Hannah Arendt's 1951 study of Nazi and Stalinist rule, published in three parts on antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism itself. It argues that totalitarianism is essentially different from despotism, tyranny or dictatorship, combining a fluid, shapeless structure with total control through terror, and names the concentration camp as its true central institution, the place where the regime's belief that everything is possible was put into practice by reducing people to interchangeable units.
Facts
Key ProvisionPublished in 1951, Hannah Arendt argues, across its three parts on antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism, that the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were not merely extreme dictatorships but a genuinely new form of domination, arising from the collapse of Europe's class structure into an atomized, isolated mass of individuals stripped of the intermediate loyalties, to class, community, tradition, that had once anchored political life. She contends totalitarian movements mobilize this rootless mass through ideology and organized terror in pursuit not of obedience alone but of total domination over both public and private existence, and identifies the concentration and extermination camp as totalitarianism's central institution, the site where the regime sought to prove that human plurality itself could be eliminated. 1 Classification
Document TypePolitical Philosophy or Theoretical Work 1 Original Language Original Language Connections
Drafted By
Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, analysing the shared mechanisms of Nazi and Stalinist rule.
Source Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Influenced
Communism, Ideologies Analyzes Stalinist Russia as totalitarianism's other paradigm case.
Source Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Fascism, Ideologies Analyzes Nazi Germany as one of totalitarianism's two paradigm cases.
Source Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Sources
1. Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyDocument type, description
Hannah Arendt's 1951 study of Nazi and Stalinist rule, published in three parts on antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism itself.
- Influenced: Fascism
- Influenced: Communism
Drafted By: Hannah Arendt, Page text
The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism , published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon.
In Group: Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Political Works, Page text
The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism , published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon.
View the Source 2. Wikidata: The Origins of Totalitarianism
- Wikidata Q1327843, class allow-list match, case-insensitive label variant (w-bbfill-smallsix2-0926/resolve_ci.ps1)
- Wikidata Q1327843 via P407 (w-bbfill-smallsix2-0926/propfill_varchar.ps1)
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