Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism Explained

Mass Society and the Collective Groups Behind Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, attributes the formation of a mass society in Europe in the first decades of the 20th century to "grassroots eruptions" from a number of collective groups. These were the Mob, the masses, the tribes, and the starving multitude — all "mobilized for action" and powerful (Arendt, 1973).

The first of these groups, the Mob, Arendt perceives as having proceeded from the anti-Semitic riots that flared during the Dreyfus Affair in France. This Mob, according to her, was recruited from all classes of society — the "residue" or the "refuse of all classes" that accumulated from those left behind by the economic cycles of capitalism. They were displaced by the class structure and resented ordered society, and were quickly mobilized for violence by instigators. Arendt distinguishes the Mob from the People in that the Mob was outside the class structure and always attuned to public-spirited action, while the People was firmly placed within it. She is careful to note that the Mob was not identical with, but only a caricature of, the People.

As the first wave of collectivities, the Mob reappeared in Arendt's section on "Imperialism" as joining the gold and diamond rush in South Africa in the late 19th century. Arendt refers to the Mob as the "superfluous men who established a counter-society through which men could find their way back into a human world of fellowship and purpose." Others who dug for gold and diamonds included the second wave of collectivities Arendt calls the masses — workers' movements whom she considers the authentic People, as distinguished from the faceless and displaced non-People, such as the Mob. Those who had a human "world" belonged to the People; those who did not, she classed as the non-People.

She writes that those "superfluous men" (the Mob) who joined the workers' movements became part of the People, and those who did not were incorporated into the imperialist Mob. This imperialist Mob was thrown out of the "human world of fellowship and purpose" by having no place in a structured society, by being physically uprooted and divested of normal expectations and constraints (Arendt). Hence, they were severed from civilization and forced into a ghostlike existence in which they were devoid of any sense of responsibility for their actions and decisions.

From this mold evolved the tribes as the third group or strain of collectivities. These tribes developed out of the imperialist Mob that struggled against or alongside a native population without themselves becoming part of the People, as they were without foundation or structure. People had a world and histories, unlike the Mob and the tribes (Arendt) — examples of which were the Boers and African tribes. They did not share a tangible territory and institutions with the People, but only what they possessed internally.

The starving multitude Arendt writes about accounted for the rest outside these three collectivities — displaced, struggling, incensed, and lost for identity and a place of their own. It was this condition of world-lessness that rendered the Mob inherently susceptible to influence and mobilization by movements. A movement, according to her, was a new way of holding these fragmented individuals together without providing them a stable world or existence. A movement could hold them and get them to act in concert by introducing a racist ideology that made them feel "superior" by merely offering them a "definition" of themselves. This filling-in of their vacuum could incline them to commit violent acts in defeating or displacing another group.

Totalitarianism vs. Tyranny: Terror, Power, and De-politicization

Arendt writes that a totalitarian government or movement used "tyrannical measures of force and violence" that threatened not only its subjects but the world at large. It differed fundamentally from a tyrannical government. In a tyrannical government, the tyrant and the people were different, opposed, and mutually threatening — but only to each other. In a totalitarian government, the threat took the form of a total "de-politicization" of all phases and aspects of life, wherein the whole of society was radically atomized (Arendt). It did not pit one side against the other; rather, the people or subjects were rendered inanimate or incapable of free action — which was the simple threat in a tyrannical government — as well as the very element of free action or innate human initiative itself. It dug deeper into the source of opposition within a human being, annihilating spontaneity in thinking, aspiring, and creative undertaking (Arendt) — the very basis of what it means to be human. The totalitarian system destroyed all human potentiality, including solitude and any sense of isolation that could rebuild that potentiality. Arendt writes that this form of government first appeared under Stalin after 1929 and under Hitler after 1938.

