Hannah Arendt
THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM: FIFTY YEARS LATER
Volume 69 No. 2 (Summer 2002)
Arien Mack, Editor
Jerome Kohn, Guest Co-Editor
1.2.1. Table of Contents, Abstracts, and Notes on Contributors
Co-Editor's Note
The editor of Social Research, Arien Mack, and I both thought that it would be appropriate and of interest to begin this issue with a hitherto unpublished selection of Hannah Arendt’s writings that immediately followed the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Origins was first published in 1951 and that same year Arendt submitted a proposal to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a book that she described as follows:
The most serious gap in The Origins of Totalitarianism is the lack of an adequate historical and conceptual analysis of the ideological background of Bolshevism. This omission was deliberate. All other elements that eventually crystallized into the totalitarian movements and forms of government can be traced back into subterranean currents in Western history, emerging only when and where the traditional social and political framework of European nations had broken down. Racism and imperialism, the tribal nationalism of the pan-movements and antisemitism, bear no relation to the great political and philosophical traditions of the West. The shocking originality of totalitarianism, the fact that its ideologies and methods of governing were entirely unprecedented and that its causes defied proper explanation in the usual historical terms, is easily overlooked if one lays too much stress on the only element that has behind it a respectable tradition and whose critical discussion requires a criticism of some of the chief tenets of Western political philosophy: Marxism.1
The new book was originally to be called Totalitarian Elements in Marxism, but as Arendt began work on it she became convinced of what she had only given a hint at the end of the final sentence in the description just quoted: namely, that her study could not be adequately undertaken without first thoroughly examining the entire tradition of philosophic and political thought. She realized that Marx not only stood firmly in that tradition but also that with Marx that tradition had come full circle: in an extremely complicated way it had come back to its origins and thus, as she said later, “culminated and found its end.”2 Henceforth Arendt’s working title for the book became Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought, which is the overall title of the two manuscripts from which the selections published here are taken (the title of the first manuscript omits the word “Western”). The first selection bears the subtitle “The Broken Thread of Tradition” and the second “The Modern Challenge to Tradition.”
Arendt’s proposed book was never completed. Although parts of it were incorporated into The Human Condition, On Revolution, and Between Past and Future, approximately a thousand pages are prepared for or relevant to the work on Marx in the Library of Congress. Some of these materials were delivered as lectures for the Christian Gauss Seminar at Princeton University in 1953, others at Notre Dame University the following year, and still others elsewhere. To read these manuscript pages is not easy: they are disordered, cut up and pasted together for the various lectures, and for that reason also at times repetitive. More than anything else, however, their difficulty stems from the fact that in the early 1950s Arendt’s mind was extraordinarily fecund, literally brimming over with ideas that were written down in white heat in a decidedly Germanized English. The sentences, and consequently the paragraphs, are often far too long and unwieldy; in addition, as she used to say and here exemplified, “the English language has no rules where the adverbs go.” Nevertheless, to immerse oneself in these texts is metaphorically to swim in a sea of ideas that would later be thematized in distinctive ways in Arendt’s published works throughout the rest of her life. These thematizations can be generally characterized as reflecting the tension that Arendt keenly felt between what she sometimes called thinking and acting and sometimes philosophy and politics. All the Marx manuscripts have been collected and edited and will be published under a title that tries to capture that tension at the moment it first became apparent to her: Karl Marx and the Problem of Political Philosophy.
The following selections, while suggesting some totalitarian elements in Marxism and some of the problems Arendt found in Western political thought, are really an introduction to the full story she told about Marx.
Jerome Kohn,
Guest Co-Editor
Table of Contents "Hannah Arendt Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought"
George Kateb
Ideology and Storytelling
Antonia Grunenberg
Totalitarian Lies and Post-Totalitarian Guilt: The Question of Ethics in Democratic Politics
Richard Bernstein
The Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics
Margaret Canovan
The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Hannah Arendt’s “Populism ”
Jacques Taminiaux
The Philosophical Stakes in Arendt's Genealogy of Totalitarianism
Claude Lefort
Thinking With and Against Hannah Arendt
Jonathan Schell
A Politics of Natality
Andrew Arato
Dictatorships Before and Beyond Totalitarianism
Jeffrey Isaac
Hannah Arendt on Human Rights and the Limits of Exposure, or Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong about the Meaning of Kosovo
Seyla Benhabib
Political Geographies in a Global World: Arendtian Reflections
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl
On the Origins of a New Totalitarianism
Roy Tsao
The Evolution and Structure of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism
Jerome Kohn
Arendt’s Concept and Description of Totalitarianism
Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)
Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago, and was University Professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research from 1968 until her death in 1975. Her books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964), Between Past and Future (1968), Men in Dark Times (1968), and The Life of the Mind (1975).
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Ideology and Storytelling
George Kateb
George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University. His books include Utopia and its Enemies and The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, winner of the 1994 Spitz Book Prize by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought.
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Totalitarian Lies and Post-Totalitarian Guilt: The Question of Ethics in Democratic Politics
Antonia Grunenberg
Antonia Grunenberg is Director of the Hannah Arendt-Zentrum, Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet Oldenburg. Her publications include Die Lust an der Schuld [The Desire for Guilt: The burden of the past on the political realm](2001) and the article on Arendt in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001).
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The Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics
Richard J. Bernstein
Richard J. Bernstein is Dean of the Graduate Faculty and Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School University. He is the author of Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (2002). His previous work includes Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996) and Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998).
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The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Hannah Arendt’s “Populism ”
Margaret Canovan
Margaret Canovan is Professor at Keele University. Her recent publications include Nationhood and Political Theory (1996) and Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (1992). She is currently working on a book about the concept of “the people”.
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The Philosophical Stakes in Arendt's Genealogy of Totalitarianism
Jacques Taminiaux
Jacques Taminiaux is Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and the founder and Director of the Centre d'Études phénoménologiques at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is co-editor of The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (with Gendre, 1998).
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Thinking With and Against Hannah Arendt
Claude Lefort
Claude Lefort is at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France.
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A Politics of Natality
Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Schell, The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is a Visiting Professor in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty, New School University. His books include The Unfinished Twentieth Century (2001) and The Fate of the Earth (1999).
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Dictatorships Before and Beyond Totalitarianism
Andrew Arato
Andrew Arato is Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Sociology and Co-Cha ir of the Committee for Democratic Studies at the New School University’s Graduate Faculty. He is the author of From neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory (1993). His essay “Good-bye to Dictatorships?” appeared in Social Research (66:3, Fall 2000).
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Hannah Arendt on Human Rights and the Limits of Exposure, or Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong about the Meaning of Kosovo
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University. He is the author of Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (1992) and Democracy in Dark Times (1997).
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Political Geographies in a Global World: Arendtian Reflections
Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Her publications include The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (forthcoming, 2002).
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On the Origins of a New Totalitarianism
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is on the faculty at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and has a private practice in psychoanalysis in New York City. She has published Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, A Biography (1982) and has authored many books, including The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996).
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The Evolution and Structure of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism
Roy T. Tsao
Roy T. Tsao teaches political theory in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. His book Arendt’s Arguments will be published by Cambridge University Press.
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Arendt’s Concept and Description of Totalitarianism
Jerome Kohn
Jerome Kohn is Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at new School University. He is the editor of a series of volumes of Arendt’s unpublished and uncollected works, and has written numerous essays on various aspects of her thought.
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