The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

Concentration on an artificially complicated inner life helped Jews to respond to the unreasonable demands of society, to be strange and exciting, to develop a certain immediacy of self-expression and presentation which were originally the attributes of the actor and the virtuoso,

people whom society has always half denied and half admired. Assimilated Jews, half proud and half ashamed of their Jewishness, clearly were in this category.

Disraeli’s display of exoticism, strangeness, mysteriousness, magic, and power drawn from secret sources, was aimed correctly at this disposition in society. And it was his virtuosity at the social game which made him choose the Conservative Party, won him a seat in Parliament, the post of Prime Minister, and, last but not least, the lasting admiration of society and the friendship of a Queen.

Not until the end of the nineteenth century, when the pogroms in Russia initiated the modern Jewish emigrations, did Jewish poverty enter London, and along with it the difference between the Jewish masses and their well-to-do brethren.

The great difference is that Disraeli knew even a little less of Jewish past and present and therefore dared to speak out openly what others betrayed in the half-conscious twilight

Political success never satisfied him. It was more difficult and more important to be admitted to London’s society than to conquer the House of Commons,

around 1850, justify a particularly bitter attack by stating that he was only “plainly speaking out what every one is saying of Disraeli in private and no one will say in public.”

Politicians fell in love with the charlatan who transformed boring business transactions into dreams with an oriental flavor; and when society sensed an aroma of black magic in Disraeli’s shrewd dealings, the “potent wizard” had actually won the heart of his time.

In no European country did the middle classes ever achieve enough self-respect to reconcile their intelligentsia with their social status, so that aristocracy could continue to determine the social scale when it had already lost all political significance.

knew that the aristocracy, which year after year had to see quite a number of rich middle-class men buy titles, was haunted by very serious doubts

He therefore defeated them at their game by using his rather trite and popular imagination to describe fearlessly how the Englishmen “came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe,”

He began as a not too gifted writer and remained an intellectual whom chance made a member of Parliament, leader of his party, Prime Minister, and a friend of the Queen of England.

It is well known that the belief in a Jewish conspiracy that was kept together by a secret society had the greatest propaganda value for antisemitic publicity, and by far outran all traditional European superstitions about ritual murder and well-poisoning.

The truth was, of course, that the sons of Jewish millionaires inclined toward leftist movements precisely because their banker fathers had never come into an open class conflict with workers.

They found themselves in a state of affairs where the distinctions between society and politics were constantly blurred and where, despite seemingly chaotic conditions, the same narrow class interest always won.

He could not make a political reality out of the chimerical power of “exception Jews”; but he could, and did, help transform chimeras into public fears and to entertain a bored society with highly dangerous fairy-tales.

Since he knew the nobility of his time far better than he ever came to know the Jewish people, it is not surprising that he modeled the race concept after aristocratic caste concepts.

Her decline, therefore, caused partly by the economic expansion of other nations, and partly by internal disintegration,

what happened in France in the eighties and nineties happened thirty and forty years later in all European nation-states.

Nineteenth-century antisemitism, at any rate, reached its climax in France and was defeated because it remained a national domestic issue without contact with imperialist trends, which did not exist there.

antisemitism reappeared in Germany and Austria after the first World War,

When Marcel Proust, himself half Jewish and in emergencies ready to identify himself as a Jew, set out to search for “things past,” he actually wrote what one of his admiring critics has called an apologia pro vita sua.

Proust, born on the fringe of society, but still rightfully belonging to it though an outsider,

There is no better witness, indeed, of this period when society had emancipated itself completely from public concerns, and when politics itself was becoming a part of social life. The victory of bourgeois values over the citizen’s sense of responsibility meant the decomposition of political issues into their dazzling, fascinating reflections in society.

