The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

Fall 2025

A classic work originally published in 1951; this edition has a forward by Ann Applebaum written in 1924.

I did not read the entire book in detail; in particular, I only skimmed the section on antisemetism. To me, the most interesting claim in the book is that totalitarianism owes much of its origins to colonialism/imperialsm. All that said, here is a summary of the main points of each of the three sections:

The Book

Antisemitism

Arendt argues that antisemitism is distinct from traditional anti-Jewish sentiment, and that it instead emerged from the breakdown of the nation-state system (meaning the emergence of groups of ‘stateless’ people in the wake of the breakup of Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the failure of existing states to protect basic human dignity and political membership, or even “the right to have rights”

The Dreyfus affair. The wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration of a military office suspected of treason; conviction was easy because he was jewish and unpopular. As evidence that contradicted his conviction accumulated, the affair became a political litmus test…

Arendt contends that antisemitism was weaponized by totalitarian movements to mobilize masses against the existing political order, making Jews a proxy for attacking the nation-state system itself. This is due to she argues to the influence Jews had through their financial services to the state, even while remaining politically neutral. (I would also argue that this role was facilitated by the fact that they would never be able to take or maintain power independently because of their social position).

Imperialism

Imperialism as “expansion for expansion’s sake,” with an aim towards empire and global domination.
Argues that European imperialism provided precedents/proving grounds for totalitarian methods of domination and bureaucratic control through colonial experiments.
Formation of a transnational capitalistic class: analysis of how economic interests transcended national boundaries, creating new forms of political organization that prioritized capital accumulation over traditional state structures.
Bureaucracy: Tyranny without a tyrant. “Arendt argues that bureaucracy as it developed in India, Egypt, and Algeria was a new form of government of foreign people that sought to rule and dominate them outside of legal restraints. As a non-legal government based on personal power, bureaucracy was intertwined with racism that justified the brutal colonial rule by European powers.”
Also, the justification for bureaucrats is typically associated with their education and intelligence, thus creating a rift between the educated elite and the uneducated masses that, for Arendt, threatens to become the new racism.

Bureaucracy

Tyranny without a tyrant
Eliminating opportunities for citizen action and speech
Frustration with unaccountable systems leads to violent responses
Dehumanizing – reducing people to “cogs in the administrative machinery”
Inscribing politics into administrative policy and mechanisms

Totalitarianism

Criteria

Transnational: World domination as goal.
Terror as a means to subjugate the masses rather than just political opponents
Control via police rather than military.
Domination of all spheres of life, not just political aspects.
Use of a monolithic ideology as of an instrument of coercion.
Creation of superfluous people.
“Novel form of government” that “differs essentially from despotism, tyranny and dictatorship”

Preconditions

Erasure of distinction between fact and fiction among the masses.
Movements founded on a mass of isolated, lonely individuals.

Other forms of control

The crucial distinction is that these traditional forms maintain some structural limitations and pursue specific goals, while totalitarianism represents “a novel form of government” that “differs essentially from other forms of political oppression.

Despotism (as opposed to Monarchy): A form of government in which a single entity rules with absolute power,” not subject to laws; dependent on the acquiescence of the people. May be benevolent or benign. Differs from monarchy in that the monarchy is subject to rules and laws, particularly with respect to who is eligible to rule.
Tyranny: Control via mutual fear — government of people, people of government for own self-interest without any legal restraint.” Aristotle’s definition states: “Any sole ruler, who is not required to give an account of himself, and who rules over subjects all equal or superior to himself to suit his own interest and not theirs…”
Dictatorship: Hierarchy of control using military means. Dictatorship ranges from constitutional (legitimate — temporary and subject to the rule of law) to unconstitutional (illegitimate—attained by usurpation and intended to be permanent).

How to Do Nothing…, Jenny Odell

*How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell, 2019

I found this book to be quite a disappointment. For the most part, it is not about the attention economy; nor does it say much about how to resist it. It is really just a lament about the state of late-capitalist-resource-extrative-modernism. And while there is certainly much to lament, I don’t really find much in the way of strategies on how to resist the various forces that are having such negative effects on the environment and world.

The book seems very undisciplined — or perhaps self-indulgent — to me. It meanders from polemical to anecdotal. In the smaller potion of the book that did seem to be about the attention economy, I was bemused by the author’s inclination to delve back into history (quoting Seneca for example), but not recognizing that the ability to reach so far back to find apropos material suggests that the malaise that she is investigating seems to have been present, at least in the west, for centuries.

A bit cynically, I wonder if the publisher insisted she tack on the ‘Attention Economy’ bit of the title to garner attention and thus up sales. To my eye the book is more about mindfulness and focus, and while I actually am in sympathy with many of the ‘lessons,’ I can’t say I learned anything. Mostly, when the book turns to the entrancement of people by Twitter or Facebook or some other form of broadcast media, I want to say, ‘Come on, just get a grip. Show a little character and self-discipline by recognizing that you don’t like the way this slice of the media is effecting you, and do something different.

