Totalitarianism - Revision Notes

Totalitarianism is all about control. HANNAH ARENDT argued that the 20^th century totalitarian regimes were completely different from anything that had come before.

Everything is in the state, the state controls everything and there is nothing outside of it. The aim is to completely strip away peoples individuality and undermine their humanity. Two methods to destroying individuality:
1) State Terror – Destroys their ability to act against the government
2) Ideology – Eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience

Ideology is a type of specialist knowledge and is also used as justification for the authority of rulers. It is a way to avoid responsibility and gives people “total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future”. Ideology frees you of common sense and reality. The breakdown of a stable human world breaks the institutional and psychological barriers that normally set limit to what is possible, e.g. concentration camps. For Arendt when the Nazi’s denied the Jews citizenship it removed their humanity. Totalitarianism highlights the fragility of civilisation. If you control language you control thought.

Totalitarianism is so different from what has come before; it develops an entirely new political institution and destroys all political, legal and cultural traditions of the county. It transforms the classes into masses and destroys individuality. Because it’s so different from what has come before it’s difficult to predict their course of action.  

Some try to compare totalitarianism to tyranny, but the difference is that tyranny has no law, whereas totalitarianism believes in higher law. Totalitarianism defies all positive law (common, cultural law). Nazi Germany followed the law of nature, using biology as the basis of their laws. The race struggle and segregation of the Jews was based on DARWIN’S idea that man is a product of natural development. Whereas Stalin’s Communist Russia was based on MARX’S teleological view of history, that history is working towards something.

You do not have to be inherently evil to do evil things, Arendt calls this the banality of evil. An example of this is the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was a Nazi fugitive who stood on trial in Jerusalem. He provided transport for Jews across Europe to concentration camps. His defence was that he was just doing his job and he didn’t directly kill any Jews. Arendt takes an existentialist view to this in that he had a choice to make and as far as SARTRE is concerned, by not making a choice he is living in “bad faith”. Eichmann was just doing his duty and following the categorical imperative of KANT. But you can’t just sit back and be passive in your own life, you have to be accounted for, you have to choose.