The only way I can understand this book being held in high regard is that it reads like a thriller for a certain type of intellect and it conveys exciting feelings that are easily mistaken for profundity.
A professor friend tells me: “Her thing was against the public private distinction, in favor of some sort of Greek model of public life. I’ve never seen the point of her stuff.”
Another prof says: “I’ve always felt she was an extremely over-rated thinker and writer. She seems like one of those people that pretentious journalists like to cite to back up their own half-baked ideas. Assertions supported by unsupported assertions. Like you I was curious to see what people said in book reviews. And it was just what you described: Stupid generalizations and speculations with no arguments, mixed with the odd truism, reported as breathtaking “insights”. Pretty pathetic that such a mediocrity is acclaimed as a deep thinker, but it’s not unusual.”
A bud says: “I think there was a market for a lady political theorist. And, to be fair, “the banality of evil” is a catchy phrase.”
Any coincidence between Hannah Arendt’s assertions in this book and reality are purely accidental. This is a work of theory for which little evidence is provided. I can assert to you that 17 angels can dance on the head of a pin, but so what? How is my assertion any less valuable than Arendt’s assertion that “The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class”?
People such as Donald Trump can assert all they want that voter fraud determined the 2020 election but without evidence, these assertions are just rants. The Origins Of Totalitarianism is similarly just a rant. I’m sure there has to be something accurate and profound in there, but why waste the time to dig for it amidst all the pointless opinions?
What do you do when you start reading a highly regarded book that you’re finding it tedious? I start looking for reviews of the book. I did so in this case and none of them matched my own thinking. Then I looked for a study guide to the book to get a handle on it. That was useful, but I still couldn’t find what was I looking for. So then I started emailing people I respected to get their perspective. When their experience matched mine, I felt at peace.
When Donald Trump took office in January of 2017, sales for Arendt’s book took off and there were all sorts of think pieces published that year about the relevance of Origins for our current situation. Karen Greenberg wrote April 14, 2017 for The New Republic: “Her concerns are clearly present before us, now, in the United States. Public displays of racism and xenophobia are on the rise. The White House has issued yet another Muslim ban alongside a refugee ban. Anti-Semitic incidents are skyrocketing around the country. Imperialism as well is an unmistakable part of the language of Trump and his administration: “America First,” has become the administration’s policy mantra, along with an escalation in drone strikes, a willingness to alienate long-standing allies including the UK, Germany, Australia and Sweden, and a drum roll to war with North Korea, and maybe Syria. The instability of the nation-state as we know it alongside the rise of transnational groups are eroding political institutions in America, much like the erosion Arendt saw in Germany.”
So how much totalitarianism did we experience during the Trump years?
Hakim Bashara writes Jan. 19, 2021 for Hyperallergic.com: “A Trump executive order that includes erecting a statue for Hannah Arendt, the political thinker who dedicated her scholarship to understanding the roots of totalitarianism, struck many as a new height of irony.”
Ironic how?
From Jewish Insider Jan. 18, 2021:
Of the many names included in President Donald Trump’s executive order on Monday expanding on a previous mandate to establish a statue park called the “National Garden of American Heroes,” one that stands out as particularly unexpected is Hannah Arendt, the German-born Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the United States, where she became an American citizen in 1951.
For those even passingly familiar with Arendt’s oeuvre, including her best-known work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Trump’s announcement no doubt came as a surprise — and a jarring one at that. Over the past four years, Arendt’s writings — including her famous coinage, “the banality of evil,” a phrase she invented after witnessing Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem — were repeatedly invoked as opinion columnists, professors and other pundits endeavored to make sense of the president’s apparent flirtation with autocracy, so often that it has become something of a journalistic cliché.
On social media, Arendt’s inclusion in Trump’s list was, predictably, singled out.
But what would Arendt have made of Trump’s executive order? It’s impossible to say, of course — she died in 1975 at the age of 69 — but those who are in a position to speculate offered varying takes.
“I think she would be appalled,” Roger Berkowitz, who directs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College — on whose campus Arendt is buried and where she taught for many years — told Jewish Insider on Monday evening. “I think Arendt would find it ridiculous that Trump nominated her. I think she would find Trump ridiculous, and I think she’d find him dangerous insofar as he undermines the basic idea of truthfulness and truth in the country. His attack on the election she would have found abhorrent and dangerous.”
