Arendt's Concept

and Description of
Totalitarianism

JL HE enormous complexity of Hannah Arendt's The Origins 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 important; yet to neglect the reason that Arendt wrote her bookthe
fact that Nazism and Stalinism appeared in the world in the second 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 difficult questions and genuine confusion. Was Arendt crediting
Hitler and Stalin, let alone any of their henchmen, with an awareness of ACT-concept of totalitarianism? Indeed, how likely is it that
these "nonpersons" 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
humanity and her concomitant notion of the right to have rights.
I think thai many of us have heard enough about an "evil
empire" and more recently about an "axis of evil" to question in
those expressions, and in those who employ them, what precisely
is meant by evil. For her part, half a century ago, Arendt described

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radical evii in ways that have become increasingly cogent and

alarming. She gives her readers no comfort at all, either in tracing 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 problematic enforcement by al! nations ofthe right to have rights, the
right of all human 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 Banality of Evil, and to one passage from The Human
Condition, but the primary focus of this paper will remain on the
earlier work.

I:
The Inversion of Politics

The scope of Arendt's conceptual objectives, in Origins and

related works from the same period generally, may be summarized as follows. First, as she insists again and again, totalitarianism made clear once and for all the uselessness of causality as a
category of historical thought, as it also exploded our standards
of political judgment insofar as they are grounded in traditional
moral and legal principles. Thus for her the difficulty of understanding 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, Montesquieu's addition to that formulation of each kind of government's principle of action, along with the human experiences in
which those principles are embedded. Third, Arendt makes three
related distinctions: between governments of law and arbitrary

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

623

power; between the traditional notion of humanly established

laws and the new totalitarian conception of suprahuman laws governing the evolution of nature and directing the course of history;
and between traditional political authority tbat gives stability to
legal institutions, thereby both allowing and limiting human
action, and totalitarian laws of motion whose function is, on the
contrary, to so stabilize human beings that the predetermined
course of nature and history can run freely through them. Fourth,
Arendt focuses on how totalitarianism transforms ideological systems of belief into deductive principles of action. Fifth, she distinguishes tbe terrifying human experience of abject loneliness,
on which totalitarian rule depends, from that of impotence under
tyranny, and differentiates it from the experiences of isolation
and solitude, whicb, though essential in the activities of making
and thinking, as a rule are marginal in political life. Finally,
Arendt distinguishes the phenomenal reality of human freedom
both from its material conditions, which to a great extent comprise the subject matter of traditional political thought, and from
its philosophical idea. It is totalitarianism's absolute denial of
every aspect of human freedom that results in what here is meant
by the inversion of politics.^

The descriptive strangeness and richness of Origins lies in its

startling admixture of erudition and imagination, the latter
nowhere more apparent than in the particular examples by which
Arendt illuminates the elements of totalitarianism. These examples
include her devastating portrait of Benjamin Disraeli and her
tragic account of the "great" and "bitter" life of T. E. Lawrence;
other exemplary figures are drawn from works of literature by
authors sucb as Kipling and Conrad. A single, striking instance is
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, whicb Arendt calls "the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa," her emphasis
clearly falling on tbe word "experience." It may be worthwhile to
look at this tale a little more closely.
Engaged in "the merry dance of death and trade," Conrad's
imperialistic adventurers set out in quest for ivory, and entertain

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few scruples over slaughtering the indigenous inhabitants of "the

phantom world of the dark continent" to obtain it. The 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 an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge
the actions and opinions of his characters."^ Marlow, a character
doubly distanced from the reader, in fact realizes that the "conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from
those who have a different complexion or slighdy flatter noses
than ourselves, is not a pretty thing." It is in the person of the
"remarkable" and "eloquent" Mr. Kurtz that Marlow seeks the
"idea" that will reconcile 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 "deeper and deeper into the
heart of darkness" in search of Kurtz's remote trading station,
Africa becomes increasingly "impenetrable to human thought."
In a crucial passage cited by Arendt, Marlow observes the Africans
on the shore:
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming 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
flrst ages, of those ages that are gone 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
and leapt and spun and made horrid faces; but what

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

625

thrilled you was just the thought of their bumanitylike

yoursthe thought of your remote kinship with this wild
and passionate uproar {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 exemplifies the European imperialist ("All Europe contributed to [his]
making"), bas written to the "International Society for the Suppression 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 ofthe report'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 racism is revealed as the "idea" that Marlow 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 for Kurtz'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 questionable whether Marlow is mucb less hollow 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 experience: "The horror! The horror!" In
"fright" as well as "infinite pity" Marlow supplants those words
with wbat Kurtz's "Intended" wisbes tbem to have been, her own
name, thereby ensuring that Kurtz's "example" will live on as a lie.

