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PART I Totalitarianism and Evil The 1951 work The Origins ofTotalitarianism (initially called The Burden of Our Time) made Arendt's reputation. The title of this extremely influential trilogy is misleading, for-as Arendt later admitted in a public exchange with Eric Voegelin-her intention was not so much to trace out origins as to discern and elucidate the "elements" that ultimately "crystallized" into Bolshevism and National Socialism. Part one, Antisemitism, described how the role ofJews as financiers ofWestern European governments and (more generally) champions of secular, liberal values made them targets for classes that came into conflict with the state. In the nineteenth century, the growth of nationalism and imperialism deprived them of their function in the evolving political economy, and in proportion as they enjoyed wealth without power, they became even more reviled. But their lack of practical political experience prevented Jews from recognizing that "social discrimination had turned into a political argument" against their continued presence in the nation-state. Imperialism focused on the rising power of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, especially their ability to deploy the state to protect their own wealth at home and abroad. The export to Asia and Africa of capital resources that could not be put to profitable use in the European economy called forth the export of the state's instruments ofviolence, the army and police, to protect it. Fatefully, racism and bureaucracy, which had evolved within an imperialist context, were brought back to the Western European homefront, where they had ruinous repercussions. In Eastern Europe, the frustrated imperialist impulse expressed itselfin movements like pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism, which were 1 2 Part I fueled by a celebration of blood ties and a contempt for the universalistic, Enlightenment principles and rational-legal authority that were embodied by the state. As states began to be captured by the dominant nationality, ethnic minorities risked being deprived of civic and then human rights. Totalitarianism purported to describe how these threads came together in Bolshevism and especially Nazism. In Western Europe, the breakdown of the old class and party systems as a legacy ofimperialism created lonely, resentful "masses" standing outside all normal societal structures and relationships. (Stalin, Arendt contended, tried to replicate this process ofatomization as a matter of conscious policy in the USSR.) Their experience of "worldlessness" predisposed them to put their trust in ideologies that both bestowed meaning on history and invited them to submerge their individuality in mass movements. These movements , Arendt said, were onion shaped, so that outer layers were able to buffer inner, more militant ones from the impact of any shock that would destroy their fictitious world. In power, totalitarian movements tried to make the world entirely predictable through terror, so that the "laws" of class or race conflict could speed through history, accelerating a process that their ideology deemed inevitable. Concentration camps, which reproduced the existential situation of the modern masses as worldless, bewildered beings, functioned as laboratories of total domination aiming to reduce inmates to bundles of conditioned responses; the ultimate intention, Arendt believed, was to turn society at large into a camp in which freedom, spontaneity, and plurality as such could be extinguished. When it first appeared, Arendt's book was attacked for placing too much emphasis on Nazism (for which, after all, substantially more documentation was available at the time) and indeed for jumping to conclusions about Stalinist politics on the basis of flimsy parallels to events in Germany. Today, critics are more likely to dismiss the work as a relic ofthe Cold War. John Stanley, however, finds Arendt's theory of totalitarianism useful in describing certain kinds of regimes. There is a class of regimes defined by the attempt to obliterate the boundary between public and private, to atomize citizens and strip away their personal uniqueness through terror, and to mobilize these lonely, dissociated atoms by means of clinically paranoid ideological reasoning. Arendt had argued that totalitarian states are fluid and formless; Totalitarianism and Evil 3 leaders deliberately keep followers off-balance, in constant motion , so that reality cannot infiltrate their ideologically saturated world, and pragmatic politics and utilitarian concerns cannot stabilize its social relationships. Stanley, however, denies two of Arendt's key claims: (1) that totalitarianism is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, inconceivable outside the context of twentieth century problems and experiences; and (2) that it is a novel kind of government, essentially different from old-fashioned tyranny. And he argues that her failure to see totalitarianism as an "extreme form...

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