Arendt's concept and description of totalitarianism

Social Research, Summer, 2002 by Jerome Kohn

In totalitarian society human freedom, private as well as public, is not even an illusion. Fear is omnipresent but not the source of suspicion that in tyranny appears less as an emotion than as the principle of the tyrant's action and the people's nonaction. Whereas tyranny, pitting the ruler and his subjects against each other, is ultimately powerless, totalitarianism generates immense power. It is a new sort of power, not only exceeding but different in kind from outward coercive force. In the name of ideological necessity totalitarian terror dominates human beings from within, thereby mocking the appearance and also the disappearance, the lives and the deaths of distinct and potentially free men and women. It mocks the world that only a plurality of free individuals can continuously renew and share with one another, and it mocks the earth as the natural home of such beings. Totalitarianism mocks everything that is given, everything that the totalitarians do not themselves make. The profound paradox that lies between the ideological necessity to eradicate every sign of humanity, of human freedom, of spontaneity and beginning, and the fact that the possibility of that eradication is itself something entirely new, made and brought into the world by human beings, must be faced, for it lies at the core of Arendt's concept of totalitarianism.

As Arendt understands totalitarianism, its nature is the "combination" of "its essence of terror and its principle of logicality." As "essence" terror must be total, more than a means of suppressing opposition and more than the most extreme resentment or vindictiveness. Total terror is, if not reasonable, the rational and consistent displacement of the role played by positive laws in constitutional governments. The result is neither lawless anarchy, the war of all against all, nor the tyrannical abrogation of law, for just as a government of laws would become "perfect" in the absence of transgressions, so terror "rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way." Positive laws in constitutional governments seek to mediate, to "translate and realize" higher universal laws, unalterable divine commandments or fixed natural law, but terror "is designed to translate into reality the law of movement of history or nature" directly, not in a delimited body politic but throughout mankind. The murderous "justice" of the laws of the motion of history and nature is not mediated but executed immediately: for Arendt that is the meaning of totalitarian terror.

If totalitarianism were perfected, if the entire plurality of human beings were to become the embodiment of the forces of natural and historical movement, then its essence of terror would suffice as its principle of motion. But as long as totalitarianism exists in a nontotalitarian world, it needs the processes of logical or dialectical deduction to coerce the human mind into "imitating" and becoming "integrated" into those "suprahuman" forces. (12) In other words, once it yields to the logical development of the idea, not as the content but as the premise of an ideology, the human mind will move as inevitably as natural and historical processes themselves move, against which "nothing stands but the great capacity of men" to act, to insert themselves into those very processes and alter the direction of their momentum by starting "something new." (13) The twin freedoms of acting and thinking can always prevent the vise of terror and logicality from closing, which is the reason that at all costs totalitarian regimes eliminate their every manifestation. Yet it is not the political isolation, which frustrates action, but the social loneliness of uprooted masses, the loss of their common sense, that is, their sense of community and communication, that attracts them to ideological pre-dictations of the goals of nature and history in the first place. (14) Impervious to the reality of shared experience, those who "have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others," are inwardly, beneath the crust of their lives, prepared for totalitarian organization and, ultimately, for total domination.