Summary
When totalitarianism takes power, it must confront reality; this is a constant problem for totalitarian regimes. They are forced to attempt to resist stability and normalization in their regimes, because this would stop the movement and liquidate the fiction of an ever-developing power they had created through propaganda. It is a constant struggle for totalitarian leadership to maintain the masses’ contempt for the outside world and the status quo in the face of the reality and the restrictions imposed by having political power.
Totalitarian power is characterized not by a singular power, but rather an amorphous structure and a complex relationship between the state and the party. Evidence of this includes the very common duplication of office in totalitarian regimes and the coexistence of “supposed” and “real” power. This structurelessness of totalitarian regimes complicates the supremacy of the ruler. Though the ideological line of the regime will insist that the will of the leader is the supreme law of the land, power does not rest only with the leader.
Furthermore, the lack of successful palace revolts in totalitarian regimes shows that they are not merely ruled by a clique or a gang. The power is derived, according to Arendt, from the base of isolated, atomized individuals. But not, however, for the benefit of these individuals. This explains the seeming irrationality and inefficiency of totalitarian organization. An example of this inefficiency is the duplication of offices, which often results in contradictory orders and the bungling of administrative tasks. However, this inefficient power structure works well for furthering the movement, which is ultimately the goal of every totalitarian regime. As evidence of the movement as the true purpose of a totalitarian regime, Arendt notes that the Nazis did not actually believe that the German people were the master race, whatever they may have told the masses in propaganda, but believed that they were creating the master race that would rule the earth (416).
The concept of an “objective enemy” is very important to continued totalitarian rule. Enemies are not enemies because they are against the state, but rather because of some aspect of their being, and they can be changed at any time. As soon as the Nazis murder all the Jews, they can merely declare another objective enemy to the movement. The secret police do not solve crimes; they round up those the government has declared an objective enemy for punishment or extermination. Even show trials only create a “subjective” facade after the fact, since they are aimed at objective enemies in the first place.
The concentration camp is the prime example of totalitarian domination. It treats individuals as mere collections of instincts, reactions, and responses, and thus attempts to lower them to the level of animals. Arendt argues that the camps are not only meant for indoctrination and degradation of human beings, but are also highly controlled and rational experiments in removing from human beings their spontaneity and freedom, transforming them into something even less than animal, into a thing. Depriving human beings not merely of their freedom of movement and choice but of the spontaneity of life itself, is only possible in the absolutely total domination of a concentration camp, where every aspect of life itself can be controlled and manipulated.
There is a question that still plagues Arendt. Is totalitarianism a form of modern government, or is it a new form of politics itself? To answer this question she begins by discussing the totalitarian conception of the law. Totalitarianism seems to have broken with the common law of man, but rather than replacing that with its own common law, it claims to be the purveyor of Natural and Historical law and identifies law with man. Whereas for positive law Nature and History are sources of stability and authority, for totalitarianism they are they movement itself and thus all laws are laws of the movement.
The purpose of terror is to realize the law of movement. This means, paradoxically, that terror stabilizes or freezes men into inaction, so that the rules and laws of nature and history can move freely, unhindered by human spontaneity. This has perversely solved a problem of political thought. Since government is based on lawfulness and is therefore supposed to be stable and unchanging, how does one account for and deal with the movement of the body politic and its citizens? In the completed totalitarian government, all men become One Man, and terror ensures the continuation of the movement such that all actions become the acceleration of the movement of history and nature. Even so, as long as totalitarianism does not rule the earth, terror itself is not enough to inspire and guide human action. Even fear cannot be a guiding force, since terror is arbitrary and fear cannot help a man act in order to avoid his fear. Totalitarianism needs ideology to fit men into the role of both executioner and victim so that they can be guided to accelerate the motion of history.
Ideology is the tool that accomplishes this task. According to Arendt, ideologies are not concerned with being, but with becoming. There are three characteristics of all ideological thinking that Arendt argues have been proven by the totalitarian transformation of ideologies. First, they claim total explanation of a process, of what becomes, and are always oriented towards history. Second, ideological thinking is independent of all experience and is unable to learn from experience. This second element allows it to claim to be “truer” than reality and construct a world of fiction. Third, ideologies have no power to transform reality. An ideology starts from an axiom, or premise--for example, that all history is the history of the development of race--and deduces the laws of motion of history from it. According to Arendt, this logical consistency doesn't exist in reality. The world itself is not actually created by a strictly logical process that has a single, correct starting point. In order for ideologies to change reality, they must be able to understand reality, but their dogmatic belief in a single first principle that can explain all of history and nature makes it impossible for them to actually understand the world.
This characteristic of ideologies amounts to complete dedication and submission to the so-called logic of history. Since all people exist only as a tool to the continuation of the logical movement of history--to what Arendt calls "becoming"--all freedom is crushed. Freedom is the ability to begin, the ability to move between men, contingency and individualism. All of these phrases used by Arendt to describe freedom can seem mystifying, but they are all an attempt to refer to the real spontaneity of people in the practical world. A "beginning" could be as simple as the birth of a new person. A beginning is, most importantly, something completely different from what has come before it. Furthermore, a beginning is not determined by what has come before it. In a story, for example, the beginning is a fresh start. When a story starts with action that is later explained by earlier events, we say that a story begins in media res, in the middle of thing. It literally is not a beginning the same way "Once upon a time..." can lead almost any ridiculous situation. This spontaneity is maintained by preserving individuality in society. This can be done by preserving the ability to experience and think, both of which totalitarianism attempt to stamp out.