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As the tale concludes, the indeterminate narrator of Marlow's

story is leit before "the heart of an immense darkness," and likewise, as the reader apprehends and judges Marlow's story, Conrad's indelible image of racism looms in his consciousness.
Because "Heart of Darkness" is a work of imagination that re-presents to the reader's mind what is deliberately twice removed
from his senses, its illumination of race experience is more
durable and ineluctable than any time-bound chronicle of the
atrocities committed in Leopold IFs Congo, from 1890 to 1910,
can ever be.'' Not the subject matter but the meaning of 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 totalitarianism, not many years later, made its appearance as a new form of
government.
Arendt, however, is not saying that racism or any other element
of totalitarianism caused the regimes of Hitler or Stalin, but rather
that those hidden elements, which include anti-Semitism, the
decline ofthe 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 appeared in 1958, Arendt said that her intentions
"presented themselves" to her "in the form of an ever recurring
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, not in order to save and conserve and render
fit for remembrance, but, on the contrary, in order to destroy."
Thus regardless of her historical analyses it "dawned" on her that
Origins was not "a historical. . .but a political book, in which whatever 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 totalitarianism, shed on it." The origins are not causes; "they only became
originsantecedentsafter the event had taken place." Analyzing, literally breaking up a crystal, destroys the crystal but reveals

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

627

its "constituent elements." The importance of this procedure is

among the fundamental points Arendt made in the chapter written in 1953 and added to all subsequent editions of Origins, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government":
If it is true that the elements of totalitarianism can be found
by retracing the history and analyzing the political implications 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 disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It may even be that
the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic formthough not necessarily tbe cruelestonly when
totalitarianism has become a thing ofthe past (1973: 460).
According to Aiendt, the "disturbing relevance of totalitarian
regimes. . .is that the true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without the acknowledgment that totalitarianism became this century's curse only because it so
terrifyingly took care of its problems," problems raised in one way
or another by the existence of superfluous or worldless people.
Her description of the living dead, the "inanimate" inmates of
concentration camps who experienced the full force of the totalitarian "solution"a solution that altered their nature as human
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
death, which she evokes in terms ofthe longing for death 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, not by divine judgment in an afterlife, but here on
earth by men.

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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 people, of naturally determined "inferior" races and
historically determined "dying" classes, leaves us today, on an
overcrowded and shrinking planet, with the great and unsolved
political perplexity of how human plurality can be conceived, of
how groups of human beings, historically and culturally distinct
from one another, can live together and share a common world.
Arendt's readers are left with both tbe "trembling insight" that
human nature is not unchangeable and tbe perhaps slightly more
encouraging "knowledge that far more is possible than we had
ever thought."
Arendt adds totalitarianism to the kinds of government previously known: monarchy (the rule of one) and its perversion in
tyranny; aristocracy (the rule of tbe best) and its corruption in oligarchy 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 supported hy 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 that sense totalitarian regimes are not the opposite of any previously realized
kind of government, or only of the vain attempts made throughout the long centuries of Christian belief to 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 scheme, may be the surest
way of seeing it as a novel form of government, and as such tbe
central event not only ofthe twentieth century but ofthe present,
post-totalitarian world as well.
When Arendt noted that causality, the explanation of an event
as determined by another event or chain of events that leads up

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

629

to it, "is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences," she meant that no historical event is ever predictable. 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 principle 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 not the "objective" historical scientist but the
impartial judgethe Hotneric histor, the original historian, was a
judge^for whom the existence and meaning of events are decisive. Only then the antecedents of those events can be told in stories, whose beginnings are never causes and whose conclusions are
never determined in advance.'
Her rejection of causality and insistence on contingent factors
in the course of history inform Arendt's judgment of totalitarian
crimes against humanity as unpredictable, unpardonable, and in
the end ungraspable by the human mind. Regarding such crimes
the old saying "tout comprendre c'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 Origins 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 subjective emotional reaction foisted on a purportedly "value free" scientific analysis;^ her anger is inherent in her judgment of a 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 Origins she spoke of the desperate need to
tell the "real story of the Nazi-constructed hell":

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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 experience and tbe basic misery of our times. Only from this foundation, on which a new knowledge of man will rest, can our
new insights, our new memories, our new deeds, take their
point of departure (1994: 200).
The beginning called for here, if there is to be one, will arise
from the judgment and actions of men and women who know the
nature of totalitarianism and agree tbat, for the sake ofthe world,
it must not occur againnot 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 Origins is
political, not only because she wanted to destroy what history conserves, but also because her "method" of storytelling goes against
the grain of social scientists who purport to explain totalitarianism 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 have happened." That "ought" is not based in transcendent
moral "values" but rather constitutes as strong as possible a statement 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 under 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
reemergence can be resisted. Such judgment is possible for
beings "whose essence is beginning," and reconciliation may follow only if new roots are struck in the world. Judgment is "the
other side of action" and as such the reverse of resignation. It
seeks to destroy but not erase totalitarianism, for then the histori-

