Documents

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Citation Formats

General Reference

Political Atlas. "The Origins of Totalitarianism." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://political.interactiveatlas.org/documents/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-1951.

APA Style

Political Atlas. (n.d.). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://political.interactiveatlas.org/documents/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-1951

BibTeX

@misc{politicalatlas-the-origins-of-totalitarianism,
  author = {Political Atlas},
  title = {The Origins of Totalitarianism},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://political.interactiveatlas.org/documents/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-1951},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

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 Provision

Published 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

Dates

Published

1951-01-01 1

Cross-Tradition Connections