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The Three Phases of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism*
HANNAH Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, is a bewilderingly wide-ranging work, a book about much more than just totalitarianism and its immediate origins.1 In fact, it is not really about those immediate origins at all. The book's peculiar organization creates a certain ambiguity regarding its intended subject-matter and scope.2 The first part, "Antisemitism," tells the story of the rise of modern, secular anti-Semitism (as distinct from what the author calls "religious Jew-hatred") up to the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with the Dreyfus affair in France-a "dress rehearsal," in Arendt's words, for things still worse to come (10). The second part, "Imperialism," surveys an assortment of pathologies in the world politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to (but not directly involving) the First World War. This part of the book examines the European powers' rapacious expansionist policies in Africa and Asia-in which overseas investment became the pretext for raw, openly racist exploitation-and the concomitant emergence in Central and Eastern Europe of "tribalist" ethnic movements whose (failed) ambition was the replication of those imperialist policies on the European continent. Only in part III, "Totalitarianism," does the author turn to the subject of totalitarianism itself. But here the diligent reader meets a surprise: this third part of the book makes remarkably little direct reference to the 300 pages that precede it, and confounds the expectation of a clear convergence of the tributary streams of historical narrative that flow through the first two parts. What the reader encounters instead in part III is an extended analysis of what Arendt insists is a wholly unprecedented kind of political organization, one embodied solely-and equally-in the regimes of Hitler and Stalin.
Given the contents of the first two parts of the book, with their focus on anti-Semitism and tribalist racism, one obvious puzzle is the unexpected shift from what had seemed to be a story of Nazism's sources to an analysis that accords equal standing to what she invariably calls Stalin's "Bolshevism" as well. (Her reasons for preferring that term to "Stalinism" will be taken up in the second part of this essay.) But there is a similar lack of explicit continuity...