Hannah Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Political Theory of Totalitarianism
While Hayek argues economically and Popper epistemologically, Hannah Arendt develops a political critique of totalitarianism. Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism appears in 1951 and becomes a standard work. Arendt’s question is not: why did the market fail? Or: why does science lapse into dogmatism? But rather: what is radically new about totalitarianism?
Her answer: totalitarianism is not simply dictatorship, tyranny, or despotism – all of these have always existed. Totalitarianism is a new form of rule that does not merely enforce obedience but seeks to reshape human beings themselves. One that does not merely oppress but strives for total control over thought, feeling, being.
Arendt’s thesis: totalitarianism has three origins – antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism itself (as mass movement). These three elements fuse into something historically new. And: Hegel plays an ambivalent role in her analysis.
Who Was Arendt? Intellectual-Historical Context
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), born in Hanover into an assimilated Jewish family, studied philosophy under Heidegger (with whom she had an affair) and received her doctorate in 1929 under Karl Jaspers, writing on Augustine’s concept of love. In 1933, immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power, she fled to Paris, where she worked for Zionist organizations and supported refugees. In 1940 she was interned at Gurs (as an “enemy alien”), escaped, and fled in 1941 via Spain and Portugal to New York.
In New York she initially worked for Jewish organizations, wrote for Aufbau (a German-Jewish newspaper), and in 1946 became chief editor at Schocken Books. At the same time she began her major work on totalitarianism – a working-through of her own experience: expulsion, statelessness, the destruction of her world.
Her intellectual formation: Heidegger (existential philosophy), Jaspers (illumination of existence, communication), but also the Jewish tradition (she studied Rahel Varnhagen, identified as a “German Jewess” and later simply as a Jew). Her main opponents: not only Hitler and Stalin, but the structures that made them possible – antisemitism, imperialism, mass society.
Her distinctiveness: she does not think as a systematizer (as Hegel does), but as a political theorist – proceeding from concrete phenomena (natality, plurality, action), not from abstract principles. This makes her relationship to Hegel complicated.
The Central Argument: The Three Origins of Totalitarian Rule
Arendt’s book has three parts: antisemitism, imperialism, totalitarianism. The first two are prehistory – they show how elements arose that then fused in totalitarianism.
Part I: Antisemitism – not merely religious Jew-hatred (which has always existed), but modern political antisemitism (nineteenth/twentieth century), which constructed the Jews as a power threatening the state. Arendt shows: antisemitism was not “irrational” (mere hatred), but had functions – it channeled crises, offered scapegoats, stabilized fragile nation-states.
Part II: Imperialism – Arendt argues: in the colonies, techniques of rule developed that later came back to Europe. The administration of “superfluous people” (those who could not be assimilated, were not needed, but were “in the way”) developed techniques: segregation, concentration, ultimately annihilation. The idea that people are “superfluous” – that is the root of totalitarianism.[1]
Part III: Totalitarianism – National Socialism and Stalinism as a new form of rule. Not merely oppression, but the reshaping of human beings. Concentration camps are not merely killing machinery but “laboratories” – there it is tested whether human beings can be stripped of their spontaneity, made into mere functions. This is the radically new element: total domination over humanness itself.
Three marks of totalitarian rule:
- Ideology – not mere propaganda, but a closed system of thought that explains everything and leaves no gaps
- Terror – not sporadic repression, but permanent insecurity that destroys all solidarity
- Mass movement – atomized individuals with no stable bonds, who join the movement
Arendt’s Ambivalent Relationship to Hegel
Arendt criticizes Hegel in Origins – but differently from Hayek or Popper. Her critique is specific, not blanket:
Criticism of the philosophy of history: Arendt’s basic conviction: politics is a space of freedom, of spontaneity, of new beginning (natality – being born). Every action is in principle unpredictable, because human beings are free.
Hegel’s philosophy of history seems to deny this: history follows a logic (world spirit) that is knowable. The individual is the “agent of the world spirit” – it merely carries out what happens anyway. Arendt sees in this a denial of freedom: if everything is already determined, why act at all?
She writes (in later works):
“The price Hegel pays for his system is the devaluation of human action. Action becomes a mere ‘execution’ of a predetermined necessity.”[2]
But: Arendt uses Hegel’s master-slave dialectic positively! In The Human Condition (1958) she argues: labor is not self-realization (as Marx thought), but necessity. The laborer is “slave” to necessity. Freedom begins only beyond labor – in action (political conduct).
This is Hegelian: action is self-disclosure among equals, presupposing recognition. Arendt takes over Hegel’s structure but turns it against Marx: not labor but political action is the space of freedom.
What Is True in This? (Sublation I)
Arendt captures aspects that Hayek and Popper overlook:
A genuine insight: totalitarianism as a new quality Arendt shows: National Socialism and Stalinism are not merely “bad dictatorships.” They are systematic: they want not merely obedience but total control. They destroy not merely opposition but spontaneity itself. Concentration camps are not merely killing machinery, but experiments: can human beings be robbed of their humanity?
