Re-reading Hannah Arendt
Despite the truism that there's nothing new under the sun, When you're living through the tumult of any era, it is easy to forget that we've been here before. Dictators have risen and fallen before, walls have been built and crumbled before, mass violence has been used against some before, the laws of war have been broken before and mass displacement had occured before.
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism came out in the 1950s, post WWII. As Anne Applebaum reminds us in her 2024 introduction to the book, this was an era characterised by:
- The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated
- the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”
- the division of the world into warring camps
- the large influx of refugees
- the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale
- the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies
- and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which [Arendt] described as an “entirely new form of government”
Sound familiar? I first read Arendt's book circa 2014, but I have picked it up again, because as Anne Applebaum continues in the introduction:
the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda—just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other . . . Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”
Reading that account now, it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from “real life” to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn’t created some of the same results. In a world where everyone is supposedly “connected,” loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life. In a world where “globalization” has supposedly made us all similar, a narcissistic dictator can still launch an unprovoked war on his neighbors. The twentieth-century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.
Arendt offers no easy answers. The Origins of Totalitarianism does not contain a set of policy prescriptions, or directions on how to fix things. Instead it offers proposals, experiments, different ways to think about the lure of autocracy and the seductive appeal of its proponents as we grapple with them in our own time.
To summarise, I'm re-reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism because, although Arendt didn't get everything right, it is the book for our times. I'm doing it despite David Runciman'suggestion not to look to back at history, because that is not how democracy will end this time. I defer to Runciman's expertise, but I can't help seeing some parallels from Arendt's era in the present.
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