Hannah Arendt: 5 Insights into Totalitarianism

If you wanted to kick off your career as one of the century’s most incisive political philosophers, then publishing The Origins of Totalitarianism as your first major work certainly wouldn’t do you any harm.

That’s exactly what Hannah Arendt did in 1951. Her 500+ page debut immediately became the go-to blueprint for understanding the preconditions, rise, and insidious psychology of totalitarian regimes.

Arendt focused on two genuine forms of totalitarian government from her recent history — Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia — which she shrewdly established as two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left.

Written with an authoritative timelessness, her insights remain as piercing and relevant today as ever before.

I cannot hope to convey the depth and rigour of Arendt’s tour de force in this article; but to give you a flavor of her analysis, I’ve compiled five short passages to indicate the roles she thinks propaganda, misinformation, and loneliness play in totalitarian regimes.

(Page number references relate to the 1962 Meridian edition of the book):

1. One of the essential preconditions of totalitarianism is loneliness:

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. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality.

— The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 478. ​

2. A lonely, disenfranchised people become unified by a common set of enemies:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.

— The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 227.

3. Conviction becomes more powerful than truth:

Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong.

— The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 305.

4. In fact, the goal of propaganda is to render people incapable of identifying truth:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

— The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 474.

This is achieved by flooding a lonely society with misinformation, Arendt explains in a related 1967 essay, Truth and Politics:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.

​

5. When people become cynical of truth, their loyalty goes to whoever can evoke the strongest feelings:

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. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

— The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 382.

​What do you make of Arendt’s analysis?

• Do you find her views on the preconditions and methods of totalitarianism compelling?
• How do you think people can combat propaganda?
• How do you decide what to believe online?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Hannah Arendt On Standing Up to the Banality of Evil
• ​Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning​
• ​Hannah Arendt: the Best 6 Books to Read​
• Catherine of Siena on How Wealth Corrupts Justice
• John Rawls: How a ‘Veil of Ignorance’ Can Help Us Build a Just Society
• Isaiah Berlin On Why the Pursuit of the Ideal is Dangerous
• Political Philosophy: the Best 14 Books to Read

Get one famous philosophical idea in your inbox each Sunday

If you enjoyed this article, you might like my free Sunday breakdown. I distill one piece of wisdom from philosophy each week; you get the summary delivered straight to your email inbox, and are invited to share your view. Consider joining 18,000+ subscribers and signing up below:

From the Buddha to Nietzsche: join 18,000+ subscribers enjoying my free Sunday Breakdown

In one concise email each Sunday, I break down a famous idea from philosophy. You get the distillation straight to your inbox.

Join 18,000+ Subscribers

💭 One short philosophical email each Sunday. Unsubscribe any time.