IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
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"frozen," or calcified and unable to remain a process. But totalitarianism is
also made possible by the widespread installation of fear and what Arendt
calls "total terror." And the totalitarians' system is one in which victims
and executioners alike are selected without regard to personal conviction
or sympathies, but only in terms of rigid "objective standards: i.e., who is
a Jew. And who is an Aryan."
The Origins
if
Totalitarianism
ends on a creative ambiguity, one hardly
restricted to Arendt. A great deal of argument within political theory after
World War Two focused on examinations of the causes of extremism and
the breakdown oflaw and democratic order. We need to know whether it
is politics or culture that defines the limits of power; for, otherwise, not
only are we limited in understanding or responding to such ultimate hor–
rors as the Holocaust, but the nature of democratic options as such remains
in limbo. We need to determine whether totalitarianism is but an extension
of the mobilization and massification of political processes or something
quite different and antithetical to those processes.
Arendt attends to this ambiguity in a work that appeared a decade
later. Mter
The Human Condition,
which might well be seen as an interlude
rather than a continuation of the earlier arguments about her German
mentor, Karl Jaspers, she returns squarely to the problem of totali tarian sys–
tems and political change in what may well be her most underrated effort,
On Revolution.
Indeed, this work too is dedicated to Jaspers who, in
The
Future
if
Mankind,
"dared to face both the horrors of nuclear weapons and
the threat of totalitarianism."
On R evolution
addressed the world one step
further; with the nuclear powers at a stalemate, revolutions had become the
principal political factor of the time. Understanding revolution, for Arendt,
became the key to unlocking the future.
While
On R evolution
does not directly address issues of genocide,
Arendt does illumine new directions, in coming to a psychological profile
of political absolutism, a sense of how the "passions" and the "taste" for
power lead to the emergence of the genocidal state. She takes
Robespierre's theory of revolutionary dictatorship as the quintessential
model of the European encounter with politics, an encounter that ends in
anti-politique.
"The thirst and will to power as such, regardless of any pas–
sion for distinction, although characteristic of the tyrannical man, is no
longer a typically political vice, but rather that quality which tends to
destroy all political life, its vices no less than virtues." With the appeal to
the political as a framework for rational discourse, the sort of unique qual–
ities that endeared American and British civilization to Arendt, there can
be no democratic society, so that even in Revol utionary France from 1789
to 1794, the shouts of the day were "Long Live the Republic," and not
"Up wi th Democracy."
