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At the end of the “Preface to First Edition” of Origins, Arendt writes, “Anti-Semitism (and not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)—one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities” (OT, xi). At the very beginning of her seminal work, Arendt calls for a universal principle of humanity that will provide a new guarantee of human dignity. Arendt gives her reason for the need for such a principle at the conclusion of Origins, in her analysis of totalitarianism and the unprecedented reality of the death camps. I quote her at length: ONE The Event of Natality: The Ontological Foundation of Human Rights Mankind, whether a religious or humanistic ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility. The shrinking of geographic distances made this a political actuality of the first order. It also made idealistic talk about mankind and the dignity of man an affair of the past simply because all these fine and dreamlike notions, with their time-honored traditions, suddenly assumed a terrifying timeliness. . . . The idea of humanity, purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by all men, and that eventually all nations will be forced to answer for the evil committed by all others. Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism In comparison with the insane end-result—concentration-camp society— the process by which men are prepared for this end, and the methods by which individuals are adapted to these conditions, are transparent and logical . The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses. The impetus, and what is more important, the silent consent to such unprecedented conditions are the products of those events which in a period of political disintegration suddenly and unexpectedly made hundreds of thousands of human beings homeless, stateless, outlawed, and unwanted, while millions of human beings were made economically superfluous and socially burdensome by unemployment. This in turn could only happen because the Rights of Man, which had never been philosophically established but merely formulated , which had never been politically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in their traditional form, lost all validity. (446) It is clear that Arendt places the responsibility for the death camps squarely at the feet of a philosophically invalid and politically impotent notion of human rights. This is not to suggest that she sees a causal link between the modern formulation of human rights and the event of totalitarianism . Instead, as she states in her well-known response to Eric Voegelin , she is tracing the elements that crystallized into totalitarianism rather than writing a history of totalitarianism as such.1 But, she insists, we are able to see through the crystal to the ground in which it is embedded. For Arendt, the ground that at least in part provided the condition for this crystallizing event is the modern Declaration of the Rights of Man. Here it is worth noting that Arendt is not party to those who think it enough to simply repair this declaration in order to prevent the worst from happening again. Indeed, she ends the preface by stating that totalitarianism reveals a subterranean realm that renders all such rehabilitation projects futile : “The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live” (ix). The crystallizing event of totalitarianism allows us a glimpse into the subterranean realm, revealing that the modern nation-state with its declaration of human rights is deeply entangled in a racism and an imperialism that call for something more than a restoration of the Enlightenment project. Establishing philosophically and securing politically human rights requires a new law of humanity. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues: Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have become equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of...

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