Hello, I’m Yang Zhao. The Origins of Totalitarianism begins from a clear premise: totalitarianism was a distinctive twentieth-century phenomenon.

It cannot be understood by analogy with earlier history. By any standard from another century, the twentieth century was sheer insanity: earlier experience could neither explain nor comprehend it, and that unprecedented madness produced unprecedented catastrophe.

Arendt’s generation endured two world wars within thirty years, leaving profound psychic wounds. To them, the world was destroyed twice in one lifetime, and most intolerably humanity learned nothing from the first destruction.

After World War I, people again promised to rebuild from the ruins of World War II. But they imagined restoring the supposedly beautiful nineteenth-century order before 1914 without recognizing that nineteenth-century developments had led directly to its destruction. How could they return?

Why was the world destroyed twice within one generation? Largely because the first war taught no genuine lesson and its root problems remained untreated. But answers differed over what those roots were.

 

Arendt was grieved and disappointed by what humanity learned after the second destruction. By the 1967 second edition, the new order had clearly become two blocs, American and Soviet, rendered still more terrifying by nuclear weapons.

She saw the postwar world built on an absolute contradiction. Both blocs held extreme optimism that their own power could govern the entire world. Each believed defeating the other would make global rule possible.

Where did this absurd confidence and ambition for one state or regime to rule the earth originate? Arendt’s later argument addresses that question.

Extreme optimism coexisted with complete pessimism: everyone feared the world could be destroyed at any moment.

Each bloc naively believed eliminating the other would let it establish the proper worldwide political system.

America imagined global democracy without the Soviet obstacle; Moscow imagined a worldwide socialist and communist system after defeating America.