation of its essence of terror and its principle of logicality. As
essence terro r must be total more than a means of suppressing
opposition and more than the most extreme resentment or vin-
dictiveness. Total terror is, if not reasonable, the rational and con-
sistent displacement of the role played by positive laws in
constitutional governments. The result is neither lawless anarchy,
the war of all against ail, nor the tyrannical abrogation of law, for
just as a govem ment of laws would becom e perfect in the
absence of transgressions, so terro r rules suprem e when nobody
any longer stands in its way. Positive laws in constitu tional gov-
ernm ents seek to mediate, to translate and realize higher uni-
versal laws, unalterable divine commandments or fixed natural
law, but terror is designed to translate in to reality the law of move-
ment of histoiy or na ture directly, no t in a delimited body politic
bu t thro ughout mankind. The murderous justice of the laws of
the motion of history and nature is not mediated but executed
immediately: for Arend t that is the meaning of totalitarian terror.
If totalitarianism were perfected, if the entire plurality of
human beings were to become theembodiment
of th
forces of nat-
ural and historical movement, then its essence of terror would suf-
fice as its principle of motion. But as long as totalitarianism exists
in a no n to tali tarian world, it needs the processes of logical or
dialectical deduction to coerce the hum an m ind into imitating
and becoming integrated into those suprahum an forces. ^ In
oth er words, onceit yiel sto thelogic l development
of th
idea, not
as the content but as thepremise
of
n ideology, the human mind
will move as inevitably as natural and historical processes them-
selves move, against which nothing stands bu t the great capacity
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634 SOCIAL RESEARCH
alter the direction of their m om entum by starting something
new. ^^ The twin freedoms of acting and thinking can always pre-
vent the vise of terror and logicality from closing, which is the rea-
son that at all costs totalitarian regimes eliminate their every
manifestation . Yet it is not the political isolation, which frustrates
action, but the social loneliness of uprooted masses, the loss of
their
common
sense thatis,their sense of comm unity and comm u-
nication, th at attracts them to ideologicalpre dictationsoi thegoals
of na ture and history in the first p lac e.''' Impervious to the reality
of shared ex perien ce, those who have no place in the world, rec-
ognized and guaranteed by others, are inwardly, benea th th e
crust of their lives, prepared for totalitarian organization and,
ultimately, for total domination.
Both Hider and Stalin came to realize that it was possible to
eradicate the unpredictability of hum an affairs in the true cen tral
institution of totalitarian organizational power : the concentration
camp. What Arendt saw is that eradicating unpredictability
requires altering the nature of human beings. In the camps the
internees' deprivation of all rights, even of the ability to make a
conscientious choice, does
w y with
the dynam ic conflict between
the legality of particular positive laws and the idea of justice on
which, in constitutional governments, an open and unpredictable
future depends. On the one hand, in Arendt's concept of totali-
tarianism, hum an freedom is seen as inconsequential to the
unden iable autom atism of natural and historical processes, or at
most as an im pedim ent toi tarfreedom. On the other, when the
iron band of terro r destroys hum an diversity, so totally dom inat-
ing human beings that they cease to be individuals and become a
m ere mass of identical, interchangeable specimens ofthe animal-
species man, those processes are provided with an incomparable
instrum ent of acceleration. Terror and logicality welded together
equip totalitarian regimes witli a previously undreamed of power
to dominate. But above all it is Arendt's description of how the
totalitarian systems of Hitler and Stalin inverted political life, of
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 63 5
how they subverted the consciences and destroyed the uniqueness
of hum an beings, which leads directly to the apprehension of what
she recognized as their crime against humanity.
The
rime
Against Hum anity and The Right
To
H ave Rights
In 963Arendt said that she had been thinking for many years,
or, to be specific, for thirty years, abou t the na ture of evil. It was
30 years since the Reichstag was burned in Berlin, an event fol-
lowed immediately by the Nazis' illegal arrest of thousands of
their political opponents, mainly but not exclusively communists.
Innocent of any crime, those detained were taken to the cellars of
the Cestapo or to concentration camps and subjected to what
Arend t called monstrous treatm ent. With his political opposi-
tion effectively forestalled. Hitler could dictate as a matter of pol-
icy the Jew hatred that in his case was obvious to anyone who
bothered to read
Mein
Kampf the diatribe he dictated in prison
and publisbed in 1925.Which is to say that with the conso lidation
of Nazi power anti-Semitism ceased to be merely a social preju-
dice and became a virulent form of racism: Germany would be
made judenrein racially purified, first by demoting Jews to the
status of second-class citizens, then by ridding them of their citi-
zenship altogether, deporting them, and finally by killing them.
