arendt's concept and description of totalitarism - kohn.pdf

8/9/2019 Arendt's Concept and Description of Totalitarism - Kohn.pdf

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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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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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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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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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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


15/37


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


17/37


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


18/37

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


19/37


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


20/37


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


21/37


22/37


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


23/37


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,


24/37

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


25/37


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


26/37

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-


27/37


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-


28/37

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


29/37

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


30/37

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-


31/37

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


32/37


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-


33/37


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


34/37

654 SOCIAL RESEARCH

^Âccording 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).

^Ârendt 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).

'^În 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


35/37

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.

References

Arendt, Hannah.The Chiginsof Totalitarianism. 1st. ed. New

York

1951.

. Totalitarianism.

The Meridian

(Fall 1958a).

. Freiheitund

Politik.

Die neue Rundschau69:4 (1958b).

.The Human Condition. Chicago, 1958c.

. Le tter to W. H. Auden (1960). Arendt C ollection. Library of

Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.

.Eichmann inferusalem. New York, 1963a.

. Samuel Gratton document (1963b). Arendt Collection. Library

of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.

. The Destruction of Six Million. . .Why did the World Rem ain

Silent?

Thefewish World

(September, 1964a).

. The

Deputy.

Guilt by Silence. The Storm Over the

Deputy.

Ed. E.

Bentley.

ew

York 1964b: 85-94.

.Betiveen Pastand Future.New York, 1968a.

,Men In Dark Times.New York, 1968b.

. Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture. Social Research

38:3 (Fall 1971).

.The Originsof Totalitarianism. 5th ed. New York, 1973.

.The Lifeofthe

Mind.

Vol. I:

Thinking.

New York, 1978a.

. Letter to Cershom Scholem, 24 July 1963.Thefeiu AsPariah:fetD-

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Hannah

Arendt,

Karl faspers:

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Kohler and H. Saner. New York, 1992.

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ew

York 1994.

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1949-1975. ewYork 1995.

Caws, Mary Ann.Rene

Char.

Boston, 1977.

Conrad, Joseph.Heartof Darkness. Norton Critical Ed. Sd ed. Ed. Robert


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Cano van, Margaret . Aren dt 's Th eory of Total i tar ianism.

The ambridge

Companion to Hannah Arendt

Ed. D. Villa. Cambridge, 2000.

Go ldhagen, D . J .

Hitler s W illing Executioners: Ordinary Cermans and the

Holocaust. N ew York, 19 96.

K oh n, J. Fre edo m : T he Priority of the Political. The

ambridge

Com-

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Rousset, David.

Les jours denotremoit

Paris, 1947.


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