Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination

The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance

Michal Aharony

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134457960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt's political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt's understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination; namely, the virtual eradication of human legality, morality, individuality, and plurality. This attempt, in her view, was most fully realized in the concentration camps, which served as the major "laboratories" for the regime. While Arendt focused on the perpetrators' logic and drive, Michal Aharony examines the perspectives and experiences of the victims and their ability to resist such an experiment.

The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt's concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book calls for methodological pluralism and the integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U.S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world.

Revealing various manifestations of unarmed resistance in the camps, this study demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book.

1 A Theoretical Account of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of “Total Domination”

“The supreme goal of all totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt argued in a 1950 essay, “is not only the freely admitted, long-ranged ambition to global rule but also the never-admitted and immediately realized attempt at the total domination of man.”¹

Arendt’s discussion of total domination in her first work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is fairly concise; it consists of about twenty pages out of a lengthy book that treats three distinct though related topics—anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. Nevertheless, the problem of total domination is, in many ways, at the core of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism. How, then, did she perceive attempts to implement total domination in the real world? Was total domination over humans achieved by the Nazis? Was it attempted in German society as a whole or merely in what Arendt conceived as “the laboratories” of the totalitarian regime—the concentration and extermination camps?²

In Arendt’s view, it seems, total domination was most fully realized in the concentration camps—a realm in which the assumption that “everything is possible” was tested and proven. Inflicting permanent terror on the inmates of the camps, the totalitarian regime rendered individuals superfluous and eliminated their spontaneity—as if in an “organized attempt” to “eradicate the concept of the human being.”³

This chapter explores Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and in particular her reflections on total domination, focusing on her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism (hereafter: OT), and several early texts (written between 1930 and 1954) collected in Essays in Understanding.⁴ The first section traces the roots of Arendt’s conception of total domination to her general theory of totalitarianism, emphasizing her perception of this type of regime as unprecedented. The second section analyzes the stages in the process of achieving total domination: first, the revocation of legal rights; then a decline of morality; and finally, the destruction of the individuality of human beings. The third section reveals significant ambiguities concerning the question of whether Arendt thought the Nazis had in actuality achieved total domination.

As Jerome Kohn notes, the complexity of OT arises in large part from its interweaving of a concept of total domination with a description of the Nazi and the Soviet totalitarian regimes.⁵ The main purpose of this chapter is to trace this problematic connection and to illuminate certain ambiguities, limits, weaknesses, and inconsistencies in Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism.

It should be noted that although Arendt included both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in her analysis of totalitarianism, in this work I focus primarily on the Nazi case. This methodological decision stems largely from Arendt’s own emphasis in her writing of OT. As several commentators have argued, Arendt’s parallel treatment of Nazism and Stalinism is conspicuously imbalanced; its extensive discussion of anti-Semitism and racism seems to have little concrete connection with the Soviet variant.⁶ As we learn from early outlines of OT, Arendt originally did not intend to write about the USSR. In fact, almost all of parts one and two of OT (anti-Semitism and imperialism) are adapted from articles that Arendt had published separately between 1942 and 1946 in which she is not concerned with Stalinism. Only in 1947 did she change her plan and decided to write an additional chapter, not on Nazism, but on totalitarianism in general; it was then that Arendt incorporated the Soviet case into her analysis.⁷ Although Soviet Russia was undoubtedly no less totalitarian in Arendt’s mind, as we shall see, it seems that for her the Nazi camps were the epitome of evil, the incarnation of “hell on earth.”⁸

Total Domination: The Inner Logic of Totalitarianism

In 1953, reflecting on OT, Arendt remarked that she had not intended to write a comprehensive history of totalitarianism or anti-Semitism; rather, she wanted to analyze the essential elements of totalitarianism.⁹ Her aim was not to explain totalitarianism as a historian might but to begin understanding the constellation of factors that made the phenomenon possible.¹⁰ OT, in fact, deals not with the “origins” of totalitarianism, as the title of the book indicates, but rather with the “elements which crystallized into totalitarianism.”¹¹ These elements include “antisemitism, [the] decay of the national state, racism, expansion for expansion’s sake, [and the] alliance between capital and mob.”¹²

