The Origins of Totalitarianism

What It Is

A work of political thought, published in 1951, in three long parts: antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism itself. Arendt was a German Jew who had been briefly held by the Gestapo, escaped Germany, was interned in a French camp at Gurs, escaped that too, and reached New York in 1941. She was stateless for a decade. She wrote this in the language of the country that took her in.

It is not a history in the ordinary sense, though it is built out of history. It is an attempt to think about something that had just happened and that the available political vocabulary could not hold. She refused to explain the catastrophe as an accident of German character, and she refused to treat it as one more tyranny in a long line.

The prose is German-inflected, allusive and demanding, and the book is uneven. The middle section, on European empire, is the one nobody expects and the one most readers end up talking about.

Why It Matters

Almost everything we now say about totalitarian rule was first said here. The vocabulary is hers, and so are the claims that go with it: loneliness, atomisation, superfluousness, terror as an end rather than a means. That its aim is not to make you believe a lie but to destroy your capacity to tell truth from lies at all. That terror is not a tool of the ideology but its natural conclusion. That the real horror is people being rendered superfluous.

Her most-quoted formulation, the right to have rights, came from watching what happened to human beings who had rights on paper and no state to enforce them. She had been one of them. It is why the book keeps returning to the reading lists of anyone thinking seriously about refugees and citizenship.

Her other great move, deeply unfashionable in 1951, was to refuse to treat what European powers did abroad and what they later did at home as separate subjects. The connection she drew was heresy then. It is close to standard now.

Before You Read

This is the hardest book in this group by some distance. Six hundred pages, thirty to forty hours. Twenty pages a sitting, with a pencil.

It does not have to be read in order. The third part, on totalitarianism, is the one everybody comes for and it stands on its own; a great many readers start there and work backwards into the antisemitism and imperialism sections once they can see why Arendt needed them.

The final chapter, Ideology and Terror, added to the 1958 edition, is the concentrated argument. If you read one thing, read that.

Some of the factual detail has been overtaken. She wrote before the Soviet archives opened, and specialists have corrected her on particulars. The thinking has aged far better than the sources.

Which Edition to Read

• Mariner Books Classics (2024), with an introduction by Anne Applebaum — recommended. The complete text with the best short orientation available: Applebaum, a historian of the Gulag and of modern authoritarianism, explains what Arendt was doing and why it reads as it does now. For a first encounter with a difficult book, having a guide of that calibre at the door is worth more than any apparatus. The cost: it is still a fat paperback with no annotation, and the allusions Arendt scatters through the imperialism section are left for you to chase. View on Amazon →
• The Harvest / Harcourt edition (1973). The one many libraries hold, and it carries Arendt's own prefaces to each of the three parts, written in 1967. They are the clearest account anyone has given of what she thought she had written. The cost: no modern introduction, and the typesetting is of its era.
• Schocken (2004), with an introduction by Samantha Power. Complete, with an introduction strong on Arendt's life and on why the book mattered again after 2001. The cost: the framing is very much of the early 2000s.

Take the Mariner edition for Applebaum. Whichever you buy, find Arendt's own 1967 prefaces somewhere and read them.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it in pieces, and expect to reread. Arendt does not write topic sentences. Her paragraphs work by accumulation, and a passage that seems to be circling is usually closing in.

Read the introduction first, for once. Applebaum's is orientation, not commentary, and you will need it.

Resist the urge to apply her to today's headlines as you go. She is more useful, and much more disturbing, if you first let her describe the world she actually saw.

The commonest mistake is to treat this as a history of the Nazis. It is a study of what makes people available for that kind of rule, which is a question about ordinary life, and that is why it is frightening rather than merely sad.