“Trump is everything she hated,” Berkowitz added. “That said, so is 90% of our politics, and she would have seen, for the most part, Trump as a symptom of what is wrong with our politics. What makes him exceptional is just his absolute lack of shame and his willingness to flout all common norms and standards.”
Who cares how this pointless pontificator would have reacted to getting a statute?
Thomas Edsall writes Jan. 6, 2021 in the New York Times:
As Congress is set to affirm the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, the words of Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany after being arrested in 1933, acquire new relevance.
In 1967, Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker:
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”
The fragility of democracy had long been apparent. In 1951, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt wrote:
“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.”
Totalitarianism required first blurring and then erasing the line between falsehood and truth, as Arendt famously put it:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true ….”
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
And here’s Arendt in “Truth and Politics” again, sounding like she is talking about contemporary politics:
“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.”
America in 2021 is a very different time and a very different place from the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, but we should still listen to what Arendt is saying and heed her warning.
David Brooks wrote for the Times Mar. 22, 2018: “People like Hannah Arendt and Irving Howe believed that if you stood alone and researched carefully and hard, you could transcend your own background and render independent and objective judgments about society.”
Steve Sailer notes: “David’s background has nothing to do with his choice of Hannah Arendt and Irving Howe as examples…”
Anonymous posted to Steve Sailer in 2013: “What does Heidegger have to say about race that makes him worth listening to? Or Arendt? They aren’t Natural Scientists and even if they were, much water has flowed under the bridge since they lived and breathed. This is precisely why I didn’t go on to grad school in the humanities and decided to get another bachelors but this time in hard science.”
At the time of her 1951 publication or Origins, many men wanted to bang Hannah Arendt, so I get why they would want to praise her book, but why venerate it now? Does she deserve affirmative action pokeymon diversity points for being a lady philosopher who fucked Heidegger and fled Germany with an exotic look and an exuberant personality?
This book reads like a collection of Zman blog posts.
According to GradeSaver.com:
The People
The “People” are the citizens of a nation-state. They come from the Third Estate of the French Revolution—they are the people who work. They form the body politic and are the ultimate source of authority in the functioning nation-state. They are often mistaken for the Mob or the Masses, both of which are degenerations of the People. In the mid-19th century, the People get split into classes, allowing for the Mob and the Masses to make their appearance.
The Mob
The Mob consists of the refuse of all classes of society. According to Arendt, they search for a strong-man or great leader to follow. They always use extra-parliamentary (and often violent) means to accomplish political goals since they are not represented by parties that are based on the classes they have been ejected from. The Mob was harnessed by the elite in the Dreyfus Affair to further antisemitic goals. The Mob also plays a role in imperialism, allying with capital in the case of the pan-movements and the Boers in South Africa.
The Masses
The Masses refers to the mass of isolated, atomized individuals that is created by the destruction of the nation-state and the accumulation of capital during imperialism. The Masses are not the same as the Mob. While the Mob is the refuse of all classes, the Masses are created by the apparent liquidation of classes. The Masses are the basis of totalitarian movements, which rely on a mass of humans who have lost all relations to their fellow man.
…Arendt argues that by “pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them,” which proves to be much more than merely the abolition of essential freedoms, but rather amounts to the wholesale eradication of “the love for freedom from the hearts of man” (466).
How does Arendt know what is going on in the hearts of man?
Gradesaver: “For Arendt, the history of the 19th and 20th centuries is the history of the failure of the Rights of Man.”
How can something which does not exist, such as the Rights of Man, fail?
Gradesaver: “The failure began with the triumph of the bourgeois over the citoyen and the death of the nation-state, and culminated with the crisis of the 20th century. When the world wars created a mass of stateless people, the nations of the world—which supposedly exist to realize and defend the Rights of Man—were unable to incorporate these refugees. Thus, their “rights” as men went unrecognized.”
How exactly did the bourgeois triumph over the citoyen? On what basis does she claim this? Nation-states did not die prior to WWII nor after WWII. Where does she get the idea that the purpose of nation-states is to realize and defend the Rights of Man? There are no such rights. The purpose of a state is to survive. Non-citizens have no rights. The only rights that exist are those that a nation-state chooses to extend to its citizens at a particular time and place.
Gradesaver: “For Arendt, the Rights of Man are untenable because they cannot be enforced by human political institutions, and Edmund Burke’s alternative of the “Rights of Englishmen” is preferable since the nation offers stable ground which can serve as the source of rights.”
