Everyone on the left should read the works of Hannah Arendt. Her books are a challenging read, but engaging with her work pays off. Arendt’s work combines philosophy with journalism and she spent her life trying to answer the big questions raised by the twentieth century.

To borrow from Justin Sane, I think the things she says are important. She was a German Jew who left Germany because of the rise of Nazism. She became a refugee and eventually settled in America where she wrote some of the most important political writing of the twentieth century.

Her greatest work is The Origins of Totalitarianism, which attempts to explain the series of historical events and philosophical developments that led up the Third Reich and Joseph Stalin’s regime of terror in the USSR. Arendt subscribed to a Marxist interpretation of history, but was also very critical of the totalitarian direction of Communism in Russia.

Totalitarianism in the twentieth century

The world that she describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism is difficult for someone like me to imagine. For those of us who came of age during the so-called “end of history”, it’s hard to conceive of a world ruled by Totalitarian regimes. Reading Arendt’s book it helped me to understand not just what life was like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but also what institutions, ideas and thought process contributing to making those regimes so oppressive.

Arendt draws a distinction between authoritarian regimes (governments like that of Vladimir Putin in Russia today, or Recep Erdogan in Turkey; the strongmen that Donald Trump openly flirts with) and Totalitarian regimes that seek to control every aspect of their citizen’s existence, which only exists in North Korea today. As David Runciman shows in his book How Democracy Ends, democracies can easily collapse into authoritarianism, but Arendt outlines the very specific circumstances that are needed for the rise of all-consuming totalitarianism.

This murky totalitarian world is brought to life through her writing. She explains how it works and what it’s made of: the social groups, political instructions and philosophical ideas behind them. The book shows that totalitarianism is more than just soldiers on the streets enforcing a dictator’s whims. It’s a complex series of political processes and historical precedents that Arendt traces to the origins of the antisemitism of the nineteenth century and the imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century.

The fear of totalitarianism

It would take a book to summarise Arendt’s complex ideas and they are best understood when expressed in her own words. What makes them relevant today is that we are terrified (for good reason) of the return of totalitarianism. Everyone today is frightened that their political enemies seek to become an all-dominating force that desire the establishment of total victory by controlling every thought of the people, as Stalin and Hitler attempted to do. Political debate is not framed as an exchange of ideas but a battle for freedom of thought itself.

On the left we are frightened of the authoritarian streak of Trump, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. The way that they fawn over strongmen like Erdogan, Putin, the Saudi Royal Family and Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte makes us worry that something even more sinister lurks behind their flattery of these bullies. We cannot escape the idea that Farage doesn't just want to crush Remainers and make himself Prime Minister of the UK on the back of a surge of populist nationalism, but that he would ideally like to make it impossible to think thoughts in opposition to his.

Is this an exaggeration of the power cravings of Farage and Johnson? I can’t say that it isn’t. It’s, just, within living memory that such things were tried in Europe. This is why Arendt’s writings are so important.

How society can go wrong

It was once assumed that the combination of the freedoms that liberal democracy brought, and the prosperity of free-market capitalism, would destroy authoritarianism. This is what I mean when I say that I came of age at the end of history, as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama. His assertion turned out to be premature. Authoritarianism is alive and well today and the combined forces of liberal democracy and capitalism have failed to defeat it. In some cases, they have aided the spread of authoritarianism.

Now that the inevitable triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy is in doubt, it’s essential to read Arendt as she has a lot to teach us about how our society can go wrong. Authoritarianism is spreading around the world and even supposedly liberal democracies with free markets like Hungary and Poland are not immune. It’s worth being aware of the warning signs that Arendt identifies to be aware of the rise of totalitarianism.

One of her key ideas is that social atomisation can lead to a charismatic leader coming fourth who has a story that explains the reason for most people’s suffering. This can be seen today in the strong men from Farage to Trump and Duterte. This story captures people. It cannot be argued with and those who follow the narrative of the leader grow to doubt even their own experiences that conflict with the narrative.

This can be seen today in Cornish people who followed Farage and voted for Brexit despite the money that the EU had poured into their communities. Or the blue collar Americans voting for Trump despite his inherited wealth and that he lives in New York. These facts didn’t fit with the narrative so they were dismissed.

Man is a political animal

Today we live in a society that is more atomised than the early twenty century that Arendt studied. A remedy to this can partly be found in some of the other writing of Ardent. She thought that everyone should partake in political life, as they did in Ancient Greece where politics was done face-to-face in person. Or at least in an idealised form of Ancient Greece that most historians and philosophers talk about. The one that ignores the fact that women and slaves could not engage in politics.

As a philosopher, Ardent agreed with Aristotle who said: “Man is a political animal.” She liked the idea of Socrates philosophising in the Agora with everyone else and not Plato thinking by himself. Seeing and understanding other people is more important than solitary reflection.

Arendt thought that the falling away of community in the 20th century as capitalism spread further and people became mere labour commodities was completely opposed to this way of doing politics. Today we are even more atomised than during Arendt’s life. We need to stop thinking alone and start seeing and understanding other people.

