Hannah Arendt’s three-volume The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. For Arendt, the key characteristics of a totalitarian state were ideology and state terror. The substance of the ideology, to the extent that ideology has a substance, was unimportant: any ideology could become the basis of a totalitarian system if it could be encapsulated and coupled with terror. The terror was used to enforce the ideology but also to fuel it. Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws
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