Hannah Arendt on Ideology and Terror

Hannah Arendt develops her theory of ideology from her analysis of historically existing totalitarian regimes, namely those of Hitler and Stalin, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). These regimes, Arendt says, are characterized by ideology and terror. These principles take the place of genuine political action, which is the key characteristic of any well-functioning polity. To understand just how ideology substitutes for action, we must understand how totalitarianism emerges historically as a novel form of government. Towards this end, I begin by outlining how totalitarianism differs from tyranny, according to Arendt. I go on to clarify how ideology relates to terror and finally compare ideology to the concept of action as developed in The Human Condition (1958).

According to Arendt, laws are like city walls: they establish the pre-conditions for exercising political freedom. They thus delimit the stage within which actors can act. This is why Arendt suggests in The Human Condition that lawmaking, like wall-building, is properly a pre-political activity: “before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place … the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making” (HC 194). Well-functioning polities invest in public goods, like walls and laws, in order to enable political action. By contrast, terror tears down these public things and thus erodes the capacity for genuine politics. What tyranny and totalitarianism share in common is that they both make use of terror to “raze the boundaries of man-made law” (611). Thus, Arendt writes, both tyranny and totalitarianism “abolish the fences of laws between men … to take away men’s liberties and destroy freedom as a living political reality” (611).

Yet totalitarianism differs from tyranny in that it is essentially — and perversely — lawful. In tyranny, one man exercises arbitrary, absolute power with total disregard for laws. By contrast, totalitarianism is basically lawful. “Far from being ‘lawless,’” Arendt says, totalitarianism “goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimation” (606). By following “the law of History or the law of Nature,” totalitarianism “can do away with petty legality” (606). Thus, totalitarianism also defies lawfulness. But — unlike tyranny — it does not do so arbitrarily, for totalitarianism “executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior” and thus claims to “establish the direct reign of justice on earth” (607). To apply these suprahuman laws directly to mankind, totalitarianism uses the instrument of terror. Tyranny also used terror, but it did so to abolish laws; totalitarianism, by contrast, uses terror to execute them. Lawlessness is the essence of tyranny and terror its instrument, but “terror is the essence of totalitarian domination” (610).

Tyranny and totalitarianism share in their use of terror; yet totalitarianism adds something novel, ideology. If terror leaves behind a “lawless, fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion” (612), it is ideology that will “set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth” (628). The desert of tyranny, as impoverished as it may be, “appears like a guarantee of freedom” because “it still provides some room for the fear-guided movements and suspicion-ridden actions of its inhabitants” (612). By contrast, total terror in totalitarian regimes “destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space” (612). To take political action is to form a movement, to take action in the public realm, and doing so requires a space of freedom. Totalitarianism is uniquely capable of suppressing this freedom because it “substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions” (611). We are bound so tightly together in service of a totalitarian movement that we lose all capacity for autonomous motion.

Yet totalitarian regimes still need a principle by which to “inspire government and citizens alike in their public activity” and thus ensure “the movement of a body politic and the actions of its citizens” (613). After all, how can totalitarian regimes remain mass movements (like the Nazi party surely was) if they abolish all space between men? It might seem like terror would be sufficient to regulate the actions of citizens under a totalitarian regime. Indeed, Arendt writes, “in a perfect totalitarian government … where terror can be completely relied upon to keep the movement in constant motion, no principle of action separate from its essence would be needed at all” (613). But since totalitarianism has not yet “conquered the earth,” it needs some other “guide for the behavior of its citizens in public affairs” (614). Totalitarianism therefore introduces an entirely novel principle to inspire action: ideology.

Both ideology and genuine action are related to ideas. Yet these two principles differ in numerous respects. As Arendt indicates in The Human Condition, at the core of action is the capacity to think for oneself. We can take action because we begin with our own unique individuality. Action, Arendt says, would be “an unnecessary luxury … if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model” (8). By contrast, an ideology is “the logic of an idea” (616). It begins precisely from one single starting point, from one presumed common essence, and follows it to its logical conclusion. Ideology uses “the purely negative coercion of logic” to derive “a whole line of thought” from a single starting idea (617). (Arendt does not mean to demean logic as a tool for thinking. The danger lies in taking the logic of an idea as a “total explanation,” something altogether different than the “freedom” we find in “the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought” (617).) Arendt explains that the characteristic of totalitarianian regimes is that they took their governing ideologies “dead seriously” and “proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked preposterously ‘primitive’ and absurd: a ‘dying class’ consisted of people condemned to death; races that are ‘unfit to live’ were to be exterminated” (619). In other words, claims that may have begun as descriptive were taken as guides for action. Instead of thinking about what we are doing, under ideology we simply follow the “irresistible force of logic” (620). Tyranny is so terrible because it relies on the caprice of a single individual’s rule; terror is arbitrary. Yet totalitarianism is worse because it is animated by an ideology’s “ice-cold reasoning”; its terror is logical.

A further way in which action and ideology differ is that action allows man to begin anew. Action is made possible because of natality, that is to say because of the fact that people are born into the world. As Arendt says, “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (HC 9). By contrast, ideology is “never interested in the miracle of being” (616). Moreover, natality constitutes a community characterized by plurality. And plurality is the very condition of action because “we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (HC 8). This sharply contrasts with ideology, which thrives on isolation. Indeed, Arendt says, “logical reasoning whose premise is the self-evident” — that is, ideology — is “the only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world in order to function safely” (627). By contrast, Arendt writes, “action is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act” (188). Action allows people to begin something new and thus think in a new way. Ideology puts us into a straitjacket, which forces our thinking onto an already-laid set of rails.

Terror and ideology correspond to each other in that they leave no space for movement or thinking; in other words, no space for action. This is the basic characteristic of totalitarianism. Thus, Arendt writes, “the iron band of total terror leaves no space for … private life and … the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action” (623). What characterizes totalitarianism is that isolation takes the place of plurality and rigid logic replaces free action. Ideology makes a poor substitute for action.