The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

The difference was only that there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensible reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings.

Yet there was a certain reality in England herself which corresponded to Kipling’s legend and made it at all possible, and that was the existence of such virtues as chivalry, nobility, bravery, even though they were utterly out of place in a political reality ruled by Cecil Rhodes or Lord Curzon.

Rhodes opened the society at once to all members of the “Nordic race”80 so that the aim was not so much the growth and glory of Great Britain—her occupation of the “entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific, . . . the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboards of China and Japan [and] the ultimate recovery of the United States”81—as the expansion of the “Nordic race” which, organized in a secret society, would establish a bureaucratic government over all peoples of the earth.

Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed “do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a god—nothing less.”82 But Lord Cromer sanely pointed out the same phenomenon of men degrading themselves voluntarily into mere instruments or mere functions when he called the bureaucrats “instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of Imperialism.”

the bureaucrat on one side and the secret agent on the other. Both types, as long as they served only British imperialism, never quite denied that they were descended from dragon-slayers and protectors of the weak and therefore never drove bureaucratic regimes to their inherent extremes.

every adventurer knows what Kipling means when he praises Kim because “what he loved was the game for its own sake.”

“When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.”

they were not supposed to know that in politics an endless game can end only in catastrophe and that political secrecy hardly ever ends in anything nobler than the vulgar duplicity of a spy.

the imperialists had destroyed the best man who ever turned from an adventurer (with a strong mixture of dragon-slayer) into a secret agent, Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence had not yet been seized by the fanaticism of an ideology of movement, probably because he was too well educated for the superstitions of his time, he had already experienced that fascination, based on despair of all possible human responsibility, which the eternal stream and its eternal movement exert.

Continental imperialism, therefore, started with a much closer affinity to race concepts, enthusiastically absorbed the tradition of race-thinking,

the aims of the pan-movements lacked even this rather anarchic element of human planning and geographic restraint. Yet, though they had no specific programs for world conquest, they generated an all-embracing mood of total predominance, of touching and embracing all human issues, of “pan-humanism,”

tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies,” “one against all,” that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

early as 1870 that the best possible starting point for a Pan-Slav empire would be the disintegration of Austria,

only the tribalism of the pan-movements offered a new religious theory and a new concept of holiness.

Nineteenth-century positivism and progressivism perverted this purpose of human equality when they set out to demonstrate what cannot be demonstrated, namely, that men are equal by nature and different only by history and circumstances, so that they can be equalized not by rights, but by circumstances and education.

“divine people” lives in a world in which it is the born persecutor of all other weaker species, or the born victim of all other stronger species. Only the rules of the animal kingdom can possibly apply to its political destinies.

Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility.

The Dual Monarchy, on the contrary, dominated its troublesome nationalities by giving to them just enough freedom to oppress other nationalities, with the result that these became the real mass basis for the ideology of the pan-movements.

It would be a serious error to assume that the leaders of the pan-movements were reactionaries or “counter-revolutionaries.” Though as a rule not too interested in social questions, they never made the mistake of siding with capitalist exploitation and most of them had belonged, and quite a few continued to belong, to liberal, progressive parties.

The Slavophiles’ occasional antipathy to Jews turned into antisemitism in the whole Russian intelligentsia when, after the assassination of the Czar in 1881, a wave of pogroms organized by the government brought the Jewish question into the focus of public attention.

It seemed the Jews were the one perfect example of a people in the tribal sense, their organization the model the pan-movements were striving to emulate, their survival and their supposed power the best proof of the correctness of racial theories.

what drove the Jews into the center of these racial ideologies more than anything else was the even more obvious fact that the pan-movements’ claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim.

Perhaps it was Stalin who was the first to discover all the potentialities for rule that the police possessed; it certainly was Hitler who, shrewder than Schoenerer his spiritual father, knew how to use the hierarchical principle of racism, how to exploit the anti-semitic assertion of the existence of a “worst” people in order properly to organize the “best” and all the conquered and oppressed in between, how to generalize the superiority complex of the pan-movements so that each people, with the necessary exception of the Jews, could look down upon one that was even worse off than itself.

