“Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded. Such a man was Zola!” (114)
This quote of Clemenceau characterizes the fight the Dreyfusards had to wage as seemingly the only liberals standing alone before the mob. However, the quote also reveals a crisis that both Zola and Clemenceau faced when confronted with the mob: the mob seemed to be the people. Their faith in the ability of the people to rule themselves was shaken by this unprecedented action of the mob against an individual and against the law of the state and of the body politic. The mob frequently resorted to “vigilante” tactics such as street fighting, and seemed to be guided by a few strong antisemitic voices in the press and amongst the anti-Dreyfusards. Underneath the heroism of Zola lies a shaken confidence in the very foundation of the French Republic and the desirability of the rule of the people. This touches on a problem that still plagues political theory today and is a common theme in Arendt’s work: the seeming opposition of liberalism and democracy. Phenomena such as the mob or the masses make it seem as though the democratic rule of the people will be antiliberal and that liberal rule is only possible if a few experts control the government. Ostensibly this antinomy was not a problem for the thinkers of the French Revolution, but it is a problem that, since the 19th century, has tasked the present.
“The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies—which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest—well-nigh impossible.” (137)
In this quote, Arendt is characterizing the accumulation of capital and power in imperialism as a never-ending movement. This characterization is very important for its similarity to totalitarian movements that claim to embody the never-ending movement of History or Nature. Arendt is arguing that imperialism sets in motion a process of irrational and unceasing movement, justified “for its own sake,” that will form the basis for totalitarian ideologies. Totalitarianism’s emphasis on an inevitable and “logical” movement of history picks up on a process begun by imperialism; the horrors of totalitarianism, Arendt argues, were not simply random events but were set in motion in the 19th century, with the move toward imperial expansion.
“There is a dangerous charm in [the aura of bureaucracy] because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is constantly checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience.” (245)
Here Arendt explains the appeal of the pseudomysticism of bureaucracy and rule by arbitrary decree. Because suffering happens inwardly, in our own minds, it is not limited by reason or reality. Action, however, is always limited by reality. A child can easily imagine the joyous event of eating a cookie, but in reality the cookie jar is out of reach on top of the fridge. In a bureaucracy, all that matters is the "brutal, naked event" of the domination of its subject (245). There are few limits on bureaucracy's power to expand, and its decisions are kept completely secret from most people. As a result, most people only experience bureaucracy as a series of events happening in their lives, but these events are not at all explained by reason. This is different from the ideal of governance in a democratic republic, where citizens can comprehend the laws that govern them, and thus can judge and deliberate about them. Arendt is arguing that there is a perverse appeal to bureaucracy that allows one to hide away from reality and, in interpreting and indulging in their own suffering, take refuge from the actual limitations of the world. Bureaucracy is itself like the inwardness of imagination, so suffering actually provides an outlet for imagination that cannot ever be fulfilled by a rational reality. This is so noteworthy and curious for Arendt because people are finding satisfaction in their own suffering and this leads to them preferring a form of government that completely excludes them from all decisions. When reality is so constraining on the individual that suffering becomes paradoxically preferable, then Arendt believes we must question that reality.
“Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the candidates [of the 1932 German election] lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened—afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo. In this general fear all class divisions disappeared from the political scene.” (265)
In this quote, Arendt is describing the election that led to the rise of the Nazi regime. She treats it as a symptom of the liquidation of classes into the atomized mass as well as the liquidation of parties. Parties had operated based upon representing the class interests of their constituents, but in the extreme atmosphere of the 1932 election, people were no longer voting in their own interest, but rather in fear of certain outcomes that were potentially apocalyptic. Such an atmosphere liquidates not only classes and class interests politically but the social bonds of men who now go to the voting box as a bundle of reactions and vote out of fear of consequences.
“For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. ‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible,’ refuse to believe their eyes and ears in face of the monstrous, just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left for them. The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world.” (436-37)
Arendt is arguing that the rejection of reality in a totalitarian era is a two-sided phenomenon. Not only do those within the totalitarian regime reject reality and live in a land of fiction cultivated by propaganda, but those outside the regime refuse to face the reality of the atrocities happening. By rejecting the normal world as irrational, the totalitarian regime begins through its actions to make the normal world irrational.
“[Totalitarianism] can do without the consensus iuris because it promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and will of man; and it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.” (462)
Here Arendt is arguing that the lawlessness of the totalitarian regime and their complete disregard for the consent of the governed follows logically from their raising of historical and natural law to an ideal. When man becomes identical with the movement of the laws of history, he is merely a means to its end and no longer acts according to will or spontaneity. Since the consent of the governed is only required because laws are made and fulfilled in practice by the free will and action of man, when these things are lacking, it becomes completely superfluous to the hyper-rationalized execution of natural and historical laws.
“Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.” (464)
Like many other important figures in Arendt's historical analysis—imperialism, expansion, movement—terror seems to exist as an irrational end-in-itself. The terror of the concentration camp rules over a a completely subdued and subjugated population. It becomes the irrational law guiding and manipulating every aspect of a person's public and personal life. Thus, complete totalitarianism has completely destroyed the whole life of man as man, who has become a mere means to the end of the endless march of history.
“Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical, concerned with becoming and perishing, with the rise and fall of cultures, even if they try to explain history by some ‘law of nature.’” (469)
Arendt argues against ideologies because they completely destroy all stable ground. In the words of Marx, the face of one of the most important ideologies she is arguing against, "all that is solid melts into air." This defines ideologies, which have no respect for tradition or closed form and absolutely no respect for being. Arendt believes that this historical quality of ideologies and their obsession with becoming only leads humanity to Hell.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." (474)
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is someone who cannot think or experience. The so-called convinced Nazi or Communist can still be said to have chosen something or, in the process of becoming "convinced," had thoughts of some kind. When a person reflects on his own choices and activity, he is having an experience of some sort. The convinced ideologue who has chosen to follow an ideology is potentially able to revoke that choice, even if only in a limited way. As long as activity in an individual still exists for himself, totalitarianism has not yet turned men into One Man. By contrast, Arendt uses the idea of "One Man" to express a state of humanity where every person only exists for the purpose of the movement of history. This means they no longer exist for themselves. Arendt believes that freedom is defined by spontaneity, which is the ability of an individual or individuals to act in new and surprising ways. When man ceases to exist for himself, but becomes a tool for an almost god-like force, he loses all his spontaneity and therefore cannot resist totalitarianism in any way. The choice to become a true believer in Nazism or Bolshevism means that a person has still retained some of his humanity, so he is actually more of a liability to totalitarian rule than the person who has stopped thinking at all and therefore cannot exercise spontaneity or resist the totalitarian order.
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” (478)
It is helpful to relate loneliness to superfluousness. In both cases, man no longer has his relation to other men; however, loneliness is much more specific as to the totalizing nature of this atomization. This superfluousness, leading to a deep loneliness, in modern man is what creates the possibility for totalitarianism, according to Arendt. The process in society that creates this loneliness, typified in Arendt's historical analysis by the process of imperialism, is the road to totalitarianism.