This is more significant than Hayek’s economic or Popper’s epistemological critique. Arendt captures the anthropological dimension: totalitarianism attacks what makes human beings human – freedom, spontaneity, plurality.
A genuine insight: colonial continuity Arendt’s thesis of imperialism as an origin is pathbreaking – even if she does not think it through radically enough. She sees: in the colonies, techniques of rule were developed (racism, concentration camps, the elimination of “superfluous people”) that then came back to Europe.
This is precisely the thesis that Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Domenico Losurdo will later develop: fascism is colonialism turned inward. Arendt does not state it so explicitly – but she suggests it. This sets her apart from Hayek and Popper, who ignore colonialism.
A genuine insight: mass movement and atomization Arendt shows: totalitarianism needs atomized masses – people without stable bonds (family, class, religion), who join the movement because they seek orientation. This is sociologically precise: National Socialism recruited from “declassed” middle strata, from people without belonging.
This is an aspect Hegel underestimated: the dissolution of all bonds (in “civil society”) does not automatically produce new mediation, but can lead to atomization – and that is dangerous.
Internal Tensions and Limits (Sublation II)
But Arendt’s position has tensions:
First tension: the critique of Hegel often misses Hegel
Arendt’s criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of history overlooks: Hegel distinguishes ex post knowledge from ex ante planning. The philosopher can recognize, retrospectively, the reason at work in history (“the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk”). But he cannot predict what is to come – and should not.
Hegel’s philosophy of history is not a manual for politicians (“this is how it must proceed”), but a retrospective interpretation (“this is how it hung together”). That is something different from historicism (à la Popper).
Arendt’s concern is justified: philosophy of history can be abused (Stalin: “historical necessity”). But that is not Hegel’s fault – it is the fault of dogmatization.
Second tension: freedom without mediation?
Arendt emphasizes spontaneity, natality, new beginning. Every action is unpredictable, because human beings are free. This is important against deterministic philosophy of history.
But: Arendt underestimates what Hegel knew: freedom needs mediation. Abstract freedom (“everyone does spontaneously whatever he wants”) is arbitrariness, not freedom. Concrete freedom arises in institutions that structure recognition.
Arendt’s ideal is the Greek polis – free citizens acting publicly. But: this presupposed slaves (who took over necessity), excluded women, was limited to a few thousand people. Modern mass societies cannot return to the polis.
Hegel saw this: modern freedom needs complex mediation (law, corporation, state). Arendt wants freedom without this mediation – but that is romantic, not realizable.
Third tension: labor versus action – too sharply separated
Arendt separates: labor (necessity, reproduction) versus action (freedom, politics). This is analytically useful, but too sharp.
Hegel (and Marx after him) saw: in labor, human beings recognize themselves. The slave labors, shapes the world – and thereby becomes conscious of himself. Labor is not merely necessity but also self-realization (though alienated under capitalism).
Arendt rejects this: labor is only necessity, freedom is only in action. But this creates a problem: what about the billions who must labor? Are they unfree so long as they labor? That would be aristocratic (only those who need not work are free).
Fourth tension: neglect of the social question
Arendt wrote in On Revolution (1963): the French Revolution failed because it tried to solve the “social question” (poverty, hunger) – this destroyed freedom. Only the American Revolution succeeded, because it confined itself to political freedom.
This is questionable. The French Revolution did not fail because it tried to fight poverty, but because it did not do so consistently enough – and thereby radicalized the masses. Arendt’s neglect of the social question blinds her to: without a minimum of justice there is no recognition, and without recognition no stable freedom.
Systematic Placement (Sublation III)
Arendt captures aspects that Hayek and Popper overlook: the anthropological dimension (the attack on spontaneity), colonial continuity, the significance of mass movement. Her critique of philosophy of history is more nuanced than Popper’s.
But: she underestimates what Hegel knew:
- Freedom needs mediation (not merely spontaneity)
- Labor is also self-realization (not merely necessity)
- Social justice is a condition of political freedom (not an obstacle)
What is productive: Arendt’s emphasis on plurality (people are different, and that is good), natality (each generation begins anew), action (political conduct is unpredictable) – these are important additions to Hegel. They show: history is open, not determined.
The synthesis: Hegel’s mediation (institutions enable freedom) + Arendt’s spontaneity (institutions must not smother freedom) = reflexive institutions that make new beginnings possible without collapsing into chaos.
Later thinkers take this up:
Jürgen Habermas uses Arendt for “communicative action” – but adds what she neglected: a systematic theory of institutions.
Seyla Benhabib, a student of Arendt, combines Arendt with critical theory: recognition (Hegel) + plurality (Arendt) = democratic iteration.
Axel Honneth shows: Arendt’s “struggle for recognition” (in action) is Hegelian – even if she does not admit it.
Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Part II: Imperialism. Her thesis: “The Nazis are convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction.” The colonial experience normalized violence. ↩︎
Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future (1961), essay “The Concept of History.” Arendt’s criticism targets the idea that history has a “goal”—which makes action superfluous. ↩︎