The Origins of Totalitarianism
May. 1st, 2017 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyI've made it through five chapters of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Now the library's gone and recalled it! I must snavel my own copy; it's a challenging read, and I'm going to need to re-read at least some of it. I've stuck loads of coloured sticky bookmarks in it, so what I want to do before returning it is quickly jot down which pages caught my attention and why.
Arendt traces the historical reasons for the position of the Jewish people in Europe, and how it changed, first with the appearance of nation-states in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, then the French Revolution, and lastly the rise of imperialism. (14-15) One important element was a lack of interest in / involvement in politics, which contrasts with the "ficitious role of a secret world power" which antisemites still asign to the Jewish people (20-21, 24-25).
The earliest antisemitic political parties in Germany characterised themselves as "above all parties", which to me recalls the boasts of fascist politicians that they are not politicians. Previously, writes Arendt, only the state and the government had claimed to represent the whole nation, and not parties or classes; the antisemitic parties aspired "to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state." (38-39)
Some damn interesting and intricate stuff about "vice" - about how socialites welcomed gay men and Jewish people into their circles because they saw them as representing thrilling naughtiness. "They did not doubt that homosexuals were 'criminals' or that Jews were 'traitors'; they only revised their attitude towards crime and treason. The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime... The best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and general weariness, had burst like an abscess." There may be a connection here to the lionisation of organised criminals in pop music, and perhaps to the "Social Negroes" that Tom Wolfe writes about in "Radical Chic" IIRC. (ETA: according to Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell's Angels were in demand at fashionable parties.)
Arendt talks at length about the mob. I need to re-read what she has to say, as I'm not clear I genuinely understand who they are. (106-)
She analyses the rise of imperalism at some length - the critical change IIUC being the merging of the state with private economic interests. (eg 126-7). Was it in Inga Clendinnen's book "The Aztecs: an Interpretation" where I first encountered the idea that the Aztec civilisation depended on constant warfare and expansion, and therefore they couldn't have lasted much longer, even if the conquistadors hadn't arrived - that they would have run out of peoples to conquer? Arendt paints a similar picture of the endless expansion required by imperialism, which could only end in catastrophe: "The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours." (145)
Finally for now, this interesting remark: "The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his own class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own." (154)
Arendt traces the historical reasons for the position of the Jewish people in Europe, and how it changed, first with the appearance of nation-states in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, then the French Revolution, and lastly the rise of imperialism. (14-15) One important element was a lack of interest in / involvement in politics, which contrasts with the "ficitious role of a secret world power" which antisemites still asign to the Jewish people (20-21, 24-25).
The earliest antisemitic political parties in Germany characterised themselves as "above all parties", which to me recalls the boasts of fascist politicians that they are not politicians. Previously, writes Arendt, only the state and the government had claimed to represent the whole nation, and not parties or classes; the antisemitic parties aspired "to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state." (38-39)
Some damn interesting and intricate stuff about "vice" - about how socialites welcomed gay men and Jewish people into their circles because they saw them as representing thrilling naughtiness. "They did not doubt that homosexuals were 'criminals' or that Jews were 'traitors'; they only revised their attitude towards crime and treason. The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime... The best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and general weariness, had burst like an abscess." There may be a connection here to the lionisation of organised criminals in pop music, and perhaps to the "Social Negroes" that Tom Wolfe writes about in "Radical Chic" IIRC. (ETA: according to Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell's Angels were in demand at fashionable parties.)
Arendt talks at length about the mob. I need to re-read what she has to say, as I'm not clear I genuinely understand who they are. (106-)
She analyses the rise of imperalism at some length - the critical change IIUC being the merging of the state with private economic interests. (eg 126-7). Was it in Inga Clendinnen's book "The Aztecs: an Interpretation" where I first encountered the idea that the Aztec civilisation depended on constant warfare and expansion, and therefore they couldn't have lasted much longer, even if the conquistadors hadn't arrived - that they would have run out of peoples to conquer? Arendt paints a similar picture of the endless expansion required by imperialism, which could only end in catastrophe: "The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours." (145)
Finally for now, this interesting remark: "The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his own class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own." (154)
