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Is Totalitarianism a New Phenomenon? Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John L. Stanley
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Extract

Contrary to Arendt's claims, totalitarianism is not unique to the modern world. It is found occasionally in past ages and is exemplified in Shaka's rule over the Zulu. It is not clear whether the ideological “logic” of modern dictators differs from the seemingly paranoid behavior of Shaka or of certain ancient despots. Indeed, if Aristotle's account is accurate, certain extreme despots, by definition, treated citizens as slaves or household laborers. They thus projected the private realm into the public, effectively abolishing both; Arendt is wrong to say that modern dictators were the first to do so.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , Spring 1987 , pp. 177 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1987

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References

Notes

1 Burrows, Robert, “Totalitarianism: The Revised Standard Version,” World Politics 21 (01 1969)Google Scholar. As we shall see, Burrows is not entirely hostile to the concept of totalitarianism.

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8 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 509.Google Scholar

9 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. xxxviGoogle Scholar. All further references will be to this edition except as noted.

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11 Ibid., p. 27.

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14 Ibid., p. 280.

15 Ibid., pp. 276–77.

16 Ibid., p. 275.

17 Ibid., p. 277 citing The Origins, p. xxxi.Google Scholar

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19 Aristotle, Politics 1292a17, b8Google Scholar. The translation of SirBarker, Ernest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958)Google Scholar has been used and consulted. I have sometimes altered the phrasing or compared it with Newman, W. L.'s edition of the text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).Google Scholar

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31 Ibid., p. 325.

32 Ibid., p. 373.

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34 Ibid., pp. 345–46.

35 Ibid. Thus in distinguishing leaders' personalities from those of followers, Tucker, Robert C. says, “Hitler would in all probability not have had a successful career in the Reichsbank under Hitler.”Google Scholar See “The Dictator and Totalitarianism,” World Politics 17 (07 1965): 577Google Scholar. For another discussion of this point see Aronson, Ronald, The Dialectics of Disaster (London: NLB, 1985), chap. 2, esp. pp. 37–41.Google Scholar

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37 Ibid., pp. xxvi, xxix.

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39 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 468.Google Scholar

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42 Ibid., p. 458.

43 Ibid., p. 353.

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46 Plato, Republic 576aGoogle Scholar. Cf. 567d; Hiero, , I, 38Google Scholar. Cf. Aristotle who puts into the mouth of the tyrant, “all men want my overthrow, but my friends have the power to effect it; distrust them above all others” (Politics 1313b25).

47 Alliluyeva, Svetlana, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 78.Google Scholar

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49 Alliluyeva, Svetlana, Only One Year (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 205Google Scholar. The author attributes too much responsibility for the terror to Beria. Roy Medvedev says Stalin was a more traditional tyrant motivated by power and jealousy. Distinguishing between real mental illness and various abnormal states, he denies that Stalin was a fully pathological paranoid schizophrenic and insists that he was fully responsible for his actions. Yet he admits Stalin's “morbid suspiciousness” and “serious psychic derangement,” and he compares Stalin's motives to those of Nero: a jealousy of anyone who could outperform him. Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism (London: Spokesman, 1976), pp. 306, 313, 316, 351Google Scholar. Alec Nove, on the other hand, speaks of Stalin, 's “pathological suspiciousness” (Was Stalin Really Necessary [London: Unwin, 1964], p. 29).Google Scholar

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51 Arendt, , The Origins, pp. 417–18.Google Scholar

52 Politics 1314b1 ffGoogle Scholar. This is the observation of Newman, W. L., The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 4, p. lxiGoogle Scholar. Cf. Politics 1285 a-b. See also Section 5 of the present essay for an elaboration of this point.

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54 Arendt, , Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 41.Google Scholar

55 Arendt, , The Origins, pp. 218–21.Google Scholar

56 Moore, , Political Power and Social Theory, pp. 78–79; 35–36.Google Scholar

57 Arendt, , The Origins, pp. 191–92Google Scholar, citing James, Selwyn, South of the Congo (London: John Long, 1944)Google Scholar. However, James refers to Shaka as “a black Hitler” and briefly compares him to modern totalitarians. Cf. p. 19.

