Thinking withand againstHannah Arendt

1 WOULD like to propose a few critical remarks concerning Han-nah Arendt's conception of the foundation of the totalitariansystem as she presented it in the third part of The Origins of Total-itarianism. In the late seventies, when I read this great work, Iwas filled with admiration for and felt very close to the thoughtof the author. In 1956, the Soviet regime, which I had previouslydenounced as the rule of a state bureaucracy over the prole-tariat, revealed itself to be a new form of political society. Para-doxically, I discovered its totalitarian nature after reading thefamous report Khrushchev issued at the Central Committee thatyear—that is, at a time when Arendt claimed to have observedthe beginning of the end of totalitarian government in theSoviet Union. This point is not merely anecdotal, since terror, ormore exactly mass terror, is for Arendt—but not for me—themain criterion of totalitarianism. However, Arendt's descriptionof a new kind of regime, which she claimed was "unprece-dented," was a profound insight into the phenomena of bothNazism and communism.

I continue to think that Arendt brought to light an essentialcharacteristic of a totalitarian system when she perceived in it adomination from xoithin. "Totalitarianism," she writes, "is nevercontent to rule by external means, namely, through the state anda machinery of violence. . . . Thanks to its peculiar ideology andthe rule assigned to the ideology in the apparatus of coercion,totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terror-

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izing human beings from within, hi this sense, it ehminates thedistance between the rulers and the ruled."

The question to be answered is the rollowing; How can domi-nation be exercised from within? Assuming that ideology doesplay an important role, one must clarify the meaning of thisnotion. Detaching this question from the details of her rich inves-tigation of Nazism and communism, I would like to introduce thedistinction between arguments developed in the main section ofthe third part of Arendt's book, namely, the three chapters of itsfirst edition and the fourth chapter, which Arendt later added inorder to replace what she referred to as "the inconclusiveremarks" that had before fmictioned as a conclusion. This newchapter, entitled "Ideology and Terror," tends to resolve the diffi-culties Arendt had previously confronted. It is for this reason thatI insist on its importance.

I will now present a short overview of the first stage of Arendt'sinterpretation in which she minimizes the role played by propa-ganda, the importance of which had been strongly emphasized bypolitical scientists. According to Arendt, propaganda was essen-tially addressed to foreign audiences. She argued that the massesdid not take literally the speeches of the leaders. Indoctrinationaddressed to the elite was more efficacious. But this claim doesnot account for the adhesion of the masses to the regime. Fur-thermore, indoctrination implies a sort of domination from out-side. Arendt, while insisting on the role of the ideology, reducesits doctrinal content to a minimum. Kventually, the reader dis-covers that for Arendt the main means of totalitarian dominationis "organization." In fact, we already know that the snccess of total-itarian movements resides in their capacity to organize individu-als who had been atonii/ed and isolated in bourgeois society. I willleave aside her odd argument that Stalin had to atomize the Russ-

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ian people to make possible the project of total organization.Arendt claims that totalitarianism in power holds the peopletogether because of its ability to organize society. Far from accord-ing any real importance to Marxist or Leninist theory, she pre-sents them as useless. She even goes so far as to say that the truegoal of totalitarianism "is not persuasion, but organization, theaccumulation of power without the possession of the means ofviolence. For this purpose, the originality of ideological contentcan only be considered an unnecessary obstacle." ElsewhereArendt argues that it is "not the passing successes of demagogythat win the masses, but rather it is the visible reality and power ofliving organization." According to her, the notion of ideologytends to be negligible. As for racism, it is "realized every day in thefunctioning hierarchy of a political organization"; and as to social-ism, "the functioning of the Comintern is more convincing thanany argument or mere ideology can ever be." As examples of thelack of significance granted to ideology, Arendt points to the per-sistence of both the myth of the Jewish conspiracy (when mostJews had already been exterminated) and the myth of the Trot-skyist conspiracy (when it had already been defeated).

