The Origins Of Totalitarianism By Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German born political theorist. She was often described as a philosopher. She rejected that labeled on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with “man in the singular”. Instead she described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” As an assimilated Jew, she escaped Europe during the Holocaust and became an American citizen. Her works deal with nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. (en.wikipedia.com) In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote about the rise of anti-Semitism, in the Central and Western Europe in the 1800s. Hannah Arendt was a Jewish

She examines European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. The institutions and operations of totalitarianism movements are explored. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were the two forms totalitarianism government she focused on in the book. Written during the Cold War period and just after the Second World War, this book takes an important look into the minds of totalitarian leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. The Origins of Totalitarianism is broken down in to three sections; anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism.

The first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism is about the historical origin of anti-Semitism. Hannah Arendt explores the rise of anti-Semitism in the birth of the nation-state, the emancipation of the Jews, the rise of the Jewish bankers, the roles of Jews within society, and the Dreyfus Affair. It happened in France at the end of the year 1894. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the French General Staff, was accused and convicted of espionage for Germany. (Arendt p.89) Although it was known to be that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent, his trial and imprisonment, and attempted suppression of evidence that would have freed him, revealed the anti-Semitic climate of both the army and

Each class that came into open conflict with the state turned anti-Semitic. According to Hannah Arendt, Schoenerer’s agitation with the disadvantages for the nationalization of Austrian railroads, the major part of which had been in the hands of the Rothschild’s since 1836 due to a state license which expired in 1886, became the actual beginning of articulate anti-Semitic movement is Austria. Schoenerer’s movement was defeated by the Christian Socials under the leadership of Lueger. The decades when Lueger ruled Vienna were actually a kind of golden age for the Jews. Christian Socials never attacked the monarchy because the Hapsburg were a German house and had granted their German subject a certain predominance. Bagetelle pour un Massacre (1938) by Louis Ferdinand Celine went straight to the core and demanded the massacre of all Jews. In the Golden Age of Security, a section in the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses how the more the government lost in power and prestige, the less attention was paid to the Jews. The declining need for Jewish services threatened Jewish bankers with extinction and forced certain shifts in Jewish occupations. She talks about how more and more Jews left state finance for independent