From that m om ent on Arendt said she felt responsible. But
responsible for what? She hardly meant that she was responsible
for having been bo rn a Jew, but that, unlike m any others, she
could no longer be simply a bystander and would
respond
as a
Jewto tbe attacks on Jewish citizens of her native land. Eventually
she was led to confront a new kind of criminality, one bent on
destroying not only Jews bu t h um an plurality as such; and still
later to determ ine the principlebywhich thislawfulcriminality, in
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636 SOCIAL RESEARCH
punished. When Hitlerw sdefeated in 1945 incontrovertible evi-
dence of Nazi factories of exterm ination came to light, and at
the same time information concerning slave labor camps in the
Soviet Gulag emerged. Struck by the structural similarity of those
institutions, Arendt turned her attention to their function in
Nazism and Stalinism. The camps haunted Arendt's writing until
Stalin's death in 1953; and then eight years later reemerged on
the horizon of her thought in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in
Jerusalem. In one way or another the Nazi camps played a major
role in the controversy that followed the publication
of
ichmann
In Jerusalem A
Report
on
the
Banality ofEv ilm 1963, and , al tho ugh
she ceased to write directly about them after 1966, it is fair to say
that the overpowering reality of the camps lay behind her pre-
occupation with the problem of evil that lasted until the end of
her life.
Although the containment and brutal elimination of political
opposition had been a factor in the camps during the revolution-
ary stages of the rise to power of totalitarian movements, it is in
the postrevolutionary period, when H itler and Stalin had becom e
the unopposed leaders of huge populations, that Arendt brought
them into focus as entirely new phenomena. So-called objective
enemiesthose guilty of no crime, or of
possible
but no t actual
crimes^were incarcerated without even the pretense of the
always equivocal legal concept of protective custody. She called
the knowledge of what acttially transpired in the camps the real
secret of the secret police that in both cases administered them,
and she considered, disturbingly, the extent to which this secret
knowledge corresponds to the secret desires and the secret com-
plicities of the masses in our time
(1973:
437).
Arendt was not a survivor of the camps, nor did she write in
empathy (to ber an ethical and cognitive presum ption ) with
those who had actually experienced total terror. In a revealing
passage she
says:
Only the fearful imag ination of those who have
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 637
smitten in their own fiesh, of those who are consequently free
from the bestial, desperate terror which. . .inexorably paralyzes
everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking
about horrors, adding that such thinking is useful only for the
perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political
passions (1973: 441). The trouble with most accounts from rec-
ollection or by eyewitnesses is that in direct propordon to their
authenticity they are unable to com municate things that evade
hum an understand ing and hum an experience. They are
doomed to fail if they attempt to explain psychologically or socio-
logically what cannot be explained either way; that is, to explain
in terms tha t make sense in the h um an world what does no t make
sense the re. Moreover, survivors who have resolutely return ed
to the world of common sense tend to recall the camps as if they
had m istaken a nightm are for reality. The camps were indeed a
phantom world Arendt deliberately echoes the appearance of
Africa to Co nrad 's adventurers that had materialized with all
the sensual data of reality, bu t to he r that meant not that the sur-
vivors had experienced a terrifying dream but that they had been
the victims ofapreviously unknown c rime. On e ofthe underlying
reasons for the controversy created by Arendt's book on Eich-
m ann was and remains the failure of many readers, both Jews and
non-Jews, to transcend the fate of their own peoplebe it doom
or escapein orde r to judg e what was pernicious for hum anity
its lf
The notion ofa crime against humanity had been introduced
in the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals in 1946, but in
Arend t's opin ion it was confused the re with crimes against
peace and war crimes certainly grievous transgressions but
not crimes against every human beingand had never been
clearly defined nor its perpetrators properly identified with
regard to what it was they had done. To Arendt the genocide of
the
ews
throughout Nazi-controlled Europe was a crime against
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6 3 8 S O C I A L R E S E A R C H
pe op le which violated the or de r of m an kin d. . .and an al to-
ge the r different com mun ity, namely, the comity ofall the natio ns
of the world. It req uires b oth imag ination a nd the steadfastness of
h u m a n solidarity to face what A ren dt m ea nt by the absolute evil
of totalitarianism, to see that, in the case of the Nazis, what is
at tributa ble to the long history of Jew-h atred an d anti-Semitism
is only the choice of victims [an d] n ot the na tu re of the c rime.
In the cam ps H itler an d Stalin fully realized mo der nity's con-
te m pt for reality, for wh at is given and no t self-made, go ing far
bey ond the cynical an d nihilistic no tion th at everything is per-
m itted to the insane prop osit ion that everything is possible.
A re nd t un de rsto od the camp s as laboratories in which experi-
m ents were condu cted to tes t that proposi t ion, and what those
expe rimen ts dem ons trated was that the om nipo tenc e of
man
can be bo ug ht at the price of the superfluity of
men.