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

631

cal processes that did not cause but led to its emergence would
remain intact and "the burden of our time" be reaccumulated.^^
A quotation from Karl Jaspers that struck Arendt "right in the
heart" and which she chose as the epigraph for Origins stresses
that what matters is not to give oneself over to the despair of the
past or the Utopian hope of the future, but "to remain 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 turning point for the present world, 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 particularly brutal form of tyranny or despotism. In a tyrannical political realm, which hardly can be called public, the tyrant and the
people exist in isolation from each other. Due to the lack of rapport or legal communication between the people and the tyrant,
all action in a tyranny manifests a "moving principle" of mutual
fear: the tyrant's fear ofthe people on one side, and the people's
fear of the tyrant, or, as Arendt put it, their "despair over the
impossibility" of joining together to act at all, on the other. It is in
this sense that tyranny is a contradictory and futile form of government, 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 constitutional republics or monarchies, corrupts itself, cultivating
within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Therefore, the essential impotence of a tyrannically ruled state, however fiamboyant
and spectacular its dying throes may be, and regardless of the cruelty and suffering it may infiict on its people, presents no menace
of destruction to the world at large.
In the early revolutionary stages of development and whenever
and wherever they meet opposition, totalitarian movements

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employ tyrannical measures of force and violence, but their

nature differs from that of tyrannies precisely in the enormity of
their threat of world destruction. That threat has often been seen
as the total politicalization of all phases of life. But Arendt saw it as
the inversion of the genuinely political: a phenomenon of total
depoliticalization {Entpolitisierung) that appeared for the first time

in the regimes of Stalin after 1929 and Hider after 1938. Totalitarianism's radical atomization ofthe 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. Totalitarianism 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 human freedom, private as well as public,
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, not only exceeding but different
in kind from outward coercive force. In tbe name of ideological
necessity totalitarian terror dominates human beings from within,
thereby mocking the appearance and also the disappearance, the
lives and the deaths of distinct and potentially free men and
women. It mocks the world that only a plurality of free individuals can continuously renew and share with one another, and it
mocks the earth as tbe natural home of such beings. Totalitarianism mocks everything that is given, everything that the totalitarians do not themselves make. The profound paradox that lies
between the ideological necessity to eradicate every sign of human-

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633

ity, of human freedom, of spontaneity and beginning, and the fact

that the possibility of that eradication is itself something entirely
new, made and brought 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 "combination" of "its essence of terror and its principle of logicality." As
"essence" terror must be total, more than a means of suppressing
opposition and more than the most extreme resentment or vindictiveness. Total terror is, if not reasonable, the rational and consistent 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 govemment of laws would become "perfect" in the
absence of transgressions, so terror "rules supreme when nobody
any longer stands in its way." Positive laws in constitutional governments seek to mediate, to "translate and realize" higher universal laws, unalterable divine commandments or fixed natural
law, but terror "is designed to translate into reality the law of movement of histoiy or nature" directly, not in a delimited body politic
but throughout mankind. The murderous "justice" of the laws of
the motion of history and nature is not mediated but executed
immediately: for Arendt that is the meaning of totalitarian terror.
If totalitarianism were perfected, if the entire plurality of
human beings were to become the embodiment of the forces of natural and historical movement, then its essence of terror would suffice as its principle of motion. But as long as totalitarianism exists
in a non to tali tarian world, it needs the processes of logical or
dialectical deduction to coerce the human mind into "imitating"
and becoming "integrated" into those "suprahuman" forces.^^ In
other words, once it yields to the logical development of the idea, not
as the content but as the premise of an ideology, the human mind
will move as inevitably as natural and historical processes themselves move, against which "nothing stands but the great capacity
of men" to act, to insert themselves into those very processes and

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alter the direction of their momentum by starting "something

new."^^ The twin freedoms of acting and thinking can always prevent the vise of terror and logicality from closing, which is the reason 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, that is, their sense of community and communication, that attracts them to ideological pre-dictations oi the goals
of nature and history in the first place.''' Impervious to the reality
of shared experience, those who "have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others," are inwardly, beneath the
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 human affairs in "the true central
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 away with the dynamic 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 totalitarianism, human freedom is seen as inconsequential to "the
undeniable automatism" of natural and historical processes, or at
most as an impediment to i/tar freedom. On the other, when "the
iron band of terror" destroys human diversity, so totally dominating human beings that they cease to be individuals and become a
mere mass of identical, interchangeable specimens "ofthe animalspecies man," those processes are provided with "an incomparable
instrument" 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

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

635

how they subverted the consciences and destroyed the uniqueness

of human beings, which leads directly to the apprehension of what
she recognized as their crime against humanity.

