RAYMOND ARON
373
graduated income taxes, educational benefits to children), as well as per–
sonal security and stable employment? Such stability would slow down
production. Given the age at which, in the 1920s and 1930s, those
bourgeoisie came to occupy secure and permanent top positions, social
dissatisfaction would be concentrated in them and give them an authority
and confidence that would progressively limit the Party's omnipotence.
The Party maintains social mobility; at the same time it itself represents
the only source of conflict resolution within a ruling class that has not yet
established constitutional, peaceable procedures by which to regulate
conflicts.
All these explanations, even when they are combined, leave us with a
mysterious margin: the mass arrest of millions of people which crippled in–
dustries, the army, and the managerial elite was neither necessary nor
reasonable. It is not certain that anyone wanted the great purge as it ac–
tually
unfolded, any more than anyone wanted collectivization as it was
practiced. The snowballing mechanism described in Alexander
Weissberg's admirable book,
L'Accuse
(1953), may have intervened as
much as Stalin's sadism did.
These sociological explanations, sketched quickly here, are by no
means incompatible with Mme. Arendt's interpretations which seek out
the essence of totalitarianism. The complex connections she establishes
among terror, ideology, and the police do not vanish on account of these
explanations.
It
is not out of the question to consider terror the essence of
the totalitarian regime in order to distinguish it from simple tyranny,
which is the absolute power of one alone ruling over all and reducing
them to impotence. But the totalitarian essence did not arise mysteriously,
fully
armed, out of the mind of History or of the mind of Stalin. Certain
circumstances favored its emergence, and others will foster its disappear–
ance.
In her essay, "Ideology and Terror," written originally in 1953 for the
Karl
Jaspers
Festschrift
[which later appeared as the final chapter of the re–
vised editions of
The Origins of Totalitarianism
beginning in 1958], Mme.
Arendt articulates both her method and her thought by recourse to
Montesquieu's ideas . Every political regime has a nature and a principle.
The nature is "that which makes a thing be what it is and the principle is
what makes it act." The monarchical principle is honor, the republican
principle is virtue. Tyranny's principle is fear. However, Mme. Arendt
goes on to say that totalitarianism has no principle. A regime whose ide–
ology proclaims cosmic or historical laws superior to the will of human
beings, whose praxis throws individuals into isolation and abandonment
and prepares them to accept the roles of executioner or victim, is not
