The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt's first major book, published in 1951 and enlarged in 1958, which asks how Nazism and Stalinism, a new form of government, became possible. It has three parts. 'Antisemitism' traces how European Jews became a political target as the nation-state declined, ending with the Dreyfus Affair. 'Imperialism' shows how the scramble for colonies spread race-thinking, bureaucratic rule and expansion for its own sake, and how the stateless refugees after the First World War revealed that the rights of man protected only those with a state: what mattered was the 'right to have rights'. 'Totalitarianism' analyses mass movements, the alliance of mob and elite, propaganda, the secret police and the concentration camps as laboratories of total domination. The closing chapter, 'Ideology and Terror', argues that totalitarianism feeds on the loneliness of isolated people. Critics question whether Nazism and Stalinism fit one model, and her treatment of colonised Africans.

It remains a central account of how antisemitism, imperialism, statelessness and propaganda prepared the ground for total domination, and of the warning signs worth watching for.