Background: This essay was written in 2019 as part of a master’s degree. It has since been updated to reflect my evolving thoughts on the horrors of totalitarianism, and indeed human evil in general. Whilst the conclusions below are my own, this should be seen more as an illustration of Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism in the 20th century.
This essay will outline Hannah Arendt’s account of the unprecedented evil of totalitarianism in the 20th century, with specific focus on the regimes of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. This will be done first by outlining the distinctive nature of totalitarianism, and why it cannot be captured under the conventional categories of moral and political thought. Next, I will unpack the comparison that Arendt makes between common sense and ideological ‘supersense’, which will lead into an attempt to distinguish the radical evil of totalitarianism from more conventional forms of evil.
Finally, the application of radical evil in the context of the concentration camps will be discussed, with the aims and processes of total domination being explored. It will be concluded that Arendt offers a compelling reading of totalitarian evil which sheds much light on this unique and disturbing political force.
Ideology and Evil
In her ground-breaking work On the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt undertook a systematic investigation of the profoundly destructive phenomenon of totalitarianism. In doing so, she aimed to shed light on what she believed to be a historical experience that is entirely novel to the modern era. For Arendt, events in regimes like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia unearthed not only the destructive potential of modern technology, but also offered a chilling lesson about the “truly radical nature of Evil” (Arendt 1973, ix). Rather than simply embodying another version of tyranny, racism or imperialism (1973, xv), she believed that there was something uniquely diabolical in the essence of totalitarianism which frequently eludes traditional categories of thought.
Indeed, the ‘radical evil’ on display in such regimes transcended many traditional frameworks for discussing morality. This is because radical evil does not, as in most forms of evil, treat human beings as a ‘means’ towards an immediate practical ‘end’ (Formosa 2007, p718). Whilst traditional forms of evil have frequently involved the sacrifice of human wellbeing or even human lives in the pursuit of some other value (economic gain, personal ambition, reasons of state etc), many victims of totalitarianism were denied even the slim dignity of making a minimal social contribution. As Arendt noted, labour in the concentration camps produced no material goods, offered nothing towards the war effort, and seems to have existed solely to “burden and torture” the prisoners (1973, p428). In this way, the only ‘end’ which can be identified in the camps was that of making human beings entirely valueless and superfluous (Formosa 2007, p718), reducing them to a position lower than that of the slave.
Another way that totalitarianism defied conventional categories of thought was in how it utilized its instruments of terror: which are often assumed to have existed solely for the purposes of suppressing political opposition. This interpretation was promulgated even by Nikita Khrushchev, who attributed the terrors wrought under Stalin to his predecessor`s inherent “suspiciousness”. In fact, Arendt points out that most terror in the USSR occurred after opposition had already been quashed [1], meaning there was no more need to fear rebellion (1973, xxx). At enormous cost and effort, the Communists therefore instigated an extensive system of terror and oppression for seemingly no practical purpose. Such flagrant disregard for utilitarian concerns was also displayed by the Nazis when the destructive practices of the concentration camps were ramped up immediately after the defeat at Stalingrad. This was done at the expense of strategic utility, and perhaps even victory in the war itself (1973, p410). These examples confirm Arendt`s belief that conventional categories of thought are impotent in comprehending the unique evil of totalitarianism.
The divide Arendt identifies here can be understood mainly as a disjunction between common sense, which views human action through the prism of rational utility, and the ideological “supersense” which typifies totalitarian thinking (1973, p457). This supersense is characterized by claims of having discovered a ‘hidden course’ in the world; a discernible path which ‘History’ or ‘Nature’ is believed to be following. For the Soviets, History would end once a worldwide Communist utopia had finally been established. Similarly, the Nazis believed that Nature would one day culminate in a global Aryan empire with the Germanic people at its helm (1973, p412). Such claims serve to narrativize political events by placing them in the context of an overarching process which is thought to be inevitable. It is only by fully accounting for these utopian aspirations that specific practices within totalitarian regimes can be explained. For instance, the non-utilitarian tendencies in both Germany and the USSR become comprehensible only when one realizes that all calculations of instrumental utility must be subordinated to a higher ‘ideological calculation’; one which evaluates actions according to how much they contribute to the utopian project.
Such calculations account for many of these regime`s greatest crimes. Whilst the mechanics of evil outside the totalitarian sphere usually revolve around the sacrifice of one party’s vital interests for the benefit of another, totalitarian radical evil can be more fittingly understood as the sacrifice of reality itself in the pursuit of utopia. In other words, whilst instrumental evil is conducted entirely within the confines of reality (seeking tangible and immediate benefits at a calculable cost to others), ideological evil instead takes place in something like a ‘hyper-reality’ [2] (seeking imagined and distant goals at an almost incalculable cost in the real world). In the pursuit of its utopian ends, totalitarianism is often willing to commit atrocities which would be unthinkable to a purely instrumental evildoer. Further, the demand for “complete consistency” in totalitarian thought (1973, p458), coupled with a conviction in the omnipotence of mankind (Formosa 2007, p720), motivates such regimes to seek a goal more odious than anything which precedes it in history: the transformation of human nature itself.
A Clockwork Man
Arendt identifies this impulse to rewrite human nature with the end-goal of totalitarianism: which is the “total domination of the total population of the Earth” (1973, p392). By ‘total domination’ she means a process whereby all human plurality and spontaneity are utterly destroyed, leading to the denigration of personality to the status of “mere object” (1973, p438). This process was pursued most rigorously in the concentration camps, in which a three-stage process was implemented. Firstly, authorities attempted to destroy the “juridical person” in man, by completely blurring the distinction between the innocent and the guilty (1973, p449). Next, the “moral person” was destroyed by rendering all acts of martyrdom or rebellion socially meaningless (1973, p451). The final stage was the destruction of the “individual person” through the eradication human spontaneity entirely (1973, p455). Arendt saw this last stage as the culmination of the total domination process, with the main function of the camps being the conversion of individual human beings into an “anonymous mass” of “non-men” (Levi 1996, p90), emptied of all their authentically human qualities.
The type of human being that emerged from this process was one of only two tangible products produced by the camps, the other being a huge quantity of corpses (1973, p447). Total domination thus sought the conversion or death of mankind itself, with the camps of both Germany and the USSR representing huge laboratories in the pursuit of this goal (1973, p392). Primo Levi, himself a holocaust survivor, agreed with Arendt on this. He contended that the Nazi concentration camps represented a “gigantic biological and social experiment”, whereby a systematic attempt to reconfigure the fundamentals of human nature took place (Levi 1996, p87). In the camps Levi noticed a brutal process of selection, with every prisoner engaging in a ferocious and solitary struggle for survival [3]. The law he outlined governing this process bears striking similarity to the Matthew [4] effect: “to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away” (Levi 1996, p89).
Whilst it is tempting to infer from this that the Nazis intended to create a caste of hardened and adaptable survivors through brutal selection processes, other factors may suggest otherwise. Indeed, according to Levi the opposite type of person manufactured in these conditions – the “Musselmanner, the drowned” – formed “the backbone of the camp” (Levi 1996, p90). This means that the majority of human beings emerged weakened and broken from the system rather than strengthened. It could be argued that this mass of emaciated men was merely the refuse of the Nazi totalitarian experiment – the ‘failed ones’ who could not live up to the camp ideal. However, this interpretation seems incompatible with Arendt’s understanding of total domination. If the goal of the camps was the absolute control of human beings and the rewriting of human nature then it seems the ‘drowned’, reduced as they were to mere “elementary reactions” (1973, p456), represented more of a success by ideological standards. Indeed, not merely were such people utterly devoid of their former personalities, but also were rendered deeply susceptible to indoctrination and control by the regime.
This is because the removal of spontaneity in human beings results in an absolute inability to act in an original or unexpected way. Arendt argues that such men become “ghastly marionettes with human faces”, conditioned and predictable beings who act with “perfect reliability even when going to their own death” (1973, p455). What’s more, the conditioned reactions imbued within the drowned are not set in stone, it being always possible to liquidate and replace behaviours at will according to ideological necessity (1973, p456). The project of the camps according to Arendt therefore aimed at the automatization of human beings – the conversion of ‘persons as agents’ into ‘persons as machines’. This represented the full realisation of total domination, as well as a final victory of totalitarian evil over reality itself. In seeking to produce what can be labelled a type of ‘Clockwork Man’ [5], totalitarianism aimed to prove the validity of its nihilistic thesis: not only that “everything is permitted”, but also that “everything is possible” (1973, p440).
What was being undertaken was thus not merely a conventional form of exploitation or slavery. In either destroying man (through mass extermination) or converting him (via total domination), totalitarianism sought to remove its greatest obstacle to the realization of utopia: unpredictable elements within human nature itself. In the hellish crucible of the concentration camps, under intense heat and pressure, humanity was stripped down to its bare essentials. The ‘elementary reactions’ which constituted the thoughts and behaviour of the Clockwork Men can therefore be seen as being akin to ‘human raw material’; an amorphous mass of drives and instincts that can be directed in whatever direction the authorities chose. As the “model citizen” of a totalitarian regime (1973, p456) the Clockwork Man would no doubt prove invaluable in the future, where ever more radical efforts and sacrifices would be required of the citizenry in the long march towards utopia.
Conclusion
Primarily, it is this willingness to destroy and then rebuild humanity according to an ideological blueprint that defines the radical evil of totalitarianism for Arendt. She saw in this phenomenon the nihilistic principle that ‘everything is possible’ at work, with a terrifying new reality to match: that now “the power of man is so great that he really can be what he wishes to be” (1973, p456). If the experiences of the 20th century are anything to go by, then this observation may yield a shocking conclusion: that, when given an almost absolute level of collective power to become what he ‘wishes to be’, man exhibited a burning impulse to transform himself into either a slave or a monster. The puzzle of totalitarian evil is thus not that of man’s inhumanity to man, but rather is that of man’s revulsion and fear towards his own humanity. Perhaps, though, this mindset is not quite so mysterious as it first appears. After all, as Samuel Johnson once observed, “he who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” (Johnson 1842, p359).
Notes:
[1] Indeed, terror rose in “inverse proportion” to opposition, suggesting that resistance was not the pretext for terror but rather was the “last impediment to its full fury” (1973, p393).
[2] Whereby ideological visions of the future become more real than the world which appears in the present.
[3] This speaks again to the ‘hyper-realism’ of totalitarianism. In nature man can cooperate and achieve group solidarity, even when struggling to survive. The process of selection in the camp was therefore more brutal than natural selection – whereby ‘Social Darwinism’ became a warped and cartoonish version of Darwinism in nature.
[4] The biblical Matthew, himself also a ‘Levi’.
[5] Referencing Antony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’, in which an authoritarian government has similar ambitions for the novel`s criminal protagonist.
Bibliography:
Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism, New Edition with Added Prefaces. London: Harcourt Brace & Co.
Formosa, P. (2007). Is radical evil banal? Is banal evil radical?. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 33(6), pp.717-735.
Johnson, S. (1842). Johnsoniana: Or, Supplement to Boswell: Being Anecdotes and Sayings of Dr. Johnson. J. W. Croker (ed.). Philadelphia: Carey and Hart.
Levi, P. (1996). Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon and Schuster.