722
PARTISAN REVIEW
down to the Dreyfus Affair attempts to demonstrate how the peculiar
social and economic situation of the Jews established a connection be–
tween them and the state, and eventually made them the obvious butts
of the attacks of all those hostile to the established polity. An examina–
tion of the genesis of modern imperialism probes also into the sources
of racism and reveals the means through which expansion undermined
the stability of the nation-state and ultimately of the rights of man. The
final essay treats totalitarianism itself-as an ideology, as a movement
seeking control, and as a functioning system of power.
To her task Miss Arendt brings a maturity of political judgment
that springs from her exceptional powers of philosophical analysis and
from a clear consciousness of the nature of the realistic determinants of
government. Many sections of the work are illuminating and generally,
even the digressions are rewarding for their insight.
The central contribution of the volume is the delineation of the
exact features that distinguish totalitarianism from other modes of
political organization. Totalitarianism, as it appeared in the Soviet
Union in the 1930s and in Germany after 1940 was not simply another
version of the ancient or modern dictatorships; it was not even simply
another police state. It embodied rather an altogether novel pattern of
power organization, the ends of which were global domination, the
means of which were total terror. Installed with the aid of the mob,
maintained by appeals to the masses, and obsessed with the need of
implementing a rigid ideology, totalitarianism operated with a com–
plete and destructive disregard of material reality. Its ideal end results
were the concentration camps and the crematoria.
There are particular stages of her analysis, at which I question the
validity of Miss Arendt's interpretation, and there are points at which
the discontinuity of the essays does not permit her to do justice to her
own arguments. But these are minor matters. The reader with the
patience and intelIigence to get beyond a rather difficult style and
to comprehend the skill and subtlety with which Miss Arendt refines
and elaborates her concepts wiII lay the book down with a clear under–
standing of how totalitarianism came into being.
I am not however sure he wiII understand why. What, after all,
is essentially unprecedented in totalitarianism? Not the global ambitions;
dreams of universal imperium tormented many a tyrant before the
twentieth century. Not the denial of common humanity; seventeenth–
century Englishmen in America called the Indians "imps of Satan"
and meant it quite literally. Not even the use of total terror as an
instrument of policy; the counselors of Henry VIII in the sixteenth