In the
cam ps hu m an beings were m ad e into one utterly pred ictable liv-
ing corpse, a body per m an en tly in the process of dying. M en
and wo me n were red uce d to the lowest com m on de no m ina tor of
organ ic l ife, re nd er ed equal in the sense of be ing
interchange-
able,
an inh um an equality that stands in the sharpe st possible
contrast to political equality. If political equality is an equality of
peers ,
the achievement of a plurality of distinct individuals who of
their own will join tog eth er to ge ne rate the pow er requ ired to
affect the cours e of the ir wo rld, th en the equality of the cam ps
is of un diffe ren tiated hu m an being s dep rived of every relation to
an yth ing like a wo rld: in A ren dt's words, to be sup erflu ous
means not to belong to the world at all .
H um an exis tence, accord ing to Are ndt , is in part con di t ioned
and in part free, but in the camps terror corroded the part that is
free. Unlike fear that is intelligible in its relation to an object in
the world, or to the objectivity of a threatening world, terror
con-
ditions
hu m an beings in mu ch the same way that the beh avior of
animals can be conditioned by electric shock. Systematically
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 63 9
in the ho pe of being fed, much as Pavlov's dog (to Arendt a per-
verted animal) was conditione d to salivate not when it was hun-
gry but when a bell was rung.^^ In the contrived, inhuman, but
rationally consistent nonw orld of the camps, innocence is
beyond virtue and guilt is beyond crime : the categories of inno-
cence and guilt, right and wrong, virtue and vice, and almost
everything else that since time immemorial has been associated
with the specific natu re of hum an beings ceased to make sense. As
yet, at least as far as is known, the totalitarian camps are the only
places on earth where the dehumanization of man was scientifi-
cally implemented and systematically carried out, not for any
com prehensible purpose but for its own sake.
When com pared with its insane end-result, the assault on
human nature in the camps was methodological and threefold.
The first, essential step was the destruction of jur idica l or polit-
ical man by disfranchisement; second, the moral person was
destroyed by rendering his or her conscience impotent; and
third , the unique identity of the individual was obliterated by
annihilating the human capacity for spontaneity in thought and
action. Disfranchisement means the elim ination of every legal sta-
tus, including that of ordinary criminals. Human beings are sub-
jected to torment not only unfit for any conceivable crime but
also unconnected to anything they have done; they are punished
for having been born a Jew, for being the representative of a dying
class,
for being asocial, or mentally ill, or the carrier of a disease.
New categories would have to be invented when old categories
became exhausted, or victims would have to be selected
randomly
as in fact they were in Stalin's more perfect system. The arbi-
trariness of the choice of victims aims at destroying the civil
rights of the whole population , and that destruction is carried
ou t ne ithe r by indo ctrination no r brainwashing, for it is no t con-
sent {which implies the possihility of dissent) tha t is wanted b ut
only discipline. The destruction of jurid ical or political man is
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640 SOC IAL RESEARC H
Next, the ability to make a conscientious choice is eliminated.
Prisoners are made to choose not between good and evil but
between evil and evil. When a mother is forced to choose one of
her children to be murdered in order to save the life (or post-
pone the death) of another, she is implicated in the crime com-
mitted against her. Martyrdom is not possible since the camps are
what Arendt called holes of oblivion, places completely cut off
from the outside world in which a martyr's story might be told,
remembered, and become an example for others. The dead are
imm ediately forgotten as if they had never existed, their deaths
as superfluous as their lives had been. Einally, the concentration
of human beings, massing them together and binding them in
terror's band of iron, destroys every relation to and distinction
from one another. They are submitted to torture, not to learn
what they know but to so hu rt them that they become bund les of
insensate flesh. Their spontaneityis,as it were, wm ng from them :
ren dered incapable of acting or thinking, they drift 'like dum -
mies to their death,' ^^ no more than living fuel for the engines
of destruction. In the slave labor camps of the Gulag, with their
supposed economic rationale,'^ the
l borers
are starved or frozen
to death, at once replaced by others whose lives and deaths are
made no less superfluous than those of their predecessors.
To grasp the evil of totalitarian criminality requires a mental
perspective in which the experience of being superfluousthe
loneliness of not belonging to the world, the sense of the futility
of livingis reflected. That experience was forced by terror on
those condemned to die, but Arendt saw further that the func-
tioning of the laboratories of extermination dep ended on the
changed nature of the condemners. She was of course aware of
the gulf in terms of human suffering that separates the two, but
her point was that the condemners themselves were superfluous
as human beings. S.S. officers were selected by photographs, by
objective racial characteristics rath er than by interviews in
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642 SOC IAL RESEARC H
There is no ready answer to that questioiT. In the Nazi case it is
well known that Hitler's inexorable will to dehumanize those who
presen ted no threat to him hin de red his ability to fight effectively
against his real enemies at the end of World War II. What is the
po int of dom inating men at any cost, not as they
are,
no t for any
utilitarian purp ose, but in ord er to change the ir very nature ? If
it is for th e sake of the consistency of a lying world order, as
Arendt went on to suggest, what is the sense of system that even
if it succeeded in destroying the hum an world ouldno t end in the
creation of a thousand-year Reich or Messianic Age but only
in self-destruction? For the sheer destructive momentum of total-
itarianism is like a jugg erna ut or fireball that if unchecked could
ravage and reduce the hum an world to ashes until therew snoth-
ing left for it but to wield on and consumeitself (In an admittedly
minorw ythis anti-utilitarianism is foreshadowed in Co nrad's Mr.
