Summary
With all the historical pieces in place, Arendt finally begins her analysis of totalitarianism itself. She begins with the more well-known aspect of totalitarianism, the totalitarian leaders, who are characterized by their fame and its curious impermanence. Arendt chalks this up to the fickleness of the masses that totalitarian movements harness and what she calls the “motion-mania” of the movement itself. A totalitarian movement is only animated by its constant motion, and the fanaticized members identify completely with this movement. As soon as the movement stops, it becomes completely irrelevant to those who once followed it in mass.
The totalitarian movement aims to organize the masses, and in fact totalitarian rule is only possible in countries with a large superfluous mass. According to Arendt, two “illusions” of democracy were revealed by the totalitarian movements’ organization of the masses (312). First, it showed that the majority of people did not take part in government, and that a minority is actually actively controlling politics. Second, it showed that, contrary to popular belief, the masses were neither neutral nor inconsequential and could be harnessed for the furtherance of totalitarian ideologies.
Totalitarian movements seemed to rise to power through democratic means before dissolving democracy itself. But Arendt argues that this was not merely a "mistake" on the part of the masses. According to Arendt, it was the result of the breakdown of the class system in Europe. When large swathes of the population became superfluous and unable to participate in labor, they were effectively ejected from class society and turned into the classless “masses.” The breakdown of the class system also meant the breakdown of the party system, since parties had represented class interests in the preceding half-century.
The masses grew out of a highly atomized society. When men were torn from their relations with other men, they became atomized and isolated individuals that constituted a “mass” rather than a society or a body politic. The psychology of the mass man was characterized on the one hand by a self-centeredness—each man was filled with bitterness that they were at the center of a massive injustice—and on the other by a selflessness—that each individual did not matter but was only an instrument for the furtherance of the ideology with which they identified. Arendt uses a comparison of the Nazis to the Bolsheviks to show the importance of the atomization of masses to totalitarian movements and regimes. While atomization had already occurred in the case of Nazi Germany, Stalin had to create an mass of atomized individuals in order to destroy Lenin’s revolutionary leadership and change it into totalitarian rule (318). Once power passed from the Soviets to the bureaucracy, Stalin was able to create these conditions by liquidating classes and introducing the Stakhanov system, which isolated and atomized the workers by altering the actual work process.
The elite also played an important role in this process. The “front generation” of intellectuals who had experienced the first World War had adopted a generally anti-liberal attitude and were attracted to the way the mob destroyed respectability and seemed to reveal the sickness of the status quo. Totalitarian movements also claimed to abolish the separation of public and private life. Though it has often been wrongly assumed that totalitarian movements only appeal to the poor masses, Arendt shows that the elite were also attracted to totalitarianism and the mob.
While the mob and the elite are attracted to the totalitarian movement, the masses as a whole must be won over through propaganda. When a totalitarian movement takes power, this gives way to terror, which rules over a completely subordinate population that has already succumbed to the psychological warfare of propaganda. A common characteristic of propaganda is that it makes predictions about the future in order to avoid argument or reason, since the only possible proof of its statements does not yet exist on earth. Furthermore, the totalitarian leader cannot admit an error and must seem infallible. The leader’s infallibility strengthens propaganda, and propaganda reinforces the image of the leader’s infallibility.
Propaganda is not new or unique to totalitarianism. It has existed for at least half a century before totalitarianism during the rise of imperialism, though not in the totalizing and perfected mass form of totalitarian propaganda. The success of totalitarian propaganda lies in the modern masses' distrust of their own reality and experience. Repetition, not argument, convinces the masses of truth.
The most efficient and consistent fiction of which the Nazis convinced the masses was that there was a Jewish world conspiracy. The Nazis built up the image of the Jewish people as secretly controlling the world and vowed that the Nazis (as representative of the Aryan race) would take their place. The concept of Volksgemeinshaft, or the folk community, became the central concept of all their propaganda and the image of a world dominated by Nazis. What made it so effective as propaganda was that while it was an image of the future, it was realized immediately in the fiction of Nazi propaganda, which claimed that the Aryan race was already superior and destined to win the world. Stalinist Bolshevism has a similar concept, according to Arendt, in the classless society and its campaign against a global Trotskyist conspiracy.