Finally she makes some sense. John J. Mearsheimer noted in his book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities:
One can make the case that it is dangerous to think in terms of universal rights in a world of nation-states. Doing so risks giving people the impression that there is some higher authority—maybe some international institution—empowered to protect their rights. In fact, there is no such entity; states protect an individual’s rights, not some superior authority. Hannah Arendt saw the problem: “The Rights of Man . . . had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” 98 She maintained that stateless people and unwanted minorities residing inside nation-states live in grave danger, because there is no enforcement mechanism to defend their rights, including the right to life, if they come under attack. “The abstract nakedness of being nothing but human,” she argued, “was their greatest danger.”
Arendt’s solution was to eschew talk of universal rights and instead emphasize “nationally guaranteed rights.” In this she aligned herself with Edmund Burke, who “opposed the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man” and instead made the case that rights “spring ‘from within the nation.’” For Arendt, as for Burke, “It was much wiser to rely on an ‘entailed inheritance’ of rights which one transmits to one’s children like life itself, and to claim one’s rights to be the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.” 100 Her opposition to this universalist strand of liberalism was driven in good part by concerns about survival.
Gradesaver: “Superfluousness is a recurring theme in Arendt’s work used to describe the status of men who have lost their relations to other men and have been rendered superfluous to society.”
Nations are extended families. Those who are outside the nation but still inside the state are generally considered superfluous unless they have special skills or assets. This is not a new fact of life. It has ever been such.
Gradesaver: “This touches on a problem that still plagues political theory today and is a common theme in Arendt’s work: the seeming opposition of liberalism and democracy. Phenomena such as the mob or the masses make it seem as though the democratic rule of the people will be antiliberal and that liberal rule is only possible if a few experts control the government. Ostensibly this antinomy was not a problem for the thinkers of the French Revolution, but it is a problem that, since the 19th century, has tasked the present.”
When nationalism and liberalism collide, nationalism always wins. Liberalism is an artificial construct based on a fantasy about people as primarily individuals with inalienable rights. Nationalism is natural based on the understanding that people are primarily members of a group, a tribe, a family, a nation. The world has steadily become less liberal and democratic since 2007 according to Freedom House since liberalism and democracy have not been found to be more useful on the margin for many states than the alternatives.
Arendt: “The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies—which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest—well-nigh impossible.” (137)
The human heart has always been such. Man has always sought unlimited money and power. This is not new to the 19th and 20th Centuries and there is nothing about this eternal human condition that makes new political bodies impossible.
* Gradesaver: “There are few limits on bureaucracy’s power to expand, and its decisions are kept completely secret from most people. As a result, most people only experience bureaucracy as a series of events happening in their lives, but these events are not at all explained by reason. This is different from the ideal of governance in a democratic republic, where citizens can comprehend the laws that govern them, and thus can judge and deliberate about them.”
What a shocking insight! The way governments work is different from the ideal. Who would have thought that? There has never been a modern democratic republic where citizens comprehend the laws that govern them and then judge and deliberate about them. Bureaucracies always develop a power of their own that is largely impervious to check in the courts, by the executive and by the legislature.
* Arendt: “Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the candidates [of the 1932 German election] lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened—afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo. In this general fear all class divisions disappeared from the political scene.”
Class divisions did not disappear but they were superseded by more primal human instincts — the will to live. In 1932, Germany was headed for total government — the choice was only between total government of the right or of the left.
Gradesaver: “Arendt is arguing that the rejection of reality in a totalitarian era is a two-sided phenomenon. Not only do those within the totalitarian regime reject reality and live in a land of fiction cultivated by propaganda, but those outside the regime refuse to face the reality of the atrocities happening. By rejecting the normal world as irrational, the totalitarian regime begins through its actions to make the normal world irrational.”
What evidence does Arendt have that people in total regimes believe the propaganda? And why should outsiders “face the reality of the atrocities happening.” They can’t do anything about it. The reality of human nature is that people do not care about out-groups.
Gradesaver: “Here Arendt is arguing that the lawlessness of the totalitarian regime and their complete disregard for the consent of the governed follows logically from their raising of historical and natural law to an ideal. When man becomes identical with the movement of the laws of history, he is merely a means to its end and no longer acts according to will or spontaneity. Since the consent of the governed is only required because laws are made and fulfilled in practice by the free will and action of man, when these things are lacking, it becomes completely superfluous to the hyper-rationalized execution of natural and historical laws.”