Arendt's insistence on organization is justified: totalitarian rulegives credence to the idea that all things can be organized in soci-ety. In this sense, the image of a big machine imposes itself, andit is significant that in the Soviet Union, one ofthe main figuresof the enemy of the people was the "saboteur." Nonetheless, orga-nization does not account for the process of identification thatmen and women make with the leader, or for the feelings theyhave of being included in a community, be it the community ofthe Party or the community of "the people as One." Curiously,Arendt does pay attention to this phenomenon in many places:for example, after vmderscoring the role of organization, shemakes reference to the famous speech that Hitler gave to the S.A.in which he said: "All that you are, you are through me; all that Iam, I am through you alone." \ • • \

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My argument is that the notion of organization has nothing todo with the attempt to integrate tlie ruler and the ruled into"One" body. Aiendt fails to make a distinction between organiza-tion and huorpmation. Organization implies the idea of a suppos-edly rational society, whereas incorporation refers to the notionof a collective body and appeals to a program of a social prophy-lactics. On the one side, the figure tjf tlie enemy is the saboteur; onthe other side, it is the figure of tlie parasite, the vermin.

As I have indicated, the chapter "Ideology and Terror" opens anew way to investigate the specificit)' of totalitarianism. HereArendt adopts a more philosophical approach to the phenome-non by questioning the status of law and by rethinking the mean-ing of ideology. She is no longer content with merely saying thattotalitarian government is unprecedented. Instead, her claim isthat it has "exploded the veiy alternative on which all definitionsofthe es.sence of government have been ba.sed in political philos-ophy; that is, tbe alternative between lawful and lawless govern-ment, between arbitran' and legitimate power." She observes thatone is confronted with a kind of government quite different fromthose on which philosophers, from Aiistotle through Mon-tesquieu, have based their theories of politics. She writes that thetotalitarian regime "defies all positive laws including those tbat ithas established. But it does not operate without the guidance oflaw, nor is it arbitrai7 for it claims to obey strictly and luiequivo-cally those laws of Nature or of History from which all positivelaws have been supposed to spring." Then she adds: "it is the mon-strous claim of totalilarian rule that far from being lawless it goesto the source of authority, fioni which all positive laws receivedtheir ultimate legitimation." When speaking of totalitarian lawAiendt does not refer to the speech of tbe rulers, but suggeststhat the rulers themselves submil to the supreme authoiity ofthelaw or do what they do in obedience to the law. She claims that"totalitarian lawfulness executes the law of History or of Nature"without translating it into standards ol right or wrong for individ-ual behavior, and that in conirast with any constitutional regime

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it does not need a consensus juris. We see that Arendt retains theidea put forward in the first chapter of her book where she wrotethat "totalitarianism effaces or masks the distance between rulersand ruled."

My point is: How can History or Nature impose itself as anunconditional authority? According to Arendt, History andNature are conceived as movement. The law of History or Natureis a law of movement so that when men obey the law they aretaken up into this movement. There is no longer a transcendenceof law, and consequently there is no longer a discrepancy betweenthe supreme law and positive laws. Arendt uses striking words tobring to light the transformations created by the totalitarian sys-tem. She speaks of an "embodiment of law into men" or of an"identification of man and law." Nonetheless, she must accountfor the origins of the new notion of movement. She claims thatthis new concept is related to the "tremendous intellectualchange" that occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, achange that consisted in interpreting everything as being a stagein a process. Thus for her it is in accordance with both Marxistand Darwinist ideology that totalitarian government elevatesmovement to the status of a law, and in so doing discloses its verysignificance. Totalitarian government, by incorporating the move-ment of History or the movement of Nature, undertakes to elim-inate forever the members of the declining classes or any humanbeings it deems unfit to live. Terror, Arendt argues, executes thelaw of movement by transforming itself into a law of killing.

Totalitarian government thus does not need a principle thatwould guide the behavior of individuals. Whereas "virtue" is nec-essary in a republic, "honor" in an aristocratic regime, and "fear"in tyranny, in the totalitarian system even fear becomes useless,since one never knows the reason why she or he could be treatedas an enemy. On the other hand, everyone ought to be preparedto assume both the role of executer and the role of victim. This"two-sided preparation," Arendt says, is effected by ideology. Aswe have already noted, in the first chapters of her book she argues

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that the content of ideolog) is not important; now however shetakes seriously both Marxism and Darwinism. In both of thesedoctrines she detects a logical construction that reveals their ide-ological meaning independent of iheir doctrinal content.Although they did not draw from the notion of a law of Histoiy orNature the imperative that men become their executors, theselaws nonetheless "bear the seeds of totalitarian ideolog}" sincethey already disclose the essence of ideology which is "the logic oian idea."

