Totalitarianism: The Inversion of Politics
   by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

   

   When Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, World War II had ended
   and Hitler was dead, but Stalin lived and ruled. Arendt wanted to give her readers a sense of
   the phenomenal reality of totalitarianism, of its appearance in the world as a terrifying and
   completely new form of government. In the first two parts of the book she excavated hidden
   elements in modern anti-Semitism and European imperialism that coalesced in totalitarian
   movements; in the third part she explored the organization of those movements, dissected the
   structure of Nazism and Stalinist Bolshevism in power, and scrutinized the "double claim" of
   those regimes "to total domination and global rule." Her focus, to be sure, is mainly on
   Nazism, not only because more information concerning it was available at the time, but also
   because Arendt was more familiar with Germany and hence with the origins of totalitarianism
   there than in Russia. She knew, of course, that those origins differed substantially in the
   two countries and later, in different writings, would undertake to right the imbalance in her
   earlier discussion (see "Project: Totalitarian Elements in Marxism").

   The enormous complexity of The Origins of Totalitarianism arises from its interweaving of an
   understanding of the concept of totalitarianism with the description of its emergence and
   embodiment in Nazism and Stalinism. The scope of Arendt's conceptual objectives may be
   glimpsed in the plan she drew up for six lectures on the nature of totalitarianism delivered
   at the New School for Social Research in March and April of 1953 (see "The Great Tradition and
   the Nature of Totalitarianism"). The first lecture dealt with totalitarianism's "explosion" of
   our traditional "categories of thought and standards of judgment," thus at the outset stating
   the difficulty of understanding totalitarianism at all. In the second lecture she considered
   the different kinds of government as they were first formulated by Plato and then jumped many
   centuries to Montesquieu's crucial discovery of each kind of government's principle of action
   and the human experience in which that principle is embedded. In the third lecture she
   explicated three important distinctions: first, between governments of law and arbitrary
   power; secondly, between the traditional notion of humanly established laws and the new
   totalitarian concept of laws that govern the evolution of nature and direct the movement of
   history; and, thirdly, between "traditional sources of authority" that stabilize "legal
   institutions," thereby accommodating human action, and totalitarian laws of motion whose
   function is, on the contrary, to stabilize human beings so that the predetermined courses of
   nature and history can run freely through them. The fourth lecture addressed the totalitarian
   "transformation" of an ideological system of belief into a deductive principle of action. In
   the fifth lecture the basic experience of human loneliness in totalitarianism was contrasted
   with that of impotence in tyranny and differentiated from the experiences of isolation and
   solitude, which are essential to the activities of making and thinking but "marginal phenomena
   in political life." In the final lecture Arendt distinguished "the political reality of
   freedom" from both its "philosophical idea" and the "inherent 'materialism'" of Western
   political thought.

   In addition to its complexity the stylistic richness of The Origins of Totalitarianism lies in
   its admixture of erudition and imagination, which is nowhere more manifest than in the
   particular examples by which Arendt brought to light the elements of totalitarianism. These
   examples include her devastating portrait of Disraeli and her tragic account of the "great"
   and "bitter" life of T. E. Lawrence; other exemplary figures are drawn from works of
   literature by authors such as Kipling and Conrad (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter
   7). A single, striking instance of the latter is Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which Arendt
   called "the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa," her emphasis clearly
   falling on the word "experience." Engaged in "the merry dance of death and trade," Conrad's
   imperialistic adventurers were in quest of ivory and entertained few scruples over
   slaughtering the indigenous inhabitants of "the phantom world of the dark continent" in order
   to obtain it. The subject of Conrad's work, in which the story told by the always ambiguous
   Marlow is recounted by an unnamed narrator, is the encounter of Africans with "superfluous"
   Europeans "spat out" of their societies. As the author of the whole tale as well as the tale
   within the tale, Conrad was intent not "to hint however subtly or tentatively at an
   alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his
   characters."^1 Marlow, a character twice removed from the reader, is aware that the "conquest
   of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion
   or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing." It is in the person of the
   "remarkable" and "eloquent" Mr. Kurtz that Marlow seeks the "idea" that alone can offer
   redemption: "An idea at the back of [the conquest], not a sentimental pretense but an idea;
   and an unselfish belief in the idea."

   As Marlow's steamer penetrates "deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness" in search of
   Kurtz's remote trading station, Africa becomes increasingly "impenetrable to human thought."
   In a passage cited by Arendt, Marlow observes the Africans on the shore:

   The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who could tell? We . . .
   glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be, before an
   enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could
   not remember, because we were traveling in the night of the first ages, of those ages that are
   gone leaving hardly a sign--and no memories. . . . The earth seemed unearthly . . . and the
   men were . . . No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this
   suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leapt and
   spun and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like
   yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

   The next sentence spoken by Marlow consists of one word, "Ugly," and that word leads directly
   to his discovery of Kurtz, the object of his fascination. He reads a report that Kurtz, who
   exemplifies the European imperialist ("All Europe contributed to [his] making"), has written
   to the "International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs." It is a report in the
   name of progress, of "good practically unbounded," and it gives Marlow a sense "of an exotic
   Immensity ruled by an August Benevolence." But at the bottom of the report's last page,
   "luminous and terrifying like a flash of lightning in a serene sky," Kurtz has scrawled
   "Exterminate all the brutes!" Thus racism is revealed as the "idea" of the mad Kurtz and the
   darkness of his heart becomes the counterpart of the not inhuman but "uncivilized" darkness of
   Africa. The horrific details follow, the decapitated heads of Africans stuck on poles, facing
   inward toward Kurtz's dwelling. Marlow rationalizes Kurtz's "lack of restraint": "the
   wilderness . . . had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know," a whisper
   that "echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core." It is questionable whether
   Marlow is less hollow when, at the end of the work, he attempts in "fright" to lie about
   Kurtz's last words, "The horror! The horror!" The experience of race is now complete; even the
   shadowy narrator of Marlow's story is left before "the heart of an immense darkness" in which
   the image of Kurtz's racism looms in the consciousness of Conrad's readers and of the world.

   Arendt, however, is not saying that racism or any other element of totalitarianism caused the
   regimes of Hitler or Stalin, but rather that those elements, which include anti-Semitism, the
   decline of the nation-state, expansionism for its own sake, and the alliance between capital
   and mob, crystallized in the movements from which those regimes arose. Reflecting on her book
   in 1958 Arendt said that her intentions "presented themselves" to her "in the form of an ever
   recurring image: I felt as though I dealt with a crystallized structure which I had to break
   up into its constituent elements in order to destroy it." This presented a problem because she
   saw that it was an "impossible task to write history, not in order to save and conserve and
   render fit for remembrance, but, on the contrary, in order to destroy." Thus despite her
   historical analyses it "dawned" on her that The Origins of Totalitarianism was not "a
   historical . . . but a political book, in which whatever there was of past history not only
   was seen from the vantage point of the present, but would not have become visible at all
   without the light which the event, the emergence of totalitarianism, shed on it." The origins
   are not causes, in fact "they only became origins- antecedents--after the event had taken
   place." While analyzing, literally "breaking up," a crystal into its "constituent elements"
   destroys the crystal, it does not destroy the elements. This is among the fundamental points
   that Arendt made in the chapter written in 1953 and added to all subsequent editions of The
   Origins of Totalitarianism (see "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government"):

   If it is true that the elements of totalitarianism can be found by retracing the history and
   analyzing the political implications of what we usually call the crisis of our century, then
   the conclusion is unavoidable that this crisis is no mere threat from the outside, no mere
   result of some aggressive foreign policy of either Germany or Russia, and that it will no more
   disappear with the death of Stalin than it disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It may
   even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form--though not
   necessarily the cruelest--only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.

   According to Arendt the "disturbing relevance of totalitarian regimes . . . is that the true
   problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without the acknowledgment that
   totalitarianism became this century's curse only because it so terrifyingly took care of its
   problems" (see "Concluding Remarks" in the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism).
   The rejection of the totalitarian answer to the question of race, for instance, does not solve
   but reveals the problem that arises when race is viewed as the origin of human diversity.
   Totalitarianism's destruction of naturally determined "inferior" races or historically
   determined "dying" classes leaves us on an overcrowded planet with the great and unsolved
   political perplexity of how human plurality can be conceived, of how historically and
   culturally different groups of human beings can live together and share their earthly home.

   Defying classification in terms of a single academic discipline such as history, sociology,
   political science, or philosophy, The Origins of Totalitarianism presents a startling
   interpretation of modern European intellectual currents and political events. Still difficult
   to grasp in its entirety, the book's climactic delineation of the living dead, of those
   "inanimate" beings who experienced the full force of totalitarian terror in concentration
   camps, cut more deeply into the consciousness of some of Arendt's readers than the most
   shocking photographs of the distorted bodies of the already dead. Such readers realized that
   there are torments worse than death, which Arendt described in terms of the longing for death
   by those who in former times were thought to have been condemned to the eternal punishments of
   hell. She meant this vision of hell to be taken literally and not allegorically, for although
   throughout the long centuries of Christian belief men had proved themselves incapable of
   realizing the city of God as a dwelling place for human beings, they now showed that it was
   indeed possible to establish hell on earth rather than in an afterlife.

   Arendt added totalitarianism to the list of kinds of government drawn up in antiquity and
   hardly altered since then: monarchy (the rule of one) and its perversion in tyranny;
   aristocracy (the rule of the best) and its corruption in oligarchy or the rule of cliques; and
   democracy (the rule of many) and its distortion in ochlocracy or mob rule. The hallmark of
   totalitarianism, a form of rule supported by "superfluous" masses who sought a new reality in
   which they would be recognized in public, was the appearance in the world of what Arendt, in
   The Origins of Totalitarianism, called radical and absolute evil. Totalitarian regimes are not
   the "opposite" of anything: the absence of their opposite may be the surest way of seeing
   totalitarianism as the crisis of our times.

   Totalitarianism has been identified by many writers as a ruthless, brutal, and, thanks to
   modern technology, potent form of political tyranny whose ambitions for world domination are
   unlimited. Disseminating propaganda derived from an ideology through the media of mass
   communication, totalitarianism relies on mass support. It crushes whoever and whatever stands
   in its way by means of terror and proceeds to a total reconstruction of the society it
   displaces. Thus a largely rural and feudal Russian Empire, under the absolutist rule of czars
   stretching back to the fifteenth century, was transformed first by Lenin after the October
   Revolution of 1917 and then by Stalin into an industrialized Union of Soviet Socialist
   Republics; a Germany broken after its defeat in World War I was mobilized and became the
   conqueror of most of Europe in the early 1940s less than a decade after Hitler's assumption of
   power; and in China the People's Republic, by taking the Great Leap Forward in 1958 followed
   by the Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966 and ending with Mao Zedong's death in 1976,
   expunged much of what remained of a culture that had survived for more than three thousand
   years.

   Such achievements require total one-party governmental control and tremendous human sacrifice;
   the elimination of free choice and individuality; the politicization of the private sphere,
   including that of the family; and the denial of any notion of the universality of human
   rights. In diverse areas of the world where political freedom and open societies have been
   virtually unknown or untried, totalitarian methods have been seen to exert an ongoing
   attraction for local elites, warlords, and rebels. Such well-known phenomena as "brain
   washing," "killing fields," "ethnic cleansing," "mass graves," and "genocide," accounting for
   millions of victims and arising from a variety of tribal, nationalist, ethnic, religious, and
   economic conditions, have been deemed totalitarian in nature. Totalitarianism, moreover, is
   frequently employed as an abstract, vaguely defined term of general opprobrium, whose
   historical roots are traced to the political thought of Marx or in some instances to Rousseau
   and as far back as Plato. But because of what has been called its "inefficiency," which Arendt
   attributes to its "contempt for utilitarian motives," totalitarianism rarely occurs in the
   political analyses of those who consider the function of politics in terms of "utilitarian
   expectations." Recently, however, prominent political theorists such as Margaret Canovan in
   England and Claude Lefort in France have seen in the decline of communism and the diminished
   intensity of left and right ideological debates an opportunity for an impartial and rigorous
   reassessment of the concept of totalitarianism. Although Arendt may have experienced a similar
   need to understand Nazism after its defeat in World War II, for her impartiality was the
   condition of judging the irreversible catastrophe of totalitarianism as "the central event of
   our world."

   When Arendt noted that causality, the explanation of an event as being determined by another
   event or chain of events which leads up to it, "is an altogether alien and falsifying category
   in the historical sciences," she meant that no historical event is ever predictable. Although
   with hindsight it is possible to discern a sequence of events, there is always a "grotesque
   disparity" between that sequence and a particular event's significance. What the principle of
   causality ignores or denies is the contingency of human affairs, i.e., the human capacity to
   begin something new, and therefore the meaning and "the very existence" of what it seeks to
   explain (see "The Difficulties of Understanding" and "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"). It
   is not the "objectivity" of the historical scientist but the impartiality of the judge who
   perceives the existence and discerns the meaning of events, of which the antecedents can then
   be told in stories whose beginnings are never causes and whose conclusions are never
   predetermined.^2 The rejection of causality in history and the insistence on the contingency,
   unpredictability, and meaning of events brought about not by nature but by human agency inform
   Arendt's judgment of the incomprehensible and unforgivable crimes of totalitarianism. In
   regard to such crimes the old saying "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" (to understand
   everything is to forgive everything)--as if to understand an offense, say by its psychological
   motive, were to excuse it--is a double "misrepresentation" of the fact that understanding
   seeks reconciliation. What may be possible is reconciliation to the world in which the crimes
   of totalitarianism were committed (see "The Difficulties of Understanding"), and a great part
   of Arendt's work on totalitarianism and thereafter is an effort to understand that world. But
   it should be noted that the outrage that pervades her judgment is not a subjective emotional
   reaction foisted on a purportedly "value free" scientific analysis.^3 Her anger is impartial
   in her judgment of a form of government that defaced the world and "objectively" belongs to
   that world on whose behalf she judged totalitarianism for what it was and what it meant.

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   2. The concept of history derives from the Greek verb historein, to inquire, but Arendt found
   "the origin of this verb" in the Homeric histor, the first "historian," who was a judge (see
   Thinking, "Postscriptum"; cf. Illiad XVIII, 501).

   3. Such a view, as Arendt points out, accurately describes many historical accounts of
   anti-Semitism, none more so than D. J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
   Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996).

   Even before she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt spoke of the desperate need to
   tell the "real story of the Nazi-constructed hell":

   Not only because these facts have changed and poisoned the very air we breathe, not only
   because they now inhabit our dreams at night and permeate our thoughts during the day -- but
   also because they have become the basic experience and the basic misery of our times. Only
   from this foundation, on which a new knowledge of man will rest, can our new insights, our new
   memories, our new deeds, take their point of departure. (See "The Image of Hell.")

   The beginning called for here, if there were to be one, will arise from individual acts of
   judgment by men and women who know the nature of totalitarianism and agree that, for the sake
   of the world, it must not occur again--not only in the forms in which it has already occurred,
   which may be unlikely, but in any form whatsoever.

   The significance of the story Arendt went on to tell and retell lies entirely in the present,
   and she was fully aware that her "method," a subject which she was always loath to discuss,
   went against the grain not only of political and social scientists but also, more importantly
   to her, of those reporters, historians, and poets who in distinct ways seek to preserve, in or
   out of time, what they record, narrate, and imagine. Reflecting later on the moment in 1943
   when she first learned about Auschwitz, Arendt said: "This ought not to have happened." That
   is no purely moral "ought" based in ethical precepts, the voice of conscience, or immutable
   natural law, but rather as strong as possible a statement that there was something
   irremissibly wrong with the human world in which Auschwitz could and did happen.

   Reconciliation to that world requires understanding only when totalitarianism is judged, not
   by subsuming it under traditional moral, legal, or political categories but by recognizing it
   as something unprecedented, odious, and to be fought against. Such judgment is possible for
   beings "whose essence is beginning" (see "The Difficulties of Understanding") and makes
   reconciliation possible because it strikes new roots in the world. Judgment is "the other side
   of action" and as such the opposite of resignation. It does not erase totalitarianism, for
   then, thrown backward into the past, the historical processes that did not cause but led to
   totalitarianism would be repeated and "the burden of our time" reaccumulated; or, projected
   forward into the future, a never-never land ignorant of its own conditions, the human mind
   would "wander in obscurity."^4 A quotation from Karl Jaspers that struck Arendt "right in the
   heart" and which she chose as the epigraph for The Origins of Totalitarianism stresses that
   what matters is not to give oneself over to the despair of the past or the utopian hope of the
   future, but "to remain wholly in the present." Totalitarianism is the crisis of our times
   insofar as its demise becomes a turning point for the present world, presenting us with an
   entirely new opportunity to realize a common world, a world that Arendt called a "human
   artifice," a place fit for habitation by all human beings.