I’ve got a simpler explanation — the strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must.
* Arendt: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” (478)
How does she know? By what measures are people headed for total government more objectively lonely than other people?
Hannah Arendt writes:
* Drunkenness and incompetence, which loom so large in any description of Russia in the twenties and thirties and are still widespread today, played no role whatsoever in the story of Nazi Germany, while the unspeakable gratuitous cruelty in the German concentration and extermination camps seems to have been largely absent from the Russian camps, where the prisoners died of neglect rather than of torture. Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime but apparently has been entirely absent from China after the revolution… Absolute monarchy, no doubt, was a very different affair in Spain, in France, in England, in Prussia; still it was everywhere the same form of government. Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the “theoreticians,” for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible. (1966 Introduction)
* …Hitler, who during his lifetime exercised a fascination to which allegedly no one was immune, 1 and who after his defeat and death is today so thoroughly forgotten…
* Hitler’s rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule 3 and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large populations, survived many interior and exterior crises, and braved the numerous dangers of relentless intra-party struggles if they had not had the confidence of the masses… Nor can their popularity be attributed to the victory of masterful and lying propaganda over ignorance and stupidity. For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones… Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda…
* The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet “deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever.” 6 The disturbing factor in the success of totalitarianism is rather the true selflessness of its adherents…
[LF: This is bogus. There is no evidence that mobs are less moral than individuals. Also, the motives of those pushing totalitarianism tended to be mixed in the same way that those who oppose totalitarianism tend to have mixed motives. People are complicated. Sometimes a total government is a rational response to reality just as dictatorship is the most prudent form of government at times for a state to survive a crisis. It’s a lot easier to have human rights when you have no enemies on your doorstep. A weakness of Arendt’s analysis is a lack of awareness of things like cultural dimensions. Some cultures are individualistic and others put the group first. Totalitarianism is less likely to develop in an individualistic culture.]
* The Nazis, who had an unfailing instinct for such differences, used to comment contemptuously on the shortcomings of their Fascist allies while their genuine admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party in Germany) was matched and checked only by their contempt for Eastern European races.
* …Nazism, up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over Europe, lagged so far behind its Russian counterpart in consistency and ruthlessness; even the German people were not numerous enough to allow for the full development of this newest form of government. Only if Germany had won the war would she have known a fully developed totalitarian rulership…
* Conversely, the chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the lands of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China, where there is almost inexhaustible material to feed the power-accumulating and man-destroying machinery of total domination, and where, moreover, the mass man’s typical feeling of superfluousness—an entirely new phenomenon in Europe, the concomitant of mass unemployment and the population growth of the last 150 years—has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for the value of human life…. Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.
* Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization.
[LF: Total movements are possible when total movements bring an adaptive advantage to a challenging reality.]
* The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one’s own or somebody else’s party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions.
[LF: Most people have no rational reason to care about politics. Despite this, people are not naive. So Hannah Arendt is stupid to think that new forms of propaganda caused people to support things against their own interest. Democracy is a tricky thing. It has come to mean rule by discussion of elected representatives but a dictator may well better represent majority sentiment than the legislations of parliaments.]
* It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devilish cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the class system, the only social and political stratification of the European nation-states, certainly was “one of the most dramatic events in recent German history” 18 and as favorable to the rise of Nazism as the absence of social stratification in Russia’s immense rural population (this “great flaccid body destitute of political education, almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling action” 19 ) was to the Bolshevik overthrow of the democratic Kerensky government. Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers implicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with the end of the second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown of the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries, while events in Russia clearly indicate the direction which the inevitable revolutionary changes in Asia may take. Practically speaking, it will make little difference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of Nazism or Bolshevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics.
[LF: So to preserve democracy, our ruling elites have decided since WWII to restrict the realm of the political. The working class is no longer to be trusted, neither is free speech. Tracy B. Strong noted in his Introduction to Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political: “An intellectual consequence of the experience with Nazism was to effectively shrink, perhaps one might say homogenize, the language and terms of political debate in the subsequent period. As the Nazi experience fades from consciousness (at just over sixty years of age, I am among the last to have been born during the war and to have been taught by those with adult consciousness during the war), so also possibilities excluded by the specter of Auschwitz have returned. The revival of interest in Schmitt is consequent, I believe, to this increasing distance from the 1930s.”]
