The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

administrators of permanently increasing power in the past era of moderate imperialism did not even try to incorporate conquered territories, and preserved existing backward political communities like empty ruins of bygone life, their totalitarian successors dissolved and destroyed all politically stabilized structures, their own as well as those of other peoples. The mere export of violence made the servants into masters without giving them the master’s prerogative:

Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.

Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim, even if his principles were not recognized by the bourgeois class for a long time. Hobbes’s Leviathan35 exposed the only political theory according to which the state is based not on some kind of constituting law—whether

if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man. It regulates the relations between individual and society, and all other ambitions as well, for riches, knowledge, and honor follow from it.

It would be a grave injustice to Hobbes and his dignity as a philosopher to consider this picture of man an attempt at psychological realism or philosophical truth. The fact is that Hobbes is interested in neither, but concerned exclusively with the political structure itself, and he depicts the features of man according to the needs of the Leviathan.

It acquires a monopoly on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed.

Hobbes’s Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with new props from the outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang.

This process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of a never-ending accumulation of capital determined the “progressive” ideology of the late nineteenth century and foreshadowed the rise of imperialism.

the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached these limits.

Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate fact that men must die. Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle.

Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie’s instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the new class’s faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle.

He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d’état.

the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to “annex the planets,” it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

Péguy in France and Chesterton in England knew instinctively that they lived in a world of hollow pretense and that its stability was the greatest pretense of all.

The tremendously increased wealth produced by capitalist production under a social system based on maldistribution had resulted in “oversaving”—that is, the accumulation of capital which was condemned to idleness within the existing national capacity for production and consumption. This money was actually superfluous, needed by nobody though owned by a growing class of somebodies.

The first reaction to the saturated home market, lack of raw materials, and growing crises, was export of capital. The owners of superfluous wealth first tried foreign investment without expansion and without political control, which resulted in an unparalleled orgy of swindles, financial scandals, and stock-market speculation, all the more alarming since foreign investments grew much more rapidly than domestic ones.

Export of money and foreign investment as such are not imperialism and do not necessarily lead to expansion as a political device. As long as the owners of superfluous capital were content with investing “large portions of their property in foreign lands,” even if this tendency ran “counter to all past traditions of nationalism,”

As long as it fulfilled this basic function in modern society, which is essentially a community of producers, its wealth had an important function for the nation as a whole.

The opening of the Suez Canal, however, and the subsequent administrative conquest of Egypt, lessened considerably the importance of the old trade station on the Cape. The British would, in all probability, have withdrawn from Africa just as all European nations had done whenever their possessions and trade interests in India were liquidated.

“The workmen find that although the Americans are exceedingly fond of them, and are just now exchanging the most brotherly sentiments with them yet are shutting out their goods. The workmen also find that Russia, France and Germany locally are doing the same, and the workmen see that if they do not look out they will have no place in the world to trade at all. And so the workmen have become Imperialist and the Liberal Party are following.”

Socialists were still probing the economic laws of imperialism when imperialists had long since stopped obeying them, when in overseas countries these laws had been sacrificed to the “imperial factor” or to the “race factor,” and when only a few elderly gentlemen in high finance still believed in the inalienable rights of the profit rate.

that the national body itself was so deeply split into classes, that class struggle was so universal a characteristic of modern political life, that the very cohesion of the nation was jeopardized. Expansion again appeared as a lifesaver,

In theory, there is an abyss between nationalism and imperialism; in practice, it can and has been bridged by tribal nationalism and outright racism.

imperialism was the chief cause of the degeneration of the two-party system into the Front Bench system, which led to a “diminution of the power of opposition” in Parliament and to a growth of “power of the Cabinet as against the House of Commons.”

the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that civil servants are in the pay, not of the state, but of the owning classes.

In ruling foreign peoples in faraway countries, they could much better pretend to be heroic servants of the nation, “who by their services had glorified the British race,”

vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes” as James Mill could still describe them; they were to become the very backbone of British nationalism,

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.

