Product Description

In the final volume, Arendt focuses on the two genuine forms of the totalitarian state in history-the dictatorships of Bolshevism after 1930 and of National Socialism after 1938. Index.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122479 in Books
• Published on: 1968-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780156906500
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, Brooklyn College, and the University of Chicago. She also wrote political studies "Origins of Totalitarianism" 1951, "The Human Condition" 1958, "Eichmann in Jerusalem" 1963

Customer Reviews

A rationale that explains the horrors of totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt describes totalitarianism as a system of total domination based on a combination of propaganda and terror. She bases it primarily on a policy of keeping the population off balance by systematically arresting and executing members that it decides are "objectively guilty" because of their religion, their economic status, or other arbitrarily selected criteria. She draws a distinction between merely authoritarian and totalitariam regimes based on the arbitrariness of the selection process of its victims. The victims in totalitarian regimes bear no relationship to concerns of security; rather they are based upon some such ideological foundation as race or social status.

It can happen again.
Well thought out and documented book. Its most important insight: given the right conditions totalitarianism can happen again.

Way Too Much Zen
This book was written at a time when the great power of the world were well on the way to becoming so openly nukers that little corners of the world, and individuals, especially, might be disregarded with impunity by whatever powers wanted to destroy them for their own purposes. What is truly frightening about this situation is the realization that any excuse, race, use of illegal drugs, possession of weapons, sleeping in the Chinese embassy on the night of May 7, 1999, having a sinful Messiah for a minister, putting kids in daycare in a federal building, etc., might end up being considered a deadly mistake if those who have high-powered explosives are working in a system which will allow them to blame one of their enemies for the tragedy which will be the subject of the news.

I happened to be reading a book on the KGB before I started reading this, and the situation at the time of the death of Stalin, then Beria, seems to fall in the sense of how this book claims that individuals don't matter to the system. Once Stalin was dead, having served Stalin was of no benefit to Beria. When Stalin was ruler, it was dangerous for anyone to get more votes than Stalin, as Kirov did shortly before his death. The denunciations of Stalin which followed Stalin's death did not end the practices which Stalin had been denounced for engaging in, any more than the attempt to impeach an America president in 1999 prevented any American from lying about his private life under oath forever after.

Long after this book was written, the political system in the Soviet Union started to allow a broader selection of candidates, and Sakharov was the most popular politician in the Soviet Union at the time of his death from a heart attack. Sakharov had been an inventor of a sandwich design hydrogen bomb, which was first successfuly tested by dropping it from an airplane on November 22, 1955, a mere 8 years before an American president died under more suspicious circumstances, possibly related to his support for a ban on such tests.

I haven't forgotten that someone posted a message after I had reviewed a book which didn't discuss any nuclear weapons whatever. This shows what kind of thing can happen when a person who reads a lot gets involved with those whose totalitarianism expects more respect than I happen to believe that any media deserve at the moment. Not everything that I have written has been posted, and it might be easiest for me to complain about family values totalitarianism. No one would think that the things which are done are limited to those acts which could be printed in a family newspaper, but the media can use family values as an excuse to ignore the most upsetting stories. Reviews of books are not supposed to get too personal, but sometimes the subject matter of the account makes any attempt to comprehend what is in the book offensive. In my own case, I tried to review a book by Gennifer Flowers called PASSION AND BETRAYAL in which the personal is covered by a little black nightie, but not for long. This might be personally embarrassing for the author and a friend of hers, but the danger that some form of totalianism might be criticized in that book would hardly occur to anyone who did not know about the episode when her neighbor with the video camera was getting beat up by guys who kept asking, "Where's the tape?"