The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men,

The obsession of totalitarian movements with “scientific” proofs ceases once they are in power.

Enfantin who could already “see the time approaching when the ‘art of moving the masses’ will be so perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet will possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substance,”

the assumption that objective laws of power can be discovered. Rohan’s political theory that “the kings command the peoples and the interest commands the king,”

the traditional core of modern utilitarianism, positivist or socialist, but none of these theories assumes that it is possible “to transform the nature of man” as totalitarianism indeed tries to do. On the contrary, they all implicitly or explicitly assume that human nature is always the same, that history is the story of changing objective circumstances and the human reactions to them, and that interest, rightly understood, may lead to a change of circumstances, but not to a change of human reactions as such.

suspicion of the Allies that the murder of the insane which Hitler ordered at the beginning of the war should be attributed to the desire to get rid of unnecessary mouths to feed was altogether unjustified.

Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying them of their utilitarian content, the interests of a class or nation.

Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.

Stalin, in the great speech before the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1930 in which he prepared the physical liquidation of intraparty right and left deviationists, described them as representatives of “dying classes.”

all those elements—democracies, Jews, Eastern subhumans (Untermenschen), or the incurably sick—that are not “fit to live” anyway. Incidentally, Hitler too spoke of “dying classes” that ought to be “eliminated without much ado.”

the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.

the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch.

one mysterious world conspiracy has followed another in Bolshevik propaganda,

What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

all the “confessions” of political opponents in the Soviet Union are phrased in the same language and admit the same motives, the consistency-hungry masses will accept the fiction as supreme proof of their truthfulness;

The revolt of the masses against “realism,” common sense, and all “the plausibilities of the world” (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense.

Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices—and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.

The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.

From these sore spots the lies of totalitarian propaganda derive the element of truthfulness and real experience they need to bridge the gulf between reality and fiction.

In the eyes of the masses, they then acquire the reputation of superior “realism” because they touch upon real conditions whose existence is being hidden.

The representation of the Jew as the incarnation of evil is usually blamed on remnants and superstitious memories from the Middle Ages, but is actually closely connected with the more recent ambiguous role which Jews played in European society since their emancipation.

This gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification which not only restored some of the self-respect they had formerly derived from their function in society, but also created a kind of spurious stability which made them better candidates for an organization.

When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of “German” and “Worker” connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left.

those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives—for

popularity of the Protocols was based on admiration and eagerness to learn rather than on hatred,

motif of a global conspiracy in the Protocols which appealed most to the masses, for it corresponded so well to the new power situation.

(Hitler very early promised that the Nazi movement would “transcend the narrow limits of modern nationalism,”

The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination.

This new community, tentatively realized in the Nazi movement in the pretotalitarian atmosphere, was based on the absolute equality of all Germans, an equality not of rights but of nature, and their absolute difference from all other people.

After the Nazis came to power, this concept gradually lost its importance and gave way to a general contempt for the German people (which the Nazis had always harbored but could not very well show publicly before)

The Volksgemeinschaft was merely the propagandistic preparation for an “Aryan” racial society which in the end would have doomed all peoples, including the Germans.

the Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazis’ attempt to counter the Communist promise of a classless society.

while the Volksgemeinschaft, with its connotation of conspiracy for world conquest, held out a reasonable hope that every German could eventually become a factory owner.

frightfully “new” in methods of rule and ingenious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine, have never invented an ideology which was not already popular.

Hitler’s brilliant gifts as a mass orator did not win him his position in the movement but rather misled his opponents into underestimating him as a simple demagogue, and Stalin was able to defeat the greater orator of the Russian Revolution.

in the case of Stalin, cannot be explained by the psychology of the liar whose very success may make him his own last victim.

the point was that the Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself.

superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic.

It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible.

Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives.

the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or s...

they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.

the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism.

other typically totalitarian features, such as the appointment of functionaries from above and the eventual monopolization of appointments by one man are secondary in importance.

Every hierarchy, no matter how authoritarian in its direction, and every chain of command, no matter how arbitrary or dictatorial the content of orders, tends to stabilize and would have restricted the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement.

Hitler was the first to say that each movement should divide the masses which have been won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members.

Hitler, consequently, was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the ranks of sympathizers while at the same time keeping the number of party members strictly limited.

The ingeniousness of this device during the movements’ struggle for power is that the front organizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of outside normalcy which wards off the impact of true reality more effectively than mere indoctrination.

The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms,

fellow-traveler organizations surround the totalitarian movements with a mist of normality and respectability that fools the membership about the true character of the outside world as much as it does the outside world about the true character of the movement.