A Paper on The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

(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.

Jurnal Ledalero, 2015

If we wish to understand a totalitarian system as a whole, we need first to understand the central role of the concentration camp as a laboratorium to experiment in total domination. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in the twentieth century shows how a totalitarian regime cannot survive without terror; and terror will not be effective without concentration camps. Experiments in concentration camps had as their purpose, apart from wiping out any freedom or spontaneity, the abolishing of space between human beings, abolishing space for politics. Thus, totalitarianism did not mirror only the politics of extinction, but also the extinction of politics. As a way forward, Arendt analyses political theory that forces the reader to understand power no longer under the rubric of domination or violence – although this avenue is open – but rather under the rubric of freedom. Arendt is convinced that the life of a destroyed nation can be restored by mutual forgiveness and mutual promises, t...

Jurnal Ledalero

This article aims to map out Hannah Arendt's proposal on democratic political action as a solution to the problem of totalitarianism. For this purpose, the article will consist of three parts. The first part will deal with the problem of totalitarianism as reflected in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The second part will deal with Arendt's philosophical proposal of democracy as political action against totalitarianism as its enemy. It argues that freedom and constitution are the basis of people's political action in public space for the sake of nation and community. The third part will deal with the problem of human rights and Arendt's proposal of political natality. According to the principle of natality, people as subjects of politics are capable to find their own ways to preserve their own life. Human transcendence is actualized in time frame. As conclusion, the paper will discuss the contribution of Arendt's thoughts of people's transcendence and its implications in facing the mob-rule.

Afkar Wa Affak, 2019

This paper aims to shed light on Hannah Arendt's analysis of the growth of the modern anti-Semitism. She assumes in her monumental masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951) that the identification of the modern anti-Semitism with the rise of the nation-states in Europe is a misleading thought and a mere ready-made explanation. For her, the modern anti-Semitism grew as the European system of nation-states crashed. On the other hand, Arendt, through almost all her writings, has seemed supporting the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, for that, this paper aims as well to discover Arendt's position towards founding a Jewish homeland, her proposals concerning that issue and her relationship with Zionism.

American Political Science Review 2016

Notwithstanding its status as a modern classic, Hannah Arendt's study on The Origins of Totalitarianism is generally considered to be lacking a clearly reflected methodological basis. This article challenges this view and argues that in her study Arendt implicitly applies a characterological method of political theorizing that provides a genuine conceptual framework for systematically connecting structural analysis with ideographic historical investigations and with a political theory of action. On this conceptual basis, the study renders an analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism not merely in terms of abstract structural concepts, but in terms of dynamic character-context constellations. Arendt's account not only shows interesting parallels to a number of similar conceptual reflections, especially in the 20th century's theory debate; it can also serve to inspire the current debate on methodology in political theory.

PMLA, 2012

This book examines the nature of totalitarianism as interpreted by some of the finest minds of the twentieth century. It focuses on Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarianism was an entirely unprecedented regime and that the social sciences had integrally misconstrued it. A sociologist who is a critical admirer of Arendt, Baehr looks sympathetically at Arendt's objections to social science and shows that her complaints were in many respects justified. Avoiding broad disciplinary endorsements or dismissals, Baehr reconstructs the theoretical and political stakes of Arendt's encounters with prominent social scientists such as David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. In presenting the first systematic appraisal of Arendt's critique of the social sciences, Baehr examines what it means to see an event as unprecedented. Furthermore, he adapts Arendt and Aron's philosophies to shed light on modern Islamist terrorism and to ask whether it should be categorized alongside Stalinism and National Socialism as totalitarian.

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.

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...