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Hannah
Arendt
THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM: FIFTY YEARS LATER Volume 69 No. 2 (Summer 2002) Arien Mack, Editor Jerome Kohn, Guest Co-Editor |
| Table of Contents | Abstracts and Notes on Contributors | Ordering information |
| Co-Editor's
Note
The editor of Social Research, Arien Mack, and I both thought that it would be appropriate and of interest to begin this issue with a hitherto unpublished selection of Hannah Arendt’s writings that immediately followed the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Origins was first published in 1951 and that same year Arendt submitted a proposal to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a book that she described as follows: The most serious gap in The Origins of Totalitarianism is the lack of an adequate historical and conceptual analysis of the ideological background of Bolshevism. This omission was deliberate. All other elements that eventually crystallized into the totalitarian movements and forms of government can be traced back into subterranean currents in Western history, emerging only when and where the traditional social and political framework of European nations had broken down. Racism and imperialism, the tribal nationalism of the pan-movements and antisemitism, bear no relation to the great political and philosophical traditions of the West. The shocking originality of totalitarianism, the fact that its ideologies and methods of governing were entirely unprecedented and that its causes defied proper explanation in the usual historical terms, is easily overlooked if one lays too much stress on the only element that has behind it a respectable tradition and whose critical discussion requires a criticism of some of the chief tenets of Western political philosophy: Marxism.1 The new book was originally to be called Totalitarian Elements in Marxism, but as Arendt began work on it she became convinced of what she had only given a hint at the end of the final sentence in the description just quoted: namely, that her study could not be adequately undertaken without first thoroughly examining the entire tradition of philosophic and political thought. She realized that Marx not only stood firmly in that tradition but also that with Marx that tradition had come full circle: in an extremely complicated way it had come back to its origins and thus, as she said later, “culminated and found its end.”2 Henceforth Arendt’s working title for the book became Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought, which is the overall title of the two manuscripts from which the selections published here are taken (the title of the first manuscript omits the word “Western”). The first selection bears the subtitle “The Broken Thread of Tradition” and the second “The Modern Challenge to Tradition.” Arendt’s proposed book was never completed. Although parts of it were incorporated into The Human Condition, On Revolution, and Between Past and Future, approximately a thousand pages are prepared for or relevant to the work on Marx in the Library of Congress. Some of these materials were delivered as lectures for the Christian Gauss Seminar at Princeton University in 1953, others at Notre Dame University the following year, and still others elsewhere. To read these manuscript pages is not easy: they are disordered, cut up and pasted together for the various lectures, and for that reason also at times repetitive. More than anything else, however, their difficulty stems from the fact that in the early 1950s Arendt’s mind was extraordinarily fecund, literally brimming over with ideas that were written down in white heat in a decidedly Germanized English. The sentences, and consequently the paragraphs, are often far too long and unwieldy; in addition, as she used to say and here exemplified, “the English language has no rules where the adverbs go.” Nevertheless, to immerse oneself in these texts is metaphorically to swim in a sea of ideas that would later be thematized in distinctive ways in Arendt’s published works throughout the rest of her life. These thematizations can be generally characterized as reflecting the tension that Arendt keenly felt between what she sometimes called thinking and acting and sometimes philosophy and politics. All the Marx manuscripts have been collected and edited and will be published under a title that tries to capture that tension at the moment it first became apparent to her: Karl Marx and the Problem of Political Philosophy. The following selections, while suggesting some totalitarian elements in Marxism and some of the problems Arendt found in Western political thought, are really an introduction to the full story she told about Marx. Jerome
Kohn,
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| Notes
on Contributors
(at time of publication) Karl
Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought
Hannah
Arendt taught at the University of California at
Berkeley,
Princeton University, and the University of Chicago, and was University
Professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research
from 1968 until her death in 1975. Her books include The
Origins
of Totalitarianism (1968), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution
(1963),
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964), Between Past and Future (1968), Men in
Dark
Times (1968), and The Life of the Mind (1975).
Ideology
and Storytelling
George
Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of
Politics,
Emeritus, and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at
Princeton
University. His books include Utopia and its Enemies and The
Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, winner of the
1994
Spitz Book Prize by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought.
Totalitarian
Lies and Post-Totalitarian Guilt: The Question of Ethics in Democratic
Politics
Antonia
Grunenberg is Director of the Hannah Arendt-Zentrum,
Carl
von Ossietzky Universitaet Oldenburg. Her publications include
Die Lust an der Schuld [The Desire for Guilt: The burden of the
past
on the political realm](2001) and the article on Arendt in the International
Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001).
The
Origins of Totalitarianism: Not History but Politics Richard
J. Bernstein is
Dean of the Graduate Faculty and Vera List Professor of Philosophy at
the
New School University. He is the author of Radical Evil: A
Philosophical
Interrogation (2002). His previous work includes
Hannah
Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996) and Freud and the
Legacy
of Moses (1998).
The
People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of
Hannah
Arendt’s “Populism ”
Margaret
Canovan is Professor at Keele University. Her recent
publications
include
Nationhood and Political Theory (1996) and Hannah Arendt:
A Reinterpretation
of her Political Thought (1992). She is currently working on
a
book about the concept of “the people”.
The Philosophical Stakes in Arendt's Genealogy of Totalitarianism Jacques
Taminiaux is Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston
College
and the founder and Director of the Centre d'Études
phénoménologiques
at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He is
co-editor of The
Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger
(with Gendre, 1998).
Thinking With and Against Hannah Arendt Claude Lefort Claude
Lefort is at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences
Sociales in France.
A
Politics of Natality
Jonathan
Schell, The Nation's peace and disarmament
correspondent,
is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is
a Visiting Professor in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty, New
School
University. His books include The Unfinished Twentieth
Century
(2001) and The Fate of the Earth (1999).
Dictatorships
Before and Beyond Totalitarianism
Andrew
Arato is
Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Sociology and Co-Cha ir of the
Committee
for Democratic Studies at the New School University’s Graduate Faculty.
He is the author of From neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory (1993).
His essay “Good-bye to Dictatorships?” appeared in Social
Research
(66:3, Fall 2000).
Hannah
Arendt on Human Rights and the Limits of Exposure, or Why Noam Chomsky
Is Wrong about the Meaning of Kosovo
Jeffrey
C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and
Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at
Indiana
University. He is the author of Arendt,
Camus, and Modern Rebellion (1992) and Democracy in Dark Times (1997).
Seyla
Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and
Philosophy at Yale University. Her publications include
The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era
(forthcoming,
2002).
On
the Origins of a New Totalitarianism
Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl is on the faculty at the Columbia Center for
Psychoanalytic
Training and Research, and has a private practice in psychoanalysis in
New York City. She has published Hannah
Arendt: For Love of the World, A Biography (1982) and has authored
many
books, including The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996).
The
Evolution and Structure of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism
Roy
T. Tsao teaches political theory in the Department of
Government
at Georgetown University. His book Arendt’s
Arguments will be published by Cambridge University Press.
Arendt’s
Concept and Description of Totalitarianism
Jerome
Kohn is Trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary
Trust
and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at new School University. He
is
the editor of a series of volumes of Arendt’s unpublished and
uncollected
works, and has written numerous essays on various aspects of her
thought.
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