Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975
INTRODUCTION: In her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt traces the historical origins of anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism and totalitarianism. Regarding Arendt, Wikipedia comments: “Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century.” Arendt’s political ideology is hard to pin down, but maybe it can best be described as anti-totalitarian and pragmatic rationalist-realist. Her depiction of the human condition is cold, realist and disquieting.
Arendt, born in 1906, was an educated intellectual and a German Jew. She escaped Nazi Germany a few months before Europe closed its borders. She was thus personally familiar with the social moral hypocrisy and decay of European nations and the rising horrors the hypocrisy and decay engendered. Although anti-Semitism and racism predated the industrial revolution, Arendt argues it led to the modern foundations of anti-Semitism, racism as a political ideology, imperialism and totalitarianism.
This review was inspired by a search for where President Trump might fit among Western demagogues and tyrants from the point of view of someone who never knew Trump as a political leader. Trump was five years old when Arendt published her book. Regarding the book, Wikipedia comments: “The book is regularly listed as one of the best non-fiction books of the 20th century.”
Apparently, this reviewer's thought is not unique. Trump has inspired others to look to books on political theory for insight into whatever it is that Trump is. One reviewer wrote in 2017: “The book whose success is a surprise, however, is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). At 752 pages, Arendt’s magnum opus is not brief, and with its panoramic exploration of history, philosophy, politics and psychology, the book can exercise a reader’s mind. But recently it sold out on Amazon . . . . .”
The Origins of Totalitarianism is organized in three parts. Part one, Antisemitism chapters 1-4, Imperialism, chapters 5-9, and Totalitarianism, chapters 10-13. Given Arendt’s dense writing style and the length of the book, reviews of individual chapters are necessary to reasonably summarize the content and tenor of what Arendt is trying to convey. A review of the entire book seems inadequate, or at least beyond this reviewer’s capacity.
REVIEW: The Classless Society (chapter 10): Arendt opens chapter 10 with the observation that totalitarian regimes are transient. The conditions that lead to the possibility of a totalitarian regime are so unusual that only two existed in her time, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Other contenders from the past might include Mussolini in Italy. Arendt does not put Mussolini in the totalitarian category, relegating him instead to the status of mere dictator. Totalitarians are different from dictators. Totalitarians seek global control and they ‘atomize’ their populations such that social classes, groups and even families are broken down. Atomized societies are classless societies.
Morality, truth and history are swept away as impediments to total control. Absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the leader is the only acceptable norm for the citizen. The propaganda and lies employed does not just play on “ignorance and stupidity”:
For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian leaders usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. The Nazis ‘were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction’. Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of communist propaganda, and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics. The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. . . . . .
Arendt elaborates on propaganda and the alliance between the mob and intellectual elites, who in their cynicism at the time were attracted to shiny and strange new things. In their cynicism, the elites were even willing to see the collapse of civilization “for the fun of seeing how those who had been unjustly excluded in the past forced their way into it.”
To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s or Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination.
That paints a bleak picture of significant portions of societies drowning in cynicism and willing to accept social collapse in exchange for something different, or at least entertaining. In that milieu, neither democracy nor the cold morality of a relentless quest for acquisition of greater wealth by the bourgeoisie seemed worth defending. Arendt argues that the morals, or lack thereof, of the capitalists had subverted democratic norms and put economic and property concerns before all other things. In essence, European nations had been conquered by a ruthless economic ideology and many people in society saw that, or at least felt the sting.
Arendt describes the sources of social cynicism and deep distrust she sees in the historical record.
An atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (after the nineteenth century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. . . . . In the growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions – which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy – those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the content itself. Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardians of Western traditions and confounded on all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it only did not possess in private and business life, but held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity on which the existing society seemed to rest.
Thus, despite the bleak pictures of societies that Arendt describes, one can see in the reaction to a hypocritical and morally bankrupt bourgeoisie, many people were clearly repulsed by the corrupt sleaze at the top. That reaction is not one coming from pure apathy. That may have led to political apathy and grudging, silent tolerance of democratic governments. But at the least average people were looking for moral consistency, even if they could not see it was the morality of an insanely vicious and evil totalitarianism.
