The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt | Notes & Summary

A central question that Arendt wrestles with in this classic is what were the cultural conditions that nourished the rise of totalitarianism.

I will bring Arendt into dialogue with Marx to analyze the socio-cultural conditions that gave rise to totalitarianism in Nazi Germany. I will analyze these conditions by explaining why totalitarianism was appealing to each of the four classes of individuals Arendt identified. In this endeavor, Marx’s lens of alienation proves to be one with high explanatory power.

Fundamentally, the phenomena of alienation is a state characterized by a certain lack of authenticity, when a being is divorced from part or parts of their true nature. It may manifest as worthlessness or nihilism and is antagonistic to any individual actualizing their potential and living a meaningful life. Alienation eventually manifests as a diverse range of experiences we generally conceive of as suffering.

The four classes in question are: the mass who exhibit a directionlessness and almost admirable selflessness, the bourgeois characterized by a contradictory duplicity in values and actions, the intelligentsia elite that disposed of humanitarian values at an alarmingly fast pace, and the mob of the Nazi party which unapologetically announced vicious intentions.

I will begin my analysis by attributing the source of societal-wide alienation to the activities of the bourgeois. I will then discuss the alienated qualities of the mob and the masses and the appeal of totalitarian values to both of these groups. Finally, I will end the discussion with the most dumbfounding puzzle of all: why the blatantly anti-humanitarian ideals and the shamelessly explicit manner they were expressed proved attractive to the intelligentsia elite.

The Bourgeois

The Bourgeois are characterized by their “double morality” which is both a cause of and amplified by the increasing schism separating public and private life. Nazism appealed to them for two reasons: they enjoyed seeing their secret philosophy of personal gain and mindless acquisition being accepted and they wanted a strong man in the public sphere such that they can focus on private economic matters.

The bourgeois are a class initially characterized in history by an indifference and neutrality in the political realm. “The competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy and even hostility toward public life” (Arendt). Any political matter concerning one’s fellow citizen was merely seen as a “needless drain on [one’s] limited time and energy” that could have been better spent on capitalistic pursuits. This class began engaging in politics when their antagonism towards national and foreign affairs grew in proportion to how heavily these political decisions hindered their economic freedom. In the private sphere, they would optimize any process for further personal gain; in the public sphere, they bring forth liberal ideals on the facade of humanitarian values, but within it, hides the secretive political agenda to rid any authority of it’s ability for individual acquisition. Liberalism did not emerge from a well considered and “justified separation between the personal and public spheres, but was rather the psychological reflection of the nineteenth-century struggle between bourgeois and citozen, between the man who judged and used all public institutions by the yardstick of his private interests and the responsible citizen who was concerned with public affairs as the affairs of all” (Arendt). Thus a double morality emerged within the bourgeois that was obvious for all of society to see: the private morality of acquisition in stark contradiction with the publicly paraded virtues of compassion, individualism, and tolerance.

Long before Arendt, Marx announced his disbelief for the efficacy of liberal individual ideals for human emancipation: “He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business” (Marx). Marx is lamenting the fact that liberal rights perpetuate a notion of atomistic individuals that are out for themselves and separated from the community, and through this process people become alienated from their human nature, or species-being, of a social animal: “Man is far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being … The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the presentation of their property and their egoistic persons” (Marx). Of course this alienation due to liberal rights instated from the greed of the bourgeois did not only affect its host but was a key mechanism that paved the way for all other classes to consider Nazism palpable.

The first reason that the Bourgeois embraced the openly competitive and ruthless Nazi values were because this double morality left a profound tension and cynicism in the psyche of the bourgeois. It was refreshing to have their true morality, namely the private one centered around acquisition, to be publicly announced and welcomed in the form of Nazism: ”it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along” (Arendt).

The second reason is that they’ve always wanted a dictatorial strong man in the public sphere to take care of national and foreign affairs so they can focus on private gains. Yet they mistook the Nazis for mere dictators, not realizing that totalitarian movements “can tolerate bourgeois individualism no more than any other kind of individualism” (Arendt).

The Mass

In the economic sphere, the above changes set into motion by the bourgeois accelerated capitalistic processes. The mass was alienated by this acceleration in four distinct ways as laid out by Marx. They were alienated from the product, since it was owned by the capitalist rather than the workers and it did not satisfy their desires directly. They were alienated from the process of production, because the division of labor has deskilled the worker so much that he ends up doing the one same motion on the conveyor belt over and over. The work is tedious, repetitive, and boring. They were alienated from the species being and our human tendencies to produce freely — to determine, plan, and execute a series of productive actions. Finally, they were alienated from each other, as the division of labor made work much more isolated and pitted individuals against each other in competition.

In the political sphere, the mass had no one to represent them politically due to the breakdown of class divisions. Just as Marx described “society appears as a system which is external to the indi­vidual and as a limitation of his original independence” (Marx). In other words, the mass feels profoundly alienated from the governing body and the public community. “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships” (Arendt).

