Arendt's concept and description of totalitarianism

Social Research, Summer, 2002 by Jerome Kohn

Both Hitler and Stalin came to realize that it was possible to eradicate the unpredictability of human affairs in "the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power": the concentration camp. What Arendt saw is that eradicating unpredictability requires altering the nature of human beings. In the camps the internees' deprivation of all rights, even of the ability to make a conscientious choice, does away with the dynamic conflict between the legality of particular positive laws and the idea of justice on which, in constitutional governments, an open and unpredictable future depends. On the one hand, in Arendt's concept of totalitarianism, human freedom is seen as inconsequential to "the undeniable automatism" of natural and historical processes, or at most as an impediment to their freedom. On the other, when "the iron band of terror" destroys human diversity, so totally dominating human beings that they cease to be individuals and become a mere mass of identical, interchangeable specimens "of the animal-species man," those processes are provided with "an incomparable instrument" of acceleration. Terror and logicality welded together equip totalitarian regimes with a previously undreamed of power to dominate. But above all it is Arendt's description of how the totalitarian systems of Hitler and Stalin inverted political life, of how they subverted the consciences and destroyed the uniqueness of human beings, which leads directly to the apprehension of what she recognized as their crime against humanity.

II: The Crime Against Humanity and The Right To Have Rights

In 1963 Arendt said that she had "been thinking for many years, or, to be specific, for thirty years, about the nature of evil." It was 30 years since the Reichstag was burned in Berlin, an event followed immediately by the Nazis' illegal arrest of thousands of their political opponents, mainly but not exclusively communists. Innocent of any crime, those detained were taken to the cellars of the Gestapo or to concentration camps and subjected to what Arendt called "monstrous" treatment. With his political opposition effectively forestalled, Hitler could dictate as a matter of policy the Jew hatred that in his case was obvious to anyone who bothered to read Mein Kampf, the diatribe he dictated in prison and published in 1925. Which is to say that with the consolidation of Nazi power anti-Semitism ceased to be merely a social prejudice and became a virulent form of racism: Germany would be made judenrein, racially "purified," first by demoting Jews to the status of second-class citizens, then by ridding them of their citizenship altogether, deporting them, and finally by killing them.

From that moment on Arendt said she "felt responsible." But responsible for what? She hardly meant that she was responsible for having been born a Jew, but that, unlike many others, she could no longer be "simply a bystander" and would respond as a Jew to the attacks on Jewish citizens of her native land. Eventually she was led to confront a new kind of criminality, one bent on destroying not only Jews but human plurality as such; and still later to determine the principle by which this lawful criminality, in its strangest and most dangerous instance, could justifiably be punished. When Hitler was defeated in 1945 incontrovertible evidence of Nazi "factories" of extermination came to light, and at the same time information concerning slave labor camps in the Soviet Gulag emerged. Struck by the structural similarity of those institutions, Arendt turned her attention to their function in Nazism and Stalinism. The camps haunted Arendt's writing until Stalin's death in 1953; and then eight years later reemerged on the horizon of her thought in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. In one way or another the Nazi camps played a major role in the controversy that followed the publication of Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, and, although she ceased to write directly about them after 1966, it is fair to say that the "overpowering reality" of the camps lay behind her preoccupation with the problem of evil that lasted until the end of her life.