The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

The multiplication of offices was extremely useful for the constant shifting of power; the longer, moreover, a totalitarian regime stays in power, the greater becomes the number of offices and the possibility of jobs exclusively dependent upon the movement,

there is no hierarchy without authority

the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically opposed to that of totalitarian domination.

authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to restrict or limit freedom,

but never to abo...

Totalitarian domination, however, aims at abo...

The evidence of Hitler’s as well as Stalin’s dictatorship points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure.

Stalin has shot almost everybody who could claim to belong to the ruling clique and has moved the members of the Politburo back and forth whenever a clique was on the point of consolidating itself.

he prevented their formation by constant shifts in power and authority, and frequent changes of intimates in his immediate surroundings, so that all former solidarity between those who had come into power with him quickly evaporated.

As techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear simple and ingeniously effective. They assure not only an absolute power monopoly, but unparalleled certainty

that all commands will always be carried out; the multiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure the dictator’s complete independence of all his inferiors and make possible the swift and surprising changes in policy for which totalitarianism has become famous.

The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.

The state machine is transformed into a front organization of sympathizing bureaucrats whose function in domestic affairs is to spread confidence

One of the important differences between a totalitarian movement and a totalitarian state is that the totalitarian dictator can and must practice the totalitarian art of lying more consistently and on a larger scale than the leader of a movement.

Totalitarianism in power uses the state as its outward façade, to represent the country in the nontotalitarian world. As such, the totalitarian state is the logical heir of the totalitarian movement from which it borrows its organizational structure.

The first stage of ferreting out secret enemies and hunting down former opponents is usually combined with drafting the entire population into front organizations and re-educating old party members for voluntary espionage services, so that the rather dubious sympathies of the drafted sympathizers need not worry the specially trained cadres of the police.

Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for “objective enemies” begun does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes.

the totalitarian regimes have proved that this part of the totalitarian Utopia can be realized almost to perfection, because it is temporarily independent of defeat or victory.

Since the totalitarian secret police begins its career after the pacification of the country, it always appears entirely superfluous to all outside observers—or, on the contrary, misleads them into thinking that there is some secret resistance.

The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

One of the reasons for the duplication of secret services whose agents are unknown to each other is that total domination needs the most extreme flexibility:

Under totalitarian, as under other regimes, the secret police has a monopoly on certain vital information. But the kind of knowledge that can be possessed only by the police has undergone an important change: the police are no longer concerned with knowing what is going on in the heads of future victims (most of the time they ignore who these victims will be), and the police have become the trustees of the greatest state secrets.

The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

every person in a totalitarian country knows also that it is the greatest crime ever to talk about these “secrets.”

So long as they guard the secret they belong to the elite, and as a rule they do not betray it even when they are in the prisons and concentration camps.121

develops a true secret police as the nucleus of its government and power. It

Their faith in human omnipotence, their conviction that everything can be done through organization, carries them into experiments which human imaginations may have outlined but human activity certainly never realized.

Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions,

The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only “freedom” would consist in “preserving the

Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal both through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and th...

The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal.

The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.

Propagandistically this means that the “protective

custody” is handled as a “preventive police measure,”

The inclusion of criminals is necessary in order to make plausible the propagandistic claim of the movement that the institution exists for asocial elements.

Criminals do not properly belong in the concentration camps, if only because it is harder to kill the juridical person in a man who is guilty of some crime than in a totally innocent person. If

The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man.

making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible:

In the Soviet Union a woman will sue for divorce immediately after her husband’s arrest in order to save the lives of her children; if her husband chances to come back, she will indignantly turn him out of the house.

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.

Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity.

Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive.

masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.

Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous.

In the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement.

Guilt and innocence become senseless notions;

Under totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to avoid the dangers man fears.

deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality. The

Party. If you don’t confess, you cease to help History through the Party, and have become a real enemy.—The coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and, through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C which it logically engenders.

can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.