The Crime Against Humanity and The Right To Have Rights

In 1963 Arendt said that she had "been thinking for many years,
or, to be specific, for thirty years, about the nature of evil." It was
30 years since the Reichstag was burned in Berlin, an event followed 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
Arendt called "monstrous" treatment. With his political opposition effectively forestalled. Hitler could dictate as a matter of policy 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 consolidation
of Nazi power anti-Semitism ceased to be merely a social prejudice 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 citizenship altogether, deporting them, and finally by killing them.
From that moment on Arendt said she "felt responsible." But
responsible for what? She hardly meant that she was responsible
for having been born a Jew, but that, unlike many others, she
could no longer be "simply a bystander" and would respond as a
Jew to 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 but human plurality as such; and still
later to determine the principle by which this lawful criminality, in
its strangest and most dangerous instance, could justifiably be

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punished. When Hitler was defeated in 1945 incontrovertible evidence of Nazi "factories" of extermination 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 Eichmann
In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality ofEvilm 1963, and, although

she ceased to write directly about them after 1966, it is fair to say
that the "overpowering reality" of the camps lay behind her preoccupation 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 revolutionary stages of the rise to power of totalitarian movements, it is in
the postrevolutionary period, when Hitler and Stalin had become
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 not 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 complicities 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 presumption) with
those who had actually experienced total terror. In a revealing
passage she says: "Only the fearful imagination of those who have
been aroused by [firsthand] reports but have not actually been

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

637

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 recollection or by eyewitnesses is that in direct propordon to their
authenticity they are unable "to communicate things that evade
human understanding and human experience." They are
doomed to fail if they attempt to explain psychologically or sociologically what cannot be explained either way; that is, to explain
in terms that make sense in the human world what does not make
sense there. Moreover, survivors who have "resolutely" returned
to the world of common sense tend to recall the camps as if they
"had mistaken a nightmare for reality." The camps were indeed a
"phantom world"Arendt deliberately echoes the appearance of
Africa to Conrad's adventurersthat had "materialized" with all
the "sensual data of reality," but to her that meant not that the survivors had experienced a terrifying dream but that they had been
the victims of a previously unknown crime. One ofthe underlying
reasons for the controversy created by Arendt's book on Eichmann 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 order to judge what was pernicious for humanity
itself.
The notion of a "crime against humanity" had been introduced
in the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals in 1946, but in
Arendt's opinion it was confused there 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 Jews throughout Nazi-controlled Europe was a crime against
the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish

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SOCIAL RESEARCH

people" which "violated the order of mankind. . .and an altogether different community," namely, the comity ofall the nations
of the world. It requires both imagination and the steadfastness of
human solidarity to face what Arendt meant by the "absolute" evil
of totalitarianism, to see that, in the case of the Nazis, what is
attributable to "the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism"
is "only the choice of victims [and] not the nature of the crime."
In the camps Hitler and Stalin fully realized modernity's "contempt for reality," for what is given and not self-made, going far
beyond the cynical and nihilistic notion that "everything is permitted" to the "insane" proposition that "everything is possible."
Arendt understood the camps as "laboratories" in which "experiments" were conducted to test that proposition, and what those
experiments demonstrated was that "the omnipotence of man"
can be bought at the price "of the superfluity of men." In the
camps human beings were made into one utterly predictable "living corpse," a body permanently in "the process of dying." Men
and women were reduced "to the lowest common denominator of
organic life," rendered "equal" in the sense of being interchangeable, an inhuman "equality" that stands in the sharpest 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 together to generate the power required to
affect the course of their world, then the "equality" of the camps
is of undifferentiated human beings deprived of every relation to
anything like a world: in Arendt's words, "to be superfluous
means not to belong to the world at all."
Human existence, according to Arendt, is in part conditioned
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 conditions human beings in much the same way that the behavior of
animals can be conditioned by electric shock. Systematically
starved men and women were conditioned to behave inhumanly

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

639

in the hope of being fed, much as Pavlov's dog (to Arendt a "perverted" animal) was conditioned to salivate not when it was hungry but when a bell was rung.^^ In the contrived, inhuman, but
rationally consistent nonworld of the camps, "innocence is
beyond virtue and guilt is beyond crime": the categories of innocence and guilt, right and wrong, virtue and vice, and almost
everything else that since time immemorial has been associated
with the specific nature of human 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 scientifically implemented and systematically carried out, not for any
comprehensible purpose but for its own sake.
When compared 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 juridical or political 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 elimination of every legal status, including that of ordinary criminals. Human beings are subjected 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 arbitrariness of the choice of victims aims at destroying "the civil
rights of the whole population," and that destruction is carried
out neither by indoctrination nor brainwashing, for it is not "consent" {which implies the possihility of dissent) that is wanted but
only "discipline." The destruction of juridical or political man "is
a prerequisite for dominating him entirely."

