Hanna Arendt fs Argument about Totalitarian Government
When Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, World War‡U had ended and Hitler was dead, but Stalin lived and ruled. Arendt wanted to give her readers a sense of the phenomenal reality of totalitarianism, of its appearance in the world as a terrifying and completely new form of government. Arendt includes three parts in this book, and she carefully analyzes and developed her terms. In the first two parts of the book, she explains hidden elements in modern anti-Semitism and European imperialism that united into totalitarian movements. Also, in the third part of gIdeology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,h she describes the organization of those movements by dissecting the structure of Nazism and Stalinist Bolshevism in power (Lee A. ... Moreover, her arguments in that third part are totally convincing because she writes that the totalitarian government, such as Hitlerfs and Stalinfs one, indeed has a group of leaders of a markedly new kind of government, one which relied heavily upon its own lawfulness and terror to achieve its goal. ... Like the same things, Arendt insists that the totalitarian government also has a different kind of lawfulness from other countries. According to Arendt, the civilized world follows the positive law and establishes consensus iuris, and she says that they have moral judgment and legal punishment which, most of the countries today follow. On the other hand, she says that the totalitarian government gdefies, it is true, all positive laws, even to the extreme of defying those which it has itself establishedh (89). She points out that the government ignores every positive laws, which do not hurt people and use different thing to control their people. In Nazi Germany, Hitler did exactly the same things Arendt describes. He did not care about law there, but emphasized his words and made his people do whatever he wanted. ... Also, Arendt says although the totalitarian government gclaims to obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature or of History from which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring,h the truth is that leaders such as Hitler and Stalin redefine and pervert those very laws according to their whims (90).