Totalitarian movements and rule are organized around the will of the leader as the supreme law of the state, and rely on a general anonymity of organized members. Since the will of the leader becomes the supreme law in the totalitarian movement, no individual member is able to take responsibility for his own actions or explain the reasoning behind them in any particular situation. The members become merely the instrument of the will of the leader, and their actions cease to be autonomous.
The top layer of totalitarian organization is the clique that forms the innermost circle around the leader. These men do not necessarily believe in the ideologies and fictions they propagate, and will quickly change them based on what is necessary for the success of their movement. What unites them is their shared moral cynicism and their belief that since everything is possible for omnipotent humanity, everything is permitted. They can manipulate the masses and exert their dominance on any population within their control; therefore they ought to do so, it is their sacred right as the chosen to do so. They do not believe that the leader is infallible, but rather that he can become infallible through wielding the instruments of totalitarian domination.
Analysis
Since the Nazis rose to power through the use of mass democracy, democracy appears to be opposed to liberalism. It is a common argument following the events of the 20th century, and even today, that the involvement of the masses in politics will lead to the rise of totalitarianism and ought to be avoided. For example, in a recent interview for openDemocracy, intellectual Francis Fukuyama, famous for his work on the "End of History," argued in favor of liberalism and against democracy. Fukuyama argues that people primarily vote based on their class interest, and that the involvement of the masses of working people more directly in politics will lead to poor or irrational decisions that are explicitly illiberal.
Arendt is attempting to critique this view. It has been a common method throughout her work that she interrogates the relationship between cause and effect, and this is no exception. When people oppose liberalism to democracy, they treat the irrationality of the masses as a cause of totalitarianism, but it is actually an effect of the disintegration of class society and the party system. This mistake is very similar to a mistake she identified by historians and intellectuals of the Dreyfus Affair, who falsely identified the mob with the people. The masses are also not the people, and democracy as a form is not the ultimate cause of the rise of totalitarian regimes.
This does not mean that she thinks the masses are a good thing: quite the contrary. As Peter Baehr argues in "The 'Masses' in Hannah Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism," Arendt believes that the masses are fundamentally a detriment to liberalism, but this view is nuanced, Baehr argues, because she thinks the creation of the masses are the product of a "specific conjecture" of society (12). The problem for Arendt is deeper, and stems from the dynamic of modern society that has destroyed the nation-state and the people, leaving behind only the totalitarian movement and the masses.
In actuality, the masses are won to totalitarianism through propaganda and identification with the movement. The identification of the masses with the movement of history or nature proposed by totalitarianism is only possible because society has already itself disintegrated into a movement. Governments are dominated by bureaucracy, and the movement of capital in never-ending imperial expansion destroys the stable ground of the nation-state. Finally, the individual becomes completely isolated from all of his relations in society and becomes like an atom, completely self-contained and navigating the world without support. In such a situation, propaganda can effectively be used by the mob and the elite to win over the masses because the fiction such propaganda provides seems as plausible as reality, both of which have been unstable and topsy-turvy.
When the masses identify themselves with the totalitarian movement, they lose the ability to have real experience. One has an experience when he interacts with the world and is able to reflect on his autonomous actions and their consequences. This also means experience changes a person. As a very simple example, if one experiences the sensation of being burned by fire, he will likely learn how to use fire without hurting himself, and thus change his own behavior. This happens in a more complex way all the time. One can experience a work of art or music, an abstract emotion such as love or hate, or even politics and governance. Such experiences, however, rely on the autonomy of the person acting. Therefore, when all actions of an individual are not his own, but rather are merely in service of the will of the leader and, through him, the grand movement of history, he is incapable of reflecting on them or having an experience at all.
This is why argument cannot convince masses who have become part of a movement; only repetition and brute force can "affect" the masses, because they are unable to undergo actual experience. For an argument to be effective, the hearer must have the capacity for independent reason and experience. Liberal party politics relies on this capacity, trying to persuade citizens through reason. Repetition short-circuits this entire process because without experience, only the fact of an event and its repetition give it any validity. The Nazis don't merely repeat the phrase that the Aryan race is superior to others; they take steps through the use of terror and violence to attempt to make it seem the case in reality. These actions are part of the "repetition," which is a slightly more abstract concept than its colloquial use. Through this process, terror is able to establish the unquestioned supremacy of a supposed "law" governing historical change. Only when individual spontaneity and reason is completely stamped out can totalitarianism prosper; thus, terror will relentlessly pursue this goal.