Kurtz, whose extremism did more harm than good to the Com-
pany for which he worked.)
Tha t totalitarianism appeared in two major Eu ropean countries
at almost the same time is an irrevocable reality in the history of
our world. Because its reappearance in some form is more easily
imagined than its first occurrences ever were, there are certainly
important lessons to be learned from its origins or elements.
Today the widespread existence of uprooted masses, of millions
and in some areas of the world generations of homeless, unedu-
cated refugees, alienated from anything like a com mon world and
ripe for th e logical dictates of one or ano the r ideology, constitutes
such a lesson. But it must also be remembered that from first to
last for Arendt, the evildoing of totalitarian domination was
beyond sinfulness and without hum anly com prehensible
motives. It is one th ing to conceive totalitarianism as a novel
form of government, but to account for men whose acts are
inconceivable is another.
When Eichmann was taken captive in Argentina by agents of
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 64 3
saw an opportunity, unusual for philosophers, to confront the
realm of hu m an affairs and hu m an deeds. . .directly. She
reported on the trial forThe New
Yorker im^dzine
and shortly after
ichmann in ferusalemwas published, prom pted hy questions suh-
mitted by a journa list, she reflected on why she, a writer and
teacher of political philosophy. . .had. . .undertaken a reporter's
job (1963b). It was, she said, because the trial offered her the
opportunity to encou nte r in the flesh a notorious Nazi criminal,
and she was eager to grasp, if possible, hisindividual^\\\\i whyhe
had done what he did, which, she adde d, was not relevant to he r
m ore theoretical considerations in
Origins.
In the earlier work she
had dea lt with the type of totalitarian criminal, bu t now she
sought to know Who was Eichmann? and What were his deeds,
not insofar as his crimes were part and parcel of the Nazi system
bu t insofar as he was a hum an being? She had , she said, the wish
to expose myselfnot to the deeds which, after all, were well
knownbut to the evildoer
himself.
She maintained that her report of the trial did not go beyond
the evidence p resen ted in testimony, but she fit that evidence into
an ominously meaningful story. The facts alone tend to become
less and less significant with the passage of time; their recitation
today all too often makes them seem unreal, as if listening to
them after many years set up a shield against the experiences of
terror and human destruction that they circumstantiate. Arendt's
story provides no such shield. It enabled her, as it may enab le us,
to see in Eichmann a most unexpected perpetrator of this new
criminality and by judging him forswear the processes of dehu-
manization in a world in which their possibility nevertheless
remains real.
There are several important respects in which Eichmann in
ferusalem
differs from
Origins
and Arendt laid considerable
emphasis on these differences in a number of letters. To Mary
McCarthy she mentioned three (Arendt, 1995). She wrote, first,
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644 SOCIAL RESEARCH
because there are simply too many people in the world to make
oblivion possible. Second, she realized that Eichmann was
m uch less infiuenced by ideology than she would have assumed
before attend ing the trial: exterm ination per se, she found, did
not depend on an ideology or its logic. Third, she said that the
phrase the banality of evil stands in contrast to. . .'radical evil.'
She developed this contrast in greater detail in a letter to Ger-
shom Scholem (Arendt, 1978b): It is indeed my opinion now
that evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extrem e. Thoug ht tries
to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it con-
cerns itself with evil, it is frustrated. Th at th ere is no thing in evil
for thought to latch on to is what Arendt m eant by the banality of
evil: not that Eichm ann's acts are com monplace, hu t that the mas-
siveness ofthe evil he infiicted on the world
defies
thoughO^
In a subsequent letter to McCarthy, who had written of the
mor l exhil r tion that reading
Eichmann Inferusalem
afforded her,
Arend t noted: you were the only reader to understand what oth-
erwise I have never admittednamely that I wrote this book in a
state of euph oria. In a letter to a Germ an corresp ond ent, she
said that 20 years after she had learned of the existence of
Auschwitz she experienced acur
posterior
thatis,a healing of he r
inability to think through to its roo t in the acts of men the evil of
totalitarian criminality. The posterior or later cure is also impor-
tant in the sense that for Arendt the terrible injury infiicted on
the Jewish peo ple would at long last ppe r as a crime against
humanity, and the exemplary criminal capable of that incom-
prehen sihle crime, in the person of Eichm ann, who
w s
not even
an anti-Semite, be identified.
Arendt saw Eichm ann , on trial for his life, as a buffoon whose
inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to
think
namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody
else.
No com munication was possible with him, not because
he lied bu t because he was surro unded by the most reliable
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 645
ers, and henc e against reality as such. . . . [It was] proof
against reason and argument and information and insight
of any kind (1963a: 49, 78).
