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Authority in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Hannah Arendt
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Extract

The rise of fascist, communist and totalitarian movements and the development of the two totalitarian regimes, Stalin's after 1929 and Hitler's after 1938, took place against a background of a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities. Nowhere was this breakdown the direct result of the regimes or movements themselves, but it seemed as though totalitarianism, in the form of regimes as well as of movements, was best fitted to take advantage of a general political and social atmosphere in which the validity of authority itself was radically doubted.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 1956 , pp. 403 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1956

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References

1 The first to use this argument seems to be Aristotle, when in his Politics he wished to demonstrate that “every political community is composed of those who rule and those who are ruled” (1332b12). There he said: “Nature herself has provided the distinction … (between) the younger and the older ones, of whom she fitted the ones to be ruled and the others to rule” (1332b36).

2 The formulation is Lord Acton's in his “Inaugural Lecture on the ‘Study of History’” reprinted in Essays on Freedom and Power (New York, 1955), p. 35.Google Scholar

3 This formulation occurs frequently in Nazi literature. We quote here from Heinrich Himmler, “Die Schutzstaffel als antibolschewistische Kampforganisation.” Schriften aus dem Schwarzen Korps, No. 3, 1936.Google Scholar

4 The most interesting item in this literature is Maunz, Theodor, Gestalt und Recht der Polizei (Hamburg, 1943)Google Scholar. Mr. Maunz is one of the very small number of legal experts in the Third Reich who had fully succeeded in cleansing himself of the “prejudice” that the notion of Law has a certain connection with the concept of justice. His is the best conceptualization of Nazi “legal” practice.

5 Quite characteristic is the speech of Stalin on the occasion of the publication of the Soviet Constitution of 1936.

6 For the principle: “Der Wille des Fuehrers ist oberstes Gesetz,” see for instance Gauweiler, Otto, Rechtseinrichtungen und Rechtsaufgaben der Bewegung (1939), p. 10Google Scholar. Also, Best, Werner, Die Deutsche Polizei (1941), p. 21Google Scholar: “Der Wille der Fuehrung, gleich in welcher Form er zum Ausdruck gelangt…, schafft Recht und aendert bisher geltendes Recht ab.” There exist numerous documents which show clearly that there could be a great difference between an order and the will of the Fuehrer. See for instance PS 3063 of the Nuremberg Documents which reports on the pogroms of November 1938: The order to the SA-men in charge of the pogroms demanded that they cany their pistols, but the implication was that “every SA-man should know now what he must do …, that Jewish blood should flow, that according to the will of the leadership the life of a Jew did not matter.” (My italics.) A reliable Nazi was not the one who obeyed unquestioningly the orders of Hitler, but who was able to discern Hitler's “will” behind these orders. Needless to say that this “will” was always more radical than the orders. In the formulation of Frank, Hans, Technik des Staates (Munich, 1940)Google Scholar: “Der kategorische Imperativ des Handelns im Dritten Reich lautet: Handle so, dass der Fuehrer, wenn er von Deinem Handeln Kenntnis haette, dieses Handeln billigen wuerde.”

7 The most famous of these decrees is of course the ordinance with which Hitler started the second World War and which, on September 1, 1939, ordered “alien unheilbar Kranken den Gnadentod zu gewaehren.”—But there exist a great many similar decrees, from 1933 onwards, which were valid law in the Third Reich and yet were never published. They were collected by Martin Bormann during the war into 5 large volumes under the title Verfuegungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben, indicating in the Preface: “Nur fuer interne Parteiarbeit bestimmt und als geheim zu behandeln.” A set of the first four volumes is in the Archives of the Hoover Library at Stanford, Cal.

8 For this plan of Hitler for the post-war period, see Nuremberg documents published in Vol. 8 of Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, 1946), pp. 175 ff.Google Scholar

9 Only a detailed description and analysis of the very original organizational structure of totalitarian movements could justify the use of the onion-image. I must refer to the chapter on “Totalitarian Organization” in my book The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951).Google Scholar

10 The formulation: “Recht ist was der Bewegung nuetzt” appears very early, see for instance Dienstvorschrift fuer die P.O. dess NSDAP, 1932, p. 38Google Scholar, which preceded the later Organisationsbuch der NSDAP that carries the same sentence among the “duties of party-members” in all its editions.