Stalinism in Retrospect: Hannah Arendt

**This article originally appeared in History and Theory 54 (October 2015), 353-366**

Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid-to-late 1940s? “Stalinism in Retrospect,” her contribution to Columbia University’s Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question.

Arendt’s foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the “whole taste” of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. “Stalinism in Retrospect” documents Arendt’s arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar’s participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter’s National Security Advisor (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt’s argument.

You can read Peter Baehr's article in full by clicking the link below:

Stalinism in Retrospect: Hannah Arendt (Edited with notes by Peter Baehr)

About Peter Baehr

Peter Baehr is Chair Professor of Social Theory and Fellow of the Center of Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and an author to the Hannah Arendt Center blog. He is also President of the History of Sociology Research Committee, International Sociological Association. His articles have appeared in such venues as the American Sociological Review, Archives européennes de sociologie, European Journal of Political Theory, History and Theory, and Political Theory. His first book – Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World – was a Choice Outstanding Book of 1998. His co-edition/translation of the 1905 version of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (Penguin Classics), was nominated for the Wolff Translation Prize. His current research centers on the rhetoric of Islamism and Western governments’ response to it. For more information about Peter Baehr’s publciations and research areas, visit his Lingnan University homepage.