   Arendt's papers provide many interesting opportunities to study the development of her
   thought. For instance, in "The Difficulties of Understanding," written in the early 1950s,
   judgment is conjoined with understanding. As late as 1972, in impromptu remarks delivered at a
   conference devoted to her work, she associated it with the activity of thinking. But Arendt
   was working her way toward distinguishing judgment as an independent and autonomous mental
   faculty, "the most political of man's mental abilities" (see "Thinking and Moral
   Considerations"). Although the activities of understanding and thinking reveal an unending
   stream of meanings and under specific circumstances may liberate the faculty of judgment, the
   act of judging particular and contingent events differs from them in that it preserves freedom
   by exercising it in the realm of human affairs. That distinction is critical for her view of
   history in general and totalitarianism in particular and has been adhered to in this
   introduction.

   Arendt's judgment of totalitarianism must first and foremost be distinguished from its common
   identification as an insidious form of tyranny. Tyranny is an ancient, originally Greek form
   of government which, as the tragedy of Oedipous Tyrannos and the historical examples of
   Peisistratus of Athens and Periandros of Corinth demonstrate, was by no means necessarily
   against the private interests and initiatives of its people. As a form of government tyranny
   stands against the appearance in public of the plurality of the people, the condition,
   according to Arendt, in which political life and political freedom--"public happiness," as the
   founders of the American republic named it--become possible and without which they do not.

   In a tyrannical political realm, which can hardly be called public, the tyrant exists in
   isolation from the people. Due to the lack of rapport or legal communication between the
   people and the tyrant, all action in a tyranny manifests a "moving principle" of mutual fear:
   the tyrant's fear of the people, on one side, and the people's fear of the tyrant, or, as
   Arendt put it, their "despair over the impossibility" of joining together to act at all, on
   the other. It is in this sense that tyranny is a contradictory and futile form of government,
   one that generates not power but impotence. Hence, according to Montesquieu, whose acute
   observations Arendt drew on in these matters, tyranny (which he does not even bother to
   distinguish from despotism, malevolent by definition, since he is concerned with public rather
   than private freedom) is a form of government that, unlike constitutional republics or
   monarchies, corrupts itself, cultivating within itself the seeds of its own destruction (see
   "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"). Therefore, the essential impotence of a tyrannically
   ruled state, however flamboyant and spectacular its dying throes, and whether or not it is
   despotic, and regardless of the cruelty and suffering it may inflict on its people, presents
   no menace of destruction to the world at large.

   In their early revolutionary stages of development, to be sure, and whenever and wherever they
   meet opposition, totalitarian movements employ tyrannical measures of force and violence, but
   their nature differs from that of tyrannies precisely in the enormity of their threat of world
   destruction. That threat has often been thought possible and explained as the total
   politicalization of all phases of life. Arendt saw it, and this is crucial, as exactly the
   opposite: a phenomenon of total depoliticalization (in German Entpolitisierung [see "Freiheit
   und Politik"]) that appeared for the first time in the regimes of Stalin after 1929 and Hitler
   after 1938. Totalitarianism's radical atomization of the whole of society differs from the
   political isolation, the political "desert," as Arendt termed it, of tyranny. It eliminates
   not only free action, which is political by definition, but also the element of action, that
   is, of initiation, of beginning anything at all, from every human activity. Individual
   spontaneity--in thinking, in any aspiration, or in any creative undertaking--that sustains and
   renews the human world is obliterated in totalitarianism. Totalitarianism destroys everything
   that politics, even the circumscribed political realm of a tyranny, makes possible.

