ALPHABET OF JUSTICE
427
reduces the scruple against murder to a petty-bourgeois sentimentality.
And totalitarian society differs from militarized regimes-and from
previous despotisms-by creating a new form of compliance to its ends.
Just as the Christian sense of sin forced men to internalize guilt as
conscience, and to substitute self-regulation for external restraints, so
the totalitarian belief instills in its followers a guilt-free sanction which
replaces conscience with the higher end.
It is quite unlikely that any
society
can be totalitarian for long,
since the diverse desires of men cannot be harnessed to a single end
without some strong allegiance, an enemy in wartime, or compliance
through terror. But what the "rediscovery of evil" showed-the pre–
occupation in the decade of the fifties with Kierkegaard, Simone Weil,
Camus, Tillich, Niebuhr and Barth-was that a truth which had been
throught to be historical and political was,
au fond,
metaphysical. The
frightening prospect it disclosed was that, given the structural tendencies
of modem societies to centralize power and to manipulate vast numbers
of men through the agencies of state coercion, the totalitarian potential
was an ever-recurrent one.
V. THE PAROCHIAL AND THE UNIVERSAL
All of this leads to the point which,
in intention,
was the pivot of
Miss Arendt's book-that the Israelis failed to understand the uniquely
new nature of the crimes committed, a failure reflected in the indict–
ment of Eichmann as instigating crimes against the Jewish people. For
the Israelis, Nazism was one of the long procession of brutalities
committed within the tradition of anti-semitism. For Miss Arendt the
Nazi
crimes, the rationalized murder of entire populations, is the
beginning of a new set of fearful possibilities in human history.
The point was anticipated a dozen years ago in her
Origins of
Totalitarianism:
"The chances for eventual success of totalitarianism
are slimmer still if we remember that almost no system has ever been
less capable of gradually expanding its sphere of influence.... [But]
the totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience
of modem masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth."
And the point is taken up as the rationale for her argument in
Eichmann in Jerusalem:
"The particular reasons that speak for the
possibility of a repetition of the crimes committed by the Nazis are even
more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modem population
explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through auto–
mation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in
tenns of labor, and that, through nuclear energy make it possible to
