arendt origins of totalitarianism amazon

In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable… Isolation then becomes loneliness. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together… isolated men are powerless by definition.Īlthough isolation is not necessarily the same as loneliness, Arendt notes that loneliness can become both the seedbed and the perilous consequence of the isolation effected by tyrannical regimes: Isolation may be the beginning of terror it certainly is its most fertile ground it always is its result. Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. What perpetuates such tyrannical regimes, Arendt argues, is manipulation by isolation - something most effectively accomplished by the divisiveness of “us vs. Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)

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 preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men * as well as the reality around them for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. Exactly twenty years before her piercing treatise on lying in politics, she writes: Half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) examined those peculiar parallel dimensions of loneliness as a profoundly personal anguish and an indispensable currency of our political life in her intellectual debut, the incisive and astonishingly timely 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism ( public library).Īrendt paints loneliness as “the common ground for terror” and explores its function as both the chief weapon and the chief damage of oppressive political regimes. “Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,” Olivia Laing wrote in The Lonely City, one of the finest books of the year.

Arendt origins of totalitarianism amazon