Arendt argues that totalitarians rise to power in two steps. First they rely on the mob for initial support, and then they harvest the masses and stay in power as long as the masses stay loyal to the leader. For Arendt, the mob is not the industrial working class or the people as a whole, but it is “the refuse of all classes . . . . . the riff-raff of bohemians, crackpots, gangsters and conspirators.” She asserts that although totalitarian leaders rise from the mob, the early supporters are cast aside or killed once the leader has power. What seems to attract the mob to totalitarians is their status as social castaways and the promise of social destruction with a new world order. The mob sees and rejects the deep hypocrisy of the dominant bourgeoisie morals and social norms that nation states of the time were built on. In a sense, the mob was the collateral damage of the industrial revolution, including its grotesque concentration of wealth at the very top.
Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism includes two other necessary components. One is a circumstance where the masses, normally apathetic, non-political citizens have “acquired the appetite for political organization.” This reflects a disaffected population that tolerates democratic government without enthusiasm. The totalitarian leader relies on charm, charisma and relentless propaganda to help create and shape the political appetite. These previously apathetic populations can be captured by totalitarian movements. The other component is a sufficient population of the masses. “Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible. . . . . they [German and Russian totalitarian movements] recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention.” Arendt asserted that totalitarian movements in Eastern European countries all led to mere dictatorships because they did not have sufficient populations for the human slaughter necessary to atomize subject societies or nations. In all of this, Arendt casts the masses in a constantly negative light, e.g., inarticulate, apathetic or stupid.
With the necessary support of the masses, Arendt sees the end of two illusions that democratic governments deluded themselves with:
The first was that people in its majority had taken an active part in its government and that each individual was in sympathy with one’s own or somebody else’s party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country . . . . . The second illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter . . . . . democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.
Arendt makes many other important points. One is her assertion that, for the typical citizen, it does not make much difference what brand of totalitarianism one lives under. “Practically speaking, it will make little difference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of Nazism or Bolshevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics.” In an atomized, classless society, the underlying ideology is as irrelevant as truth and reason.
Another assertion Arendt makes is that neither Nazism nor Bolshevism constituted a new form of government or that their political goals were ever attained, even after the movements attained power and control.
Their idea of domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion; namely the permanent domination of each individual in each and every sphere of life. The seizure of power through means of violence is never an end in itself but only the means to an end, and the seizure of power in any given country is only a welcome transitory stage but never the end of the movement. . . . . a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist.
That seems to argue that totalitarianism, in view of its disregard for truth, morals, social class and most everything else, is simply an endless process of demanding and receiving loyalty and not much else. Whether one can count that as a form of government or an ideology seems to be open to debate.
Is Trump a would-be totalitarian, or just a would-be dictator?: Based on chapter 10, Trump does not look to be a true totalitarian. Not only are circumstances in America not ripe, with powerful institutions standing in his way, Trump himself is too shallow and self-centered to aspire to the kind of brutal rule that Hitler and Stalin conceived. Aspects of Trump fit the totalitarian mold, e.g., his constant mendacity, ability to play on people’s discontent, contempt for democratic institutions and a lack of any cognizable moral compass are all there. But Trump just does not have it in him to kill millions by playing on racism and/or class conflicts. That is the case even if the independent press and independent law enforcement and our independent judiciary were swept away, which is what Trump would very much like to see. Trump wants to be a dictator and he makes that very clear in his public statements. Nonetheless, he clearly falls short of the creatively vicious mind and the work ethic it would take. Trump likes looking at himself in the mirror far too much for that kind of a project to appeal.
That said, Trump’s authoritarian successor just might consider it. Conditions will be better. Trump has done much to plow and prepare the soil for a serious totalitarian to make a run at total power. Trump has weakened the press by fomenting baseless distrust and his party is now openly favoring single-party rule status and willing to break laws to get it. Trump and his party are packing federal courts with unqualified and/or extremist ideologues, which is an important step in destroying judicial independence. Trump’s view of the rule of law is also clear – he hates it. For Trump, the law only applies to enemies, not himself or friends.
The 2020 elections will be interesting, to say the least. Whether they turn out to be frightening is a key question.
B&B orig: 1/4/18
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