There was an element of feeble-minded resentment against a people who, it was feared, had received a rationally incomprehensible guarantee that they would emerge eventually, and in spite of appearances, as the final victors in world history.

OPEN DISREGARD for law and legal institutions and ideological justification of lawlessness has been much more characteristic of continental than of overseas imperialism.

continental imperialists lacked the geographical distance to separate the illegality of their rule on foreign continents

Contempt for law became characteristic of all movements.

If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness.

the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country—even

The French atmosphere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexations;

What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretative speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth.

Only the Russian Empire of that time offered a complete picture of rule by bureaucracy.

the Pan-German League, could hope to find a larger appeal only in times of national emergency.

France, ruled by party alliances, no real government has been possible since the establishment of the Third Republic and its fantastic record of cabinets. Her weakness was the opposite of the German one; she had liquidated the state which was above the parties and above Parliament without reorganizing her party system into a body capable of governing.

France, the parties suffocated the government; in Germany, the state emasculated the parties.

true goal of every “party above parties” was to promote one particular interest until it had devoured all others, and to make one particular group the master of the state machine. This is what finally happened in Italy under Mussolini’s Fascism, which up to 1938 was not totalitarian but just an ordinary nationalist dictatorship developed logically from a multiparty democracy.

It was precisely through the identification of the party with the state, which both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks have always carefully avoided, that the party ceased to be a “movement” and became tied to the basically stable structure of the state.

the totalitarian movements and their predecessors, the pan-movements, were not “parties above parties” aspiring to seize the state machine but movements aiming at the destruction of the state,

they clung to an outdated nontotalitarian state worship and could not understand that the masses’ furious interest in the so-called “suprastate powers” (überstaatliche Mächte)—i.e., the Jesuits, the Jews, and the Freemasons—did not spring from nation or state worship but, on the contrary, from envy and the desire also to become a “suprastate power.”93

that the initial anticlerical flavor of Fascist nationalism subsided rather quickly and gave way to a modus vivendi as in Italy, or to a positive alliance, as in Spain and Portugal.

In contrast to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, who destroyed the spirit of the army by subordinating it to the political commissars or totalitarian elite formations, the Fascists could use such intensely nationalist instruments as the army, with which they identified themselves as they had identified themselves with the state.

The movements originated in Austria-Hungary, where hatred of the state was an expression of patriotism for the oppressed nationalities and where the parties—with the exception of the Social Democratic Party (next to the Christian-Social Party the only one sincerely loyal to Austria)—were formed along national, and not along class lines. This was possible because economic and national interests were almost identical here and because economic and social status depended largely on nationality; nationalism, therefore, which had been a unifying force in the nation-states, here became at once a principle of internal disruption, which resulted in a decisive difference in the structure of the parties as compared with those of nation-states.

the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps itself in constant movement.

while the “party above parties” wanted only to seize the state machine, the true movement aimed at its destruction; while the former still recognized the state as highest authority once its representation had fallen into the hands of the members of one party (as in Mussolini’s Italy), the latter recognized the movement as independent of and superior in authority to the state.

they became either anti-Fascist or anti-Bolshevik or both.101 By this negative approach seemingly forced upon them from the outside, the older parties showed clearly that they too were no longer able to function as representatives of specific class interests but had become mere defenders of the status quo.

everywhere parties were now organized along national lines as though the liquidation of the Dual Monarchy had served only to enable a host of similar experiments to start on a dwarfed scale.103 In other countries, where the nation-state and the class basis of its parties were not touched by migrations and heterogeneity of population, inflation and unemployment caused a similar breakdown;

after 1935, under the pretext of enlarging their mass base, they formed Popular Fronts everywhere and began to appeal to the same growing masses outside all class strata which up to then had been the natural prey to Fascist movements. None of the old parties was prepared to receive these masses, nor did they gauge correctly the growing importance of their numbers and the growing political influence of their leaders.

The neutrality of the army, its willingness to serve every master, eventually left the state in a position of “mediation between the organized party interests. It was no longer above but between the classes of society.”

in Poland (in 1934) a so-called “partyless bloc,” with a program of support for a semifascist government and a membership drawn from the nobility and the poorest peasantry, workers and businessmen, Catholics and orthodox Jews, legally won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament.