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Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), unlike her later books, is centrally concerned with the nature and fate of the modern state. The book presents a series of political pathologies - antisemitism, imperialism, tribalism, and totalitarianism - that Arendt regards as the result of failures in the state's dual mission to integrate diverse social groups into a single body politic, and to uphold the uniform rule of law for all. Her underlying conception of the state bears a striking, though unacknowledged affinity to that of Hegel. Like Hegel, moreover, she argues that citizens' mutual recognition of one another's human rights, as mediated through state institutions, is an indispensable condition for full human self-consciousness and agency. Her version of this argument is developed first through an excursus on the origins and effects of racism among Europeans living in Africa, and then through an analysis of the unique plight of stateless refugees.
The book that established Hannah Arendt's reputation as a political thinker was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).1 Its account of totalitarianism was highly influential in its time, and the book is still widely read today. And yet the full measure of Arendt's ambitious project in political theory in this first major book of hers has rarely been taken. One reason for this is simply that the book encompasses so much disparate historical material-ranging from the role of Jewish bankers in seventeenth-century state finances, to European imperialism in Africa, to the police methods of Stalin-that its larger philosophical claims about the nature and function of political institutions tend to get lost amid its episodic narratives. Many of the most important of those theoretical claims are fairly tangential to what Arendt has to say about totalitarianism and its historical origins; the book's rather misleading title (which Arendt herself came to regret) lulls the reader into discounting the significance of such claims, and thus missing the full scope of her theoretical project.2 Moreover, students of Arendt's thought have generally approached the book from the retrospective vantage of her later works like The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963).3 In fact, however, Arendt's theoretical priorities underwent a substantial shift between the time she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and those later books.4 As a result of...