The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

Goebbels’ sincere conviction that ‘the greatest happiness that a contemporary can experience today’ is either to be a genius or to serve one,fn57 was typical of the mob but neither of the masses nor the sympathizing elite.

The elite’s contempt for the genius and its yearning for anonymity was still witness of a spirit which neither the masses nor the mob were in a position to understand, and which, in the words of Robespierre, strove to assert the grandeur of man against the pettiness of the great.

They had convinced themselves that traditional historiography was a forgery in any case, since it had excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.

Injustices in the past as well as the present became intolerable when there was no longer any hope that the scales of justice eventually would be set right.

The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.

Not Marx’s dialectical materialism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’; not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anticlericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history.

object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal official history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people.

Not Stalin’s and Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination.

In the growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions – which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy – those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the content itself.

it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.

The intellectual elite of the twenties who knew little of the earlier connections between mob and bourgeoisie was certain that the old game of épater le bourgeois could be played to perfection if one started to shock society with an ironically exaggerated picture of its own behavior.

The avant-garde did not know they were running their heads not against walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the spirit of the time.

The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism.

The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so that the only political result of Brecht’s ‘revolution’ was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.

How irresistible the desire for the unmasking of hypocrisy was among the elite can be gauged by the fact that such delight could not even be spoiled by Hitler’s very real persecution of the Jews, which at the time of Céline’s writing was already in full swing.

this shows the elite’s lack of a sense of reality, together with its perverted selflessness, both of which resemble only too closely the fictitious world and the absence of self-interest among the masses. It was the great opportunity of the totalitarian movements, and the reason why a temporary alliance between the intellectual elite and the mob could come about, that in an elementary and undifferentiated way their problems had become the same and foreshadowed the problems and mentality of the masses.

the equally irresistible appeal of the totalitarian movements’ spurious claim to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man.

Double morality as practiced by the bourgeoisie became the outstanding sign of that esprit de sérieux, which is always pompous and never sincere.

affairs as the affairs of all. In this connection, the liberals’ political philosophy, according to which the mere sum of individual interests adds up to the miracle of the common good, appeared to be only a rationalization of the recklessness with which private interests were pressed regardless of the common good.

totalitarian movements asserted their ‘superiority’ in that they carried a Weltanschauung by which they would take possession of man as a whole.

The bourgeois class, having made its way through social pressure and, frequently, through an economic blackmail of political institutions, always believed that the public and visible organs of power were directed by their own secret, non-public interests and influence. In this sense, the bourgeoisie’s political philosophy was always ‘totalitarian’; it always assumed an identity of politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only as the façade for private interests.

its differentiation between public and private life, were a concession to the nation-state which had desperately tried to keep the two spheres apart.

They found each other so easily, if only temporarily, because they both sensed that they represented the fate of the time, that they were followed by unending masses, that sooner or later the majority of European peoples might be with them – as they thought, ready to make their revolution. It turned out that they were both mistaken. The mob, the underworld of the bourgeois class, hoped that the helpless masses would help them into power, would support them when they attempted to forward their private interests,

Himmler was himself ‘more normal,’ that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.

He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.

The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself.

organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything – belief, honor, dignity – on the slightest provocation.

Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but s...

‘The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is som...

Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, this whole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes proceeded toward their greatest crimes.

The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand.

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.fn65

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.

Under conditions of constitutional government and freedom of opinion, totalitarian movements struggling for power can use terror to a limited extent only and share with other parties the necessity of winning adherents and of appearing plausible to a public which is not yet rigorously isolated from all other sources of information.

in totalitarian countries propaganda and terror present two sid...

Wherever totalitarianism possesses absolute control, it replaces propaganda with indoctrination and uses violence not so much to frighten people (this is done only in the initial stages when political opposition still exists) as to realize constantly its ideological doctrines and its practical lies.

When they liquidated the greater part of the Polish intelligentsia, they did it not because of its opposition, but because according to their doctrine Poles had no intellect, and when they planned to kidnap blue-eyed and blond-haired children, they did not intend to frighten the population but to save ‘Germanic blood.’

But such propaganda always makes its appeal to an external sphere – be it the nontotalitarian strata of the population at home or the nontotalitarian countries abroad.

In this respect Hitler’s speeches to his generals during the war are veritable models of propaganda, characterized mainly by the monstrous lies with which the Fuehrer entertained his guests in an attempt to win them over.

But, basically speaking, totalitarian domination strives to restrict propaganda methods solely to its foreign policy or to the branches of the movement abroad for the purpose of supplying them with suitable material.

The relationship between propaganda and indoctrination usually depends upon the size of the movements on one hand, and upon outside pressure on the other.

smaller the movement, the more energy it will expend in mere propaganda; the greater the pressure on totalitarian regimes from the outside world – a pressure that even behind iron curtains cannot be ignored entirely – the more actively will the totalitarian dictators engage in propaganda.

Terror continues to be used by totalitarian regimes even when its psychological aims are achieved: its real horror is that it reigns over a completely subdued population.

Where the rule of terror is brought to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears entirely; it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany.

terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government.

It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist has aptly called ‘power propaganda’:fn8 it made clear to the population at large that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and that it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than a loyal Republican.

The strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the ‘scientific’ nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses.

is also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the ‘only soap that prevents pimples’ may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who do not use his soap.

The obsession of totalitarian movements with ‘scientific’ proofs ceases once they are in power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to serve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for entirely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans.

The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from the more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological origin, of socialism in one instance and racism in the other, show more clearly than when their spokesmen pretend that they have discovered the hidden forces that will bring them good fortune in the chain of fatality.