JUDITH N. SHKLAR
71
ideological weapon of any kind, but especially one wielded against
the support of human rights abroad. Her own career as a cold warrior
came to an end in the sixties. She was always fiercely anti-Soviet,
knowing what that regime was since the Moscow Trials, but she could
not bear most ex- or anti-Communists. Only those German
jormer
Communists like her husband, who had quit the party very early,
could count on her respect, as Young-Bruehl carefully explains.
Of all the sections of
The Origins oj Totalitarianism
the one on the
theory of mass society was the least original and the most superficial,
as well as the most popular. Its classic exposition had already
appeared in Emil Lederer's
The State oj the Masses,
to which Arendt
failed to acknowledge a very obvious debt. In post-Marxist specula–
tive sociology, the failure of the proletariat to appear and the success
of fascism meant that class society was dead and had been replaced
by an undifferentiated "mass," which was easily held together by
hate ideologies, propaganda, and terror. The nonsociety of these
disoriented individuals was the inevitable successor of class society
as Marx had seen it. The American spin-offs from this were numer–
ous. The consumer society, McCarthyism, mid-mass conformism,
and even the populist tradition in American politics were squeezed
into this essentially Marxist vision. For no one could say a good
word for the middle class. Mass theory became at most a rather
crude weapon in the hands of various local old-left radicals, who
wanted to take one last whack at America. As for
The Origins
of
Totali–
tarianism-it
remains enormously interesting and must surely
become a primary document in the intellectual history of the middle
years of this century.
Arendt's next book was the first non-Jewish and the most
German of her American writings. By the mid-fifties her
Bildung
had
reasserted itself. She had brushed up her Greek and she had picked
up the surviving pieces of her German past, including Heidegger.
She wrote to her husband that her first visit to Karl Jaspers in Basel
in 1949 was "like coming home." She returned to Germany often
from then on. Being "back home" revealed some not unexpected
layers of thought and feeling. In keeping with the oldest traditions
and the purest ideals of German
Bildung
she worshiped ancient
Greece. No one ever had a worse case of Athens-worship than
Arendt. The passionate longing for that lost culture waS the deepest
impulse of romantic poetry and of that quest for "spiritual" libera–
tion, especially in a society as unfree as the Germany of Schiller,