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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 postpone the death) of another, she is implicated in the crime committed 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
immediately 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 hurt them that they become bundles of
insensate flesh. Their spontaneity is, as it were, wmng from them:
rendered incapable of acting or thinking, they drift "'like dummies 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 laborers 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 functioning of the "laboratories" of extermination depended 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 rather than by interviews in
which their inclination or disinclination, their psychological suit-

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

641

ability or unsuitability for the horrendous tasks they were called

upon to perform, could be assessed. It was never a question of
what the S.S. believed: their only law was the logicality of the ideology as set forth in the Fiihrer's will. When their chief, Himmler,
told the members of the S.S. that they must become "superhumanly inhuman," that is, cease being human, if tliey were to carry
out the "great task that occurs but once in two thousand years," he
intended clearly to extirpate their capacity to think and act spontaneously. In this telling sense, according to Arendt, the destroyers were as subjectively innocent as those they destroyed. Probably
more than any other single factor, the failure of "the Rights of
Man," "formulated" and "proclaimed" in the American and
French Revolutions of the eighteenth century but never "politically secured" or "philosophically established," allowed a form of
government to appear that, although made by men, destroyed
humanity, and in which indifference toward death was the only
common experience: "We did not care if we died today or only
tomorrow, and there were times we cursed the morning that
found us still alive," Eichmann said.
From Arendt's point of view the unprecedented crime against
all humanity, radically and absolutely evil, baffles understanding.
She asked:
Why should lust for power, which from the beginning of
recorded history has been considered the political and
social sin par excellence, suddenly transcend all previously
known limitations of self-interest and utility and attempt
not simply to dominate men as they are but to change their
very nature; not only to kill whoever is in the way of further
power accumulation but also innocent and harmless
bystanders, and this even when such murder is an obstacle,
rather than an advantage, for the accumulation of power?
(1994: 353)

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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
presented no threat to him hindered his ability to fight effectively
against his real enemies at the end of World War II. What is the
point of dominating men at any cost, not "as they are," not for any
utilitarian purpose, but in order "to change their very nature"? If
it is for the sake of "the consistency of a lying world order," as
Arendt went on to suggest, what is the sense of a system that even
if it succeeded in destroying the human world could not end in the
creation of a "thousand-year Reich" or "Messianic Age" but only
in self-destruction? For the sheer destructive momentum of totalitarianism is like a juggernaut or fireball that if unchecked could
ravage and reduce the human world to ashes until there was nothing left for it but to wield on and consume itself. (In an admittedly
minor way this anti-utilitarianism is foreshadowed in Conrad's Mr.
Kurtz, whose extremism did "more harm than good to the Company" for which he worked.)
That totalitarianism appeared in two major European 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, uneducated refugees, alienated from anything like a common world and
ripe for the logical dictates of one or another 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 humanly "comprehensible
motives." It is one thing 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
the Israeli government and brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arendt

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

643

saw an opportunity, unusual for philosophers, to confront the

"realm of human affairs and human deeds. . .directly." She
reported on the trial for The New Yorker im^dzine and shortly after
Eichmann in ferusalem was published, prompted hy questions suhmitted by a journalist, 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 encounter "in the flesh" a notorious Nazi criminal,
and she was eager to grasp, if possible, his individual ^\\\\i, why he
had done what he did, which, she added, was "not relevant" to her
more theoretical considerations in Origins. In the earlier work she
had dealt with the "type" of totalitarian criminal, but 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"
but insofar as he was a human 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 presented 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 enable us,
to see in Eichmann a most unexpected perpetrator of this new
criminality and by judging him forswear the processes of dehumanization 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,
that she no longer believed in the existence of "holes of oblivion"

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because "there are simply too many people in the world to make
oblivion possible." Second, she realized that "Eichmann was
much less infiuenced by ideology" than she would have assumed
before attending the trial: "extermination 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 Gershom Scholem (Arendt, 1978b): "It is indeed my opinion now
that evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extreme." "Thought tries
to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated." That there is nothing in evil
for thought to latch onto is what Arendt meant by the banality of
evil: not that Eichmann's acts are commonplace, hut that the massiveness ofthe evil he infiicted on the world defies thoughO^
In a subsequent letter to McCarthy, who had written of the
moral exhilaration that reading Eichmann Inferusalem afforded her,