Men lose the ability to experience and think when they are disconnected completely from other men, when they are completely atomized. When there is no public life, there is also no private life. Atomized men, though "alone" in a sense, are not individuals; they are rather tools in a historical process. Arendt notes that this description seems similar to the conditions of people when they are laboring, because in that situation they often do not actively "cooperate" with others in the sense of negotiating collective actions. Rather, they simply co-participate in an abstract process of production. This condition also shares some similarities with tyranny, where a tyrant creates society according to a blueprint of how it should look. But for Arendt, what distinguishes the atomization caused by totalitarianism from that caused by labor—in which one leaves one's public life temporarily—or that of tyranny—where one cannot act politically—is how totalizing it is. This distinguishes the common ground of totalitarianism—loneliness—from mere isolation. Loneliness is not only being unable to act with other men, but also being completely cut off from and abandoned by them. Loneliness is connected to the superfluousness of men in modern society, because someone who has been abandoned completely by their community is superfluous to that community. Since loneliness is present in even non-totalitarian societies, totalitarianism must be taken seriously as a potential threat to the whole world. Totalitarianism, should it succeed, would mean the destruction of humanity as such. But Arendt still feels that the beginning of a new generation could bring hope for overcoming the problem of totalitarianism. Because new people are always being born, it is always possible that new ideas and new chances for freedom might also enter the world.
Analysis
The horror of the concentration camps is that even if the inmates are not killed, they are living as if they are dead and erased from the world. This also means that the murder of inmates is completely impersonal. Forced labor in the camps was not even for any purpose other than the perpetuation of the camps themselves, and did not contribute to the economy of the totalitarian regime in any way. The camps and the people in them are completely superfluous to society, and are only possible because of the superfluousness of the masses. Superfluousness is what connects the concentration camps as the culmination of totalitarian terror to the very first problem of the mob that was present in Arendt's analysis of antisemitism and imperialism.
Superfluousness is the result of the disintegration of the state, but it also takes a more overt legal form. Arendt argues that totalitarian regimes stamp out the “juridical” character of man, which subjectively judges according to reason what society ought to do and respects the rights of man. Actions such as removing legal protections from specific groups create superfluous men and a mass of atomized individuals. Under these conditions, the totalitarian regime may carry out its experiments. It also makes humans themselves superfluous to all the processes of society. Since judgment is no longer necessary, human beings to not have to be involved in politics as human beings, but become instead instruments, at best, and superfluous masses that may be exterminated, at worst. Just as the concentration camp erases the humanity of its inhabitants, the administration of a camp does not actually require any human faculties; rather, it destroys them, turning both the inmate and the administrator into mere tools.
Ultimately, superfluousness is the state of not existing in a community. Arendt uses the thread of superfluous men running through her entire argument to show that the concentration camp and totalitarianism are the result of the breakdown of the human community. This argument at first seems contrary to her claim that the totalitarian movement sacrifices the individual for the collective, but the collective is not actually the same as the community. She states that the goal of this movement is not man, but the fabrication of mankind. A community is a group of individuals who work together based on their free will and autonomous action, but Arendt believes that creation of "mankind" actually sacrifices the community by stomping out all individual freedom.
An important metaphor used in this section to describe this process of stomping out all individual freedom is Pavlov's dog. Pavlov's dog is a dog trained by a researcher in animal behavior, Ivan Pavlov, who eats on command. This is important because it shows how the use of totalitarian control of private life can turn a being into no more than a machine. The dehumanization of men under totalitarianism was so total that they were not even animals.
Finally, Arendt insists that by understanding totalitarianism, we can see the hope that remains. This is crucial to understanding why Arendt embarked on her study of totalitarianism in the first place. Totalitarianism attempts to stamp out human spontaneity, because human spontaneity is what can defeat it. This is a bit puzzling, because for totalitarianism to succeed at all, spontaneity had to fail. If spontaneity has failed, why even take the time to write about totalitarianism, since it seems unbeatable? The answer reveals itself when we consider that Arendt believes spontaneity to be a fundamental aspect of humanity. Since it is so fundamental, it was also a characteristic of the humanity that created the conditions for totalitarianism. Spontaneity led, spontaneously and freely, to what Arendt believes to be a mistaken path for humanity as a whole. Human spontaneity, by circumstance, caused humanity to attempt to make itself a god. This choice, embodied in the Rights of Man, destabilized rights and eventually also destabilized government. Arendt believes that by learning from this mistake, humanity can instead choose to form governments with more limited powers that are based on more stable communities. Arendt believes that limitation of power and a respect for "being"—human spontaneity and freedom within a community—can safeguard human spontaneity so that humanity will always have some opportunity to start anew, no matter how dark the world gets.
