The Origins of Totalitarianism

An attempt to understand a form of government that had no precedent, by someone who had escaped it twice. Arendt argues that totalitarianism required a specific European preparation - and that its central discovery was that human beings can be made superfluous.

Date: 1951
Author: Hannah Arendt
Region: New York
Language: English

The translation record

1955 German, Hannah Arendt Her own version, differing from the English in places Attested

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Solitary — No documented reply on either side
Form: Treatise
Method: Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work

Attacked on publication for equating Nazism with Stalinism, criticised for its history, and never out of print; sales rose sharply again after 2016.

What the book says

Three long studies, of antisemitism, of imperialism and of totalitarian government, arguing that they are one story. Arendt's claim is that totalitarianism is not tyranny intensified but something new, and that its materials were assembled in Europe over the preceding century. The first part traces how Jews became politically exposed - closely tied to states, detached from any class, and therefore available as an explanation when the nation-state began to fail. The second argues that the techniques were rehearsed in the colonies: bureaucratic rule over populations with no rights, administrative massacre, and the race thinking that justified both, brought home when Europe ran out of elsewhere. It also contains the analysis the book is most read for now - the condition of the stateless and the refugee, people who have lost not this or that right but the right to have rights at all, since rights turned out in practice to belong to citizens rather than to human beings. The third part describes the regime itself: a movement rather than a government, an ideology that explains everything, terror applied to the innocent because guilt would make it predictable, and the camps as laboratories for showing that anything is possible.

What it argues

That totalitarian rule is a distinct phenomenon rather than an extreme case of despotism, and that what distinguishes it is the abolition of the space between people in which politics happens. A tyrant wants obedience and leaves private life alone; a totalitarian movement requires everything, uses ideology to make the world fully explicable, and applies terror after opposition has ended, because terror aimed at the guilty would still allow the innocent to feel safe. Its precondition is loneliness - not solitude, but the condition of a person with no place, no reliable relationships and no world held in common - which mass society produced and which makes an ideology's total explanation welcome. The section on statelessness makes the sharpest single point: the rights of man turned out to be unenforceable for anyone who was not a citizen of a functioning state, so the people who most needed them had none.

No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.

How it argues

By historical narrative built toward a concept, which is why it satisfies neither historians nor political theorists entirely. Arendt moves between detailed episodes - the Dreyfus affair, the scramble for Africa, the Boers, the pan-movements - and abstract claims about what they made possible, and the connections are asserted with great force and uneven evidence. The prose is dense, allusive and often magnificent. She does not proceed from definitions; the concept of totalitarianism is assembled as the book goes, which is why the added final chapter, written last, is where it is clearest.

The moment

Arendt was a German Jew who had studied with Heidegger and Jaspers, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, escaped to Paris, was interned by the French in 1940, escaped again and reached New York in 1941, stateless for years. The book was written in the late 1940s as the extent of the camps became known, and its last part was substantially revised as the Soviet material improved. It is the work of someone analysing something she had been inside.

How it travelled

As a category and an argument about the category. Totalitarianism became a Cold War term of art, used in ways Arendt disliked, and the equation of Nazi and Soviet systems was contested from the first - by scholars who thought the differences greater than the similarities and by those who thought the concept served a political function. Historians have corrected a great deal of her detail, particularly on the Soviet Union and on the imperial chapters. The statelessness material, comparatively neglected for decades, has become the most cited part of the book since the 1990s.

The strongest objection

That the concept holds the two regimes together at the cost of what distinguished them. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union differed in origin, ideology, economic organisation and trajectory, and a category defined by structural features - movement, ideology, terror, camps - can be made to fit both only by selecting the features that match. Historians have pressed this hardest on the Soviet side, where Arendt's picture of a system in permanent motion fits the 1930s and not the decades after. The related charge is methodological: the imperial chapters assert a line of descent from colonial administration to European totalitarianism that is illuminating as a suggestion and thin as history. Arendt's answer would be that she is describing a form rather than writing a comparative history, which is a fair distinction and does not settle whether the form is real.

Why read it

In parts. The chapter on the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man, in the second part, is the single most important thing in it and can be read alone; the concluding chapter on ideology and terror is the theoretical core. The imperial chapters are the most historically contested. It is long, difficult and worth it.

Where to read it

First printed: 1951
First in English: 1951
Digitised: No

The 1958 edition adds the chapter on ideology and terror, which is where the theoretical argument is most concentrated and which was written after the rest. Editions differ enough that scholars specify which they cite.

Written in English; Arendt produced a German version herself, which differs from the English in places. The text is in copyright.

Where it stands

Live and busier than it has been for fifty years. The analysis of statelessness is central to work on refugees and citizenship; the account of loneliness, ideology and the appeal of total explanation is cited constantly in current writing about politics; and the concept of totalitarianism itself is under continuous argument.

On quoting this book

In copyright. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Whether Nazism and Stalinism belong under one concept is the standing dispute and has been since 1951. How much of the history survives sixty years of subsequent scholarship is a real question, particularly for the Soviet sections and the account of imperialism. Whether Arendt's later work supersedes this book's framework is argued, since she moved away from the term. And the relation between this book and her reporting on the Eichmann trial twelve years later - where the emphasis shifts from a system that makes people superfluous to individuals who fail to think - is a genuine interpretive problem rather than a change of subject.