Out of this unfortunate socio-economic situation arouse a class that is paradoxically characterized by a form of selflessness — a willingness to neglect personal suffering for the advancement of a greater cause — that on face value appeared admirably virtuous, and was indeed one of the appeals of Nazism to the intelligentsia elites. But upon further inspection, this selflessness does not stem from love of what is being sacrificed for — the cause — but a neglect for what is being sacrificed — their individual well-being. They are still self-centered but unlike the bourgeois, it is a form of “self-centered bitterness … repeated again and again in individual isolation” (Arendt). Unlike the bourgeois, the mass did not have the avenue of economic acquisition, perverted as it was, to give their life any meaning. This nihilism coupled with the economic, political, and social alienation detailed above rendered them selfless in the perverted sense that they no longer valued their own well-being and had a feeling of being expendable. It wasn’t that they found a truth worth sacrificing themselves for, but what they were sacrificing was so worthless.

While intellectuals have warned against the profound damage of alienation they never foresaw this radical loss of self-interest, “the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense” (Arendt). It was precisely this distorted sense of selflessness that the Nazis took advantage of. Himmler described the men he was appealing to as “not interested in ‘everyday problems’ but only ‘in ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries, so that the man … knows he is working for a great task which occurs but once in 2,000 years’” (Arendt). A profound lack of meaning and ordinary social relationships resulting from alienation underlies the Nazi regime’s ambitions: only an outrageously enormous promise can satisfy a pitifully deranged psyche.

The Mob

The mob of the Nazi party is the least interesting of the classes for its intentions are the most clear: “What the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed, with great precision, was access to history even at the price of destruction” (Arendt).

These individuals were damaged by the same alienating forces that affected the mass, but instead of desperation, they reacted with overwhelmingly vicious power. But make no mistake, the problem they faced were the same as the mass. In fact, “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life … was the strongest factor in their mass appeal” (Arendt). Rather than being shameful, they treated their suffering as a badge of honor, as proof that they embodied the mass destiny of the time.

The Elite

The most perplexing of classes that aligned itself with Nazism is the intelligentsia elite, for the doctrines of totalitarianism seemed so much in contradiction with the generally professed values of the time. How could a group of discerning, independent thinkers side with such a blatantly vulgar and arbitrary regime?

The primary reason is, unfortunately, that they enjoyed watching the irony of the bourgeois be unveiled. Much like the mass who sided with the Nazis out of nihilism rather than genuine passion for genetic purification, it was less so that the intelligentsia agreed with the stated values of Nazism, but rather that they were drowning in disgust for the bourgeois’ double morality and hypocrisy. “Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values … those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the content itself” (Arendt).

Furthermore, early 20th century German discourse had exhausted the vital appeal of ideologies because they have all been attacking and debunking each other repeatedly in public discourse, resulting in a situation in which “all traditional values and propositions had evaporated” making it easier to accept blatantly absurd contradictions.

These bastions of righteousness and guardians of truth were fine with Nazism’s blatant forgery of history because they have become fully cynical from the hypocrisy of the bourgeois mentality and the inherent bias in history. “They were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce themselves clearly enough in totalitarian propaganda. They had convinced themselves that traditional historiography was a forgery In any case, since it had excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind” (Arendt). In short, they lost their belief in the notion of truth, or at the very least, the human capacity to sustain it.

Two additional reasons helped convince the elite. Firstly, the mass’s lack of self-interest was a profoundly seductive force which gave authority and credence to the leadership of the mob. Secondly, the very nature of totalitarian movements — the collapse of reality into the political, and society into the party — presented itself as a radical solution to what Marx identified as an alienating separation between the public and private sphere. “The totalitarian movements’ spurious claim to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man” (Arendt).

Conclusion

Throughout our Marxian analysis of Arendt, two learnings seem extremely important and pertinent in our age as the information economy further atomicizes the worker and alienates the individual.

Firstly, in the long run, society pays the price of sanity and truth for blatant hypocrisy and virtue signaling. The bourgeois’ double morality obliterated any basis to even discuss the validity of liberal and humanitarian values and cultivated a cynicism that eventually lead to a rejection of truth.

Secondly, social problems should be taken with utmost seriousness because, if left unchecked, seemingly trivial matters such as the alienation from the production line can rapidly surmount into societies over-correcting and descending into total chaos. Marx proceeded the Nazis by decades yet his profound insights into societal problems were left unresolved and were the primary motivations for each of the four classes to align themselves with totalitarianism. Even the mob can be seen as, as I have argued, victims of alienation.

I will end this essay with a paragraph-long quote from Arendt describing how an artist who wanted to expose bourgeois hypocrisy through a play portraying businessmen as gangsters and gangsters as businessmen was shocked when the irony was lost on everyone. People took it as a normative guide. This paragraph is a perfect analogy for the social circumstances under which totalitarianism took hold and is a stark reminder for us to guard against and work on seemingly innocuous societal problems that, left unchecked can be devastating:

Particularly significant in this respect was the reception given Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessman as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so that the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution” was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.

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