The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt Analytical Essay Sample

đź“ŚCategory: Books, History
đź“ŚWords: 626
đź“ŚPages: 3
đź“ŚPublished: 24 January 2022

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt is concerned with dissecting the rise of antisemitism in Europe that amounted to the extreme consequence of Hitler’s Final Solution from a sociological approach. While she is not always entirely clear in her analysis, her stream of consciousness is helpful in understanding the roots of antisemitism and how it coincides with the emergence of the imagined concept of the nation. Arendt utilizes an array of historical events and perspectives in her argument while exploring the origins of discrimination against the Jewish people in all European countries in which they had a significant presence, long before the true rise of facism as represented by the horrors of the second World War. The history of the Jewish people is “the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language” (8). It is impossible to evaluate the causes of the antisemitic movement without taking into account that the Jews were consistently excluded from the social body throughout history, and the unique economic and political circumstances of Europe only furthered this distinction that subsequently grew into hatred. 

Furthermore, Hannah Arendt implies that it was no accident that the Jews became subject to this extreme form of discrimination, and with this argument denies the relevance of the scapegoat theory. While they were never fully integrated into the nation-state and remained a separate group, certain Jews were granted special privileges in society on the basis of their age-old experience and expertise in financial management – a skill that was indispensable to the growing world powers. This is exemplified on page 17, “thus the Jews were the only part of the population willing to finance the state’s beginnings and to tie their destinies to its further development.” However, with the growing importance of national identity as the uniting factor of the nation-state, identity and blood were now prioritized by the state governments rather than ability, thus pushing the Jewish people into a heightened state of exclusion and discrimination. It seems to me as though Arendt is arguing that the new conditions of the nation-state are what ultimately led to the elevation of antisemitism, and that is the most important thing to bear in mind regarding the relationship between the nation-state and antisemitism. This is synonymous with a sudden rise in the new idea of identity based on race, and the nationalist ideal suggests that the national community is to be grounded in blood. Political equality was guaranteed through the nation-state, but the Jews never belonged to a nation-state and were not considered part of the homogenous body of citizens that is considered the nation. 

Due to the long-standing Jewish relations with the high-class as financiers of the aristocracy, antisemites felt threatened by the power-seeking tendencies of this population. Concurrent with the rise of the nation-state, the nobility began to lose its prominence in society because they were seen as a disruption to the formation of this entity. Since the Jews were associated with the nobility as their financiers, this only further isolated the Jewish people from society and from the imagined community of the nation-state. Furthermore, the Jews’ inability to assimilate led antisemites to believe that they aspired to disrupt the organization of the social body. The Jewish peoples’ detachment from society led many to consider Jewishness as a “vice.” This way of thinking furthered the antisemitic narrative and introduced the association between race and the substance of a person’s soul. Designating Jewishness as a vice is arguably what contributed to the establishment of antisemitism as a political ideology that contaminated the minds of many Europeans at the time. Nevertheless, itt is difficult for anyone to comprehend the vicious and inhumane acts committed by the Nazi party on their ideological basis of antisemitism. While there will always be unanswered questions about this dark time in world history, Hannah Arendt offers an impactful analysis that connects the rise of antisemitism with the preexisting social conditions of the Jewish people in Europe, the emergence of totalitarianism, and artificial concept of the nation that is territorially defined by the nation-state.

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