Benjamin Balint: Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later

Islamic terrorism is the new totalitarianism. At least that's the impression one gets from some Western commentators these days. In"Terror and Liberalism," Paul Berman invoked totalitarianism in order to explain the strikingly modern ideology of Islamism. Joschka Fischer, then Germany's foreign minister, spoke of a"third totalitarianism." This past February, Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy and others published a statement calling radical Islam"a new totalitarian global threat." And last month, President Bush said that today's Islamic terrorists are"successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century."

The ongoing post-9/11 resurrection of the term totalitarianism coincides with the centennial this month of the political theorist who thought most deeply about it. Who better than Hannah Arendt to help us say whether such language can meaningfully illuminate the new dispensation?

Arendt, who was born in Hannover, Germany in 1906 and died in New York in 1975, seldom shied away from engaging — or igniting — political controversy. ...

... Arendt's most enduring legacy — and the one most relevant to today's debates — is her 1951 book"The Origins of Totalitarianism," where her genius in conceptualizing the unfamiliar burns brightest. Wrestling with the most destructive forces of the 20th century, she concludes that despite their outward differences, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were in profound ways inwardly similar. They belonged to an utterly new, totalitarian type of regime that could not be explained by any of Montesquieu's 200-year-old categories — republic, monarchy, despotism. As a refugee from Nazi terror who fled to America (by way of Paris and the Gurs internment camp) in 1941, she knew whereof she spoke.

Arendt's theory of totalitarianism gained political currency almost immediately. As former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz said, Arendt"had perhaps done more than any single writer to establish the moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, thereby supplying the theoretical basis not only for hard anti-Communism but also for exactly the kind of resistance to Communist expansion the U.S. was mounting through the policy of containment."

So are Arendt's views as relevant to the War on Terror as they once were to the Cold War?

In a new book,"Why Arendt Matters" (Yale University Press), Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, suggests Arendt's views are indeed relevant, but not in the way we might expect. She contends that Arendt would be troubled by totalitarian temptations within America no less than in militant Islam. In what Young-Bruehl calls America's"unthinking" reaction to 9/11, the nation"became, overnight, militarized," the administration started detaining suspected terrorists in"state-sanctioned torture centers," and"the secret services began to operate like a shadow government, that is, in ways that Arendt had identified as proto-totalitarian." For much of this, Young-Bruehl blames the" cadre of neoconservatives," adding that anti-Communists of Podhoretz's stripe"distorted and exploited" Arendt's views."Victory for democracy over totalitarianism, they held, justified any means for promoting democracy — including totalitarian means."

But in flattening Arendt's nuanced arguments into a kind of shrill op-ed, Young-Bruehl lets her contempt for Bush and the neocons obscure Arendt's essential distinction between those who imperfectly guarantee freedoms and those fundamentally dedicated to destroying them. As a result, she takes the latter with less than adequate seriousness....