RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every time conservatives win elections and begin to govern effectively, or simply push back against authoritarian manifestations of wokeness, the loudest voices on the Left evoke the specter of fascism. One side effect of this is that books like George Orwell’s 1984 or Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism momentarily become best sellers again. It is simply assumed that both authors took aim at “fascism” broadly define and never saw any enemies on the Left. These subtle books, which belong to neither the Left nor the Right but to the larger cause of liberty and human dignity, are thus instrumentalized for authoritarian “anti-fascist” purposes.

In no way is this a new phenomenon. Walter Cronkite, the longtime CBS news anchor and “the most trusted man in America” in a bygone age, wrote an introduction to an earlier edition of 1984 in which he suggested that the totalitarian nightmare sketched in that powerful and profound book eerily anticipated…Richard Nixon and Watergate. Last year, Anne Applebaum, who once wrote with erudition and gusto about the crimes of Communism, penned an introduction to a new paperback edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she did not mention Communism once and identified Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule in Russia with full-scale totalitarianism. Examples of the systematic abuse of these anti-totalitarian classics could be multiplied.

However, Arendt herself was a political thinker very difficult to pigeonhole. She was a German Jew who despised National Socialism, yet she defended her teacher (and sometime lover) Martin Heidegger against the charge that his apologetics for the same had discredited him philosophically. She worked indefatigably to aid Jewish refugees and displaced persons both before and after the Second World War, yet she was far from a wholehearted Zionist. She honorably resisted the totalitarian temptation in its Communist form, but had an unreasonable distrust of ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers who had borne heroic witness to Communism’s crimes.

Arendt was hardly a conservative, but she had no interest in the kind of shallow liberalism that places naïve confidence in an ideology of Progress; in fact, she compellingly argued that “Progress” and “Doom” were two sides of the same pernicious coin. In a famous 1959 essay in Dissent magazine on the wisdom of federal intervention in Little Rock, Arkansas, she challenged the view that racism and enforced segregation were best fought by eliminating the indispensable distinction between public and private realms.

In classic works like The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1964), Arendt defended politics, the self-government of citizens in the polis, as among the most honorable expressions of our humanity. She cherished America’s contributions to republican liberty and criticized the French revolutionaries, as well as Marx and the Marxist tradition, for eroding political liberty by an inordinate and deforming preoccupation with “the social question,” with the amelioration of poverty and social inequities at all costs. In her later writings, she turned to Plato’s Gorgias to deepen our understanding of the sources of “responsibility and judgment” and to renew an appreciation of the internal dialogue between “me and myself,” which was her version of moral conscience.

Arendt ought to be given credit as the first political philosopher of distinction to wrestle seriously with the phenomenon of totalitarianism, the great human and political novelty of the twentieth century. Her big, baggy book The Origins of Totalitarianism (which could have benefited from more editing) was first published in 1951 and underwent many revisions over the next quarter century. Her later Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was and remains controversial for reducing Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust, and the Nazi bureaucrat who literally made its nightmarish trains run on time, to an unthinking avatar of German dutifulness, a pathetic embodiment of the “banality of evil.” Arendt was so prone to “paradoxical” formulations and insights that she allowed a preoccupation with the “banality of evil” to crowd out a deeper appreciation of the monstrous character of the Holocaust in both its fanatical and its specifically “bureaucratic” manifestations. Many of her fellow Jews also took her to task for displaying no sympathy for the dilemmas faced by the Judenräte or Jewish councils set up in Nazi-occupied Europe. She inordinately and heavy-handedly blamed the victim, according to these critics. In her 1963 book, Arendt was in no way denying the intrinsic evil of the Holocaust, but her repeated emphasis on Eichmann’s “banality” gave rise to both criticism and misunderstandings. We now know that Eichmann dissembled at his trial in Jerusalem and was in fact a deeply committed Nazi ideologue whose undoubted thoughtlessness took a rigidly ideological form. Tapes from his secret life in Argentina readily attest to that.

In contrast to Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism made “radical evil” its animating theme. That work is now available in a handsome and authoritative “expanded edition” from the Library of America, a version that restores the original “Concluding Remarks” from the first 1951 edition, as well as a rich 1958 essay, “Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution.” The latter was for Arendt a “glorious revolution,” one that gave her hope that those living under the totalitarian juggernaut yearned for “freedom of thought” and political self-determination. The new hardcover edition of the work is also the first version to be annotated, and amply so. That is immensely helpful to readers as we get further away from the events under consideration and because of the sheer number of Arendt’s learned (and sometimes obscure) references.