This composition made it seem that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those standing outside the class-divided nation were the people itself (the Volksgemeinschaft, as the Nazis would call it) rather than its distortion and caricature. The historical pessimists understood the essential irresponsibility of this new social stratum, and they also correctly foresaw the possibility of converting democracy into a despotism whose tyrants would rise from the mob and lean on it for support.

But Hobbes at least provided political thought with the prerequisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law.

Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization.

But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.

We owe it to these “scientific” preachers rather than to any scientific findings that today no single science is left into whose categorical system race-thinking has not deeply penetrated.

old misconception of racism as a kind of exaggerated nationalism is still given currency.

Witnessing the gigantic competition between race-thinking and class-thinking for dominion over the minds of modern men, some have been inclined to see in the one the expression of national and in the other the expression of international trends, to believe the one to be the mental preparation for national wars and the other to be the ideology for civil wars.

From the very beginning, racism deliberately cut across all national boundaries, whether defined by geographical, linguistic, traditional, or any other standards, and denied national-political existence as such.

Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently denied the great principle upon which national organizations of peoples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed by the idea of mankind.

For if the men of the French Revolution identified themselves mentally with Rome, it was not because they opposed to the “Germanism” of their nobility a “Latinism” of the Tiers Etat, but because they felt they were the spiritual heirs of Roman Republicans.

Augustin Thierry still adhered to the identification of classes and races and distinguished between a “Germanic nobility” and a “celtic bourgeoisie,”16 and again a nobleman, the Comte de Rémusat, proclaimed the Germanic origin of the European aristocracy.

RACE-THINKING in Germany did not develop before the defeat of the old Prussian army by Napoleon. It owed its rise to the Prussian patriots and political romanticism, rather than to the nobility and their spokesmen.

These definitions, which appear almost simultaneously in the writings of the Catholic Josef Goerres and nationalistic liberals like Ernst Moritz Arndt or F. L. Jahn, bear witness to the utter failure of the hopes of rousing true national sentiments in the German people.

In Germany, where the conflict between the nobility and the rising middle class was never fought out on the political scene, personality worship developed as the only means of gaining at least some kind of social emancipation.

German intellectuals, though they hardly promoted a political fight for the middle classes to which they belonged, fought an embittered and, unfortunately, highly successful battle for social status. Even those who had written in defense of nobility still felt their own interests at stake when it came to social ranks. In order to enter competition with rights and qualities of birth, they formulated the new concept of the “innate personality” which was to win general approval within bourgeois society.

The only Junker of this period to develop a political theory of his own, Ludwig von der Marwitz, never used racial terms. According to him, nations were separated by language—a spiritual and not a physical difference—and although he was violently opposed to the French Revolution,

This insistence on common tribal origin as an essential of nationhood, formulated by German nationalists during and after the war of 1814, and the emphasis laid by the romantics on the innate personality and natural nobility prepared the way intellectually for race-thinking in Germany.

IN 1853, Count Arthur de Gobineau published his Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines which, only some fifty years later, at the turn of the century, was to become a kind of standard work for race theories in history.

from time immemorial, mankind has wanted to know as much as possible about past cultures, fallen empires, extinct peoples; but nobody before Gobineau thought of finding one single reason, one single force according to which civilization always and everywhere rises and falls.

Without Darwinism or any other evolutionist theory to influence him, this historian boasted of having introduced history into the family of natural sciences, detected the natural law of all courses of events, reduced all spiritual utterances or cultural phenomena to something “that by virtue of exact science our eyes can see, our ears can hear, our hands can touch.”

observed that Gobineau, thirty years before Nietzsche, was concerned with the problem of “décadence.”31 There is, however, this difference, that Nietzsche possessed the basic experience of European decadence, writing as he did during the climax of this movement with Baudelaire in France, Swinburne in England, and Wagner in Germany, whereas Gobineau was hardly aware of the variety of the modern taedium vitae, and must be regarded as the last heir of Boulainvilliers and the French exiled nobility who, without psychological complications, simply (and rightly) feared for the fate of aristocracy as a caste.

that the fall of civilizations is due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood.