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even moved by fear. In order for fear to move anyone to act, the individ–
ual must believe that by his action he will escape threats of repression or
purge. Totalitarianism is an attempt to exercise total domination of men
which dehumanizes them, either by sending them to concentration camps
or, in so-called normal society, by subjecting them to obsessive propa–
ganda and to mysterious decisions made by authorities who themselves
appeal to cosmic and human laws.
One cannot help asking whether, formulated this way, Mme.
Arendt's thesis is not contradictory. A regime without a principle is not a
regime.
It
cannot be compared to either a monarchy or a republic. As a
regime, it exists only in its creator's imagination. In other words, Mme.
Arendt constructs an essentially political regime out of certain aspects of
Hitlerian and Stalinist phenomena. She draws out and probably exagger–
ates the originality of German and Russian totalitarianism. Taking this
genuine originality to be the equivalent of a fundamental regime, she is
led to see in our time the negating of traditional philosophies. And she
slides toward a contradiction: defining a functioning regime by an essence
that implies the impossibility of its functioning.
In one sense, the ideology and terror of totalitarianism are the ampli–
fication of revolutionary phenomena, a connection made by Crane
Brinton in
The Anatomy of Revolution
(1952). As has often been said, the
Bolsheviks are Puritans or Jacobins who succeeded, that is, who held on
to power. They too say or think that only the pure will save the
Revolution. They too, once they embody that state, reject the liberty
they demanded of their enemies in power. They too are the apostles of
"the despotism of liberty," a logical contradiction which an historian can
easily ·explain, since social upheavals in their first phase exclude demo–
cratic methods, even if they are to be ultimately favorable to democracy.
A revolutionary society imposes on its militants a break with all other
bonds. Nothing, neither family nor work, matters in the face of true faith
- in God or in the classless society - and authentic action for individual or
collective salvation. To the extent that this attitude and these beliefs are
maintained, the common man in effect finds himself, according to Mme.
Arendt's analysis, sacrificed to mysterious laws, severed from close-knit
communities, subjected to a terror that merges not only with the arbitrary
will of one man, but also with a sort of fatality.
One could say that revolutionary fever, as Crane Brinton analyzes it,
cannot last for as long as several decades. Yet indeed, Bolshevism has
taken on patent, even radical newness in comparison with other revolu–
tionary societies. Aiming beyond the goals of the Puritans or the Jacobins,
situating the Promised Land at the end of historical development,
promising economic equality and abundance for all, Bolshevism entails