Arendt noted: "you were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admittednamely that I wrote this book in a
state of euphoria." In a letter to a German correspondent, she
said that 20 years after she had learned of the existence of
Auschwitz she experienced a cura posterior, that is, a healing of her
inability to think through to its root in the acts of men the evil of
totalitarian criminality. The posterior or later cure is also important in the sense that for Arendt the terrible injury infiicted on
the Jewish people would at long last appear as a crime against
humanity, and the exemplary criminal capable of that "incomprehensihle" crime, in the person of Eichmann, who was not even
an anti-Semite, be identified.
Arendt saw Eichmann, 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 communication was possible with him, not because
he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable
of all safeguards against the words and the presence of oth-

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

645

ers, and hence 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 transportation of millions of innocent Jews to their annihilation in
Auschwitz, Eichmann boasted that he had done his duty to the
end. Unlike those members of the S.S. who attempted to "negotiate" with the enemy when it became clear that the Nazi cause was
lost, Eichmann declared "that he had lived his whole life. .
.according to a Kantian definition of duty"; and "to the surprise of
everybody, [he] came up with an approximately correct definition
of [Kant's] categorical imperative," even though he had "distorted" it in practice. Arendt recognized, moreover, "that Eichmann's distortion agrees with what he called the version of Kant
'for the household use of the little man,'" the identification of
one's will with "the source" of law, which for Eichmann was not
pure practical reason but, and regardless of its logicality, simply
what the FUhrer w'lWed. He "supported and carried out" the physical 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 Eichmann in ferusalem is
its account of human conscience. The refusal ofthe court to consider seriously the question of Eichmann's conscience resulted in
its failure to confront what Arendt called "the central moral, legal,
and political phenomena of our century." The Israeli judges
understood conscience traditionally as the voice of God or lumen
naturale, speaking or shining in every human soul, telling or illuminating the difference between right and wrong. This simply did
not apply in the case of Eichmann. Eichmann had a. conscience,

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and 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 Thou shall not kill but on the contrary every voice saying Thou shall kill, "it began to function the
other way around." If the phenomenon of a changeable conscience indicates a "moral collapse," Arendt was convinced by testimony 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
meaning in Jerusalem than during his career in the S.S. He contradicted himself constantly but he did not lie, his conscience was
clear, and he did not suffer from remorse: "He knew that what he
had once called his duty was now called a crime, and be accepted
this new code of Judgment as if it were nothing btit another language rule."^*^ From the moment he was captured he expected to
die, but on what legal ground could his criminality be judged to
warrant the death sentence? If, as Arendt believed, "intent to do
wrong" was not proved against Eichmann, and if therefore the
court's judgment was anything like a "language rule" expressing
the Justice, if not of the victor, then of the injureda kind of
vengeancethen that Judgment could not be grounded at all:
after another war with a different outcome it could change to
another 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 forgive trespasses as the buman power to break an otherwise irreversible chain of revenge, tbat is, of further trespasses to avenge

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

647

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 beginning. 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 the same passage Arendt also cites Jesus on certain offenses
or stumbling blocks {scandala) that, unlike trespasses, cannot be
forgiven: "Woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he
cast into the sea." To Ai-endt this meant that such offensesshe
was clearly thinking ofthe radical evil of totalitarianismalso cannot be punished, for to imprison or peremptorily terminate the
finite life of a mass murderer is ludicrous as an act of retribudon
(that is, as adequate or just punishment) 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
hinder the human power to start anew, although that is not stated
explicitly in this passage (1958c: 238-41).
When Arendt was present at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, this
same matter arose in far greater specificity. She objected that justice 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 her own judgment of Eichmann, which concludes:

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[J] ust as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people 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 member of the human 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).
Arendt's Judgment cannot 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 Eichmann's unpardonable deeds. The power of the Judgment she exercised, however, may be considered an act of retributive Justice, but only if its symmetry with Eichmann's crimes
is seen on a political ratber 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
political crime against humanity, that is, against the human condition and the human world, against "human diversity as such. .
.without wbich the very words 'mankind' or 'humanity' would be
devoid of meaning."
Having listened to Eichmann, whose psychological profile was
normal, Arendt determined that he was not a "monster" but distinguished from most but by no means al! other 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 later felt the need to Justify philosophically because of its
widespread and perhaps understandable misrepresentation as a
trivialization, or even exculpation, of the criminality of Eichmann. Hardly a hint of what became her immense final task can
be given here, except for one aspect of it that is pertinent: her dis-