But, and this is what is ominous, his inability to reflect on and
judge his own acts also led Arendt to see that Eichmann was not
corruptible. Having overcome and in his case even forgotten
any natural inclination he may once have had to hinder the trans-
portation of millions of innocent Jews to their ann ihilation in
Auschwitz, Eichmann boasted that he had done his duty to the
end. Unlike those mem bers of the S.S. who attem pted to negoti-
ate with the enemy when it becam e clear that the Nazi cause was
lost, Eichm ann declared that he had lived his whole life. .
.according to a Kantian definition of
duty ;
and to the surprise of
everybody, [he] cam e up with an approximately correct definition
of [Kant's] categorical imperative, even though he had dis-
torted it in practice. Arendt recognized , moreover, that Eich-
mann's distortion agrees with what he called the version of Kant
'for the househ old use of the little m an ,' the identification of
one's will with the source of law, which for Eichm ann was no t
pure practical reason but, and regardless of its logicality, simply
what theFUhrerw lWed. He supported and carried out the physi-
cal destruction of European Jewiy and would have done the same
for any group or anyone at all whom a power he deemed higher
than himself had decreed unfit to live. He could be relied on to
do whatever his conscience assured him was his duty.
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of ichmann
in
ferusalem is
its account of human conscience. Th e refusal of the court to con-
sider seriously the question of Eichm ann's conscience resulted in
its failure to confront w hat Arend t called the central moral, legal,
and political ph en om en a of our century. Th e Israeli judg es
understood conscience traditionally as the voice of God orlumen
naturale speaking or shining in every human soul, telling or illu-
m inating the difference between righ t and
wrong.
This simply did
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646 SOCIAL RESEARCH
an d it seems to have ftinctioned in the expected way for a few
weeks after he became engaged in the transport of
Jews,
and then,
when he heard no voice saying hou shall not killbut on the con-
trary every voice saying hou shallkill it began to function the
oth er way aroun d. If the phen om eno n of a changeable con-
science indicates a moral collapse, Arend tw sconvinced by tes-
timony presented at the trial that this collapse was widespread
throughout Europe, from which even respected members of the
Jevidsh leadership were not exempt.'^ And if this collapse led her
subsequently to dismantle moral philosophy, not to reveal moral
phenomena as ilkisory (as Nietzsche had attempted to do) but to
strip them of their traditional trappings, for her it also lay at the
core of the proceedings in Jerusalem .
Eichmann was neither stupid nor hostile: he knew and for the
most part admitted his acts but could no more reflect on their
m eaning in Jerusalem than durin g his career in the S.S. He con-
tradicted himself constantly b ut he d id not lie, his conscience was
clear, and he did not suffer from rem orse: He knew that what he
had once called his duty
w s
now called a crime, and be accepted
this new code of Jud gm ent as if it were noth ing btit ano the r lan-
guage rule. ^*^ From the m om ent he was cap tured he expected to
die,
but on what
legalground
could his criminality be judge d to
warrant the death sentence? If, as Arend t believed, intent to do
wrong was no t proved against Eichmann, and if therefore the
court's judg m en t was anything like a language rule expressing
the Justice, if not of the victor, then of the injureda kind of
vengeancethen that Judgm ent could not be gro und ed at all:
after another war with a different outcome it could change to
ano ther language rule, and go on and on changing.
Vengeance was a topic tbat Arendt had considered in
The
Human Condition
published three years before the Eichmann
trial. There she interpreted Jesus of Nazareth's injunction to for-
give trespasses as the buman power to break an otherwise irre-
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 647
previous ones, ad infinitum. Forgiveness is no mere reaction to a
trespass but an unpredictable, spontaneous, free action marking
an end to what is forgiven and opening the way to a new begin-
ning. As a human action forgiveness is not unconditional: it can
only take place between the trespasser who "repents," changes his
mind, and wants to start anew, and the forgiver who releases him.
Yet in th e same passage Arendt also cites Jesus on certain offenses
or stumbling blocks {scandala that, unlike trespasses, cannot be
forgiven: "Woe un to him, through w hom they com e It were bet-
ter for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he
cast into the sea." To Ai-endt this meant tha t such offensesshe
was clearly thinking o fth e radical evil of totalitarianism also can-
not be punished, for to imprison or peremptorily terminate the
finite life of a mass murderer is ludicrous as an act of retribudon
(tha t is, as adequate or jus t p un ishm ent) because of its lack of
symmetry with the crime in question.^^ She concludes that the
inability to forgive an oftense that cannot be punished, and vice
versa, is an important "structural element in the realm of human
affairs," for such offenses "transcend [that] realm. . .and the
potentialities of human power, both of which they radically
destroy wherever they make their appearance." What cannot be
forgiven, pardoned,^'^ or punished would therefore presumably
hinde r th e hum an power to start anew, although that is no t stated
explicitly in this passage (1958c: 238-41).
