https://pensarelespaciopublico.files.wo ... arendt.pdfTerror, then, was not a means for totalitarian regimes but, in Arendt’s view, their very essence. But this raises two important questions. First, how can a regime whose essence is terror come to power in the first place? What was the basis of its mass appeal? Secondly, how is it that European culture, the culture of the West, gave birth to these pathological experiments in what Arendt calls “total domination”?
For Arendt, the appeal of totalitarianism lay in its ideology. For millions of people shaken loose from their accustomed place in the social order by
World War, the Great Depression, and revolution, the notion that a single idea could, through its “inherent logic,” reveal “the mysteries of the whole
historical process – the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, [and] the uncertainties of the future” was tremendously comforting.
Once the premise of the ideology was accepted – that is, once the idea that all history is the history of class struggle (Marxism) or a natural development resulting from the struggle between the races (Nazism) – every action of the regime could be logically “deduced” and justified in terms of the “law” of History or Nature. The idea of class struggle logically entailed the idea of “dying classes” who would soon be swept into the dustbin of history (and should be helped on their way), just as the Nazis’ conception of racial/cultural struggle entailed the idea of “unfit races” – races whose built-in inferiority would lead them to extinction in the ruthless Darwinian struggle for survival and domination. The unembarrassed claim of totalitarian ideology in both its Marxist and its National Socialist forms was that the logic of its central animating idea mirrored the logic of the historical or natural process itself.
Hence, totalitarian regimes could claim an authority which transcended all merely human laws and agreements (which the regimes treated with thinly disguised contempt), an authority derived directly from the “laws of motion” which governed the natural or historical process.
The certitude that arises from the apparent possession of such a “key to history” helps us understand the nature of totalitarianism’s appeal. But what about the second question? How is it that Europe, the home of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, gave birth to a form of politics as brutally murderous as totalitarianism? Arendt’s answer to this question is complex and multi-faceted; any summary of it will be simplified to the point of distortion. Nevertheless, we can note that Arendt viewed modern European history as, in large part, a series of pathologies, with totalitarianism as “the climactic pathology.” Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism were not aberrations born of peculiarly dysfunctional national characters or political histories; rather, they were phenomena made possible by a particular constellation of events and tendencies within modern European history and culture. Foremost among these was the imperialism of the late nineteenth century, with its focus on expansion for the sake of expansion and the limitless accumulation of wealth. This boundless pursuit of wealth and empire undermined the self-limiting structure of the nation-state and prefigured the totalitarian pursuit of global conquest.
Moreover, it represented, in Arendt’s eyes, the triumph of the bourgeois(who lusted after wealth and power at any price) over the citoyen (who was concerned with the public realm and the preservation of rights and freedoms).
Dissolving the stable boundaries of the public world in order to expand further and gain more, imperialism set the stage for political movements which were concerned no longer with care of a stable and limited public world, but with conquest and the self-assertion of national (ethnic or racial) identity.
Is Arendt correct?