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

649

covery that what traditional morality had thought of as the voice of

conscience is in fact the actualization of consciousness in the activity of thinking. That discovery, prompted by Eichmann's meaningless 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 that Arendt meant literally the activity of thinking and not its results, not things
thought no matter how profound they might be. She certainly was
not stating a new moral theorem from which new rules might be
derived, which in turn could only dissolve in further thinking, or
become customs and habits as changeable as "table manners" or
Eichmann's "coascience."
What Arendt meant by the actualization of consciousness was
not consciousness in the psychological sense but a knowing-withoneself {con-scientia) that imposes limits when it is experienced.
The crucial point is that the activity of thinking provides an
intense and ineluctable ex^mence of plurality: the activity of thinking, that is, the actuality of the silent dialogue with oneself, discloses a difference within the identity of the thinker. At a speed
greater than lightning these "two-in-one," as she called them, converse as long as the activity of thinking lasts. She further found
that these thinking "partners" have to be on good terms, essentially 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 Eichmann was entirely oblivious, in this congeniality ofthe two-in-one.
By the same token it is in the activity of thinking that the specifically 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 humanity, noted as "ugly" by Marlow in Conrad's tale, became horrifyingly explicit in Hider and Stalin's "claim to global rule," but here
it is the sheer activity of thinking that makes a human being not
only respect and relish but also refuse to abrogate at any cost the

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right of other human 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 it was
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 diametric opposite of Eichmann, not because of any "doctrine," of which
he had none, but because he cared more for the activity of thinking, with himself and others, than for a life without meaning.
In her critical lectures on moral philosophy delivered after and
largely in response to the storm of controversy unleashed by her
accotxnt of the Eicbmann trial, Arendt repeats the saying of Jesvis
cited earlier, emphasizing that "It were better for him that a millstone 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 point of view of the world
it vifas better for Eichmann that he be rid of his life. That is neither
pardon nor punishment, but Justice rendered 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 Judgment been the court's Judgment, Justice, a political virtue, would not only have been done in
Jerusalem but also would have been seen to be done throughout
tbe world. And what is most important, the human 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 humanis generis, an
enemy of every human being.
With the establishment of the state of Israel Jews were finally
able "to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own
people"; they no longer needed "to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

651

of the rights of man." When she wrote Origins 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 "independent of human plurality,"
are not innate, and are not possessed by human beings "expelled
from the human community." In Origins she therefore spoke of "a
right to have rights," a right "to live in a framework where one is
judged by one's actions and opinions," and it was that right that
she strove to make visible as the fundamental principle of human
solidarity, the "new foundation of human community as such."
Were that community to arise it would stand in positive opposition to totalitarianism. Unlike the traditional way of reading the
categorical scheme of forms of government, however, this world
political community, which would not aspire to global rule, 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 citizenshipthis right is the only one that can and can only be
guaranteed 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 secured" only if it is established as
the principal tenet of international law, a law "above nations," the
enforcement of which would be legally binding on all peoples and
all nations, superseding any "rules of sovereignty."'^-^ That may
seem unlikely to occur, but it surely is not 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
judgments, be they economic or military, in utilitarian terms. The

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advent of totalitarianism demonstrated that utilitarian thinking is

no longer of use in responding to the problems and perplexities
of our world. What Arendt called "the old utilitarian equation of
the good with the 'good for' some pre-existing given entity" cannot suffice for a beginning as unprecedented as totalitarianism
itself. It is of this beginning that in time totalitarianism would
unequivocally be seen as the inversion, just as tyranny more than
two millennia ago was seen as the perversion of the monarchy
that historically it preceded. What is meant is not the restoration
of anything like a monarchical form of government, but rather
that the one principle, the monos arche, of the beginning Arendt
called for would be the "right to the human condition itself," the
"prepolitical," "prelegal," and "so to speak, the prehistorical"
foundation of a world in which human beings live together with
some degree of freedom and justice, even if not in "perpetual
peace." All "rights spring from human plurality," including the
"transcending" right to have rights, which cannot be conceived as
a moral right in any traditional sense, lt is the one right directly
derived from Arendt's philosophic establishment of the immanent law of human plurality on earth.
Well before she went to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann
trial Arendt had spoken of the "thunder" of the "explosion" of
totalitarian domination that nevertheless leaves us silent "whenever we dare to ask, not 'What are we fighting against' but 'What
are we fighting/or?'"^^ She did not answer that question directly,
perhaps because at the time she did not know how to formulate a
more compelling answer than she had already given in Origins,
and perhaps because she wanted her readers to think the question 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 considered "fighting/or'' the
political confirmation ofthe human right to have rights the highest and most urgent task of republican democracies today.

