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The three phases of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism

Social Research, Summer, 2002 by Roy T. Tsao

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This much of Arendt's account of imperialism in the 1946 Commentary article is carried over to her eventual book. But only in the earlier version does she extend her argument to Nazism itself. In that version, "full-fledged" imperialism ultimately transcends rapacious expansion for expansion's sake to become destruction for destruction's sake, a transformation whose weird culmination is a form of collective suicide:

   In Nazism we saw the first case of a thoroughgoing imperialist policy,
   whose lust for conquest is governed by the principle "All or Nothing," and
   whose wars end in "Victory or Death." And we also saw the workings of its
   peculiar, curious logic by which the All inevitably reverts to the Nothing,
   and even Victory cannot but end in Death. Following its own law, the
   power-accumulating machinery built by imperialism can only go on swallowing
   more and more peoples, enslaving more and more territory, destroying more
   and more human beings--until eventually it ends by devouring itself
   (Arendt, 1946a: 33-4).

Arendt does not mean here simply that the imperialist ambition for possession fuels a self-defeating hubris, but that the desire to possess somehow becomes a desire to consummate possession in destruction--since destruction "is the most radical form of domination as well as of possession," and "only what one possesses through destruction can be really and definitely dominated" (Arendt, 1946a: 33-4; cf. OT, 145). She goes on to claim that it was only this, with its resulting "insane preoccupation with death itself," that can account for the Nazis' mass slaughter of the Jews: "No matter what the rationale, real or alleged, for anti-Semitism might be, the building of death factories, the diversion of so many millions of people into the machinery of mass murder, made no conceivable sense in a war situation where all available forces were needed for actual fighting" (Arendt, 1946a: 35). The Nazi regime's mad devotion to its genocidal program during the last years of the war, in flagrant disregard for rational advantage or minimally prudent concern for self-preservation, is thus presented as the workings of a "hidden drive for suicide" that imperialism had harbored from the start. "Nothing could prove more conclusively than this senseless slaughter how deeply and intimately Victory and Death were intertwined."

It is this last stretch of her argument that Arendt would soon abandon. She would continue to believe that the aspect of Hitler's regime that most cried out for explanation was its sheer disregard for rational advantage or its supporters' interest in self-preservation, a phenomenon that for her was most horribly evident in its willingness to divert desperately needed resources away from the battlefront in the last years of the war for the sake of a coldly calculated program of mass murder, inflicted on people who posed no conceivable threat. She would similarly remark at the outset of part III of her later book that "the disturbing factor in the success of totalitarianism is ... the true selflessness of its adherents" (307). What she would repudiate of her earlier view is the further claim that this phenomenon of "selfless" violence could somehow be traced to its very opposite, a culminating negation of the insatiably rapacious lust for power she finds at the heart of imperialism. The most she offers in the Commentary article in support of that suggestion is the invocation of a mysterious, vaguely Hegelian dialectic, whose supposed climax only flaunts its essential aporia: "the All inevitably reverts to Nothing," the lust for power becomes a drive for suicide--with no real insight on how or why such an inversion would be bound to occur. (That is not to doubt the possible adequacy of her theory of tribalist expansionism on its own in accounting for other, less manifestly "suicidal" instances of state-sponsored genocide, from the European imperialists' massacres in Africa the turn of the last century to the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia in our own time.) As we will see in a moment, she would come to characterize the "selflessness" of totalitarianism and its resulting murderousness as a madness of another kind, attributable to an entirely different inner dynamic and governing mentality. (8)

The three phases of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism

Social Research, Summer, 2002 by Roy T. Tsao

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