The victory of bourgeois values over the citizen’s sense of responsibility meant the decomposition of political issues into their dazzling, fascinating reflections in society.

he was involved in both of its most fashionable “vices,” which he, “the greatest witn...

the “vice” of Jewishness and the “vice” of homosexuality, and which in their reflection and individual reconsideration became very much alike

Topics of conversation which he formerly would have avoided—love, beauty, jealousy—lest somebody suspect his anomaly, were now welcomed avidly “in view of the experience, strange, secret, refined and monstrous upon which he founded” his views.

Individual exceptions, ennobled Jews, had been tolerated and even welcomed in the society of the Second Empire, but now Jews as such were becoming increasingly popular.

They did not doubt that homosexuals were “criminals” or that Jews were “traitors”; they only revised their attitude toward crime and treason.

The difference between the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which had suddenly discovered the attractiveness of Jews and inverts, and the mob which cried “Death to the Jews” was that the salons had not yet associated themselves openly with crime.

one hand they did not yet want to participate actively in the killing, and on the other, still professed openly an antipathy toward Jews and a horror of inverts.

complicated game of exposure and concealment, of half-confessions and lying distortions, of exaggerated humility and exaggerated arrogance, all of which were consequences of the fact that only one’s Jewishness (or homosexuality) had opened the doors of the exclusive salons, while at the same time they made one’s position extremely insecure.

Obviously the role of the exotic, the strange, and the monstrous could not be played by those individual “exception Jews” who, for almost a century, had been admitted and tolerated as “foreign upstarts” and on “whose friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of priding himself.”

the role of the exotic, the strange, and the monstrous could not be played by those individual “exception Jews” who, for almost a century, had been admitted and tolerated as “foreign upstarts” and on “whose friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of priding himself.”

“a family of little repute, [and] had to support, as on the floor of the ocean, the incalculable pressure of what was imposed on him not only by the Christians upon the surface but by all the intervening layers of Jewish castes superior to his own, each of them crushing with its contempt the one that was immediately beneath it.”

Jewishness as exceptionalness was the reason for admitting Jews, then those were preferred who were clearly “a solid troop, homogeneous within itself and utterly dissimilar to the people who watched them go past,”

Benjamin Disraeli was still one of those Jews who were admitted to society because they were exceptions,

wherever Jews were educated, secularized, and assimilated under the ambiguous conditions of society and state in Western and Central Europe, they lost that measure of political responsibility which their origin implied and which the Jewish notables had still felt, albeit in the form of privilege and rulership.

Jewish origin, without religious and political connotation, became everywhere a psychological quality, was changed into “Jewishness,” and from then on could be considered only in the categories of virtue or vice.

If it is true that “Jewishness” could not have been perverted into an interesting vice without a prejudic...

the final catastrophe brought upon it is frequently thought to have been a suffering as senseless as it was horrible, since it had lost the old value of martyrdom.

The Jewish reformer who changed a national religion into a religious denomination with the understanding that religion is a private affair, the Jewish revolutionary who pretended to be a world citizen in order to rid himself of Jewish nationality, the educated Jew, “a man in the street and a Jew at home”—each one of these succeeded in converting a national quality into a private affair. The result was that their private lives, their decisions and sentiments, became the very center of their “Jewishness.”

both, finally, always wavered between such apologetic attitudes and sudden, provocative claims that they were an elite.

Each society demands of its members a certain amount of acting, the ability to present, represent, and act what one actually is. When society disintegrates into cliques such demands are no longer made of the individual but of members of cliques.

The role of the inverts was to show their abnormality, of the Jews to represent black magic (“necromancy”), of the artists to manifest another form of supranatural and superhuman contact, of the aristocrats to show that they were not like ordinary (“bourgeois”) people.

Jews to represent black magic (“necromancy”),

these cliques had no consistency in themselves and dissolved as soon as no members of other cliques were around,

that the new mixed society at the end of the nineteenth century, like the first Jewish salons in Berlin, again centered around nobility.

An urge for social distinction was its answer to political equality and the loss of political position and privilege which had been affirmed with the establishment of the Third Republic.