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December 23, 2006
One of the fundamental concerns of Hannah Arendt's political theory is the question how to preserve the realm of the political, which is the only place that allows people to act as free citizens Hannah Arendt's understanding of politics is decisively influenced by her study of totalitarianism. . Having identified Nazism and Stalinism as radically new types of political regimes that aimed at the total destruction of liberty and the elimination of any political space, Arendt sought to recover the notion of freedom by studying its emergence in ancient Greece. For Greeks, it was self-evident that to be free is not just to be free from constraints (the negative freedom of modern liberalism), but to be able to initiate something new.
This is interesting article on Hannah Arendt in the London Review of Books Arendt’s claims in The Origins of Totalitarianism that totalitarianism is a new form of government, ushered onto the stage of history with the regimes of Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler. It is not just another form of tyranny, although there are similarities, but a unique and novel development. She claimed that theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of ‘superior races’ to expand territorially were themes that connected the white settler colonies, the other imperial possessions, and the fascist ideologies of post-Great War Europe.
Totalitarianism lives on, with all the references to Munich and fascism by the neo-cons to justify and legitimate their 'war against terrorism' after 9/1.This event for many marked the beginning of a new kind of war: the ambiguously labelled "war on terror" was conceived of as a war against a "new kind of totalitarianism" anchored in the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism.
The second part of The Origins of Totalitarianism is concerned with imperialism. Can this material help us to understand the US empire today? It is not obvious that it can. The book deals with the European colonial imperialism whose end came with the liquidation of British rule in India after WW2, and the decline of the European nation state, rather than the ascendency of the American empire.
Arendt argues that imperialism’s animating impulse is expansion for expansion’s sake. The imperialist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Does that mean Afghanistan leads to Iraq leads to Iran leads? ‘ Expansion is no longer part of our political vocabularly----it's now 'overreach.'
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