If anyone cares, in my never-completed dissertation, I derived Arendt's theory of totalitarianism from her critique of Heidegger (using Augustine as a proxy) in her dissertation.
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/robi02_.html
>
> [...]
>
> Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the centenary
> of Arendt’s birth
> should have devolved into a recitation of the
> familiar. Once a week, it
> seems, some pundit will trot out her theory of
> totalitarianism,
> dutifully extending it, as her followers did during
> the Cold War, to
> America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s
> academic chorus
> continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes
> of her least
> political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks
> about Zionism and
> imperialism. Academic careers are built on
> interpretations of her work,
> and careerism, as Arendt noted in her book on
> Eichmann, is seldom
> conducive to thinking.
>
> The lodestone of the Arendt industry is The Origins
> of Totalitarianism,
> published in 1951 and reissued by Schocken in 2004
> with an introduction
> by Samantha Power. Divided into three parts –
> ‘Anti-Semitism’,
> ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Totalitarianism’ – the book was
> composed at two
> different times and evinces two conflicting
> impulses. Arendt wrote the
> first two sections in the early to mid-1940s, when
> Fascism was her fear
> and a federated, social democratic Europe her hope.
> She considered
> calling the book ‘Imperialism’ and the title of her
> intended conclusion,
> on the Nazi genocide, ‘Race-Imperialism.’
>
> By the late 1940s, however, Arendt’s hope for
> postwar Europe had waned –
> it was a victim, as she had predicted in 1945, of
> the anti-Communist
> drive for collective security, which she compared to
> Metternich’s Holy
> Alliance – and the Soviet Union was her
> preoccupation. She wrote the
> last third of the book in 1948 and 1949, in the
> early years of the Cold
> War. Racism merged with Marxism, Auschwitz with the
> Gulag, and Fascism
> morphed into Communism.
>
> This last section is the least representative – and,
> as historians of
> Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least
> instructive – part of the
> book. But it has always attracted the most
> attention. Young-Bruehl
> claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal
> importance’ to the
> one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven
> scattered
> paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last
> section to examine recent
> genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that
> totalitarianism seeks not
> the elimination of a people but the liquidation of
> the person. And when
> Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also
> looks to the last
> section, even though Arendt’s analysis of
> imperialism would seem more
> pertinent.
>
> [...]
>
> If Arendt matters today, it is because of her
> writings on imperialism,
> Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and
> early 1960s, they
> not only challenge facile and fashionable
> applications of the
> totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe
> the dangers that the
> world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these
> writings, the
> journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up
> the Arendt industry
> betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area
> of her work and
> fail to engage with the unsettling realities of
> their own time. The
> latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend
> to have selective
> memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she
> wrote at the height of
> the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though
> ‘its relevance for
> contemporary events has become rather obvious in
> recent years.’ America
> was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the
> idea of
> totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are
> back, on an
> enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist
> era.’
>
> [...]
>
> Though Arendt had a long, often sympathetic
> involvement in Zionist
> politics, she was wary of the project almost from
> the start. ‘I find
> this territorial experiment increasingly
> problematic,’ she wrote in a
> 1940 letter, just one of the fascinating documents
> gathered by Jerome
> Kohn and Ron Feldman in their splendid collection of
> Arendt’s Jewish
> writings, many of which have been translated for the
> first time. In
> 1948, she confessed to her complete ‘opposition to
> present Zionist
> politics’. Her opposition was rooted in three
> concerns: the
> correspondence she saw between Zionism and Fascism,
> the Zionists’
> dependence on imperialism, and her growing awareness
> of what she called
> ‘the Arab question’.
>
> Of all the co-optations of Arendt for contemporary
> political purposes,
> none is more outrageous than the parallel, drawn by
> Power and others,
> between Palestinian militants and the Nazis. Arendt
> firmly rejected that
> analogy (in a 1948 letter to the Jewish Frontier),
> and few of the
> protagonists in the struggle over Palestine so
> reminded her of the Nazis
> as the Zionists themselves, particularly those of
> the Revisionist
> tendency, whose influence Arendt was among the first
> to notice.
>
> >From its inception, Arendt argued, Zionism had
> exhibited some of the
> nastier features of European nationalism. Drawing
> ‘from German sources’,
> she wrote in 1946, Herzl presumed that the Jews
> constituted neither a
> religion nor a people but an ‘organic national body’
> or race that could
> one day be housed ‘inside the closed walls of a
> biological entity’ or
> state. With its insistence on the eternal struggle
> between the Jews and
> their enemies, she wrote in the 1930s, the Zionist
> worldview seemed ‘to
> conform perfectly’ to that of ‘the National
> Socialists’. Both ideas, she
> added in 1944, ‘had a definite tendency towards what
> later were known as
> Revisionist attitudes’.