Lei us briefly recall the three characteristics of an ideology.First, it implies the claim of a total explanation of the historicalprocess, with the (endency to explain not what is but what becomes;second, it is impervious to any objections drawn from experience;third, it starts from an axiomatically accepted premise anddeduces everything else from this premise, which is to say that itproceeds with a consistency tbat exists nowhere in the realm ofreality.

It is significant that Arendt writes that "what fits the idea intothis new role is its own logic, that is, a movement which is the con-sequence of the idea itself and needs no outside factor to set it inmotion." She adds, "the movement of History and the logicalprocess of the notion are supposed to correspond to each other,so that whatever happens, happens acct)rding to the logic of anidea." What Arendt suggests is that "the la\v of movement" is botha law of History or Nature and also "a law of thinking." She sug-gests that the totalitarian regime corresponds to a neio regime ofthinking. It is not an exaggeration to conclude that ideology bearsthe mark of "an intellectual terrorism" whereby we are con-fronted with a way of thinking that eliminates all the argiuiientsthat would contradict the idea—similar to a way of governing thatconsists of eliminating all actual oi potential enemies.

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I want to claim that there is a gap between intellectual andpolitical terrorism, since ideology in itself has no power to trans-form reality. How can one explain the sbilt from one to the other?Arendt's answer is disappointing. According to her, each totali-tarian leader was attached to his respective ideology and acceptedit with deadly seriousness. One took pride in his supreme gift for"ice-cold reasoning" (Hitler), and the other prided himself in the"mercilessness of his dialectics" (Stalin). Arendt goes on to writethat "the stringent logicality that permeates the whole structure oftotalitarian movement and government was exclusively the workof Hitler and Stalin." Unexpectedly we see here the sudden intru-sion of the old theory of the "great men" in History.

Let me emphasize that the Arendtian notion of ideology is notclear. At first she argues that the ideology is required by the law ofmovement in order to prepare everyone to play the role of bothexecutioner and victim; later she claims that the law of movementIs derived from the ideology. Even though Arendt tends to pre-sent the law of movement as if it blinded men and forced theminto unending terror, it is clear that she does not believe in thislaw. Thus we expect that she will argue that communism orNazism is guided by a myth. Rather than setting this law at thefoundation of a new kind of state, she should have admitted thatit is invoked to justify the political line of the party, especially theterror, just as the creation of a new world and a new man isinvoked in the service of total domination.

Why does Arendt insist on the notion of movement to such anextent that it becomes more powerful than the political actors?This question seems to me to be tighUy linked to another ques-tion: Why does Arendt abstain from any reference to the role ofthe party? Assuming that the totalitarian regime exhibits a "mon-strous pretension to go back to the source of authority," one mustindicate the organ in which this authority is invested. In a totali-tarian regime power resides in the party. The party, however, isnot the main organization in the social field; rather it presentsitself as above all by reason of its monstrous pretension to be an

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emanation ofthe people and also thai which causes the people tobe a unity, a pe.ojde as One.

Its control extends to all sectors of activity. We certainly are enti-tled to say that it sets everything in motion, that it creates neworganizations, and that it establishes the objectives of their devel-opment. Yet these variotis appearances of movement do not maskthe permanency of the structure and the spirit of the party. Theparty itself is not taken into the movement, since no event canalter its nature, despite the internal struggles and the capitula-tions of which it is the theater. The party is a body closed in onitself, it is not locali/able in space and time. As Orwell so bril-liantly n<}ted, the party has an immortal body, a mystical body con-nected with its real organs, which are its visible hierarchy. Thisstrange phenomenon is certainly more striking in a communistregime than in a fascist one, which is a sign that communism goesftirther in achieving the totalitarian project. In the Soviet Union,the party succeeded in establishing a set of microbodies—fromtrade unions to associations of any kind—in which the pattem ofa stibslantial community, carried out by strict control over Uiebehavior of individuals, is reproduced so that no independent orspontaneous action would be possible.

