Exposing Totalitarianism — A Kafkaesque Tragedy
Investigating Hannah Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt was one of the prominent political theorists of the 20th-century. She is celebrated for her original thinking and theorizing style, which is particularly apparent in her work on totalitarianism.
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, she was, as a Jew, compelled to flee Germany. Roughly two decades later, she published her major work The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, which illustrates quite well her original style. In a word, the book is a curious mixture of philosophy, history, and sociology.
Nevertheless, Arendt’s objective in Origins was rather simple. She argued that totalitarianism was a modern phenomenon — a novel and an exclusively modern form of government. In this way, she differs from the critics like Karl Kopper who tried to find totalitarian roots from Western philosophical heritage.
Arendt’s main argument revolves around the concept of total domination, which she considered to be a form of governing that reflects the grotesque side of modern societies. In this article, I mean to explore further what Arendt meant by this concept of total domination.
Destroying the Individual
Totalitarianism often gets mixed with tyranny or dictatorship, both of which are characterized by an individual or small group of people exercising absolute or otherwise authoritarian power over people.
However, the essence of totalitarianism does not lie in the use of absolute power as such. Instead, it lies in what Arendt calls total domination. It refers to the eradication of those human capacities that make resistance possible both in the moral and legal sense of the word.
Because totalitarian governments are highly bureaucratic, they cannot tolerate the spontaneity of individuals because it makes them bureaucratically unmanageable. This is why the ultimate aim of total domination is to eradicate individuality; our natural originality and spontaneity, which make it possible for us to think for ourselves and act autonomously.
Without these founding qualities of individuality, our thoughts and, thereby, our actions become…
