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I want to address the question whether totalitarianism is a threat today. I think a caveat is in order as I make some remarks about this question; and that is that for Hannah Arendt totalitarianism was the crystallization of several elements that together constituted this event. I say this because I think, first of all, that for Hannah Arendt there is no form of totalitarianism in the way that Montesquieu, for instance, might outline a form of government such as the republic or the monarchy. Second, we should keep in mind that these elements of totalitarianism might themselves change. There may be unpredicted and unprecedented elements of totalitarianism facing us today that would constitute or reconstitute the event of totalitarianism again, but in ways that might look very different from the analysis that Arendt gives in the Origins of Totalitarianism. That said, I do think that there is one element of totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt was herself very concerned about, and one that we are facing today . And that is what Arendt calls a “lying world order.”1 It is not often enough noted that the problem of political deception occupies a central, indeed inaugural place, in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. At the outset of Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of antisemitism, imperialism , and radical evil, Arendt raises the issue of political deception, considering the difference between the ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality. She argues that while the ancient sophists were satisfied with “a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth,” modern sophists want a great deal more, namely, and again citing Arendt, modern sophists want “a lasting victory at the expense of reality itself.”2 In these early pages of Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims that the characteristic that A Lying World Order P O L I T I C A L D E C E P T I O N A N D T H E T H R E AT O F T O TA L I TA R I A N I S M p e g b i r m i n g h a m Facing: Pages 80–81 of Hannah Arendt’s heavily annotated copy of Plato’s Symposium, translated by W. Hamilton. Arendt’s copies of Plato’s Symposium and The Republic are two of the most heavily annotated texts in the library. Her annotations frequently correct the translation and also reflect her thematic interests. At the bottom of p. 80, she writes, “The ‘right opinions.’” At the top of the page she provides the Greek original of the sentence indicated, highlighting that “true convictions” translates To orta doxadzein. On p. 81, she crosses out the English “deal” and replaces it with “mix” to render the sentence: “God does not mix directly with man.” She also corrects the translation of spirit as daimonon and writes at the top of page 81: “daimonon is between a god and a mortal.” Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College.  Political Deception and the Threat of Totalitarianism sets totalitarianism apart from tyrannical and dictatorial regimes is precisely the modern sophistic victory at the expense of reality, a victory that, she argues , institutes a lying world order. Indeed, her discussion of radical evil in the Origins of Totalitarianism cannot be understood apart from her continuing preoccupation with the problem of this particular kind of political deception . When she writes, in 1945, that the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe, Arendt is indicating that the problem of radical evil is not by any means eradicated with the defeat of totalitarianism . To my mind, this is in large part because of totalitarianism’s inseparable link with the political lie. The political lie, for Arendt, has nothing to do with what we understand by falsehood, error, or even the deliberate lie, which are the ways in which deception, in all its guises, is traditionally distinguished from truth. Falsehood and error are the opposites of truth, while a deliberate lie is the intentional dissimulation of the truth. The political lie is something else altogether, insofar as it introduces, and these are Hannah Arendt’s words, “a mutation into the history of the lie.”3 The mutation, for Arendt, is the deliberate attempt to transform a lie into reality. In her 1945 essay “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” Arendt writes, It was always a too little noted...

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