Lecture 2 (cont) & Lecture 3: Origins of Totalitarianism

  7. One response to this analysis might be to say that Arendt's diagnosis was too “close” to events, she was too pessimistic and had not yet achieved the required critical distance that might provide a more balanced view of the potentials of modernity. The next fifty years brought relative peace and economic prosperity in most Western liberal-democratic societies, a social stability and inclusiveness that and might allow us to be more sanguine. Despite a new outbreak of economic problems, the nuclear threat has receded in the decade after Arendt’s death, the Communist block largely collapsed and international and national political structures have proved more resilient than she initially expected. The prospects of democracy-- always fragile and under pressure-- in many parts of the world formerly ruled by authoritarian regimes now seem more promising, although also everywhere facing significant historical challenges. Yet, it now seems Arendt’s concern (it is interesting to note in her correspondence that her experience of Fascism had left an indelible mark of always expecting that a disaster may be just about to engulf her) seems very justified in the light of recent events. She was correct in believing that we cannot foresee a return to a world of stability and security. For those living in liberal democratic countries the burden of our times may not be concerns about immediate physical survival but uncertainty and insecurity is in a sense even more pervasive. Arendt's critique still strikes a chord in us. Those who live in the first world live in a society whose fundamental orientation has become work and consumption. Bureaucratic and economic steering mechanisms operate almost automatically seemingly beyond human control. The life world is now exposed to regular systematic transformation and constant flux. The fate of millions depends upon rapidly changing economic and political conditions that now includes the prospect of mass terror against large civilian populations, of catastrophe economic breakdown or irreversible climate change. Traditional cultural vocabularies and political allegiances are under great stress and the shape of future is in some respects less clear than in Arendt's time. We witness an increasingly widespread questioning of the legitimacy of existing political structures reflected in shrinking voter turnouts and disenchantment with major parties and their capacities to deliver in the interests of the community as a whole. We can neither dismiss her claim for the crisis character of modernity nor can we easily ignore her caution. Her view of modern society is neither one-dimensional nor totally pessimistic. She views modernity dialectically: she analyses both strengths and weaknesses, good and evil and their apparent inter-dependence. Arendt sees not just the increasing polarisation of “civilisation”, with one face, increasingly powerful in terms of human mastery over nature and potential omnipotence, and, with the other, with the increasing powerlessness and dependence of vast populations. She understands the deep paradoxes of this situation: the inextricable interweaving of good and evil. Thus she notes that without the imperialist drive for expansion and the bourgeois political device of "power for power sake" we might never have realised the ideal of humanity nor recognised the extent of human strength. Arendt vision of modernity is not a product of hopelessness or despair but of justified apprehension and great caution arising from the experience of totalitarianism. Having seen all the potentialities both for good and radical evil the modern world had to offer, she was not about to underestimate those aspects of modern life that assaulted human dignity and rendered the modern individual atomised, conformist and dehumanised. For her, a complete lack of sentimentality was the pre-condition for allowing contemporaries to understand these increasingly harsh and inconstant realities, to face up to them and resist them when necessary.

Lecture 3: The Origins of Totalitarianism

1. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is Arendt’s attempt to provide an interpretation of the horrendous experience she shared with millions of others in the epoch following the First World War. This book can justifiably be called the Origins of Totalitarianism. She argues that totalitarianism is an invention of modernity: in historical terms an entirely novel political form. It is not a necessary consequence of modernity but its darkest potential, a potential immanent to the hidden underlying tendencies and mechanisms that dissolved the spiritual and political world of the past and generated the present crisis situation. Arendt's first major work is a "problematic" work. However, the problem lies not so much where commentators originally found it: in the conflation of both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as a single phenomena called "totalitarianism". Critics pointed out that the discussion of Stalin's regime seems to be no more than an afterthought. It comes only 300 pages into the book. There is virtually no analysis of its historical background. Nor does it lie in Arendt's idiosyncratic mixture of historical narrative, political science, sociology, literary criticism, biography, history of ideas and epochal diagnosis. These, I think, are part of the pleasure of reading her but also they are consistent with her methodological desire not to provide an exhaustive explanation in terms of historical necessities that expunged the elements of individual actions and choice.