When Arendtw spresent at Eichm ann's trial in Jerusalem , this
same matter arose in far greater specificity. She objected thatjus-
tice would not appear to be done in the Israeli court's judgment
that Eichmann be executed because he intended wrong to the
Jewish peopleas if his conscience "must" have told him that
what he was doing transgressed the commandment "Thou shall
not kill"and therefore was morally guilty of capital crimes
against Jews. She then substituted he r own jud gm en t of Eich-
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648 SOCIAL RESEARC H
[ ]
ust
as
you supported and carried ou t a policy of no t want-
ing to share the ea rth with the Jewish peop le and the peo-
ple of a number of other nationsas though you and your
superiors had any right to determine who should and who
should not inhabit the worldwe find tbat no one, that is,
no m emb er of the hu m an race, can be expected to want to
share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only
reason, you must hang
(1963:
279).
Arend t's Jud gm ent cann ot be mistaken for a "language rule":
it entails nothing like a tit for a tat, nothing like revenge, nor
does it imply that the death sentence is an adequate punishment
for E ichman n's unpa rdon able deeds. The power of the Judg-
ment she exercised, however, may be considered an act of ret-
ributive Justice, but only if its symmetry with Eichm ann's crimes
is seen on a political ra tbe r than a moral level. For even if he did
not intend wrong be nevertheless violated tbe status of every
human being, including his own, not only by supporting tbe
extermination of a specific people or peoples, but by violating
the plurality "of mankind in its entirety." For her this is the real
politi l crime against humanity, that is, against the human con-
dition and the human world, against "human diversity as such. .
.without wbich the very words 'm an kin d' or 'hum anity' w ould be
devoid of meaning."
Having listened to Eichmann, whose psychological profile was
normal, Arendt determined that he was not a "monster" but dis-
tinguished from most bu t by no m eans al othe r people only by
his "authentic" incapacity for ordinary reflective tbought. Arendt
saw this incapacity as the negation of human plurality; as such it
gave birtb to tbe expression "the banality of evil," the use of which
she la ter felt th e need to Justify philosophically because of its
widespread and perhaps understandable misrepresentation as a
trivialization, or even exculpation, of the criminality of Eich-
mann. Hardly a hint of what became her immense final task can
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AREND T ON TOTALITARIANISM 64 9
covery that what traditional morality had tho ught of as the
voice of
conscience is in fact theactualizationof consciousness in the activ-
ity of thinking. That discovery, prompted by Eichmann's mean-
ingless words, rendered concrete the relation of thoughtlessness
to evildoing and opened the way to the justification she sought.
What is most elusive and difficult to grasp is tha t Arendt m eant lit-
erally the ctivityof thinking and not its results, no t things
though t no m atter how profound they mightbe.She certainlyw s
not stating a new moral theorem from which new rules might be
derived, which in turn could only dissolve in further thinking, or
becom e customs and habits as changeable as table m anners or
Eichmann's coascience.
What Arendt meant by the
actualization
of consciousness was
not consciousness in the psychological sense but a knowing-with-
oneself
{con-scientia
that imposes limits when it is experienced.
The crucial point is that the activity of thinking provides an
intense a nd ineluctab le ex^mence of
plurality:
the activity of think-
ing, that is, the actuality of the silent dialogue with
oneself
dis-
closes a difference within the identity of the thinker. At a speed
greater than lightn ing these two-in-one, as she called them , con-
verse as long as the activity of thinking lasts. She further found
that these thinking partners have to be on good terms, essen-
tially in agreement, because they cannot
go on
or
resume
thinking
if they contradict and become estranged from one other. Arendt
grounded, existentially, the law of contradiction, of which Eich-
m ann was entirely oblivious, in this congeniality ofthe two-in-one.
By the same token it is in the activity of thinking that the specifi-
cally
human
relationship between a plurality, though it be only of
two,
is philosophically established as the
political
condition of the
great plurality of mankind. The reahty ofthe concept of human-
ity, no ted as ugly by Marlow in Conrad's tale, became horrify-
ingly explicit in Hider and S talin's claim to global rule, bu t here
it is the sheer activity of thinking that makes a human being not
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650 SOCIAL RESEARCH
right of oth er hu m an beings to inhabit the world and share the
earth. Socrates, who lived thoughtfully with himself in solitude
and in public\nth the citizens of Athens, was convinced that itw s
better for him to take his own life than to renounce the thinking
that bound him to himself
and
to his city, a renunciation that
would have left him in abject loneliness. In the many references
to him in Arendt's late work Socrates stands forth as the diamet-
ric opposite of Eich mann , no t because of any doc trine, of which
he had none, but because he cared more for the activity of think-
ing, with himself and others, than for a life without meaning.
