Theory European Journal of Political

European Journal of Political Theory http://ept.sagepub.com/ Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in its Original Context Alfons Söllner European Journal of Political Theory 2004 3: 219 DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041048 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ept.sagepub.com/content/3/2/219 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for European Journal of Political Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ept.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ept.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Apr 1, 2004 What is This? Downloaded from ept.sagepub.com at Tver State University on September 23, 2014 EPT 3/2 articles 2/26/04 1:35 PM Page 219 article Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of EJPT Totalitarianism in its Original European Journal of Political Theory Context © SAGE Publications Ltd, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi issn 1474-8851, 3(2) 219–238 Alfons Söllner Technical University of Chemnitz [DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041048] abstract: The objective of this article is to contribute to an understanding of Hannah Arendt’s special place in present-day political theory by means of a contrast between her Origins of Totalitarianism and four important political science studies of National Socialism and totalitarianism, three written by authors who shared the status of involuntary emigrant with Arendt, that are offered as constituting the original context of her work. A critical appreciation of the seminal works by Ernst Fraenkel, Franz L. Neumann, Sigmund Neumann, and Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brezinski, with special emphasis on questions of method, opens the way to a reconsideration of the distinctly philosophical character of Arendt’s work, and its shocking challenges to the scientific orientations of political science. key words: Carl J. Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel, Franz Neumann, Hannah Arendt, Nazi Germany, Sigmund Neumann Little proof is needed that The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential intellectual writings of the early 21st century. How many other academic works are able to call forth a whole series of conferences on the occasion of their 50th birthday?1 Furthermore, it is not to be expected that the wave of studies, celebrations and debates on Hannah Arendt, which has swept over the western democracies since the disintegration of the Communist empire, will soon come to an end. There has been no solution of the problems of transition confronting the post-Communist states, after all, nor will those problems disappear simply because these states will soon become members of the European Union. And it is the configuration of these problems that consti- tute, in the language of Arendt’s teacher and friend, Karl Jaspers, the kairos – the transhistorical moment – of the intense interest in Hannah Arendt. If a book that is by no means easy to read has retained such a leading position, notwithstanding the boulder-strewn rapids of political as well as scholarly criti- Contact address: Alfons Söllner, Philosophische Fakultät der Technischen Universität, D-09107 Chemnitz, Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected] 219 Downloaded from ept.sagepub.com at Tver State University on September 23, 2014 EPT 3/2 articles 2/26/04 1:35 PM Page 220 European Journal of Political Theory 3(2) cism that it has had to survive, and if it has even become quite popular, then a renewed reading runs the risk of merely reproducing what is already well known, a cliché ossified in the history of the work’s reception and impact. An unprece- dented kind of book that emerged out of the modern twilight of science and politics, The Origins of Totalitarianism has become something unique, a modern ‘classic of political thought’. The ambivalent consequences of this canonization appear in the astonishing revitalization of the debate on totalitarianism after 1989. While Hannah Arendt is implicitly present throughout, she remains in the back- ground of the mainly technical dispute in Germany. In France, however, we find the opposite trend, and the discourse on totalitarianism is philosophical to a degree that reveals the limitations of such an approach.2 The Context of the Emigration of Political Scientists What is, in fact, meant by placing Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism in its ‘original context’, that is, in the context of contemporary debates? If we want to discourage the fashionable reception that merely smoothes comfortable ways out of the past into the present, then we have to begin with a solid definition of what we mean by contemporary debates. In order not to get lost in the jungle of the 20th century, we should aim at a middle course between two extremes. We would end up with much too narrow a definition of the context if we included only the immediate academic reception of the book, first in the United States in the 1950s and then, following its translation into other languages, in various European countries. Yet again, we would create too wide a context if we considered all of the rich history of the book’s impact up to the present day, inquiring into its place in the history of political ideas of the entire 20th century.3 In the following, I will assume that Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism can best be understood if the context of its emergence is defined by at least three considerations. The Origins of Totalitarianism is (1) a product of the political– scientific emigration from Hitler’s Germany, in which it (2) holds a specific and very significant place, by virtue of which it (3) was able to become a historical moving force behind the political thinking of postwar times. This presupposes a conception of contemporaneity which is as forceful as it is complex. For the sake of simplicity, I will posit that the political–scientific emigrants can be considered a generational group in Karl Mannheim’s sense,4 determined by specific key experiences, above all political. In our case, there is no need for elaborate research to ascertain the formative experience of the group of German Jewish intellectuals and scientists born around 1900, an experience that produced a psychological radicalization and political clarification of the experiences of catastrophe constitutive of the preceding generation, the generation defined by the First World War. The key was of course the experience of political expulsion from Nazi Germany 220 – on the one hand, a bare escape from an anti-Semitism that culminated in geno- Downloaded from ept.sagepub.com at Tver State University on September 23, 2014 EPT 3/2 articles 2/26/04 1:35 PM Page 221 Söllner: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism cide and, on the other, a kind of salvation by admission to a country which guaranteed survival first of all, but later also allowed for a psychological and intellectual absorption of the generation’s formative experience. At this point, however, we already need a chronological refinement. Although this generational experience is marked by the boundary stones of 1933 and 1945, it begins well before that time, not least because of the backward projection of the core events; and its resonances extend far beyond the end of National Socialism. That the political–intellectual emigration amounted to a painful disruption of German and European social and intellectual history was something that con- temporaries fully realized at the time. Its extent and, above all, its long-term consequences have only been uncovered, however, by more recent organized research in exile studies. The effects in the fields of social sciences and the humanities appear almost all-encompassing, and geographically, too, they reach far beyond the countries most directly involved in the population shifts. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to consider such scientific emigration, in conjunction with the subse- quent remigrations and repercussions, an important factor in the larger processes of internationalization as a whole.5 To assist orientation in this complex field, I would propose to differentiate between two topical domains – today we speak of political discourses – and to correlate them roughly with the major conflicts in world politics, which domi- nated the second third of the century: on the one hand, the debate on Fascism and National Socialism of the 1930s and early 1940s, a time at which the fight against the Hitler regime and European Fascism determined political thinking; on the other hand, the theory of totalitarianism, which came to the fore during the 1950s and which partly continued the discourse on Fascism, but which simultaneously established a more general system of thought harmonizing more or less with the changed constellation of powers of the Cold War.6 The configuration of the history of ideas I have thus sketched is of a contradic- tory and complex nature; it shows sedimentations and overlappings, and it is furthermore subject to rapid changes. In order to indicate the framework into which I want to fit Hannah Arendt’s book, I have to work from examples. I will limit myself to the following four titles: Ernst Fraenkel, Dual State, first published in 1941;7 Franz Neumann, Behemoth, first published in 1942;8 Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution, also published in 1942;9 and Friedrich and Brzeszinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 1956.10 The selection of just these authors can surely overcome all objections, granted that the list is incomplete and that Carl J. Friedrich is conceded a special position. It cannot be denied that these books represent milestones not only of the political–scientific emigration, but also of the historical development of the two topical domains we are concerned with: the early theory of National Socialism and Fascism, on the one hand, and the subse- quent overarching theory of totalitarianism, on the other.

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