Totalitarianism as a novel form of “government”

The last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism raises a disturbing possibility

Which one is the totalitarian leader? Image from opendemocracy.net.

“Totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny, and dictatorship.” (H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 13)

With a small group of friends I run an informal book club that uses the Signal chat platform. For the past several months we’ve been reading and discussing Hannah Arendt’s classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951. The book is challenging and yet well worth a reading, or two. Here I’d like to focus on the last chapter, entitled “Ideology and terror: a novel form of government.” In it, Arendt clearly articulates what has slowly been emerging from her 700-pages long analysis: totalitarianism is a novel form of government, invented in the 20th century and never seen before during the course of human history.

This is a rather startling claim, so let us analyze it a bit more closely. Arendt herself acknowledges that the ancient Greeks had discovered and catalogued all of the perhaps surprisingly few forms of government that humanity has tried out. According to Plato, these are:

Aristocracy (government by the best)

Timocracy (government by the brave)

Oligarchy (government by the rich)

Democracy (government by the people)

Tyranny (government by one)

The list is in descending order of desirability, the rather low ranking of democracy being the result of the fact that Athenian democracy was based on simple majority rule: 51% of the votes in the assembly could get a Socrates killed. Aristocracy is on top by definition, since t means rule by “the best,” not by people like Charles of England. The classic example of timocracy was the warrior state of Sparta.

Interestingly, for Plato any given type of government had a tendency to degenerate into the next lower one in the sequence. He had observed multiple times a democratic government in a Greek polis turning into a tyrannical one, for instance. By comparison, we could say that the modern US is a hybrid between a oligarchy and a (constitutional, representational) democracy.

As you can see, totalitarianism does not appear on Plato’s list. Many people’s intuition—including my own, before reading Arendt—is that totalitarianism is a particular instantiation of the general class of tyranny. But The Origins of Totalitarianism makes an interesting case in favor of drawing a distinction.

The two examples of totalitarianism that Arendt focuses on, naturally, belong to the early part of the 20th century: Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. They can be usefully distinguished by comparison with a number of examples of fascism, such as Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain. Arendt claims that fascism leads to a dictatorship, which is a kind of tyranny, but it does not amount to a kind of totalitarianism (despite what implied by the disturbing photo that accompanies this article). Moreover, and correctly I think, by equating Nazism and Stalinism she doesn’t buy into the simplistic notion that Hitler was “far right” and Stalin “far left.” Neither has anything to do with the right-left political continuum because—contra popular misunderstanding—the Nazi and Bolshevik “parties” were not political parties at all. They were end-of-times movements, as we shall see in a moment.

Definitely a totalitarian: Stalin in 1937, Wikimedia.

Arendt mentions a number of characteristics that are unique to totalitarianism. It transforms classes into masses by undermining differences between classes; it replaces the party system with a mass movement—not with one party, as in the case of Mussolini’s fascism; it shifts power from the military to the police, again unlike fascism; and it openly articulates a policy of world domination, something Mussolini or Franco never did, though Mussolini certainly engaged in limited colonialism. Even Mussolini’s frequent comparisons of his Italy to the Roman Empire did not amount to the totalizing projects of Hitler and Stalin.

But arguably the most important distinctive characteristic of totalitarianism, and one that Arendt accordingly insists on, is that it isn’t about one man governing a nation, but rather about the fulfillment of some inevitable law, either of Nature (in the case of the Nazi) or of History (in the case of Stalin).

The Nazi believed that their racial theory was in alignment with what Nature itself ordained: the dominance of one “master race” and the eventual annihilation of all others:

“The Nazis, foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already taken the necessary preliminary steps for the liquidation of the Polish people, while Hitler even planned the decimation of certain categories of Germans.” (Chapter 12)

The Bolshevik belief, by contrast, was that History will determine the elimination of all classes and their representatives. Arendt, again correctly I think, connects the Nazi concept of Nature to Darwin’s theories and the Bolshevik concept of History to Marx. Moreover, she then connects Darwin to Marx:

“Engels could not think of a greater compliment to Marx’s scholarly achievements than to call him the ‘Darwin of history.” (Chapter 13)

The claim isn’t that Darwin or Marx promulgated or meant to inspire anything like Nazi and Bolshevik thought, but rather than the Nazi and the Bolshevik distorted and conveniently appropriated Darwinian and Marxist ideas.

An interesting implication of this analysis is that the totalitarian ruler doesn’t typically declare himself just or wise; rather, he is simply the executor of natural or historical law. Therefore, from the totalitarian perspective, talk of morality is beside the point. As Scotty from Star Trek would have put it, you can’t argue with the laws of physics, quite regardless of whether you think their outcomes ethical or unethical.