2. The real problem is Arendt's sheer ambition and the very complicated weaving together of all the elements that she believed coalesced into this epoch as radical evil. This means that there is great difficulty in tracing the arguments and holding the separate parts of this panoramic vision together in a coherent picture. Yet, the complexity of this narrative is not only structurally important, it is also vital to the book. This is a substantive dimension of Arendt's very understanding of history. She rejects the very idea that there could be some general or simple key to historical understanding like "class" or "race". This is the shortcoming of “ideological” thinking which tries to explain everything from a single premise, which follows the logic of ideas as if the course of historical events were the same as the unfolding logic of ideas and therefore it would be conceivable to know the whole of the process (OT469). For Arendt, history is a complex constellation not only of supra-individual processes but of individual actions, choices and singular events: these are contingent, unpredictable and irreversible. This is why her portrait of great historical processes is dotted with so many excursions into detailed individual episodes revealing individual heroism, greed, moral failure and individual responsibility. It is not surprising to find that her explanation of "totalitarianism" is not simple but a very rich fabric of interwoven elements, of light and shade and historical openness. This is also indicative of the fact that, for her, the 20th century had not yet heard the end of the story.

3. The Origins is structured in three parts 1) Anti-Semitism. 2) Imperialism. 3) Totalitarianism. Arendt's analysis departs from the Holocaust. From the start she moves this event from the periphery into the very centre. This mass liquidation of a population was the exemplification of the radical evil of modernity: an unprecedented moral outrage which defying not only all traditional moral canons but even the more instrumental ideas of modern political or economic rationality. This historical unprecedented quality is the basis for her characterisation of modernity as a completely new historical constellation. She refuses to accept the standard simplistic explanations:

a.   The Jews either as merely innocent scapegoats (a vulnerable minority that was sufficiently different and weak to attract the displaced frustration and blame for all the ills of the world)

b.   As victims of seemingly eternal Anti-Semitism that has been around for over two thousand years.

In Arendt’s view these pseudo-explanations are not even close to adequate: neither really deals with the historical facts, allows for the possibility of real historical action, nor provides an account of specific Jewish responsibility in the events that produced the final tragedy.

4. Arendt finds the key to understanding the historical genesis of this otherwise inexplicable policy in the curious historical coincidence of Anti-Semitism and the collapse of nationalism. On closer inspection, this historical intersection is no coincidence at all. The linkage between these two phenomena allows an explanation of how a marginalised and ostracised race could be drawn into the very centre of a catastrophe that destroyed both them and most of Europe.

5. Part one -Anti-Semitism- is devoted to the fascinating history of the Western European Jewry in modern times. Arendt concentrates on the diplomatic and financial services they provided for the princes of the newly emerging nation states. The Western European Jews were a stateless people with strong inter-European family and financial connections. They provided indispensable financial services to the newly emerging princely nation-states. These had been unable to attract the bourgeoisie who viewed such state investment as unproductive. In return, the Jews received the special privileges and the protection of the state. However, this alliance between the Jews and the princely nation state was quite instrumental and provisional. It wanes towards the end the 19th century when the national bourgeoisie, faced with the difficulty of surplus unproductive capital and saturated domestic markets, begin to clamour for state support towards colonial ventures and became more politically and economically active in state business. The financial importance of the Jews diminishes as growing nationalism and imperialist competition changed the character of foreign policy. The old scenario of a balance of power and quest for peace in which Jewish inter-European connections sometimes played a crucial diplomatic role is replaced by a policy of "victory or death" (OT21). Both in the areas of state financing and diplomacy the wealthy Jews confronted an increasing loss of functionality. This loss was aggravated by marginalised social position of Jews in a bourgeois society increasingly defined in terms of classes. In the context of heightened class struggle, the Jews were perceived as a self-preserving marginal group defined only by wealth and ethnicity. They enjoyed special protection and a status within the state and its machinery. In the environment of intensified class conflict and increased class casualties as the crisis of bourgeois society deepened, every class which came into conflict with the new bourgeois state eventually also became Anti-Semitic. Arendt underlines the political dangers of this political naïveté and purely defensive policy of the wealthy Western Jews. For them Anti-Semitism was a problem that could be displaced as long as they enjoyed privileges and distinguished themselves from their teeming eastern brethren. They had tied their fate to the fortunes of the nation-state. When the European nation-state system began to collapse under the internal pressures of modernising dynamics, they found themselves at the centre of the storm. Arendt's main point is that traditional anti-Semitism did not acquire political relevance in the C20th until it breached the domain of social prejudice and combined with either major political issues or where Jewish interests clashed with that of other major classes of society (OT28).