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653

Notes
^There is also the complexity of the relation of the book's first two
parts on "Antisemitism" and "Imperialism" to its third on "Totalitarianism," which is not treated here. Taminiaux's and Tsao's papers in this
issue of Social Research deal with some of the pertinent issues.
^This would not be the emptiness, 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 incarnations of an alien presence, vehicles through which the monster 'totalitarianism' worked its
mysterious will." See Canovan (2000: 38).
^For one view of the positive relationship of human freedom to politics, see Kohn (2000).
*Which Chinua Achebe says he ought to have done; see Conrad
(1988: 256, emphasis added).
^'Writing in 1917 for a new edition of Heart of Darkness, first published
in 1899, Comad said that its composition had been more than "a feat of
memory." "It was like another art altogether. That somber theme had to
be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration
that, I hoped, would hang on the air and dwell on the ear after the last
note 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 conclusive reason for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise" Arendt. "Truth and Politics" (1968a: 238, 242).
'^Such a view, as Arendt points out, accurately describes many historical 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 meaning 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 judge." Arendt (1968b:
104-05).
^^ The Burden of Our Time was the title ofthe first British edition (London, 1951) of 7 he Origins of Totalitarianism.

^'For Arendt it is of no small importance that such a flourishing

occurred in Russia after the death of Stalin.

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SOCIAL RESEARCH

^^According to Arendt, "stringent logicality as a guide to action [was]

exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin," indeed their only addition "to
the ideas and propaganda 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, Arendt sees "the movement of history and the movement of
nature [as] one and the same." Nature is "swept into history" when biological life is viewed as an inevitable development (1973: 463).
^^Arendt quotes the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski on his experience
in Auschwitz: "'Never before was hope stronger than man, 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 persecutors," further dehumanizes them: that their "apathy" toward their own
death is "the almost physical, automatic response to the challenge of
absolute meaninglessness." 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 contentious and it is still a problem for some of the most astute expositors
of Arendt's thought.
^^A year later writing about Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, Aiendt
found that the wartime Roman Catholic pope, Pius XII, was not exempt
either. See Arendt (1964b).
^'^As Arendt put 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 unthinkable, but its science perceptible. To evaluate it is to admit the hypothesis of the criminal's irresponsibility. Yet any man, fortuitously or not, can
be hanged. This equality is intolerable." Quoted in Caws (1977: 31).
'^^In a letter to W. H. Auden, dated 14 February 1960, Arendt admitted "You are entirely right (and I was entirely wrong) that punishment
is a necessary alternative only to judicial pardon." But this shows only
that Arendt was already pointing to the public, political nature of crimes
against humanity, crimes that transcend the realm of Christian charity
to which, in the same letter and unlike her correspondent, though
apparendy in agreement with Jesus, she makes clear she is no friend in

ARENDT ON TOTALITARIANISM

655

the rare cases of extreme evil. Roy Tsao has addressed this important
issue in an unpublished article, "Arendt and Auden: Finding Home and
Facing Evil in the Modern World."
^^Arendt consistently opposed sovereignty, in nations as in individuals, as a power above law, in both cases contradicting the law of human
plurality.
^^"Tradition and the Modern Age" in Arendt {1968a: 27). This essay
is taken in its entirety from Arendt's Marx manuscripts of 1953-54.
References
Arendt, Hannah. The Chigins of Totalitarianism. 1st. ed. New York, 1951.
. "Totalitarianism." The Meridian (Fall 1958a).
. ''Freiheit und Politik." Die neue Rundschau 69:4 (1958b).
. The Human Condition. Chicago, 1958c.
. Letter to W. H. Auden (1960). Arendt Collection. 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 Remain
Silent?" Thefewish World (September, 1964a).
.''The Deputy. Guilt by Silence." The Storm Over the Deputy. Ed. E.
Bentley. New York, 1964b: 85-94.
. Betiveen Past and Future. New York, 1968a.
, Men In Dark Times. New York, 1968b.
. "Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture." Social Research
38:3 (Fall 1971).
. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 5th ed. New York, 1973.
. The Life of the Mind. Vol. I: Thinking. New York, 1978a.
. Letter to Cershom Scholem, 24 July 1963. Thefeiu As Pariah:fetDish Identity and Politics in the Modem Age. Ed. R. Feldman. New York,
1978b.
. Hannah Arendt, Karl faspers: Correspondence, 1926-1969. Eds. L.
Kohler and H. Saner. New York, 1992.
. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954. Ed. J. Kohn. New York, 1994.
Han?iah Arendt, Mary McCarthy: Betxoeen Friends. Correspondence,
1949-1975. New York, 1995.
Caws, Mary Ann. Rene Char. Boston, 1977.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical Ed. Sd ed. Ed. Robert
Kimbrough. New York, 1988.

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SOCIAL RESEARCH

Canovan, Margaret. "Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism." The Cambridge

Companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. D. Villa. Cambridge, 2000.
Goldhagen, D. J. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Cermans and the
Holocaust. New York, 1996.
Kohn, J. "Freedom: The Priority of the Political." The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Ed. D. Villa. Cambridge, 2000: 113-129.
Rousset, David. Les jours de notre moit. Paris, 1947.