According to Arendt, none of these elements were totalitarian in themselves; only after they were welded into a new form did they become totalitarian.¹³ Anti-Semitism and imperialism, as Arendt illustrates in the first two parts of OT, had already developed in the 19th century; only after World War I did they “amalgamate” into a new and modern phenomenon.¹⁴ It is worth emphasizing, however, that although Arendt conceived of total domination as an essential aspect of a distinctively modern pathology, she did not believe that either totalitarianism or total domination was inevitableoutcome of modernity. On the contrary, Arendt was convinced that human affairs were always and invariably contingent.¹⁵

Arendt held that totalitarianism was the curse of the 20th century and that understanding it was fundamental to understanding contemporary politics and society.¹⁶ As she argued in several of her works, totalitarianism was a new form of domination, a phenomenon that could not be understood according to our traditional political concepts or by traditional standards of judgment.¹⁷ An unprecedented form of government, it embodies “the most radical denial of freedom.”¹⁸

Drawing on Montesquieu’s analysis of the nature of different forms of government, Arendt distinguishes between a republic, traditional forms of tyranny, and totalitarianism.¹⁹ Whereas in a republic the law defines the boundaries of the body politic and thus regulates the public-political sphere in which individuals can act, tyrannical rule is “lawless.”²⁰ Both lawful government and legitimate power, on the one hand, and lawless rule and arbitrary power in tyrannies, on the other, are known to us in political philosophy. Under totalitarianism, by contrast, law and power transform into ideology and terror: “If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.”²¹

Terror was not invented, of course, by totalitarian regimes; it has been a tool of traditional tyrannies and used by various regimes during times of revolution. However, in tyrannical regimes, whose mechanism of control is fear, violence and terror are used simply to suppress political opposition. In contrast, Arendt stresses, genuinely totalitarian terror begins only when the regime has no more enemies to suppress. When terror is used not as a means to intimidate opponents but rather is directed against “absolutely innocent people” who do not know why they are being arrested (“objective enemies” of the regime), it becomes total terror.²²

Totalitarian terror stands on its own “as a power functioning outside the law,” Arendt writes; its primary aim is to eliminate any spontaneous human action.²³ Defying positive law, totalitarian regimes adhere to the “law of the movement,” namely, to their own ideology. An ideology, Arendt notes, “can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise.” The ideology of Stalinism revolved around the “law of History”; that is, a belief in the struggle of classes. In Nazism, it involved a “law of Nature”—a belief in the struggle of races. Following these historical or natural laws, the totalitarian regime ensures that “dying classes and decadent peoples,” “inferior races,” and individuals who are “unfit to live” disappear from the stage of history.²⁴ “Eventually, the proper execution of the laws of History and Nature will produce a single ‘Mankind.’ ”²⁵

Totalitarian leaders seek total domination to make reality conform to their ideology; that is “for the sake of complete consistency.”²⁶ The end of total domination, achieved by means of terror, is thus to create “an iron band which presses [individual men] all so tightly together that it is as though they were melded into each other, as though they were only one man.”²⁷ Under these conditions, which according to Arendt were fully manifested in the concentration camps, the space for free action disappears.²⁸

Before I turn to the three dimensions of total domination, I will outline some of Arendt’s observations regarding the different steps by which totalitarian regimes seize power. As Roy T. Tsao notes, Arendt “distinguishes three formally successive ‘stages’ of totalitarianism—the ‘pre-power’ stage, the consolidation and exercise of state power, and finally ‘total domination.’ ”²⁹ According to Arendt, totalitarianism began in Soviet Russia only after 1930 and in Nazi Germany by about 1938. Before these points, the respective regimes used terror in the manner of traditional tyrannies. After, however, the number of concentration camps actually increased despite the fact that both regimes had already liquidated all effective resistance.³⁰

The last stage of totalitarianism is reached once the “institutions of the state are fully assimilated to the movement.”³¹ At this point the totalitarian “experiment” achieves its deepest aims, when, under “scientifically controlled conditions,”³² huma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Theoretical Account of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of “Total Domination”
• 2 Hannah Arendt’s Sources: The Public Discourse about the Concentration Camps, 1943–1947
• 3 Witnessing
• 4 The Process of Dehumanization
• 5 Resisting Dehumanization
• 6 Resisting Dehumanization: The Case of the Sonderkommando
• 7 Total Domination Reconsidered: Between Theory and Human Experience
• Conclusion: Arendt against Arendt
• Bibliography
• Index