THE ORIGINS TOTALITARIANISM

THE ORIGINS TOTALITARIANISM

Hannah Arendt

Introduction "hy Samantha Power

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SCHOCKEN BOOKS, NEW YORK

Introcluction copyright ? 2004 by Samantha Power Copyright ? 1948 and renewed 1976 by Hannah Arcndt.

Copyright ? 1951 by Hannah Arendt. Copyright rcnewed ? 1979 by Mary McCarthy West.

Copyright ? 1966, 1968 by HannahArenclt. Copyright renewecl ? 1994, 1996 by Lotte Kahler.

All rights reserved uncler International and Pan-American Copyright Con-,

ventians. Publishecl in the United States by Schocken Baaks, a division of: ~'

Random Hause, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally pttblished in slighdy different form in the United States by HarcourtJ Inc., Orlando, in 19)1.

Schocken and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arendt, Hannah.

The origins of totalitarianism / Hannah Arendt; introcluetion by Samantha Power.

p.em. Originally published: Ist cd. New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1951]. Includes index. ISBN 0-8052-4225-2

I. Totalitarianism. 2.Imperialism. }. Antisemitism. 1. Tide.

Jq80.A74 2oo4 } 2 0 ? 5 3 -dc 2 2 .

200}060749



Book design by Peter A. Andersen Printed in the United Stares of?America

First Edition

6897

To Heinrich Bl?cher

CONTENTS

Introduction by Sam.nth. Power ix Preface to the First Edition xxv

I ANTISEMITISM

Pref.ce (1967) 3 I. Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense II 2. The Jews, the Nation-Stare, and the Birth of Antisemitism 21

3? The Jews and Society 74 4- The Dreyfus Affair II7

Ir IMPERIALISM

Preface (1967) li9 I. The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie 167

2. Race-Thinking Before Racism 210 3. Race and Bureaucracy 242

4- Continental Imperialism: The Pan-Movements 287 i. The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man 341

III TOTALITARIANISM

Preface (1967) I. A Classless Society 2. The TotaHtarian Movement

Contents

3. Totalitarianism in Power 507 4. Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government 593

APPENDIX "Totalitarianism" 617 "Concluding Remarks" 618

Bibliography 633 Index

viii

INTRODUCTION SAMANTHA POWER

I. Origins

Hannah Arendt dated her awakening to February 27, '933, the day the Reichstagburned down. From the moment Adolf Hicler began using the fire as apretext to suspend civilliberties and crush dissent, Arendt said, "I feIt responsible.".

Arendt rook responsibility for observing, for critiquing, and for summoning her generation to judgment and action. Her test for philosophy was not its "vapors of cleverness," but its capacity to improve the human condition.2 She spent her career scavenging around in the unsavory crevices of humanity, and analyzing the contours of the forbidding elouds of geopolitics, and she could have easily chosen despair. But instead she opted to take responsibility for illuminating that darkness. Hannah Arendt was and remains a writer for dark times.

Born in '906, Arendt grew up in K?nigsberg (then part of Germany) and attended the University of Marburg, where she studied theology, ancient Greek literature, and, under Martin Heidegger, philosophy. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on St. Augustine's concept of love, working at the University of Heidelberg with psychiatrist and philosopher Kar! Jaspers, who became her mentor. Wirh the Nazi crackdown in 1933, Arendt, who was Jewish, became politicized, collecting evidence of the persecution of German Jews. She was arrested by the Gestapo, and upon her release, she Red to

I. Hannah Arendt, " 'What Remains? Thc Language Remains': A Conversation with Gunther Gaus," trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Essays 1;/ Understanding, lf)jo-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (Ncw York: Harcourt

Braee, 1994), p. 5. 1. Hannah Arendt, Men 111 Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Bmce, & World, 19158), p. 74, where Arendt eites Irnrnanuel Kant's test for philosophical essays.

IMPERIALISM

The nation that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem46 was apretext used by a~l governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitlees solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Germany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how real1y to "liquidate" all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the onIy insoluble one, was indeed solved-namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory-but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of the twentieth century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 7?0,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was tben repeated in India on a large seale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state.

For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older Iaws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchie mass of over- and lUlderprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for a11 revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and -the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive a11 citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.

46. This was by no means only a notion of Nazi Germany, though only a Nazi amhor dared to express ie: "Ir is tme that a refugee question will cominue to exist evcn wbcn there is 110 longer a Jewish question; bm since Jews form such a high perccmagc of the refugees, the refugee ................
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