The fight for the right to have rights

What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?” asked Hannah Arendt in a preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism. These were “questions with which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life”.

- Kenan Malik

Among the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt had, as a Jew, fled Nazi Germany in 1933, eventually finding refuge in America. Now a new edition of her famous 1951 work has been published, with two additional chapters.

The Origins was not conceived as a book about totalitarianism. The first two parts dissect antisemitism and imperialism, respectively. Written in the mid-1940s, these two sections were to have been the core of the book, with a concluding chapter, “Race-Imperialism”, on the Holocaust.

Then came the cold war. A third section on totalitarianism “largely an afterthought”, the Arendt scholar Margaret Canovan observed - was written as the iron curtain descended and the Berlin airlift began. Arendt’s inventory of “elements” underlying totalitarianism - imperialism, racism, antisemitism, the decay of the nation state, the “alliance of capital and the mob” - made more sense in relation to Nazism than to Stalinism. But as the cold war intensified, critics ignored much of this - especially Arendt’s autopsy of imperialism - in favour of a simplistic analogy between two totalitarian systems. Which is a pity, because the themes that preoccupied Arendt are central to our world, too. Her ideas should still command our attention.