>
> In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel’s Revisionist
> party, travelled to
> America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the
> New York Times, which
> was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others.
> Herut was ‘no ordinary
> political party’, she wrote. It was ‘closely akin in
> its organisation,
> methods, political philosophy and social appeal to
> the Nazi and Fascist
> parties’. It used ‘terrorism’, and its goal was a
> ‘Führer state’ based
> on ‘ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and
> racial superiority’. The
> letter also decried those ‘Americans of national
> repute’ who ‘have lent
> their names to welcome’ the Herut leader, giving
> ‘the impression that a
> large segment of America supports Fascist elements
> in Israel’. The
> leader of Herut was Menachem Begin.
>
> The second failing of Zionism, according to Arendt,
> was that its leaders
> looked to the ‘great powers’ for support rather than
> to their future
> neighbours. Her disagreement here was both moral –
> ‘by taking advantage
> of imperialistic interests’, she wrote in 1944, the
> Zionists had
> collaborated ‘with the most evil forces of our time’
> – and strategic. At
> the very moment that imperialism was being
> challenged throughout the
> world, Zionism had attached itself to a universally
> maligned form. ‘Only
> folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant
> imperial power for
> protection, while alienating the goodwill of
> neighbours,’ she wrote. In
> a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply
> ignored or failed to
> understand ‘the awakening of colonial peoples and
> the new nationalist
> solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French
> Morocco’. Self-styled
> realists, they were profoundly unrealistic. They
> ‘mistook decisions of
> great powers for the ultimate realities’, she wrote
> in 1948, when ‘the
> only permanent reality in the whole constellation
> was the presence of
> Arabs in Palestine.’
>
> [...]
>
> Many people believe that great crimes come from
> terrible ideas: Marxism,
> racism and Islamic fundamentalism gave us the Gulag,
> Auschwitz and 9/11.
> It was the singular achievement of Eichmann in
> Jerusalem, however, to
> remind us that the worst atrocities often arise from
> the simplest of
> vices. And few vices, in Arendt’s mind, were more
> vicious than
> careerism. ‘The East is a career,’ Disraeli wrote.
> And so was the
> Holocaust, according to Arendt. ‘What for Eichmann
> was a job, with its
> daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews
> quite literally the
> end of the world.’ Genocide, she insisted, is work.
> If it is to be done,
> people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done
> well, they must be
> supervised and promoted.
>
> Eichmann was a careerist of the first order. He had
> ‘no motives at all’,
> Arendt insisted, ‘except for an extraordinary
> diligence in looking out
> for his personal advancement’. He joined the Nazis
> because he saw in
> them an opportunity to ‘start from scratch and still
> make a career’, and
> ‘what he fervently believed in up to the end was
> success.’ Late in the
> war, as Nazi leaders brooded in Berlin over their
> impending fate and
> that of Germany, Eichmann was fretting over
> superiors’ refusing to
> invite him to lunch. Years later, he had no memory
> of the Wannsee
> Conference, but clearly remembered bowling with
> senior officials in
> Slovakia.
>
> This aspect of Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann is
> often overlooked in
> favour of her account of the bureaucrat, the
> thoughtless follower of
> rules who could cite the letter of Kant’s
> categorical imperative without
> apprehending its spirit. The bureaucrat is a passive
> instrument, the
> careerist an architect of his own advance. The first
> loses himself in
> paper, the second hoists himself up a ladder. The
> first was how Eichmann
> saw himself; the second is how Arendt insisted he be
> seen.
>
> Most modern theorists, from Montesquieu to the
> American Framers to
> Hayek, have considered ambition and careerism to be
> checks against,
> rather than conduits of, oppression and tyranny.
> Arendt’s account of
> totalitarianism, too, makes it difficult to see how
> a careerist could
> survive or prosper among Nazis and Stalinists.
> Totalitarianism, she
> argued, appeals to people who no longer care about
> their lives, much
> less their careers, and destroys individuals who do.
> It preys on the
> dissolution of class structures and established
> hierarchies – or
> dissolves those that remain – and replaces them with
> a shapeless mass
> movement and a bureaucracy that resembles an onion
> more than a pyramid.
>
> The main reason for the contemporary evasion of
> Arendt’s critique of
> careerism, however, is that addressing it would
> force a confrontation
> with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when
> capitalism is
> assumed to be not only efficient but also a source
> of freedom, the
> careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going
> tolerance and pluralism.
> Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think
> too much and want too
> much from politics, the careerist is a genial
> caretaker of himself. He
> prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state
> power. He is realistic
> and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That
> careerism may be as lethal
> as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of
> barbarism, that some of the
> worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather
> than extraordinary
> ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in
> Jerusalem that neo-cons
> and neoliberals alike find too troubling to
> acknowledge.
>
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