58 An observer of Shaka, Nathaniel Isaacs, agreed calling Shaka's regime “Zoolucratical (For I do not know of anything resembling it in either ancient or modern history), a form that defies description or detail that can neither be comprehended nor digested” (Isaacs, , Travels and Adventures in East Africa [Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1936], p. 269; cf. pp. 272, 275).Google Scholar

59 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 470.Google Scholar

60 Ritter, E. A., Shaka Zulu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 354Google Scholar. Citing Fynn, Henry Francis, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1950).Google Scholar

61 Isaacs, , Travels, pp. 95–96, 206, 283Google Scholar; Fynn, , Diary, p. 19.Google Scholar

62 Ritter, E. A., Shaka Zulu, p. 180; cf. p. 290.Google Scholar

63 Arendt, , The Origins, pp. 473, 350, 427. Cf. p. 349Google Scholar where Hitler's “prediction” of the annihilation of European Jews is quoted.

64 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, pp. 163–64.Google Scholar

65 Ritter, , Shaka Zulu, p. 174.Google Scholar

66 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, p. 256.Google Scholar

67 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 192.Google Scholar

68 Isaacs, , Travels, p. 62Google Scholar; Fynn, , Diary, p. 139.Google ScholarWalter, , Terror and Resistance, pp. 253–54.Google Scholar Walter calls such views Grundnorms, touchstones of legitimacy (p. 256).Google Scholar

69 Sansom, Basil, “Traditional Rulers and Their Realms,” in Hammond-Tooke, W. D., The Bantu Speaking Peoples of Southern Africa (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 280.Google Scholar Cf. Gluckman, Max, “The Kingdom of the Zulu of South Africa” in African Political Systems, ed. Fortes, M. and Pritchard, E. Evans (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 31.Google Scholar

70 Fynn, , Diary, pp. 147–48; cf. p. 19.Google Scholar

71 Ibid., pp. 139, 144.

72 Ibid., p. 144.

73 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 415.Google Scholar As with modern totalitarians, Shaka “looked forward … with a sort of prophetic spirit for the day to arrive when all his anticipations should be realized…. The success of his operations soon verified his predictions” (Isaacs, , Travels, p. 273).Google Scholar Shaka made wide use of prophecies which he had carefully stage-managed (see Isaacs, , Travels, pp. 276–80).Google Scholar

74 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, p. 258.Google Scholar

75 Ibid., p. 6.

76 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, pp. 134–35.Google Scholar Cf. Fynn, , Diary, pp. 28–29Google Scholar; Isaacs, , Travels, pp. 62, 92, 131–35.Google Scholar

77 Ibid., p. 135.

78 Moore, , Political Power and Social Theory, p. 35.Google Scholar

79 Fynn is strongly of this opinion. Cf. Diary, pp. 139–44.Google Scholar See also Walter, , Terror and Resistance, pp. 279–89.Google Scholar Similar tendencies are found in ancient China: The Confucian, Chu Hsi, complained bitterly of Shang Yang's “reforms” in which the “evils of disturbance and deception unavoidably arose in the giving and the taking of the land” (Yu-Ning, Li, Shang Yang's Reforms, p. xvi).Google Scholar Hsun Tzu complained of the “terror and apprehension” of unalleviated insecurity (Ibid., p. xix); and the literate complained that under Lord Shang's reforms “the people were terrorized, not knowing where to place their feet” (ibid., xxxiii). See The Book of Lord Shang, trans, by Duyvendak, J. J. L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).Google Scholar We should remember that Arendt distinguishes between genocide or mass killing that clearly has pretotalitarian origins (as in the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks) and the kind of killing carried out by Shaka which “is no longer a means to frighten people” (Arendt, , The Origins, p. 440).Google Scholar That Shaka did engage in mass murder, there is no doubt. Fynn admits that the number of deaths Shaka occasioned “has been left to conjecture, but exceed a million.” Bird, J., Annals of Natal (Pietermaritzburg: Davis, 1888), p. 67.Google ScholarHattersly, A. F. says that “Natal in 1824 was almost completely depopulated” (The British Settlement of Natal [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950], p. 13).Google Scholar

