The Origins of Totalitarianism: A New Introduction

VoegelinView, 2023

are two of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century. With similar background and stories (both Germans who fled from Nazism and established themselves in America), they differ on their account of the regime that made them immigrate. Their debate, however brief, can enlighten us not only about that dark period of human history but also some present predicaments that we face. The debate began with the publication of the book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which for the first time made Arendt one of the most famous political thinkers of the 20th century. After the book's release, Waldemar Gurian, founder of the magazine The Review of Politics, commissioned Voegelin to write a review of the book. In the same publication, a few months later, Arendt publishes her response. Before the formalization in the form of essays, Voegelin sends a letter to his compatriot anticipating some topics that would appear in the review and is answered with a brief letter.

The paper analyzes the Jewish matter and how the totalitarian movement was structured and organized around this matter within the frame of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism book. The paper commences with mentioning Jews' importance in the society within the scope of court Jews. Afterward, it gives reasons for the rising of antisemitism and, after antisemitism how Jews separated into two groups which are the pariah and parvenu. Following, the paper mentions overseas imperialism to show that how it rise the racist discourse. It elaborates the racial discourses more. Later, it examines the stateless and lawless situation. Lastly, the paper analyzes the structure, contents, and acts of totalitarian movements.

(Cızık, C. 2019. Analysis of Totalitarianism in Hannah Arendt's Views, Ankara) In this study, based on the views of Hannah Arent, the place of totalitarianism in the historical scene, the factors that prepare totalitarianism and the elements that provide dominance of totalitarianism are discussed. The aim of the study is to present Arendt's thoughts on totalitarism with a general evaluation. In accordance with first of all, the place of the concepts of antisemitism and imperialism in the preparation stage for totalitarianism is tried to be examined and the meaning of these concepts for Arendt is examined. In the following parts, the elements such as mass, terror, secret police, propaganda and organization which are considered as elements of totalitarianism are tried to be explained. Those examples are considered as tools of totalitarianism and with those tools as an unique and modern phenomenon, absolute domination of totalitarianism is discussed.

