The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, established Hannah Arendt's reputation as a political thinker and has a good claim to be regarded as the key to her work, for trains of thought reflecting on the catastrophic experiences it seeks to understand can be traced to the heart of her later and more overtly theoretical writings. Half a century after the book's appearance there has been a revival of interest in the idea of totalitarianism, but the concept itself remains controversial. Far more than a technical term for use by political scientists and historians, it has always incorporated a diagnosis and explanation of modern political dangers, carrying with it warnings and prescriptions. This chapter will argue that “totalitarianism” as understood by Arendt meant something very different from the dominant sense of the term. The final section will attempt a reassessment of her theory.

Two concepts of totalitarianism

There are almost as many senses of “totalitarianism” as there are writers on the subject, but a few broad similarities have tended to hide a fundamental difference between Arendt and most other theorists. Like the rest, she is concerned with a novel political phenomenon combining unprecedented coercion with an all-embracing secular ideology; like the rest she finds examples on both the left and the right of the mid-twentieth-century political spectrum. But these apparent similarities conceal more than they reveal, and much confusion has arisen from failure to realise that there is not just one “totalitarian model,” but at least two which describe different phenomena, pose different problems of understanding, and carry different theoretical and political implications.