Totalitarianisms of course are based on a particular ideology, that is, a simple central idea that is meant to explain everything. Racism for the Nazi, communism for the Bolshevik. The “-logy” suffix, from the Greek logoi, implies a scientific view of things, not just a human opinion. Hence Hitler’s obsession with “race science” and Stalin’s parallel obsession with “dialectical science.” Never mind that such “sciences” where nonsense on stilts and directly led to the death of millions.

Totalitarianism isn’t the only kind of movement that is based on an ideology, and Arendt points out that all ideologies in turn contain totalitarian elements. But these elements are fully developed and become all-encompassing only in a totalitarian setting. She writes that “In the words of Trotsky: ‘We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.’”

Totalitarian ideology is presented as a kind of ineluctable logic: once you accept the premises the logical conclusions—say, that the Jewish “race” ought to be exterminated—surely follow, and if you don’t accept them you’re either stupid or a coward.

But how is totalitarianism possible in the first place? Arendt suggests that totalitarianism rules by consciously breaking what Cicero in his De Officiis (On Duties) called the consensus iuris, the law that governs a polity by consent of the various groups within that polity. A principal tool by which totalitarian regimes achieve this is terror, understood not simply as an instrument to achieve forced compliance, but as a means by which to accelerate the inevitable movements of Nature or History.

Cicero said that societies are in trouble when the consensus iuris is broken, image from britannica.com/biography/Cicero

Education is another such tool, but unlike the case of “standard” dictatorships, the aim of education in totalitarian regimes is not to instill a certain set of convictions (as in fascism, for instance), but rather to destroy in individuals the very ability to form any conviction at all.

Totalitarian regimes can only exist if the masses are willing to buy into a grand narrative that transcends our face value understanding of reality:

“Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things.” (Chapter 13)

Even when the facts plainly go against what the totalitarian ruler says the grand narrative explanation is always at hand: things are like this now but they will not be once that Nature or History has achieved its ultimate end. The Nazi were thinking on the scale of centuries and millennia, not years.

The totalitarian elite, says Arendt, firmly believes that the Leader will ultimately assure the triumph of what the rest of the world sees as lies and fictions over “mere” truth and reality. Accordingly, Arendt points out that the ideal target of totalitarian ideology are people for whom the distinction between true and false no longer exists. Does this not sound ominously contemporary?

There is another, crucial element for the success of totalitarianism. Indeed, an element that Arendt thinks explains why totalitarianism has only appeared in the 20th century, though it is—in her mind—here to stay: the role of isolation and loneliness.

Totalitarianism thrives when people feel isolated, that is, cut off from the social fabric. Arendt reminds us that what we call isolation in the political sphere translates into loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Once we are alienated, for whatever reason, from the political and the social, we become part of a mindless mass, a mass that can be easily manipulated even by otherwise ridiculously easy to spot lies, be they the lies of Hitler, those of Stalin, or the ones currently being dished out by certain politicians using the new, worrisome tools of social media.

Loneliness—as any psychologist will tell you—is not the same as solitude. The distinction—claims Arendt—was first drawn by Cicero in his De Re Publica, and then elaborated by the Stoic Epictetus in his Discourses. Epictetus says that the lonely person is surrounded by others with whom they cannot establish meaningful contact; the solitary person, by contrast, is “together with himself.” Loneliness leads to despair; solitude, by contrast, can be very productive. Arendt reminds us that thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude, when we are only in the presence of our thoughts. But of course thinking is the very last thing that a totalitarian regime wants us to engage in. So the regime absolutely needs to turn people into lonely individuals, to break their political and social bonds, to atomize them and render them all identical to each other. This has become possible, and increasingly easy, in modern times:

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.” (Chapter 13)

And of our century as well, I would add. In a sense, then, totalitarianism is “organized loneliness,” organized according to a totalizing ideology based on Nature or History. But this brings me to what may be the only missing element in Arendt’s analysis. If you carefully re-read what I wrote above you should notice that many of the elements we have talked about have been present in a third kind of ideology: religion, which—surprisingly—Arendt doesn’t tackle in her long work.

Of course religion by itself doesn’t necessarily lead to a totalitarian society, just like other ideologies by themselves don’t either. But the world has seen a good share of theocratic regimes that, for all effective purposes, should count as totalitarian because they match Arendt’s profile of the phenomenon. Contemporary examples include the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Historical examples are also not difficulty to find: from Early (biblical time) Israel to Papal Rome during most of the Middle Ages, from Florence under Girolamo Savonarola (1494–1498) to 16th century Münster under anabaptist control.

If this is true, that is, if theocracies are examples of totalitarianism, then the phenomenon is more ancient than Plato, but was not recognized by the Greek philosopher because he had not been exposed to Abrahamic monotheism, of which all the instances just mentioned are instantiations. Assuming again that my addition to Arendt’s conclusions is correct then the Nazi reliance on the laws of Nature, and the Bolshevik conception of the laws of History are simply secular variations on the older theme of (certain) religions attempting to build a totalizing society based on the laws of God. And what is God if not the creator of Nature and History?