History of Political Thought, 2015

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UBRARYQ^^^illBRARYf ^^iWDNVsoi^"^SiUAiNQ-iWV^\mm\^"^^mmy5 ji\EUNIVER% ^lOSANCEl£r 0F-CAIIF0% ,.j,OFCAllF(M s-v t»fs^.^K^/--^r:it. •-^^. . ;^* ^-' ^nwmm^'^•^imkmas^'^^o-mmy^^^Aavnan-i A^l•LlBRARY(9/^^.^lUBRARYO^;^^^W EUNIVER% ^LOSANCEli ^•ffOJIWOJO^^iiOillVOJO'^^TiijoNvsov^"^AaaAiNa-j ^OFCAUFOff^}, ^OFCAllFOff^.^MEUNIVERVa ^lOSANCEl i^at ivat iv^l K? aweuniver% V,wftw .1 . MBt.J^v > =3 O vvlOSANCEl% 00 >^.OF-CAl! FO.Pf. .aOF-CAII F0% ^1 i' 27 '^^Aavaaiii^^^c >on 12 ANTISEMITISM develop businesses owned by the state, and followed the routine pattern of private capitalistic enterprise. Emancipation of the Jews, therefore, as granted by the national state system in Europe during the nineteenth century, had a double origin and an ever-present equivocal meaning. On the one hand it was due to the political and legal structure of a new body politic which could function only under the conditions of political and legal equality. Governments, for their own sake, had to iron out the inequalities of the old order as completely and as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it was the clear result of a gradual extension of specific Jewish privileges, granted originally only to individuals, then through them to a small group of well-to-do Jews; only when this limited group could no longer handle by themselves the ever-growing demands of state business, were these privileges finally extended to the whole of Western and Central European Jewry.* Thus, at the same time and in the same countries, emancipation meant equality and privileges, the destruction of the old Jewish community autonomy and the conscious preservation of the Jews as a separate group in society, the abolition of special restrictions and special rights and the extension of such rights to a growing group of individuals. Equality of condition for all nationals had become the premise of the new body politic, and while this equality had actually been carried out at least to the extent of depriving the old ruling classes of their privilege to govern and the old oppressed classes of their right to be protected, the process coincided with the birth of the class society which again separated the nationals, economically and socially, as efficiently as the old regime. EquaUty of condition, as the Jacobins had understood it in the French Revolution, became a reality only in America, whereas on the European continent it was at once re- placed by a mere formal equality before the law. J4 ANTISEMITISM Jews neglected their chances for normal capitalist enterprise and business.* But without the interests and practices of the governments, the Jews could hardly have preserved their group identity. In contrast to all other groups, the Jews were defined and their position determined by the body politic. Since, however, this body politic had no other social reality, they were, socially speaking, in the void. Their social inequality was quite dilTerent from the inequality of the class system; it was again mainly the result of their relationship to the state, so that, in society, the very fact of being born a Jew would either mean that one was over- privileged-under special protection of the government-or underprivileged, lacking certain rights and opportunities which were withheld from the Jews in order to prevent their assimilation. The schematic outline of the simultaneous rise and decline of the Euro- pean nation-state system and European Jewry unfolds roughly in the fol- lowing stages: 1. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the slow develop- ment of nation-states under the tutelage of absolute monarchs. Individual Jews everywhere rose out of deep obscurity into the sometimes glamorous, and always influential, position of court Jews who financed state affairs and handled the financial transactions of their princes. This development af- fected the masses who continued to live in a more or less feudal order as little as it affected the Jewish people as a whole. 2. After the French Revolution, which abruptly changed political condi- tions on the whole European continent, nation-states in the modern sense emerged whose business transactions required a considerably larger amount of capital and credit than the court Jews had ever been asked to place at a older general Juden-reglement of 1750 was supplanted by a system of regular per- mits issued only to those inhabitants who invested a considerable part of their for- tune in new manufacturing enterprises. But here, as everywhere else, such govern- ment attempts failed completely. * Felix Priebatsch ("Die Judenpolitik des furstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert," in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915) cites a typical example from the early eighteenth century: "When the mirror factory in Neuhaus, Lower Austria, which was subsidized by the adminis- tration, did not produce, the Jew Wertheimer gave the Emperor money to buy it. When asked to take over the factory he refused, stating that his time was taken up with his financial transactions." See also Max Kohler, "Beitrage zur neueren judischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Die Juden in Halbcrstadt und Umgebung," in Studien zur Geschichte der Wirtschaft und Ceisteskultur, 1927, Band 3. In this tradition, which kept rich Jews from real positions of power in capitalism, is the fact that in 1911 the Paris Rothschilds sold their share in the oil wells of Baku to the Royal Shell group, after having been, with the exception of Rockefeller, the world's biggest petroleum tycoons. This incident is reported in Richard Lewinsohn, Wie sie gross und reich wurden, Berlin, 1927. Andre Sayou's statement ("Les Juifs" in Revue Economique Interruitionale, 1932) in his polemic against Werner Sombart's identification of Jews with capitalist develop- ment, may be taken as a general rule: "The Rothschilds and other Israelites who were almost exclusively engaged in launching state loans and in the international movement of capital, did not try at all ... to create great industries." ANTISEMITISM tury, when the Fuggers put their own credit at the disposal of the state, they were not yet thinking of establishing a special state credit. The absolute monarchs at first provided for their financial needs partly through the old method of war and looting, and partly through the new device of tax monopoly. This undermined the power and ruined the fortunes of the nobil- ity without assuaging the growing hostility of the population. For a long time the absolute monarchies looked about society for a class upon which to rely as securely as the feudal monarchy had upon the nobility. In France an incessant struggle between the guilds and the monarchy, which wanted to incorporate them into the state system, had been going on since the fifteenth century. The most interesting of these experiments were doubt- less the rise of mercantilism and the attempts of the absolute state to get an absolute monopoly over national business and industry. The resulting disaster, and the bankruptcy brought about by the concerted resistance of the rising bourgeoisie, are sufficiently well known. Before the emancipation edicts, every princely household and every monarch in Europe already had a court Jew to handle financial business. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these court Jews were always single individuals who had inter-European connections and inter-European credit at their disposal, but did not form an international financial entity." Char- * The influence, however, of mercantile experiments on future developments can hardly be overrated. France was the only country where the mercantile system was tried consistently and resulted in an early flourishing of manufactures which owed their existence to state interference; she never quite recovered from the experience. In the era of free enterprise, her bourgeoisie shunned unprotected investment in native industries while her bureaucracy, also a product of the mercantile system, sur- vived its collapse. Despite the fact that the bureaucracy also lost all its productive functions, it is even today more characteristic of the country and a greater impediment to her recovery than the bourgeoisie. " This had been the case in England since Queen Elizabeth's Marrano banker and the Jewish financiers of Cromwell's armies, until one of the twelve Jewish brokers admitted to the London Stock Exchange was said to have handled one-quarter of all government loans of his day (see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 1937, Vol. II: Jews and Capitalism); in Austria, where in only forty years (1695-1739), the Jews credited the government with more than 35 million florins and where the death of Samuel Oppenheimer in 1703 resulted in a grave financial crisis for both state and Emperor; in Bavaria, where in 1808 80 per cent of all govern- ment loans were endorsed and negotiated by Jews (see M. Grunwald, Samuel Oppenheimer und sein Kreis, 1913); in France, where mercantile conditions were especially favorable for the Jews, Colbert already praised their great usefulness to the state (Baron, op. cit., loc. cit.), and where in the middle of the eighteenth century the German Jew, Licfman Calmer, was made a baron by a grateful king who appreciated services and loyalty to "Our state and Our person" (Robert Anchel, "Un Baron Juif Fran^ais au 18e siecle, Licfman Calmer," in Souvenir et Science, I, pp. 52-55); and also in Prussia where Frederick II's Miinzjuden were titled and where, at the end of the eighteenth century, 400 Jewish families formed one of the wealthiest groups in Berlin. (One of the best descriptions of Berlin and the role of the Jews in its society at the turn of the eighteenth century is to be found in Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Leben Schleiermachers, 1870, pp. 182 ff.). ANTISEMITISM establish itself among the biggest enterprises and employers of the time.' Great privileges, decisive changes in the Jewish...

The Review of Politics, 2004

Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 2013

Postmodern Openings, 2015

The concept of totalitarianism is, undoubtedly, one of the most disputed terms in political language. This article investigates the conflict between the classical interpretations of totalitarian system that was frequently seen from the monolithic and revisionist perspective which offered some pluralistic models of Soviet and Nazi systems. The main purpose of the article is to show that, in this frame of the debates, the monolithic understanding of totalitarianism was inaccurate, therefore damaging the concept itself.

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2010

The three most lasting legacies of late-totalitarian ideology have been the subversion of the ability of language to say something about the world, most notably by gradual elimination of the differences between distinct and indeed opposite concepts; the endorsement of logical fallacies as normal forms of argument; and thirdly, the deconstructed atomized concept of the person, as a collection of primal needs and fears, devoid of a personality and communal identity, ready to be manipulated through needs and fears. I illustrate these characteristics by examining the writings of a Czech former secret police officer about Czech democracy, Derrida about Patočka's concept of responsibility, and Žižek on totalitarianism.

We locate Arendt's and Shklar's writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new 'maieutic' discourse of 're-enlightenment' in the 'age of the crisis of man'. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt's The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar's After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.