Arendt’s book has three distinct sections, one each dedicated to “Anti-Semitism,” “Imperialism,” and “Totalitarianism”. Her discussions are always insightful, even if she overstates the affinities between old-fashioned anti-Semitism, however cruel and brutal, and the murderous ideological anti-Semitism of Hitler and the National Socialists. She is harsher on British imperialism than is deserved, since the British never lost an appreciation of what happens when civilization ‘loses its mercy’ (a phrase of Thomas Babington Macaulay that Churchill liked to refer to). On the other hand, her account of “race-thinking before racism” is rich and evocative; reading it, one cannot help but think that contemporary “anti-racism” is just another form of pseudo-scientific racialism. Her discussions of how the atomization inherent in mass society and the complicity between ruthless elites and the disoriented mob paved the way for totalitarianism made a major contribution to political philosophy. Despite the missteps I noted, throughout Arendt is careful to differentiate anti-Semitism from (what she calls) “mere” hatred of the Jews, imperialism from mere conquest, and totalitarianism from mere dictatorship.

Historians and many social scientists today take issue with the idea of totalitarianism as both overwrought and unscientific. They are dismissive of “intentionality,” of the role that ideas and individuals played in the unfolding criminality of Communist and Nazi regimes, and instead insist on the central place of impersonal “structures” in giving shape to events. They also dogmatically insist that totalitarian ideology is nothing but a cover for power-seeking or vulgar utilitarian motives. Arendt is withering in dismissing this social scientific reductionism, which confuses itself with “common sense.” She points out that perfected totalitarianism destroyed human beings and human personality, as in the concentration camps, with little or no concern for utility. Creating a Juden-rein Europe did nothing to improve Germany’s prospects in the Second World War—far from it. Soviet forced labor camps were hardly productive, since hungry, half-frozen, and brutalized “class enemies” were in no way fit to be pioneers of “socialist labor.”

Arendt’s greatness lay in her willingness to confront the fact that Nazi and Stalinist totalitarians aimed not only at the “transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.” She saw the concentration camps (pure Hell in the Nazi case of death camps, as she put it, and a truly horrible “Purgatory” in the case of the Gulag) as “the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested” in ways that aim to make human beings ultimately “superfluous.” Nothing less than “human nature as such is at stake,” Arendt insisted. Arendt did not share the totalitarian or ideological view that “everything is possible,” but she feared the totalitarian experiment could “prove that everything can be destroyed.” At the same time, neither she nor Orwell ruled out the possibility that “everything is possible,” and that totalitarianism might reign permanently supreme.

Arendt adapted and applied Kant’s category of “radical evil” to this new situation, where human beings are confronted with the implacable “totalitarian system,” as she called it, that “overpowers reality and breaks down all standards we know.” Her initial 1951 edition of Origins held out some hope for the future, but a hope tempered by deep pessimism and pathos. Her original “Concluding Remarks” ended with a moving reflection on what she would later call “natality,” the fact that the gift of procreation allows new human beings to be born into the world, human beings whose sheer variety and idiosyncratic personhood frustrate the efforts of totalitarians. Arendt thus leaves us with some natural hope, but no refuge in old religious truths or transcendental hopes and aspirations. To that extent, she remained a secular philosopher to the end. She never draws the properly theological implications of her own rich reflection on, and repudiation of, “radical evil.” Hers is very much a tragic wisdom.

As suggested above, Arendt is far from infallible in her judgments. She underestimated the totalitarian character of Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship and thought that totalitarianism could not survive without mass terror, which she defined as its very “essence.” Violence and lies are indeed the twin pillars of the totalitarian project, as Solzhenitsyn noted, but the totalitarian impulse can survive its “ideal” manifestation in revolutionary terror and the concentration camps. Arendt is the theorist par excellence of “high” or “classic” totalitarianism and not of its sundry offshoots which are less murderous or ferocious, but still deny the fundamental distinctions between truth and falsehood, and good and evil, that every type of totalitarian ideology wishes to negate. (On this, see Arendt’s powerful chapter “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government” that was added to later editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism and is included in the new Library of America edition).

Even with these lacunae and missteps, Arendt’s book continues to speak to thoughtful and morally serious human beings, especially those still confronting some version or another of the totalitarian impulse. We must not let her great work be appropriated by thoughtless activists who ignore its most fundamental lessons and insights. And we conservatives must take it as it is: a rich if flawed source of wisdom from a political philosopher who, at her best, transcends ideological divides.