Hannah Ardent and Totalitarianism

‘Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality.’ – Hannah Ardent.

Hannah Ardent studied and philosophised about totalitarian movements, she looked into the past at the Nazis and the USSR and speculated of the future. She believed that there was no end to totalitarianism. 

Totalitarian regimes believe that ‘everything is possible’ and so they seek unlimited power – but the inevitable price of total power is destruction and eradication of human plurality.

Because it is our individuality makes us difficult to control and gather up into a collective movement. To destroy this individuality two methods are used: state terror and ideology.

The purpose of the terror is not just to murder vast numbers of people but also to destroy their individuality and ability to act against the government. Not just to act, but even the thought of acting. For example the Anglo-Zanzibar war, credited as the shortest war in history ensured that British rule would never be challenged again.

Thus genocide isn’t part of the movement it is the very manifestation of the movement.

Ideology compliments the policy of terror,it eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves (Orwell: War is Peace, Ignorance is strength, Freedom is Slavery)

The ideology (based in either the Laws of Nature or the Laws of History) gives them ‘the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future.’

Reality as experienced by individuals is insignificant or even irrelevant compared with what must happen. Ideology frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality.

They succeed in breaking down of the stable human world. This means a loss of institutional and psychological barriers that normally set limits to what is possible.

She highlights the fragility of civilisation; how quickly groups and whole people can fall through the cracks. For to be civilised human beings we need to inhabit a man-made world of stable structures. She cites the Nazi’s progressive of victimisation of the Jews – natural rights taken, made less than human and forced to where yellow stars.

It is being part of society enables us to be civilised, grants us access to a shared reality.

Controversy: Eichmann in Jersulam 

Israelis captured Eichmann and tried him for war crimes.

Hannah Ardent discovered that rather than this man being the personification of evil of which he helped occur. He was in actual fact a very simple, dull and ordinary person the ‘banality of evil.’

Ardent criticised Eichmann for his obedience, she criticised his inability to think.

Eichmann attempted to use Kant’s Categorical Imperative as a justifiable defence for actions. The Categorical imperative simply states that an imperative is a proposition that demands a response in action or inaction. Thus Eichmann was arguing that because he was working under a higher authority he had an obligation to serve them. However Kant values judgement over obedience so the argument was flawed from its very premise and naturally made a poor defence in a trial where his life stood on the line.

Thinking, for Ardent is the judgement made from the interaction with the internal plurality.

Deciding one option of many within. Thinking is a judgement on these ideas, to choose one of the several.

Ardent’s idea of freedom is not the exercise of the individual but a social enactment. We cannot be individually free but instead we exercise freedom in concert.

Thus she is saying we must look to our own personal judgement (thinking) over obedience of all laws mandated by government or higher authorities.

An example of this in practice is Milgram’s famous study. He examined how easily normal civilians would cooperate with an unjust authority to better understand the mindset of the German people under Hitler’s Third Reich.