# The Origins of Totalitarianism  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Hannah Arendt]] - Full Title:: The Origins of Totalitarianism - Category: #books ## Highlights > Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. ([Location 49](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=49)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. ([Location 50](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=50)) > It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. ([Location 52](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=52)) > Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism. ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=56)) > Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=59)) > And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil. ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=82)) > Enlightenment, is clearly the condition sine qua non for the birth of antisemitism, and it is of some importance to note that it occurred in Jewish self-interpretation first and at about the time when European Christendom split up into those ethnic groups which then came politically into their own in the system of modern nation-states. ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=108)) > Moreover, what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence. ([Location 172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=172)) > The only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which, at least in its Western ideological form, was a kind of counterideology, the “answer” to antisemitism. ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=184)) > It was this chain reaction, inherent in imperialist power politics and best represented on the human level by the figure of the secret agent, of which Kipling said (in Kim), “When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before”; and the only reason his prophecy did not come true was the constitutional restraint of the nation-state, while today our only hope that it will not come true in the future is based on the constitutional restraints of the American republic plus the technological restraints of the nuclear age. ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=247)) > For this lack proves merely that, in this as in other respects, the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of “counter-revolutionary” activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts. It was indeed quite in line with the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality that all such data, instead of being collected in Moscow from the four corners of the immense territory, were first made known to the respective localities through publication in Pravda, Izvestia, or some other official organ in Moscow, so that every region and every district of the Soviet Union received its official, fictitious statistical data in much the same way it received the no less fictitious norms allotted to them by the Five Year Plans.16 ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=480)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > We always suspected, but we now know that the regime was never “monolithic” but “consciously constructed around overlapping, duplicating, and parallel functions,” and that this grotesquely amorphous structure was kept together by the same Führer-principle—the so-called “personality cult”—we find in Nazi Germany;17 that the executive branch of this particular government was not the party but the police, whose “operational activities were not regulated through party channels”;18that the entirely innocent people whom the regime liquidated by the millions, the “objective enemies” in Bolshevik language, knew that they were “criminals without a crime”;19 that it was precisely this new category, as distinguished from the earlier true foes of the regime—assassins of government officials, arsonists, or bandits—that reacted with the same “complete passivity”20 we know so well from the behavior patterns of the victims of Nazi terror. ([Location 488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=488)) > The most dramatic new element in this last purge, which Stalin planned in the last years of his life, was a decisive shift in ideology, the introduction of a Jewish world conspiracy. For years, the ground for this change had been carefully laid in a number of trials in the satellite countries—the Rajk trial in Hungary, the Ana Pauker affair in Rumania, and, in 1952, the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia. ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=611)) > Foremost among them for our purpose is Tocqueville’s great discovery (in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Book II, chap. 1) of the motives for the violent hatred felt by the French masses for the aristocracy at the outbreak of the Revolution—a hatred which stimulated Burke to remark that the revolution was more concerned with “the condition of a gentleman” than with the institution of a king. According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth. ([Location 658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=658)) > The same holds true for nearly all Western European countries. The Dreyfus Affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Republic when Jews had all but vanished from important positions (though not from the political scene). Austrian antisemitism became violent not under the reign of Mettemich and Franz Joseph, but in the postwar Austrian Republic when it was perfectly obvious that hardly any other group had suffered the same loss of influence and prestige ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=671)) > Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed. ([Location 679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=679)) > More serious, because it appeals to much better people, is another common-sense fallacy: the Jews, because they were an entirely powerless group caught up in the general and insoluble conflicts of the time, could be blamed for them and finally be made to appear the hidden authors of all evil. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=685)) > A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=700)) > Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more “advanced” than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. ([Location 706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=706)) > In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=716)) > And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily. In other words, if a patent forgery like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=718)) > Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts” (Theaetetus 172). He also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth” (Phaedrus 260). ([Location 768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=768)) > The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=772)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In an imperialist age, Jewish wealth had become insignificant; to a Europe with no sense of balance of power between its nations and of inter-European solidarity, the non-national, inter-European Jewish element became an object of universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of its lack of power. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=886)) - Tags: [[favorite]] # The Origins of Totalitarianism  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Hannah Arendt]] - Full Title:: The Origins of Totalitarianism - Category: #books ## Highlights > Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. ([Location 49](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=49)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. ([Location 50](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=50)) > It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. ([Location 52](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=52)) > Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism. ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=56)) > Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=59)) > And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil. ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=82)) > Enlightenment, is clearly the condition sine qua non for the birth of antisemitism, and it is of some importance to note that it occurred in Jewish self-interpretation first and at about the time when European Christendom split up into those ethnic groups which then came politically into their own in the system of modern nation-states. ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=108)) > Moreover, what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence. ([Location 172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=172)) > The only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which, at least in its Western ideological form, was a kind of counterideology, the “answer” to antisemitism. ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=184)) > It was this chain reaction, inherent in imperialist power politics and best represented on the human level by the figure of the secret agent, of which Kipling said (in Kim), “When every one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before”; and the only reason his prophecy did not come true was the constitutional restraint of the nation-state, while today our only hope that it will not come true in the future is based on the constitutional restraints of the American republic plus the technological restraints of the nuclear age. ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=247)) > For this lack proves merely that, in this as in other respects, the Stalin regime was ruthlessly consistent: all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of “counter-revolutionary” activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts. It was indeed quite in line with the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality that all such data, instead of being collected in Moscow from the four corners of the immense territory, were first made known to the respective localities through publication in Pravda, Izvestia, or some other official organ in Moscow, so that every region and every district of the Soviet Union received its official, fictitious statistical data in much the same way it received the no less fictitious norms allotted to them by the Five Year Plans.16 ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=480)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > We always suspected, but we now know that the regime was never “monolithic” but “consciously constructed around overlapping, duplicating, and parallel functions,” and that this grotesquely amorphous structure was kept together by the same Führer-principle—the so-called “personality cult”—we find in Nazi Germany;17 that the executive branch of this particular government was not the party but the police, whose “operational activities were not regulated through party channels”;18that the entirely innocent people whom the regime liquidated by the millions, the “objective enemies” in Bolshevik language, knew that they were “criminals without a crime”;19 that it was precisely this new category, as distinguished from the earlier true foes of the regime—assassins of government officials, arsonists, or bandits—that reacted with the same “complete passivity”20 we know so well from the behavior patterns of the victims of Nazi terror. ([Location 488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=488)) > The most dramatic new element in this last purge, which Stalin planned in the last years of his life, was a decisive shift in ideology, the introduction of a Jewish world conspiracy. For years, the ground for this change had been carefully laid in a number of trials in the satellite countries—the Rajk trial in Hungary, the Ana Pauker affair in Rumania, and, in 1952, the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia. ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=611)) > Foremost among them for our purpose is Tocqueville’s great discovery (in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Book II, chap. 1) of the motives for the violent hatred felt by the French masses for the aristocracy at the outbreak of the Revolution—a hatred which stimulated Burke to remark that the revolution was more concerned with “the condition of a gentleman” than with the institution of a king. According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth. ([Location 658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=658)) > The same holds true for nearly all Western European countries. The Dreyfus Affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Republic when Jews had all but vanished from important positions (though not from the political scene). Austrian antisemitism became violent not under the reign of Mettemich and Franz Joseph, but in the postwar Austrian Republic when it was perfectly obvious that hardly any other group had suffered the same loss of influence and prestige ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=671)) > Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed. ([Location 679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=679)) > More serious, because it appeals to much better people, is another common-sense fallacy: the Jews, because they were an entirely powerless group caught up in the general and insoluble conflicts of the time, could be blamed for them and finally be made to appear the hidden authors of all evil. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=685)) > A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=700)) > Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more “advanced” than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. ([Location 706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=706)) > In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=716)) > And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily. In other words, if a patent forgery like the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=718)) > Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts” (Theaetetus 172). He also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth” (Phaedrus 260). ([Location 768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=768)) > The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=772)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In an imperialist age, Jewish wealth had become insignificant; to a Europe with no sense of balance of power between its nations and of inter-European solidarity, the non-national, inter-European Jewish element became an object of universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of its lack of power. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004Q9TLJW&location=886)) - Tags: [[favorite]]