 

1. From the standpoint of a diagnosis of modernity, the heart of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism is the second part on Imperialism. Here she connects her initial themes of Anti-Semitism and Jewish history to the fundamental dynamics-- bourgeoisification, imperialism, bureaucracy and radical nationalism—which threw the old political and economic institutions of Europe into utter crisis. For Arendt, the impact of imperialism on the nation state is the central dynamic. Imperialism represents a qualitative new phase in the evolution of the bourgeois economy. Hitherto, the bourgeoisie had been essentially an apolitical class. Its philosophy of life was orientated to ruthless competition and individual success and this produced apathy to public life and a belief that the duties of a citizen could only be a drain (OT313). However, internal developments in the bourgeois economy transform the bourgeois attitude to politics and generated a bourgeois will bent on a political takeover of the state. Imperialism was born when the ruling bourgeois class came up against the national limits to economic expansion. In the early decades of the 19th century, the potent combination of the newly emancipated market and industrialisation initially allowed very rapid capital accumulation. By the last quarter, the very success of the bourgeois industrial revolution had led to a peculiar kind of economic crisis: this was surplus money, of over-saving and a lack of prospects for productive investment within national boundaries. The bourgeois industrial revolution provided both the technological and productive means and eventually economic necessity also generated the will to expand beyond the territorial bounds of the nation-state. National governments were compelled by domestic economic pressures to adopt a more aggressive and activist foreign policy. A series of disastrous economic collapses of offshore companies involving thousands of small investors reinforced the recognition that foreign investors in search of profit needed protection. Unless the large European nation-states were prepared to project their political power beyond their own home territory, uncontrolled foreign investment appeared as too great a gamble.

2. Imperialist expansion could not be justified on the grounds of traditional nationalism. The modern Western nation-state was built on the active consent on a homogeneous population. Western nationalism was formed on the trinity of people-territory-state. Nationalism sprung from the identity of such a population forged variously by some combination of language, religion and ethnicity with a territory. In as much as the nation-state emerged as an institutional-legal structure, its laws were viewed as an expression of the people's will. Effective political power could not expand beyond the limits that would strain such consent. Genuine consent can neither be stretched indefinitely nor won from conquered peoples. The existence of significant territorial domains beyond the immediate province of effective consent, created dangerous prospects of abuse and experiments in state power. Every large European nation entered world politics in the course of the 19th century. Only a few recognised the potentially destructive consequences of imperialism for the national political body. Yet these voices had no political impact in the face of bourgeois Realpolitik.

3. Here Arendt reveals the beginnings of some key ideas central to her subsequent critique of liberalism and the rise of an emancipated social sphere. Competition and expansion are economic not political principles. (OT125). Capitalist accumulation, based on the productivity of man, has no inherent limits and must be controlled and restrained by political power (OT126). The human capacity for increased production is potentially unlimited and the workings of the bourgeois market make such expansion a driving necessity. A fundamental tension exists between the economic dynamic of bourgeois society and its underlying political framework and principals. Arendt regards "expansion" and "competition" as economic concepts that are unique to the political vocabulary of modernity. They derive not from politics or but from the economic sphere which was liberated in the 19th century. The translation of such concepts into the political realm was bound to produce dysfunctional tensions and strains.

4. A crucial element of Arendt's vision of modernity is the boundlessness of production as it escapes the confines of the household in early modernity. Production in the sense of domestic reproduction of the necessities of life is immured in an eternal circle as a process without end. The relocation of this process within the bourgeois context of capital accumulation and with the productive means provided by industrial technology was a recipe for surplus. Accumulation leads to expansion and finally to saturation. The bourgeois and industrial revolutions of the early decades of the 19th century generated not only wealth, rising living standards, rapid technological improvement but also social dislocation, competition, crisis and unemployment: in short, the surpluses both of capital and people spoken of earlier. In Arendt’s view, the imperialist drive was generated by this internal dynamic of the modern bourgeois society towards the end of the 19th century. Surplus capital in search of productive employment and surplus people resulting from increased population and the periodic unemployment crises of the market cycle. Arendt accepts that these surpluses were both a product of competition, the intensified class conflict of bourgeois society and a threat to the cohesion of the nation. Imperialism promised a solution to the problem of surplus by providing an arena of permanent expansion. By finding a home for surplus capital and surplus people it not only displaced and delayed the crisis of bourgeois society but it also provided a symbol of national unity in a climate of intensified class struggles (OT152). Yet, the political structures of bourgeois society which evolved in the early part of the 19th century-- the nation-state, civil service, parliamentary and party systems--were not infinitely elastic and came under great stress as domestic economic and social conditions deteriorated. In reality, imperialism allowed only a respite in the last quarter of the century and, in so doing, also aggravated the problem by generating the competitive international environment that culminated in World War. The consequence of this was not just the massive costs in human lives and post-war reconstruction but an even greater crisis of the bourgeois nation state. Forces were let loose which finally overturned the delicate balance of the national-state in favour of the self-assertion of nation both externally and internally against the traditional legality and egalitarian citizenship of the state. This was the result of increasing bourgeois political hegemony during the course of the 19th century and the increasing sway of economic imperatives in setting the political agenda. The increasing economic difficulties of bourgeois society meant the economic ruin of broader social strata. Not just the traditional "rabble" and unemployed workers but also large segments of the middle class. They no longer found a voice in the political status quo of antagonistic parties and nation state.

5. How does Arendt understand the 19th century class articulation of politics? Unlike Marx, she stresses the way in which these new economic groupings substituted for the now rapidly disappearing organic communities. While not as naturally determined as the orders and estates of Feudal society, membership in a class was generally by birth. Individuals still largely inherited their manners, taste, outlook and interests from their class position. This provided them with a sense of identity, solidarity and shared world in an increasingly dynamic and unstable lifeworld. She down plays the degree to which social organisation by class represented a complete break with the Feudal past based on estates. She maintains that as each class rose to greater prominence in the society this rise was always accompanied by the education and training of a certain number of its members as its political representatives (OT314). The role of class representatives was to express and advance the collective interests of the class defined in terms of their common position, shared aspirations and group identity. Class politics effectively promoted primarily sectional interest and required only limited group obligations and traditional passive attitudes towards government without individuals feeling personally responsible. This sense of passivity is intensified for the great passive majority. It remained outside all party and other political organisations. Arendt's main point is that class politics was always the politics of elites. This party system of class politics operated both on the Continent and in Britain. That the great majority of individuals in class society remained passive and indifferent to politics did not seem to matter as long as the class system and its representative political articulation appeared to be taking care of the interests of those not explicitly politically engaged. The party was the political expression of the collective interests of particular classes: it endeavoured to articulate this interest in the form of an ideology that claimed that these particular interests coincided with the general interests of the community. As the class conflict of 19th century bourgeois society intensified, the gap between the ideological rhetoric of the party with its claim to be the embodiment of general interests and the reality of its particularist and sectional interests provoked widespread distrust (OT251). Increasingly, substantial minorities felt themselves ignored in this system and were therefore susceptible to mobilisation by extra-parliamentary forces.

6. Arendt makes some important political points by comparing the contrasting fates of these political/party systems in Britain and the Continent. How are we to explain the enduring stability of British political institutions and the contemporaneous decline of the nation state in Europe? Arendt focuses on the distinctive way in which the party functioned within the body politic in each system. In the large European states, government was conceived as above the parties. The parties were defined as parts of a whole and the latter was represented by the state above parties. Thus the continental multi-parties were in principle separated from government and could never aspire to take charge of government. At this time, cabinets were appointed to advise government. Party members as advocates of special interests never governed in their own right. This tended to confine the parties to the sphere of particular interest and identify the parties with private antagonisms. Their practical role became the protection of private interests from the interference of public authority. This was why the division between citizen and bourgeois was so stark in the Continental system and men were recognised as citizens only in so far as they were not party members. For the parties, distance from government also diluted competence and responsibility while, for the citizens, government was made an alien mystery (OT254-5). The weakness and potential dangers of this arrangement are evident in comparison to the British system. There the dominant party was temporarily identical to the state whereas the other major party was as an alternative government never far from power and state. The proximity of state and power consolidated the need for competence and responsibility. The state is not some lofty entity far beyond reach but within the grasp of citizens organised in the party. This is decisive for Arendt. The Continental system promoted an organisation of private individuals who never reached the thresh hold of common action (OT254). The British arrangement promoted organisation amongst citizens towards common views and programmes. This was the condition of attaining government and therefore of any action at all.