In the first part of her "Origins of Totalitarianism" Hannah Arendt reconstructs the development of anti-Semitism in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the second part the emergence of racism and imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries up to National Socialism and their political function, and in the third part the both historical forms of total domination. She advocates the thesis that these are based on the growing destruction of political space through the alienation of the individual in mass society, against the background of the simultaneous disintegration of the nation-states through the dynamism of imperialism, traditional forms of politics, clearly inferior to the techniques of mass propaganda of the totalitarian movements.
According to Arendt, the historians of the immediate post-war period failed to answer the question of why the Jews in particular had suffered abuse, persecution and extermination. The starting point for Arendt is a criticism of the ideologies of the 19th century, with which she questions the theses and procedures of historiography that were customary up to that point . Arendt consciously moves away from causal explanationsthe usual descriptions of political history by presenting an analysis of the origins of the history of ideas and main elements of National Socialism, which takes into account the underlying political entanglements instead of reducing what happened to them. It comes closer to the character of National Socialism and Stalinism as a “break in history” than previous works on totalitarian movements.
In Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt puts forward the thesis that every world view or ideology can be taken over by a totalitarian movement and transformed into a new form of government through massive terrorism . In previous history, only National Socialism and Stalinism could fully realize this process, on the one hand for the ideology of racism and anti-Semitism, on the other hand for that of the “class and nationless society”. Unlike other authors Arendt classified only these two systems as totalitarian and not any "one-party dictatorship", not even the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. Arendt names the inclusion of all areas of life in the system of rule (not just political) as the criteria for distinguishing “total rule” from ordinary dictatorship, and in particular, for National Socialism, the complete reversal of the legal system, which made criminal violence and mass murder the rule ; and the claim to global and exclusive validity of this rule: "The struggle for total domination on a world scale and the destruction of all other forms of government and rule is inherent in every totalitarian regime ..." (Origins of Totalitarianism)
Arendt warned that, in addition to communism, anti-communism, as the “official counter-ideology” of the Cold War era , tended to develop an imperial and generally total claim to world domination.
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