In he r critical lectures on moral philosophy delivered after and
largely in response to the storm of controversy unleashed by her
accotxnt of the Eicbm ann trial, Arendt repeats the saying of Jesvis
cited earlier, emphasizing that It were be tterfor
him
that a mill-
stone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into tbe sea.
Because he sent millions of human beings to die in Auschwitz by
failing to recognize their humanity, even or especially if he was
incapable of that recognition, from the po int of view of the world
it vifasbetter for ichmannthat he be rid of his life. That is neithe r
pardon no r pu nishmen t, but Justice rend ered according to what
was for Arendt tbe immanent political law of buman plurality:
the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the
world. Had Arendt's Judgm ent been th e court's Judgm ent, Jus-
tice, a political virtue, would not only have been done in
Jerusalem but also would have been seen to be done throughout
tbe w orld. And what is most imp ortant, the hum an power of Jews
and others, including their enemies, to make a new beginning
would have been revivified, and maybe even actualized, if in the
world's eyes Eicbmann had appeared as
hostis humanisgeneris
an
enemy of every hum an being.
With the establishm ent of the state of Israel Jews were finally
able to sit in judg m en t on crimes comm itted against their own
people ; they no longer needed to appeal to others for protec-
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AREND T ON TOTALITARIANISM 651
of the rights of man. When she wrote rigins Arendt already
knew that universal human rights are a chimera for those
excluded from the power required to enforce them. She knew
from her own experience that despite any proclamation of their
universality such rights are not indepen den t of hum an plurality,
are
not
innate, and are
not
possessed by hu m an beings expelled
from the hum an comm unity. In rigins shetherefore spoke of a
righ t to have rights, a right to live in a framework where one is
jud ged by one 's actions and opinions, and it was that right that
she strove to make visible as the fundamental principle of hum an
solidarity, the new foundation of human com munity as such.
Were that community to arise it would stand in positive opposi-
tion to totalitarianism. Unlike the traditional way of reading the
categorical scheme of forms of government, however, this world
political community, which wouldnotaspire to global ru le, would
succeed totalitarianism, of which Arendt believed it alone could
right the terrible wrong.
She wrote:
Corresponding to the one crime against humanity is the
one human right. Like all other rights, it can exist only
through mutual agreement and guarantee. Transcending
the rights ofthe citizenbeing the right of man to citizen-
shipthis right is the only one that can and can only be
gua ranteed by the comity of nations.
(1951;
437)
As the source of the rights of freedom and justice , the right to
have rights can be politically secu red only if it is established as
the principal tene t of international law, a law above nations , the
enforcem ent of which would be legally bind ing on all peoples an d
all nations , supersed ing any rules of sovereignty. ' - Tha t may
seem unlikely to occur, bu t it surely is no t impossible in a world in
which we know totalitarianism to be possible. In fact, it is unlikely
only insofar as we continue to think politically and make political
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652 SOC IAL RESEARC H
adventof totalitarianism demonstrated that utilitarian thinkingis
no longerofuseinrespondingto theproblemsand perplexities
ofourworld. What Arendt called the oldutilitarian equationof
the good withthe 'goodfor' some pre-existing given entity can-
not suffice
for a
eginning
as
unprecedented
as
totalitarianism
itself. It is of
this beginning that
in
time totalitarianism would
unequivocally
be
seen
as the
inversion, jus t
as
tyranny m ore than
two millennia
ago was
seen
as the
perversion
of the
monarchy
that historicallyitpreceded. W hatismeantis not the restoration
of anything like
a
monarchical form
of
government,
but
rather
thatthe oneprinciple,themonos arche of the beginning Arendt
calledforwouldbe the rightto thehuman conditionitself, the
prepolitical, prelegal, and so to speak, the prehistorical
foundation of aworldin which human beings live together with
some degree offreedom and justice, even if not in perpetual
peace.
All
rights spring from human plurality, including
the
transcending right
to
have rights, which c ann ot
be
conceived
as
a moral right
in any
traditional sense,
lt is the one
right directly
derived from Arendt's philosophic establishment
of the
imma-
nent lawof human pluralityon earth.
Well before
she
went
t
Jerusalem
to
report
on the
Eichmann
trial Arendt had spoken of the thunder of the explosion of
totalitarian domination that nevertheless leavesussilent when-
ever we dare
to ask, not
'What
are we
fighting
against
but
'What
arewefighting/or?' ^ She did not answer that question directly,
perhaps becauseat thetimeshe did notknowhow toformulatea
more compelling answer thanshe had already given in Origins
and perhaps because
she
wanted
her
readers
to
think
the
ques-
tion through
and
answer
it for
themselves.
Be
that
as it may, I
believe that after having recognized
the
limitless potentiality
of
evil
in
sheer thoughtlessness Arendt cons idered fighting/or''
the
political confirmation ofthe human right
to
have rights
the
high-
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ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM 65 3
Notes
^There is also the complexity of the relation of the book's first two
parts on Antisemitism and Imperialism to its third on Totalitarian-
ism, which is not treated here. Tam iniaux's and Tsao's papers in this
issue ofSocial Researchdeal with some of the pertinent issues.
