MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company
First edition
Collection M HKA, Antwerp 

During her philosophy and theology studies, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) attended lectures by Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann, among others. Her admiration for Heidegger was severely tested as a result of his National Socialist views. In 1933 Arendt, being Jewish, was forced to leave Germany for Paris. In 1941, she fled to the United States. Already during the war years, and out of personal involvement, she wrote articles about 'the Jewish question', the problem of refugees and stateless persons and of imperialism and racism, which, in adapted form, were included in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, the first major post-war study into the dynamics of totalitarian systems, consists of three parts. The first part tells the story of the emergence of a modern, secular anti-Semitism (which Arendt distinguishes from what she calls 'religious Jew-hatred'). In part two, Arendt gives an overview of the imperialist and predatory policies of the European powers at the end of the 19th-and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In the last part, she discusses totalitarianism itself. According to Arendt, totalitarianism is a completely new political system that goes far beyond dictatorship. We only find it, to the same extent, in the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. According to Arendt, this totalitarianism is made possible because on the one hand a political system is dysfunctional, and, on the other, more and more people live in isolation, becoming alienated from society. These people, the so-called 'atomised and individualised mass', are open to the propaganda of totalitarian movements, which present their struggle against the backdrop of a fictional conspiracy (e.g. Jews or Trotskyists) as scientific predictions. Once the totalitarian regime comes to power, the secret police – and ultimately concentration camps – cause people to lose their legal, moral and finally even individual identities. Arendt's thinking is still relevant today because she warns us how any ideology can move towards totalitarianism by substituting the plurality, complexity and ambiguity of reality for the clarity, general validity and consistency of a fiction.