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Exposing Totalitarianism — A Kafkaesque Tragedy
Investigating Hannah Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt was one of the prominent political theorists of the 20th-century. She is celebrated for her original thinking and theorizing style, which is particularly apparent in her work on totalitarianism.
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, she was, as a Jew, compelled to flee Germany. Roughly two decades later, she published her major work The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, which illustrates quite well her original style. In a word, the book is a curious mixture of philosophy, history, and sociology.
Nevertheless, Arendt’s objective in Origins was rather simple. She argued that totalitarianism was a modern phenomenon — a novel and an exclusively modern form of government. In this way, she differs from the critics like Karl Kopper who tried to find totalitarian roots from Western philosophical heritage.
Arendt’s main argument revolves around the concept of total domination, which she considered to be a form of governing that reflects the grotesque side of modern societies. In this article, I mean to explore further what Arendt meant by this concept of total domination.