^This would no t be the em ptiness, of course, of Heidegger's idealized
understanding of National Socialism in the 1930s, but more like what
Margaret Canovan has written, in a brilliant and challenging article,
about viewing Nazism and Stalinism. . .as inca rna tions of an alien pres-
ence,
vehicles through which the monster 'totalitarianism' worked its
mysterious will. See Canovan (2000: 38).
^For one view of the positive relationship of hum an freedom to poli-
tics,
see Kohn (2000).
*Which Chinua Achebe says he ought to have done; see Conrad
(1988:256, emphasis a dd ed ).
^'Writing in 1917 for a new edition ofHeartof
D arkness,
first published
in 1899, Com ad said that its composition had been more than a feat of
memory. Itw slike ano ther art altogether. Tha t somber them e had to
be given a sinister resonance, a tonality ofitsown, a con tinue d vibration
that, I hoped, would hang on the air and dwell on the ear after the last
no te had been struck (Conrad, 1988: 4) .
*^Cf. Arendt {1978a: 216).
'Considerably later Arendt restates this point. To he meaningful, even
to exist at ail, facts must be fitted into a story, for they have no con-
clusive reason for being what they are; they could always have been oth-
erwise Arendt. Truth and Politics (1968a: 238, 242).
'^Such a view, as Arendt points out, accurately describes many histori-
cal accounts of anti-Semitism and, it may be added, none more so than
D.
J . Goldhagen 's
Hitler s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust(1996).
^ The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an
imbearable sequence of sheer happenings. . .storytelling reveals mean-
ing without committing the error of defining it [and] brings about. .
.reconciliation with things as they really are . Stories tell again and
again how at the end we shall be privileged to jud ge . Arendt (1968b:
104-05).
^^
The urden
of
Our Time was
the title ofthe first British edition (Lon-
don, 1951) of
7 he Origins of Totalitarianism.
^'For Arendt it is of no small importance that such a flourishing
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654 SOCIAL RESEARCH
^^According to Arendt, stringent logicality as a guide to action [was]
exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin, indeed their only add ition to
the ideas and propaga nda slogans of their movements.
^%ee Arendt's later discussion of the miracle of such interruptive
action in What Is Freedom ? (1968a: 168-71).
*In fact, Aren dt sees the movem ent of history and the m ovem ent of
na ture [as] one and the same. Nature is swept into history when bio-
logical life is viewed as an inevitable development (1973:463).
^^Arendt quotes the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski on his experience
in Auschwitz: 'Never before was hope stronge r than m an, and never
before did hope result in so much evil. . . . We were taught not to give
up hope . That is why we die in the gas oven.' Agreeing that
hope
stronger than
man is destructive of the veiy humanity of man, she adds
that the victims' innocence , even from the viewpoint of their persecu-
tors, further dehum anizes them : that their apathy toward their own
dea th is the almost physical, automatic response to the challenge of
absolutemeaninglessness.
See Arendt (1964a: 90).
^'^Rousset (1947), quoted by Arendt (1973).
''The only time this rationale was partially adhered to was during
World War II.
^^From the first the notion of the
banality
of
evil
proved highly con-
tentious and it is still a problem for some of the most astute expositors
of Arendt's thought.
^ A year later writing about Rolf Hoc hhuth 's
The
Deputy, Aiendt
found that the wartime Roman Catholic pope, Pius XII, was not exempt
either. See Arendt (1964b).
' As Arendt pu t it later in Thinking and Moral Considerations: A
Lecture (1971:417).
^*In the same vein regarding the Nuremberg trials, Rene Char wrote
with great force: The extent of the crime renders the crime un think-
able, but its science perceptible. To evaluate it is to admit the hypothe-
sis of the crim inal's irresponsibility. Yetanyman,fortuitously or not, can
be hanged. This equality is intolerable. Quoted in Caws (1977: 31).
'^^In a letter to W. H. Auden, dated 14 February 1960, Arendt admit-
ted You are entirely right (and I was entirely wrong) tha t pu nish ment
is a necessary alternative only to jud icial pardon . But this shows only
that Arendt
w s
already po inting to the public, political na ture of crimes
against humanity, crimes that transcend the realm of Christian charity
to which, in the same letter and unlike her correspondent, though
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A R E N D T O N T O T A L I T A R I A N I S M 6 5 5
the rare cases of extreme evil. Roy Tsao has addressed this important
issue in an unpublished article, Arendt and Auden: Finding Hom e and
Facing Evil in the Modern World.
^^Arendt consistently opposed sovereignty, in nations as in individu-
als,
as a power above law, in both cases contrad icting the law of hum an
plurality.
^^ Tradition and the M odern Age in Arendt {1968a: 27). This essay
is taken in its entirety from Arendt's Marx manuscripts of 1953-54.
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