Human freedom in a totalitarian government was less than — or not even — an illusion. The omnipresence of fear was not comparable to suspicion as an emotion under a tyrannical government: in a totalitarian government, the principle of the tyrant's action and the people's inaction were that omnipresence itself. Furthermore, a tyrannical government was ultimately powerless because the tyrant and the people opposed each other, but a totalitarian government drew overwhelming power from its mechanism (Arendt). It was a totally new and exceeding sort, which derived that power from within the ruled, rather than from outside as in a tyrannical government. It erased the boundary between life and death, decimating the potentialities that alone could "renew and share with one another." It cancelled the very earth as a natural habitat for mortals and everything else that was positive.

As Arendt understands it, totalitarianism combined the "essence of terror and its principle of logicality," wherein terror was not only total in suppressing dissent but exceeded all known forms of overwhelming resentment and vengeance. That "total terror" rationally and systematically replaced the positive laws in constitutional governments (Arendt) — which sought to realize higher universal laws — and aimed at translating into reality "the law of movement of history and nature" directly and through the whole of humankind. There was no mediation needed or wanted, and this translation had to be executed immediately. This was Arendt's concept and mechanism of terror as employed by totalitarian governments.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin realized that the unpredictability of the human mind and human affairs could be altered, manipulated, or eradicated altogether in the most infamous setting of totalitarian organizational power and evil: the concentration camp. If the potentials of the human mind and will could be eliminated totally, opposition could be absolutely abolished (Arendt). This was the totalitarian government's most effective machinery. In these camps, prisoners were deprived of all forms of rights, down to the very last shred of ability to make conscious choices, so that there disappeared the contradiction between the legality of positive laws and the idea of justice upon which the future depended. Through this rule of terror, human freedom became meaningless and a trifle in the tactical automatism (Arendt) of the system's processes. It more than undermined personhood: it deleted human diversity and turned human beings into a mere mass of identical, interchangeable pieces "of the animal species man," and at an unbelievable rate of acceleration. By merging terror and logicality, totalitarian governments — mainly Hitler's — were armed with unimaginable power to dominate the population, inverting and perverting political life by subverting human conscience and crushing the very uniqueness of human beings.

The Concentration Camp as a Laboratory of Dehumanization

In the concentration camp, Hitler actualized modernity's "contempt for reality," moving from the nihilist dogma that "everything was permitted" to the insane conviction that "everything was possible." The camp was a laboratory where experiments were continuously conducted to test and prove that insanity. It transformed a human being into a manipulated, predictable living corpse — what Arendt aptly describes as a body in the "permanent state of dying." The prisoner was reduced to the lowest organic form of life, interchangeable with organic matter, and this Arendt describes as the sharpest and most accurate contrast to political equality. These laboratory findings underscored that "the omnipotence of man" could be bought only at the price "of the superfluity of men."

In the ideal world, political equality meant the equality of peers and the achievement of a plurality of separate and distinct persons who willfully band together and generate the power to affect or establish the course of their lives and the world. But in the concentration camp, these organisms had no relation to anything like a world. They moved only as superfluous "things," belonging to the world not at all.

Arendt sees human existence as partly conditioned and partly free. But the organism in the concentration camp was deprived of the free part. Unlike the discernible and intelligible fear of an apprehended object in the world, the terror in the concentration camp was located within the human being. Arendt compared the concentration camp prisoner's inner terror to that of animals conditioned by electric shock. These men and women were grimly and systematically starved and then reconditioned to behave inhumanly in their craving for nourishment — a "perverted animal," in Arendt's description — like Pavlov's dogs responding to a bell. The contrived world of the concentration camp ruled out innocence as a virtue and guilt as a crime, obliterating the meanings and boundaries of innocence and guilt, right and wrong, virtue and vice, and everything else accruing to or underlying the essence of being human. These abstractions ceased and vanished in the prisoners, leaving no sense of those concepts and no recall or continuity with them. Human beings were systematically, scientifically, and successfully dehumanized for its own sake.