By making movement the essential feature of the totalitariansystem, Arendt wants to reduce the notion of movement to aprocess conceived of from its beginning as orientated toward anend, such tbat at each step one has to go forward in only onedirection. In doing this she dt)es not see what is masked by herconcept ofthe ideology of movement. The ideology of niovementattempts to deny that liistory is open to unpredictable events; thisideology makes impossible any change in the style of existence, insocial relationships, or in ways of thinking. While arguing that thedestruction of positive laws is at the service of the production of

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"One Man of gigantic dimension," Arendt ignores the fact that"the One" is the figure of immobility. Inasmuch as totalitarian ide-ologies claim to have found the solution to all of the confiicts tbathave torn the modern worid apart, confiicts that in previous timeswere the source of all change, it would seem that the regime inwhich movement is celebrated effects itself under the sign of arefusal of history.

When Arendt denounces so vehemently "the reign of move-ment," her denunciation aims not only at totalitarian regimesand the underlying ideologies that arose in the nineteenth cen-tury, but also the new mode of temporality tbat is characteristicof modern societies. Beyond her critique of the frenzied move-ment that reveals its nature in terror, I see her critique of themodern faith in progress, especially the faith in technologicaland scientific progress. In Arendt's thought, even before theadvent of totalitarian ideology, the very idea of history had takenon a new meaning. According to her, history, as it had been con-ceived by the Ancients, no longer consisted of the narration ofgreat deeds and events. She claims that in modernity the realmof action, that is, whatever escaped the necessity imposed by thelife processes, became incomprehensible. As a result, politicalthought disappeared.

While reading "Ideology and Terror," one should pay closeattention to the passage in which Arendt reminds us ofthe classicconception of law. She says that traditionally the regime of law wasat the service of stability in face of the biological fact of birth thatintroduces novelty. Positive laws aim at protecting the communityfrom disturbances that occur as a consequence of change. Shewrites, "Positive laws in constitufional government are designed toerect boundaries and establish channels of communicationbetween men, whose community is continually endangered by thenew men born in it. Witb each new birth a new beginning is bominto the world. A new world has potentially come into being."This argument seems to me to be derived from a triple abstrac-tion. First, Arendt omits that, as soon as one is born, one is taken

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into a network of relationships that hear the mark oi a particularculture. Second, law is reduced to the function of stahilizinga nat-ural event, as though it was not constitutive of human coexistenceas such. Thiid, admitting as she does that laws are changeable inconsequence of particular circitnistances amounts only to takinginto account discrete actions, therehy ign(3ring the gestation ofnew social relationships, new ways of thinking, new representa-tions of what is good or evil, of what is Just or unjust, right orwrong, also real ot imaginaiy possible or impossible: a gestationthat operates in the thickness of the social under the juridico-political surface. This triple abstraction permits Arendt to eludethe question of history.

All possibilities are not enclosed in the alternative betweennecessity' or contingency, anonymous process or action. The senseof history that begins with modernity should not be confused withthe belief in a myth of progress. Rather, it proceeds from the viewthat history is irreversible. Arendt rightly rejects the idea thatmovetiient has a worUi in itself, the idea that henceforth "evei7-tbing is possible." Nonetheless, she goes so far as to conflate twodifferent phenomena: on the one side, the movement in whichthe motor is definite and the effects are strictly conQolled so as toexclude any spontaneity of men and submit all sectors of activityto the same norms; on the other side, the movement that is char-acteristic of democratic societies due to the limitation of statepower, the breakdown ofthe tiaditional hierarchy, and the diffu-sion of individual freedoms and the differentiation between thepohtical,Juridical, economic, and cultural spheres. It is this latterkind of movement that Tocqueville discovered in America, a rest-less movement to which Ajendt does not give consideration.

Regarding the regime of law in the Soviet Union, it is clear thatfor Aiendt there is a complete destruction of any legality as a con-

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sequence of the full afBrmation of the law of history. Thus shefails to observe the Soviet Union's endeavor to elaborate a newframework of laws. This part of her interpretation is linked to thatof terror. In the years that followed the October Revolution, ter-ror was exercised not only against the enemies of the Revolution:all the parties that had participated in the revolutionary move-ment were eliminated, including Mensheviks, revolutionarysocialists, anarchists, workers' committees, youth movements, andfeminist movements. At the same time the trade unions weremade subject to the ruling party and freedom of the press wasabolished. As early as 1918, Lenin launched the slogan "The Partyabove everything"—which is to say, above the laws. Terror wasdecreed by Lenin to clear the Russian land of any harmful insects.Gonsidering the Leninist terror, one might say that it developedin accordance with the description that Arendt makes of a fren-zied movement that never ceases. Nonetheless, later on the pur-suit of terror required juridical means for institutionalization. In1924 a penal code was elaborated and then modified in 1928.This code continued to be applied until the Khrushchev era, so itwas in effect for approximately 30 years. Its famous Article 58(concerning the various violations of law) bears the mark of anextraordinary combination of the lawful and the arbitrary.