80 Arendt, , The Origins, pp. 365, 369.Google Scholar

81 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, pp. 166, 173.Google Scholar

82 Ibid., p. 191.

83 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 365 n. 62.Google Scholar She notes that Himmler disdained defining the word “Jew” lest it could not be changed.

84 Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p. 164.Google Scholar

85 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 78.Google Scholar

86 Ibid., pp. 374 n. and 325.

87 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, p. 164.Google Scholar Cf. Isaacs, , Travels, p. 133.Google Scholar

88 Suetonius, , The Twelve Caesars (Baltimore: Penguin 1969), pp. 165–66.Google Scholar

89 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 372 n. 82.Google Scholar

90 Ibid., p. 322.

91 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, pp. 153–55.Google Scholar

92 Moore, , Political Power and Social Theory, p. 71.Google Scholar

93 Aristotle Politics 1313b1.

94 Walter, , Terror and Resistance, p. 154.Google Scholar

95 Aristotle Politics 1313b5.

96 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 440.Google Scholar

97 Ibid., pp. 438, 453, 455, 457.

98 Ibid., p. 467.

99 Ibid., p. 465.

100 Ibid., p. 466. In this respect, Arendt's view is the opposite of Joseph Gabel's which argues, in Bergsonian terms, that space, not motion, is the source of ideological thought and false consciousness. For Gabel, the “morbid rationalism” or the various neuroses including dissociation and depersonalization arise from reification, “the preponderance of static, anti-dialectical spatial experience” (Gabel, , False Consciousness: An Essay in Reification, trans. Margaret, and Thompson, Kenneth [New York: Harper, 1978], p. 22).Google Scholar

101 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 474.Google Scholar

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103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., p. 477.

105 Ibid., p. 477, citing Luther, , “Warum die Einsamkeit fliehen,” in Erbauliche Schriften.Google Scholar

106 Aristotle, PoliticsGoogle Scholar 1314a14.

107 Politics 1311b36.

108 Politics 1302b20.

109 Politics 1313b1.

110 Politics 1313bl. See page 196 above.

111 Arendt, , The Origins, p. 475.Google Scholar Italics added.

112 Ibid., pp. 438, 453, 457.

113 Aristotle, Politics 1260b5, 1254b24, 16, 3.Google Scholar Cf. Plato, Phaedo 80a.Google Scholar As Newman puts it, “how any form of moral virtue can subsist without the deliberative faculty Aristotle does not explain” (The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 1, p. 149).Google Scholar

114 Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p. 105.Google Scholar

115 Aristotle Politics 1313b5.

116 Aristotle Politics 1295a16. Cf. 1279b16, where tyranny is defined as “single-person government of the city on the lines of despots” (despotikē). W. L. Newman concludes that in the Politics “the name, tyranny, may be given to any office exercising despotic authority” (The Politics of Aristotle, vol. 4, p. lxi).Google Scholar

117 Politics 1279b7.

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119 Politics 1279a21. Cf. 1292a17 and b8.

120 Politics 1295a21.

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123 Politics 1285b1; 1295a16.

124 Politics 1315b1–5, a5.

125 Politics 1260b2–8.

126 Politics 1252b6.

127 Politics 1260b7, 1314a14, and 1325a25, where it is said that there is “nothing noble in having the use of a slave insofar as he is a slave; or in issuing commands about necessary things.”

128 Politics 1252b7.

129 Politics 1313b34–36.

130 Politics 1313b40; 1325a29.

131 Arendt, , Between Past and Future, p. 106.Google Scholar