70
PARTISAN REVIEW
The last part of the book is not an account of what actually went
on in the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps-one need only com–
pare it to any reliable historical work on the subject. What she does
offer is quite different. It is an illustration of the post-Nietzschean
world of "nothingness." The camps are the places of terror with no
exits, where nothing normal remains. They are reality inverted. To
outsiders this world may look insane or like the hell of Giotto's
Last
Judgement ,
but that is obtuse. The camps' world , "inside," proves
"that the power of man is greater" than conventional people care to
admit. In fact, of course, human power is all there is . We create our
own knowable world and every standard in it. For God does not pre–
side over anything. This world, moreover, re-creates itself, for
everything in it is superfluous, and omnipotent man creates
superfluities to be discarded and repeated, over and over again. Hell
remains well stocked. Common sense can never grasp, and utilitari–
anism is only a barrier to recognition of, this reversal of all values.
This is not merely Dante's
Inferno
without God, it is also an echo of
Zarathustra, who already talked of men as pebbles to be kicked
aside-except there is no hope of any superman now. For the world
of terror that omnipotent man has created is also a world of neces–
sity, of "iron" laws of nature and history and with its own "icy
logic." Ideology has made and maintains this void in the absence of
"Being." Such, then, is our disorder when we must give up the very
notion of truth and our search for it. This indeed is "history" as
facing and resisting reality. For Arendt the totalitarian world was a
philosophical nightmare of which the actuality of the camps was the
expressIOn.
If
the last section of
The Origins of Totalitarianism
was an exercise
in post-Nietzschean philosophizing, the book also made a serious
contribution to political theory in the tradition of Montesquieu and
de Tocqueville. Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism as a new and
unique type of rule was a real addition to the theory of regimes. The
importance of superfluous populations also goes far to explain geno–
cide. One need only consider the American Indian. For superfluous
peoples were for Arendt both a surrealist vision and a perfectly
straightforward historical explanation of some imperialist encoun–
ters.
It
ought, finally, to be stressed that although Arendt insisted on
the gulf that separated totalitarian from authoritarian regimes, she
would not have approved of the current use of that distinction.
It
would, one suspects, have distressed her to see her work become an
