IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
Totali
tarian Vi sions of the Good Society:
Arendt
Arertdt made many small errors jor which her
critics will never jorgive her. But she also got
many oj the big things right, and jor that she
deserves to be remembered.
Amos Elon
The publication of
The Origins cifTotalitarianism
in 1951 established Hannah
Arendt as a major figure in postwar political theory. In this work she
attempted to provide a unitary approach to totalitarianism, seeing differ–
ences between national socialism and communism as of lesser significance
than the organizational and cultural linkages that such systems have with
each other-a common base in the leadership principle, in single party
politics based on mass mobilization rather than individual voluntary par–
ticipation, and not the least, in a near insatiable desire to expand from
nation to empire, whether directly through military adventure or indirect–
ly through political infiltration.
Anti-Semitism functioned differently in Germany under Hitler and in
Russia under Stalin, but they had the same common roots: the existence of
disparities between social classes and the need for objectifYing an enemy
responsible for all shortcomings and defeats suffered by nations and sys–
tems. Arendt's powerful critique of anti-Semitism was directly linked to
her participation in Jewish affairs once she came to the United States. She
served as Research Director of the Conference on Jewish Relations
between 1944 and 1946, and then as executive director of Jewish Cultural
Reconstruction in New York between 1949 and 1952.
Arendt's views on genocide extended far beyond
Eichmann inJerusalem.
Indeed, she developed a general theory of totalitarianism in which the sub–
ject of genocide was thoroughly explored. In defining Nazism, she argued
Editor's note:
"Totali taria n Visions of the Good Society: Arendt" has been
extracted, with the publishers' permission, from Chapter 13 of the author's
forthcoming book,
Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theology oj Political
Sociology
(Transaction Publishers, M ay 1999).