Rather than denouncing the destruction of law, we shouldspeak of its perversion. Although the Soviet regime dispensedwith a consensus juris, as Arendt rightly underlines, it sought tomake itself consistent by means of the appearance of legality. Onewould be wrong to reduce this new code to an instrumental func-tion that did not affect the characteristics of the regime; rather itsproduction was essential in order to constitute a new social order.On the one hand it permitted the assignment of a number of civilservants with the special charge of administrating justice, which isto say, regulating terror. Meanwhile, it provided the regime with agrid through which crimes were subject to definite sanctions; thecommissars were allowed to establish, in fact to fabricate, a dossiercorresponding to each case. Henceforth, these commissars felt

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themselves to be carrying on a trade. The administration of jus-tice participated in the stabilizing process ofthe social order. Oneobserves that the elaboration of the penal code coincided withIhe formation of a bureaucratic state.

On the other hand, the accused were enmeshed in a bureau-cratic network. Each person who was arrested i:)ecame a supposedculprit who was obliged to plead guilty, and moreover to collabo-rate with the examining magistrate by giving proof of his guilt.The repertory of crimes took into account not only actions butintentions or supposed intentions; the abstaining of doing some-thing in a particular circumstance; the failure to denounce aguilty person, and so forth. The code gave the image of a peopleentirely submitted to an arbitral^ power. As I have already noted,arbitrariness goes liand in hand with a fantastic formalism. Therewas nothing of this kind in the Nazi system.

If I have insisted on the features ofthe treatment of the law inthe Soviet Union, it is to contrast a commnnist regime with ademocratic one. The judicial procediues derive from the princi-ples of a regime. In a democratic regime, tbe administration olJustice implies the prestmiption of innocence and the right to adefense; a debate on the facts and on the authenticity of testi-monies; the role of a judge whose authority is beyond the piose-cution and the counsel, an authority independent, in principle,from state power. All of which is to say that justice is administeredin the name of a Third. This model is in accordance with a societythat makes a place for the plurality of conflicting interests andopinions, and that admits an ultimate authority that has beenlegally established. The Third marks tbe intrusion of tbe law intosocial relationships. Its legitimacy does not detach itself from theguarantee of the freedoms of movement, expression, and infor-mation. What is characteristic of the commiuiist regime is the

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absence of the Third. If the party is above everything, then thatalso means that nothing is outside the party—that is, outside thestate, of which the party is the incarnation. Consequently, there isin the administration of justice no neutral actor. The relationshipbetween the accuser and the accused is a dual relationship; theThird is foreclosed since the accuser speaks in the name of theparty. This dual relationship derives from a logic of incorporation.Moreover, the dual relationship demands to be reproduced in theaccused subject, who has to identify himself with the accuser. Self-denunciation of the accused reaches its highest point when he orshe is a communist. The Moscow trials, in particular, illusti-ate thisphenomenon. However, it is reproduced in the innumerable dia-logues between a commissar and an accused. Solzhenitsyn writes,"Always the same leitmotif repedted in endless variations. You andme, we are communists." He adds, "What would you do if youwere in my place?" It is for this reason that I spoke of a perversionof the law.

Hannah Arendt was well aware of the unprecedented phenome-non that totalitarianism constituted. Nevertheless, in searchingfor its origin, either in the ideologies and the new conception ofhistory that appeared in the nineteenth century, or in the processof the atomization of individuals that lent itself to the atomizationof masses in the beginning of the twentieth century, she did notpay attention to the new structure of the social, particularly in theSoviet Union. She denounced the myth of the One without con-sidering the scheme of a new symbolic order. That is the reasonwhy she has not measured the abyss that separates two forms ofsociety: totalitarianism and modern democracy.