The three phases of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism

Both in this article and in the later book, Arendt says that what set off the era of imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was that the European bourgeoisie was no longer content to accumulate capital under the benign noninterference of the state and instead seized the reins of state power for the sake of expanding investments abroad. Her pointed condemnation of the capitalist elite's rapacity gives her account a passing resemblance to the influential theories of earlier writers like J. H. Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg. Unlike them, however, Arendt takes remarkably little interest in the workings of the capitalist economy as such, let alone a Marx-inflected analysis of it. (5) Her concern with capitalism is restricted almost entirely to the ethos of the ruling bourgeoisie, and its concomitant understanding of political power. Imperialist policies may have begun simply as an attempt to use military force to safeguard foreign investments; nevertheless, she argues, "the resulting introduction of power as the only contents of politics, and of expansion as its only aim, would hardly have met with such universal applause ... had it not so perfectly answered the hidden desires and secret convictions of the economically and socially dominant classes" (138). For a view of those "hidden desires and secret convictions," she turns to Hobbes's Leviathan, which she takes to be the consummate (if also proleptic) expression of the bourgeois political outlook. On her reading, at least, what Hobbes depicts is a society of antagonistic individuals whose ceaseless struggle for competitive advantage is always just shy of violence, and who regard the state as a device for accumulating collective power for use against outsiders, not including the losers in that same competition--who for their part are free to form outlaw bands with much the same aims (Arendt, 1946a: 30-32). (6)

Arendt argues that it was this abiding, unavowed belief in the legitimacy of domination by force of sheer collective violence that made the imperialist financiers and politicians so readily able to draw upon the active participation of the "mob"--the denizens of the frankly criminal milieu that thrived in the bowels of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century capitalism, a motley assortment of "armed bohemians" who share the respectable bourgeoisie's possessive individualism without the latter's inhibited propriety, and who bypass the much-vaunted ethic of work in favor of more or less organized violence. (7) (Note that she uses the term "mob" not in the word's older sense of the merely uncouth and disorderly poor, but with the slang connotation of a specifically criminal underworld.) She holds that the bourgeois elite's inevitable collusion with this mob in agitating for imperialist adventures abroad, and, when successful, the mob's involvement in actually managing those adventures, is what ultimately transforms the mere exploitation of markets into a rapacious drive for the outright subjugation of native peoples--a Hobbesian accumulation of power for its own sake. The special importance of racism to the imperialist enterprise, according to her, is that it allows for the only kind of political organization that can capture the mob's imagination and allegiance: one that promises its self-exalted members a share in the spoils of profit and power with no expectation of effort or responsibility in return. As such, moreover, it naturally sanctions a politics of hostile conflict among irreconcilably alien enemy groups--or the permanent subjugation of one such group to another--with none of the limits to geographical expansion inherent to the constitutional nation-state. And she argues that what made anti-Semitism in particular so useful as a rallying cause for the would-be imperialists of the continent is precisely this same ambition for a form of domination that could be "organized internationally and bound together by blood." "The mob viewed the Jews enviously as a luckier, more successful competitor" (Arendt, 1946a: 34).