Social Theory After the Holocaust

was needed to capture a new phenomenon. The term ‘totalitarianism’ had been
coined by the Italian fascist, Giovanni Gentile, in the 1920s to express the
actuality of ‘total freedom’ when the self-realisation of the individual is
absolutely identified with the universality of the state and when the state itself
is ‘comprehensive, all embracing, pervasive… total’. Arendt’s extraction of the
concept from the megalomaniac ambitions of fascist ideology may be accused
of turning the fantasy of the ‘total’ state into the actuality of a political formation
and of neglecting the fact that megalomaniac ambitions encounter the obstacle
of other people. 68 But this was precisely Arendt’s point: the totalitarian
consciousness dreamt of total domination but it was less the realisation of this
dream than its collapse that led to escalating orgies of destruction. The concept
of totalitarianism helps us to make sense of the senseless – not by offering an
analysis of a social formation but by revealing the dynamics of destructiveness
that lay at its core.
In this usage, totalitarianism was not, as for example Dana Villa has argued,
the ‘terrible revelation’ of the essence of the West to itself: ‘The presencing of
everything as orderable and controllable is the conditio sine qua non for everything
appearing to be possible – for the totalitarian project as such.’ 69 Totalitarianism
was not the ‘result’ or ‘product’ or ‘final culmination’ of any underlying tendency
in modern political life. It was rather a ‘crystallisation’ or ‘reconfiguration’ of
elements of political modernity.
The Will to Destroy
robert fine
Why did the idea of humanity cause such offence and why did movements arise
which tried so hard to destroy it? Arendt’s answer draws on Nietzsche’s Will to
Power where he defines nihilism thus: ‘what does nihilism mean? That the highest
values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.’ 70
Nietzsche prefigured the fin-de-siècle mood of irredeemable decline when the
values and beliefs that were taken as the highest manifestation of the spirit of
the West lost their validity. He believed that this loss of values bred a destructive
and spiritless radicalism, full of hostility to culture and images of destruction, 71
and the spectre of barbarism which he anticipated turned out to be a pale image
of the barbarism of later totalitarian movements.
Following Nietzsche, Arendt viewed European nihilism not so much as a
pathological state of mind but as a valid expression of a disenchanted world.
Nihilism was the spectre haunting Europe because it was well grounded and
because all thinking beings shared the sense of revulsion felt by those who
confronted the gulf between established values and the experience of extreme
violence in the Great War:
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