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analogy with Burke suggested by Margaret Canovan fails to ho ld, for
although she shared Burke's appea l to arti fice over n ature, she lacked
his sense of the historical concreteness of specific liberties, whi ch were
reall y p rivil eges passed down from generation to genera tion . To a
significant extent, political existen tialism was directed against the
p revailing historicist orthodoxy, bou rgeois or Marxist, which domi–
na ted German thought from the time of Herder to the 1920s. The
argument that everything must be dissolved in the solvent of history,
whose dead hand weighs on the li ving present, seemed unnecessaril y
oppressive to an existentialist mentality p rocl aiming the permi ssibility
and possibility of everything. Wha t makes Hannah Arendt' s version of
the revolt against history novel is tha t it was di rected no t onl y against
history understood as the working ou t of laws or trends outside of
human control, an understanding which combined bo th religious and
n atural scientific impul ses, but a lso against the alterna ti ve view that
history is made by men . T his latter assumption , which stems from Vico
and informed Marxism, was obj ectionable to her because it refl ects the
view of man as
homo faber
creating a world of u seful p roducts ra ther
than tha t of man as free actor. Vico's humanistic stress on the creative
ori gins of history, so Hannah Arendt argued, mirrors the early modern
world 's new con fidence in the power of technology, which in volves the
domina ti on of nature and hence violence.
Miss Arendt 's faith in the poss ibility of cutting through the
restraining bonds of the past makes one of the more controversial
aspects o f her analysis of tota litarianism less obscure, if still diffi cult to
support. Altho ugh she treated Nazism and Stalinism in solely sys temic
terms as the incursion of the mos t automa tic processes of society into
the political realm, she nonetheless argu ed tha t totalitari ani sm oper–
ates on the premise that men can be made entirely anew. In o ther
words, for the Enli ghtenment 's beli ef in the infinite perfectibility of
man , to ta litarian ism substitu tes an infinite degradability. Underl ying
both , however, is a common disregard for the intractibility of hi stori cal
conditioning and the limits of human na ture. Tha t Hannah Arendt
accepted the premise tha t tota litarianism does indeed represent a
remaking o f man in wholl y new terms, whi ch is bes t shown in the
concen tra tion camps, ill ustra tes her scorn for the historical limita tions
res isting such a total transforma tion . Like the existentialists, she
tended to beli eve in unlimited human mall eability wi th little regard for
hi stor ica l constraints, even if at times she came to share the existential–
ists ' grudg ing acknow ledgement of the power of "situa ti on" to q ualify
that freedom.
Hann ah Arendt 's ani mus towards society, history, reason , utilitar-