   In totalitarian society freedom, private as well as public, is nothing but an illusion. As
   such it is no longer the source of fear that in tyranny manifests itself not as an emotion but
   as the principle of the tyrant's action and the people's non-action. Whereas tyranny, pitting
   the ruler and his subjects against each other, is ultimately impotent, totalitarianism
   generates immense power, a new sort of power that not only exceeds but is different in kind
   from coercive force. The dynamism of totalitarianism negates the fundamental conditions of
   human existence. In the name of ideological necessity totalitarian terror mocks the appearance
   and also the disappearance, both the lives and the deaths, of distinct and potentially free
   men and women. It mocks the world that only a plurality of such individuals can continuously
   create, hold in common, and share. It mocks even the earth insofar as it is their natural
   home. The profound paradox that lies between the totalitarian belief that the eradication of
   every sign of humanity, of human freedom, of all spontaneity and beginning, is necessary, and
   the fact that its possibility is itself something new brought into the world by human beings
   is the core of what Arendt strove to comprehend.

   According to Arendt the nature of totalitarianism is the "combination" of "its essence of
   terror and its principle of logicality" (see "On the Nature of Totalitarianism"). As "essence"
   terror must be total, more than a means of suppressing opposition, more than an extreme or
   insane vindictiveness. Total terror is, in its own way, rational: it replaces, literally takes
   the place of, the role played by positive laws in constitutional governments. But the result
   is neither lawless anarchy, the war of all against all, nor the tyrannical abrogation of law.
   Arendt pointed out that just as a government of laws would become "perfect" in the absence of
   transgressions, so terror "rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way" (see The
   Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 12). Just as positive laws in a constitutional government
   seek to "translate and realize" higher transcendent laws, such as God's commandments or
   natural law, so totalitarian terror "is designed to translate into reality the law of movement
   of history or nature," not in a limited body politic, but throughout mankind.

   If totalitarianism were perfected, if the entire plurality of human beings were to become one
   with the sole aim of accelerating "the movement of nature or history," then its essence of
   terror would suffice as its principle of motion (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter
   13). So long as totalitarianism exists in a non-totalitarian world, however, it needs the
   processes of logical or dialectical deduction to coerce the human mind into "imitating" and
   becoming "integrated" into the "suprahuman" forces of nature and history. In other words, the
   logic of the idea of an ideology forces the mind to move as inevitably as natural and
   historical processes themselves move, and against this movement "nothing stands but the great
   capacity of men" to interrupt those processes by starting "something new." It is not the
   political isolation that always prevents action, however, but the loneliness of socially
   uprooted, "superfluous" human beings, their loss of common sense, the sense of community and
   communication, which attracts them to logical explanations of all that has happened, is
   happening, and ever will happen. Thereby relieved of any responsibility for the course of the
   world, world-alienated masses are unwittingly, beneath the crust of their lives, prepared for
   totalitarian organization and, ultimately, domination.

   Arendt concluded that Hitler and Stalin discovered that the eradication of the
   unpredictability of human affairs, of human freedom, and of human nature itself is possible in
   "the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power," the concentration camp.
   In concentration camps the combination of the practice of terror with the principle of
   logicality, which is the nature of totalitarianism, "resolves" the conflict in constitutional
   governments between legality and justice by ridding human beings of individual consciences and
   making them embodiments of the laws governing the motion of nature and history. On the one
   hand, in the world view of totalitarianism the freedom of human beings is inconsequential to
   "the undeniable automatism" of natural and historical processes, or at most an impediment to
   their freedom. On the other, when "the iron band of terror" destroys human plurality, so
   totally dominating human beings that they cease to be individuals and become a mere mass of
   identical, interchangeable specimens "of the animal-species man," that terror provides the
   movement of nature and history with "an incomparable instrument" of acceleration. Terror and
   logicality welded together equip totalitarian regimes with unprecedented power to dominate
   human beings. How totalitarian systems accomplish their inversion of political life, above all
   how they set about destroying human conscience and the plurality of unique human individuals,
   staggers the imagination and confounds the faculty of understanding.

   

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   4. The Burden of Our Time is the title of the first British edition of The Origins of
   Totalitarianism (London, 1951). Arendt frequently cited Tocqueville's remark in the last
   chapter of Democracy In America: "As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future,
   the mind of man wanders in obscurity" (see "Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action
   after the French Revolution" and Between Past and Future, "Preface").

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   1. As Chinua Achebe says he ought to have done (C. Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in
   Conrad's Heart of Darkness" in Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. [New York,
   1998], 256).