An atomised society

We cannot go back to how Ancient Greece did politics. Aside from the fact that it tolerated slavery and excluded women, their face-to-face politics was incredibly violent. Arendt also recognised this, but what she thought we could re-create from Ancient Greece is space for dissent and for new ideas to come forward. Today, when I look at the Brexit Party, or the FBPR crowd, I am worried about their lack of space for dissenting opinions.

Today we need more democracy. Technology has allowed us to take more control of our lives, to interact in ways we couldn’t before and has given us the freedom to choose on a scale that previous generations would have found unimaginable. However, this technology appears to be breaking our politics, whilst at the same time, it seems harder than ever to influence our institutions. We need more ways that people can make decisions that affect their lives and exert some control over their existence that goes beyond putting an X on a ballot paper every five years. Politics has become more nuanced than that, but our ways of doing politics have not.

Three human activities

Another of Arendt’s ideas that remain relevant today can be found in her book The Human Condition. Here she laid out three main human activities. Labour, where we feed ourselves and do other essential things. Work, where we make things that have utility. Then action, where we do things together. Arendt thought it was through action that we reveal who we really are. This is connected to her idea that we need to be together to be political.

Under neoliberal captialism, labour and work are crushing action. Technology and capitalism have given us greater choice, but it has made the labour part of existence more complicated and time-consuming. Choice is not in itself a bad thing and lack of choice can be authoritarian, but choice that does not enrich our actions serves only to reduce the time we spend acting, together and being ourselves. Work has also expanded greatly as technology and the pressure of the job market, such as precarious contracts and cutting back the welfare safety net, have made it a necessity to never stop working. This has squeezed out action.

The commercialisation of everything has taken much of the togetherness out of action, as it is now something that can be packaged and sold. This seen as necessary to allow labour and work to continue under neoliberalism. All of this is atomising our society even more than in Arendt’s day, when capitalism was still relatively immature.

Servants of totalitarianism?

We live in atomised societies where a charismatic leader has arisen with a narrative that explains all the suffering, which would worry Arendt. She wrote that other things are necessary for the rise of totalitarianism, mainly a movement such as the Nazi or Bolshevik parties. Others are needed as well including conspiracies, real and imagined, secret police and people who are willing to serve the totalitarian movement. The latter is of utmost importance.

One of Arendt’s later great works was a detailed study of one of the most notorious servants of a totalitarianism movement. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt described the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was not a senior or particularly influencial member of the Nazi regime, but he did oversee the transportation project to move Jews from Western Europe to the death camps where millions lost their lives. His dispassionate administrative work was essential to the greatest crime in human history.

In her book, Arendt describes how she found that Eichmann was not the great villain that he appeared to be. He was thoughtless, he spoke in cliches and was unable to understand what he had done. He lacked the clear thought process that we imagine villains have when they decide to do evil. Arendt found William Shakespeare’s character of Richard III to be particularly insightful into how we imagine evil, because Richard is constantly thinking about the evil that he does and why he is doing it. Eichmann, it appears, did not.

Evil is like a fungus

The fact heat Eichmann was able to do what he did was made possible by the bureaucratisation of the world. Eichmann’s was an evil that Franz Kafka could understand; one that was cold and functional, not calculating or filled with passionate fury. Eichmann had created an unthinking machine that fed human lives into the maw of death, for no apparent reason other than he was told to do it. Arendt’s insight is that evil is like a fungus. It doesn't have deep roots. It’s only surface deep.

The growth of technology today has sadly made it easier for people to be desk murderers like Eichmann. Technology has provided us the widest range of food and taxi services ever available to humanity, all just the click of a button away. However, these same technologies have also driven people into poverty because of the lack of regulation that surrounds the people who deliver these services. Such technology could be applied to mass death with efficiency beyond Eichmann’s wildest dreams. All that is needed is the unthinking people to create them and then for no one to stop them.

Totalitarianism could happen again

From reading Arendt one thing becomes clear: totalitarianism could happen again. It will be different from the Third Riech or Stalinist Russia, just as the tech monopolies of Facebook and Google are different from the monopoly of Standard Oil and US Steel, however, the essential elements have not changed. We just need the factors outlined above and the other critical ingredient: terror.

Terror is more than living in a state of fear (although we already have that); it’s a political project that splits your legal, social and political self from your body or animal self. It’s something that rips away the fragile framework of legal and political protections that have been built around individuals since The Enlightenment. It turns people back into animals and animals can be killed easily.

Terror as a political tool has become less prevalent than it was in the time that Arendt wrote about. However, the denial of basic legal and political rights to migrants, the ICE raids and putting of kids in cages that is currently happening in the US, and is the dream of many Brexiteers, are reminiscent of the political terror that Arendt describes. Just because there is no political terror in Nunhead doesn’t mean it isn't in migrant detention centres. To paraphrase William Gibson: “The terror is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

Lessons for now

Arendt identified how the perfect storm was needed for the rise of the totalitarianism of the 1930s. It will not happen like that again, but understanding how it happens will allow us to prevent anything similar happening again. This is why Arendt is such an important writer right now. 

We may not have the perfect storm that Arendt describes, but today has many factors in common with what she described. A lack of personal politics, atomised societies, unthinking servants of totalitarianism and political terror are all present today.

Everyone on the left should read the works of Hannah Arendt to understand how society can wrong and how we can be vigilant against it.