Hannah Arendt: Terror and Ideology as the Essence of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt: terror and ideology as the essence of totalitarianism

The recognized forms of government are few in number and have remained much the same in history ever since the Greeks analyzed and classified them to include oligarchy, monarchy, despotism, republic and democracy. It is claim of Hannah Arendt in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951) that totalitarianism is a new form of government, inaugurated in the course of the 20th century by the regimes of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler (Canovan, 2000). It is not just considered by the philosopher as another form of tyranny, although it is possible to notice a great number of similarities, but as an unique ad novel development, indeed, the ultimate and most terrible tyranny (Baehr, 2010).

Russian Bolshevism and German National Socialism, which are the first and most known examples of totalitarian regimes, not only were responsible for the most devastating war in human history, which caused the death of around 36 million human beings. Bolshevik and Nazi aggressive ideology also created camps and slave labor colonies that murdered millions more (Daniel, 2010).

What caused a similar explosion of violence and hate? Why did people permit it? What made totalitarianism so novel and demoniac?

A large number of philosophers, sociologists and political theorists, many of which had experienced in first person the horrible manifestations of violence of totalitarian systems, tried to find an answer to these questions (Baehr, 2010). Probably, there is no writer who asked these questions more searchingly, or arrived at more interesting answers to them, than Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a thinker of Jewish-German origin who, following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor, and her own detention by the German police, fled Berlin in 1933 (Swift, 2009).

Her study of totalitarianism is not, however, simply an historical analysis of a phenomenon that reached its conclusion with the...