And speaking of the media, it seems to me that much of what Odell inveighs against not digital media in general, but broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook. It is a failure of analysis to fail to differentiate among media (digital or otherwise) that work in different ways, and shape discourse in different ways.

Later in the book she takes on the notion of western ‘progress’ — which she somehow ties to the attention economy — and the damage that technodeterminism and extractive capitalism have done to environment. And it has done damage, but she does not offer any convincing or compelling remedies, other that to suggest a label — “manifest dismantling” — for the various efforts to mitigate or reverse eco-system damage that have been in play for decades.

I could go on, but it feels like too much work to try to distill crisp arguments from her prose and then critique them.

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BG: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence, Tim Parks

February 2024

Book Group: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence, Tim Parks, 2005.

My initial impression, after one chapter, is that it will be a pretty straightforward read – it is not clear to me if it will be anything other than a slightly-dramatized history of the Medici’s. Parks is not a historian, cites no references, and has a 4-page “Bibliographic Note” which makes it clear that he doesn’t think much of academics. All this does not make me optimistic.

Final impression: My initial impression was accurate, but I did learn some very general things.

Most interesting was to understand how chaotic the Italian City States were at the time.
- There were continual wars conducted by mercenary armies; citizens were taxed to support the wars, and some smaller towns were sometimes looted or ravished, but mostly the wars didn’t involve civilians
- Many governments were nominally ‘elite republics’ that were governed by councils of members of powerful families, but in practice it appears that one family would typically be in power, and would uses a combination of nepotism and favoritism to stay in power.
- Italy consisted of five power centers that were continually shifting alliances: Naples in the south, Rome farther north, and then Milan, Florence and Venice. When one would become dominant, a couple others would enter an alliance against ti.
Also of interest was the way banks worked
- While banks loaned money and effectively collected interest, that counted as usury and so they used various facades to avoid the appearance of usury
- Banks also needed to participate in trading to create means of getting repayment for their investments
- Bankers also, apparently because they were really concerned about their souls, cultivated close relationships with the catholic church to achieve absolution.
As time went on
- the Church became more and more corrupt, and became of less use as a way of allowing bankers to ‘purify’ themselves by association
  - bankers, in an effort to cultivate a high social status, made more and more loans to princes and others who could not be counted on to repay them in anything but social capital.
  - the generations of Medici morphed from
    (1) just bankers who kept a low social profile (e.g., Giovani),
    (2) bankers and behind-the-scenes political operators (e.g.,Cosimo);
    (3) primarily politicians and elite patrons with little compentence in banking (e.g., Lorenzo)

w/CS: Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind*, Brian Fagan

November 2023…

*Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, Brian Fagan. Reading with CJS.

Comment after finishing seven chapters:
There is interesting material here, and I am happy to be reading it. However, the writing is not grea: it is difficult to follow if you are really trying to get a deep sense of what is going on.

The same date is sometimes referred to as 4,000 BCE, 6,000 years ago, or a millennia after another event. I can do the math, but pausing to do so drops me out of the flow of the text.
The maps helpfully included in the chapters lack many of the places referred to in the text: Where are the Taurus mountains? Are they the same as the mountains near Cudi Dag (not shown on the map either). Clearly, neither writer nor editors ever tried referring to the associated map…
Places are also referred to with different names: The Lands of Enlil; Southern Mesopotamia; the lands to the south of modern-day Bagdad; the Fertile Crescent refer, I think, to the same area. But it is difficult to be sure.
Often it is unclear what the relationship between sequential examples are — are they supposed to reinforce one another, or complement one another, or are they being presented for some other reason? Sign-posting would be really helpful.

Preface

The three themes of this book are (1) gravity and its fundamental impact on the flow of water; (2) the relationship between ritual and water management; and (3) sustainability. One point the book will take up is the way in which the invention of the mechanical pump transformed the mining and movement of water.

The book takes an anthropological perspective, closely examining the relationships between water technologies and human usage and management practices, and looking at the role rituals play. It looks at both historical examples — even reaching into the deep past where the primary source of information is archeological work — and present day examples. And of course the book addresses the ongoing crisis in water sourcing and distribution, and the question of sustainability.

About the Book

The Book

INTRODUCTION – I Can Also Paint

Prologue: Welcome to the Iron Age

C1: The Year of the Hyenas, When Men Starved

C2: Conqueror of all Lands, Avenger of Assyria

The Book

Antisemitism

Imperialism

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism

Other forms of control

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Precis

Preface

Chapter 1