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11 - The Leader and the Masses: Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism and Dictatorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

Peter Baehr
Affiliation:
Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Melvin Richter
Affiliation:
City University of New York
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Summary

Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality which no farfetched historical parallels can alleviate.

Totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the “theoreticians,” for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.

Hannah Arendt claimed that the regimes of Hitler and Stalin represented varieties of a single type that was as unprecedented as it was appalling. Struggling against the universal human impulse to categorize the new in terms of what is familiar, she reflected at length on the difficulties of trying to understand phenomena that had “exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgement.” She was herself well aware, however, that some political commentators ever since the time of the French Revolution had been exclaiming over the novelty of modern forms of oppression, while others had found remote historical precedents for the apparently new. Edmund Burke had been first in the field with his warning that the Jacobin dictatorship represented a new and particularly dangerous kind of tyranny,5 but the phenomenon that had set off most rethinking among political theorists was the Revolution’s culmination in the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Type
Chapter
Information
Dictatorship in History and Theory
Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism
, pp. 241 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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