* Indifference to public affairs, neutrality on political issues, are in themselves no sufficient cause for the rise of totalitarian movements. The competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy and even hostility toward public life…Both the early apathy and the later demand for monopolistic dictatorial direction of the nation’s foreign affairs had their roots in a way and philosophy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual’s success or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen’s duties and responsibilities could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and energy. These bourgeois attitudes are very useful for those forms of dictatorship in which a “strong man” takes upon himself the troublesome responsibility for the conduct of public affairs; they are a positive hindrance to totalitarian movements which can tolerate bourgeois individualism no more than any other kind of individualism.
[LF: Indifference to public affairs is rational as there is nothing the individual can do about them. It is not peculiar to the bourgeoisie state.]
* The masses share with the mob only one characteristic, namely, that both stand outside all social ramifications and normal political representation.
[LF: What does that mean and how is it possibly true?]
* membership in a class, its limited group obligations and traditional attitudes toward government, prevented the growth of a citizenry that felt individually and personally responsible for the rule of the country. This apolitical character of the nation-state’s populations came to light only when the class system broke down and carried with it the whole fabric of visible and invisible threads which bound the people to the body politic.
[LF: This book reads like a series of assertions for which the author feels no compulsion to provide any evidence.]
* The parties, consequently, became more and more psychological and ideological in their propaganda, more and more apologetic and nostalgic in their political approach.
[LF: And where is the evidence for this?]
* The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.
[LF: Ties of blood and soil and religion tend to tie people together, not political ideology. Absent ties of blood, soil and religion, people may abstain from slitting each other’s throats in response to incentives, but they feel little in common with each other. Citizenship is a poor substitute for nationalism.]
* The gigantic massing of individuals produced a mentality which, like Cecil Rhodes some forty years before, thought in continents and felt in centuries.
[LF: These are stirring words, but where’s the evidence?]
* The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.
{LF: How does she know?]
* Neither tribal nationalism nor rebellious nihilism is characteristic of or ideologically appropriate to the masses as they were to the mob.
[LF: Which masses exactly were indifferent to nationalism? Not the masses of Germany and Russia. Arendt is apparently speaking of masses who exist only in her imagination. No wonder she did want to provide any evidence for her assertions.]
* But the most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen from the mob rather than from the masses. 23 Hitler’s biography reads like a textbook example in this respect, and the point about Stalin is that he comes from the conspiratory apparatus of the Bolshevik party with its specific mixture of outcasts and revolutionaries. Hitler’s early party, almost exclusively composed of misfits, failures, and adventurers, indeed represented the “armed bohemians” 24 who were only the reverse side of bourgeois society and whom, consequently, the German bourgeoisie should have been able to use successfully for its own purposes. Actually, the bourgeoisie was as much taken in by the Nazis as was the Röhm-Schleicher faction in the Reichswehr, which also thought that Hitler, whom they had used as a stool-pigeon, or the SA, which they had used for militaristic propaganda and paramilitary training, would act as their agents and help in the establishment of a military dictatorship.
[LF: The people who supported the Nazis did so out of their perception of their self-interest. By and large, people were not “taken in” by the Nazis. Those Germans whose views generally aligned with the Nazis supported them and those whose views did not align opposed the Nazis. People did not evolve to be gullible. Hannah Arendt apparently views the great masses of people who went along with total approaches to governance as stupid when there is more evidence that they were self-interested and rational. I tend to discount intellectuals who fall back on the lazy argument that the reason the great mass of people do as they do is because they’re stupid.]
* That totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass, can best be seen in a comparison of Nazism and Bolshevism which began in their respective countries under very different circumstances. To change Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship into full totalitarian rule, Stalin had first to create artificially that atomized society which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historical circumstances.
[LF: I think you would find a lot of countries far more atomized than 1930s/1940s Germany and Russia, such as the United States and England at the same time, and yet these more individualistic countries did not become totalitarian.]
* All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin’s way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government.
[LF: So it was not totalitarian under Lenin? The affirmative action empire of the Soviet Union under Lenin continued with its affirmative action after Stalin took power. This is a very German book with tons of theories and a complete lack of interest in providing empirical evidence for these lofty ideas.]
