Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”

Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”

The concept of totalitarianism was first developed in the 1920s, after the World War I by the Weimar German jurist, and later Nazi academic, Carl Schmitt, and Italian fascists. The term Totalitarian was come from Italian word totalitario, totalità. That means by Totality. Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible. Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror. A distinctive feature of totalitarian government is an elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction to the whole society.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Nazi and State communist regimes were new forms of government, and not merely updated versions of the old tyrannies. According to Arendt, the source of the mass appeal of totalitarian regimes is their ideology, which provides a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the past, present, and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of race struggle; and, for Marxism, all history is the history of class struggle. Once that premise is accepted, all actions of the state can be justified by appeal to Nature or the Law of History, justifying their establishment of authoritarian state apparatus.

In addition to Arendt, many scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds and ideological positions have closely examined totalitarianism. He agrees, however, that totalitarianism seeks to mobilize entire populations in support of an official state ideology, and is intolerant of activities which are not directed towards the goals of the state. Totalitarianism government system has become the decline of the nation state and the end of the rights of man. Everything was controlled by the state authority and the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority. It takes people inside the prison within their own state. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless. Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics, and the constitutional inability of European nation states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents. 

I. The “Nation of Minorities” and the Stateless People

There is no better proof to regulate the nationality problem in Eastern and Southern Europe through the establishment of nation states and the introduction of minority treaties. Settled national tradition could not handle the new problems of world politics had became questionable. Nation states could be established by the methods of the Peace treaties was simply preposterous. Many peoples in single states called some of them state people and entrusted them with the government, silently assumed that others were equal partners in the government. Those people to who states were not conceded, no matter whether they were official minorities or only nationalities. Everybody else that true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights. There was no country on earth in which they enjoyed the right to residence.

 II. The Perplexities of the Rights of Man

State has policy and rules to govern the people in a way to give protection and security upon the state and people. It suppressed the freedom of people. All the societies are formed to protection of the Rights of Man. The state where, the Right of Man is difficult to cultivate is Totalitarian Governmental system. The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. Man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being that carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order. Every state has creating the limitation and boundaries of people to cultivate their freedom. So, Social, spiritual, and religious forces keeps them in limitation. In the process of being civilization, we human being approach the several cultural and spiritual aspect in society. It keeps themselves in limited source.

No matter how they have once been defined life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, according to the American formula; or as equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty, according to the French. No matter how once may attempt to improve an ambiguous formulation life the pursuit of happiness, or an antiquated one like unqualified right to property; the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the shows that these are rights of citizens who loss does not entail absolute rightness. This situation illustrates the many perplexities inherent in the concept of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action. Whether we like it or not we have really started to live in one world.  Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals. Man is only the master, not the creator of the world.

Janak Tamang

Prof. Dr. Shital Dahal (Green)

Seminar on City, Citizen, Migrant, Refuges & Rights

M.Phil. 18^th Sep, 2016