Work · Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Antisemitism, imperialism, totalitarianism.
Introduction
Arendt worked on the book from the mid-1940s in New York; it appeared in 1951, the year she became a US citizen after years of statelessness. Its three parts treat modern antisemitism, nineteenth-century imperialism with its racism and bureaucracy, and finally totalitarian rule in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, whose aim was to make human beings superfluous – the concentration camps being its laboratories. The chapter on the stateless refugees of the interwar years coins the phrase “the right to have rights”. The second edition of 1958 added the chapter “Ideology and Terror”; Arendt prepared the German version herself (1955). Her comparison of Nazism and Stalinism has been much debated.
Connections
Taken up in
- Eichmann in Jerusalem1963 · Hannah Arendt
- When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda2001 · Mahmood Mamdani
More works by Hannah Arendt
Appears in
- Journey ‘Thinking after Auschwitz’ · Stop 3 of 10
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