The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

The raison d’être of the state is the need for some security of the individual, who feels himself menaced by all his fellow-men.

The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours.

Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle.

acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits.

The alliance between capital and mob is to be found at the genesis of every consistently imperialist policy.

The so-called hypocrisy of British policies was the result of the good sense of English statesmen who drew a sharp line between colonial methods and normal domestic policies, thereby avoiding with considerable success the feared boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland.

In other countries, particularly in Germany and Austria, the alliance took effect at home in the form of pan-movements, and to a lesser extent in France, in a so-called colonial policy. The aim of these “movements” was, so to speak, to imperialize the whole nation (and not only the “superfluous” part of it), to combine domestic and foreign policy in such a way as to organize the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples.

At the turn of the century, the Dreyfus Affair showed that underworld and high society in France were so closely bound together that it was difficult definitely to place any of the “heroes” among the Anti-Dreyfusards in either category.

Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For

no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.

The historical truth of the matter is that race-thinking, with its roots deep in the eighteenth century, emerged simultaneously in all Western countries during the nineteenth century.

Racism has been the powerful ideology of imperialistic policies since the turn of our century.

Persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs.

If, in the early form of French aristocracy, race-thinking had been invented as an instrument of internal division and had turned out to be a weapon for civil war, this early form of German race-doctrine was invented as a weapon of internal national unity

It was Adam Mueller who insisted on purity of descent as a test of nobility, and it was Haller who went beyond the obvious fact that the powerful rule those deprived of power by stating it as a natural law that the weak should be dominated by the strong.

international character of nobility.

Gobineau tried in vain to get a wider audience by taking a side in the American slave issue and by conveniently building his whole system on the basic conflict between white and black. He had to wait almost fifty years to become a success among the elite, and not until the first World War with its wave of death-philosophies could his works claim wide popularity.

Disraeli found “something better than the Rights of Men in the rights of Englishmen” and to Sir James Stephen “few things in history [seemed] so beggarly as the degree to which the French allowed

“It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom,

The first of these was represented by the polygenists who, challenging the Bible as a book of pious lies, denied any relationship between human “races”; their main achievement was the destruction of the idea of the natural law as the uniting link between all men and all peoples.

The separation of the United States had shown that these links in themselves do not guarantee domination; and not only America, other colonies too, though not with the same violence, showed strong tendencies toward developing along different constitutional lines from the mother country.

the idea of “national mission,” was especially strong in England.

affinity to race-thinking.

While imperialism changed Egypt from a country occasionally coveted for her own sake into a military station for India and a stepping-stone for further expansion, the exact opposite happened to South Africa.

Their toil was marked by all the known disadvantages of slave labor, such as lack of initiative, laziness, neglect of tools, and general inefficiency. Their work therefore barely sufficed to keep their masters alive and never reached the comparative abundance which nurtures civilization. It was this absolute dependence on the work of others and complete contempt for labor and productivity in any form that transformed the Dutchman into the Boer and gave his concept of race a distinctly economic meaning.

The poor whites in South Africa, who in 1923 formed 10 per cent of the total white population19 and whose standard of living does not differ much from that of the Bantu tribes, are today a warning example of this possibility. Their poverty is almost exclusively the consequence of their contempt for work and their adjustment to the way of life of black tribes.

A definite advantage of this structure is that it blunts the impact of one of the basic totalitarian tenets—that the world is divided into two gigantic hostile camps, one of which is the movement, and that the movement can and must fight the whole world—a claim which prepares the way for the indiscriminate aggressiveness of totalitarian regimes in power.

(The ultimate goal of Nazi propaganda was to organize the whole German people as sympathizers.77)

This technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions

“decomposition of the status quo”78 which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force.

In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.”

On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.86

impersonate the double function characteristic of each layer of the movement—to act as the magic defense of the movement against the outside world;

and at the same time, to be the direct bridge

by which the movement is connec...

the role of the ritual. The

The “idols” are mere organizational devices, familiar from the ritual of secret societies,

both Hitler and Stalin had been members of modern secret societies before they became totalitarian leaders—Hitler

Nazi totalitarianism started with a mass

organization which was only gradually dominated by elite formations, while the Bolsheviks started with elite formations and organized the masses accordingly.

The result was the same in bot...

Totalitarian movements have proved time and again that they can command the same total loyalty in life and death which had been the prerogative of secret and conspiratory societies.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead

The machine that generates, organizes, and

spreads the monstrous falsehoods of totalitarian movements depends again upon the position of the Leader.

The topmost layer in the organization of totalitarian movements is the intimate circle around the Leader, which can be a formal institution, like the Bolshevik Politburo, or a changing clique of men who do not necessarily hold office, like the entourage of Hitler.

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have already seized.

Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction;