Totalitarianism in the Bathtub

01-20-2024

Roger Berkowitz

When Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy re-met after an initial infelicitous encounter, they exchanged books. Arendt sent McCarthy the recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism. In McCarthy’s first letter to Arendt, she writes of her fascination with Arendt’s book: 

“Dear Hannah, I’ve read your book, absorbed, for the past two weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line in the grocery store. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work . . . and also engrossing and fascinating in the way that a novel is: i.e., that it says something on nearly every page that is novel, that one could not have anticipated from what went before but that one then recognizes as inevitable and foreshadowed by the underlying plot of ideas.”

Lyndsey Stonebridge tells this story in her also surprising, wonderful, and novel new biographical tale of Arendt’s life and thinking, We Are Free To Change The World.  The book is not your typical biography and offers a quirky, original, serious, and humane inquiry into Arendt’s work and her continuing relevance in our world. She’s published an excerpt on litub, here. 

Yet as the story of how this hell came to plant itself on earth unfolds, as McCarthy says, you get a growing and uncomfortable sense that there was something inevitable about it all. I think this is partly because while the history described in the book is extreme, Arendt’s underlying “plot of ideas” feels familiar. The Origins of Totalitarianism reads like a good novel because it reveals to the reader some experience that they already know, but thanks to its pages can now understand. That is also what can make it as terrifying to read in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

This is the story of how millions of twentieth-century Europeans willingly came to live in a murderous ideological fiction. Get rid of the epic fantasy that the totalitarian masses were driven by some common purpose, a great and unified idealistic commitment to a bold, passionate, but unfortunately evil, idea. Ditch, too, the gothic horror of cunning and mesmerizing leaders and their dull, stupid, and gullible enablers. The history that Arendt chronicles in the final section of her book, “Totalitarianism,” is both more prosaic and tawdrier, which is also why it’s familiar.

There were several auguries that foreshadowed the development of totalitarianism. There were racism and imperialism, as we have seen. There were mobs and nationalism in France, pre-Nazi Germany, and Austria. Demagogues whipped up emotions across the continent and authoritarians promised to resolve things for ordinary people in Portugal, Hungary, and Poland. There was fascism in Spain and Italy, which was violent and nasty, but not the total attack on politics itself which came with totalitarian regimes. Across the globe, there were totalitarian movements that gathered up the moment’s dark discontent by giving the appearance of unstoppable momentum, but which could be stopped where there was sufficient political room for resistance.

The starting point for all these phenomena in Europe was the uprooting of people that had come with capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, and revolution. The end point for totalitarian regimes was to make human superfluousness a permanent condition for absolute rule. The anonymity of modern life discovered its denouement in a political system in which human beings ceased to matter at all.

In Western Europe, social disintegration had undermined the promises of liberal democracies before they really got started. Previously, the sense of belonging to a class or group had disguised the fact that very little genuine representative democratic activity had been occurring, despite the opening up of the franchise and political emancipation across the continent.

If you’re interested in reading The Origins of Totalitarianism, the Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group is in the middle of it now, and you can catch up on our podcast Reading Hannah Arendt, here.