Holocaust Politics

Totalitarianism's Controversial Notions

The human social animal's capacity for collective tyranny and violence in Hannah Arendt's seminal work

Since the publication of her 1951 work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt has received much criticism as a philosopher and an historian for her theory of the human, historical development of notions of society or what Arendt terms 'the social.' From the social organizations of the salon, which were loose and diffuse, and based on ideological alliances, human beings evolved in their organization, she suggests, to alliances upon material interests in the forms of classes. But the nationalist and imperialist movements of the 19th century perverted these previous mental and material social alliances in history, to create the manifestation of 'the masses' that enabled totalitarianism to take hold in Germany, Russia, and other areas of the world.

Critical to Arendt's conception of totalitarianism is her notion of the...
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