Why Did Totalitarianism Emerge Much Later Than Other Forms of Governance?

Source.

In September 2024, discontent with my academic credentials, I returned to university to study for a bachelor’s in philosophy. The text below is a paper I wrote on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Enjoy.

In chapter thirteen of the book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt (1953) questions why totalitarianism did not arise previously in history. Most forms of government were discovered early, classified by the Greeks, and had not profoundly evolved since, while totalitarianism emerged only in the 20th century.

Arendt posits that it could be either that totalitarianism is a momentary form of government leading to another political system, or that the human experience that lays the shared basis onto which a political order is formed had not previously served as a common ground for the establishment of a political order.

If there is a basic experience which finds its political expression in totalitarian domination, then, in view of the novelty of the totalitarian form of government, this must be an experience which, for whatever reason, has never before served as the foundation of a body politic (…). If we consider this in terms of the history of ideas, it seems extremely unlikely. (…). Yet, totalitarian rule confronts us with a totally different…