This is Season 9 of Ten Citizenship Courses: Big Questions About Public Life.
We should never surrender the age of ideas. We still need a knife sharp enough to cut through hardened shells, so that we can see what lies beneath.
— Yang Zhao
How can a civil society in which everyone lives freely become possible?
Across one year, ten seasons, and more than 120 episodes, this series enters into conversation with the thinkers who shaped the modern world. Each season offers a close reading of a classic with unusual power to explain contemporary life.
Season 9: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt asks how two world wars—and the concentration camps, genocides, and purges that accompanied them—could emerge in an age of advanced civilization, science, and political institutions. Moving from antisemitism to imperialism and finally totalitarianism, she traces the forces behind the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Why study totalitarianism?
Totalitarianism is not simply a more extreme form of conventional tyranny. It seeks to discipline and transform thought itself. Nor is it merely a story of evil dictators and innocent victims: it also depends on the silence, obedience, and participation of ordinary people.
Arendt therefore asks more than who created totalitarianism. She asks how an apparently modern society could arrive there at all. Why did long-standing antisemitism become systematic extermination? What kind of society makes young people eager to go to war? Why might anyone believe that one nation or system could rule the entire world? Why do seemingly ordinary people take part in extraordinary evil?
Why does totalitarianism arise in modern society?
Modernity makes people independent individuals, but it can also isolate them and weaken their public bonds. When mutual trust disappears, complex realities are reduced to friends and enemies, and people long for a single answer that explains everything. A hidden enemy is blamed for every failure; destroy it, the story promises, and order will return.
When we hand responsibility for judgment and action to others, the soil in which totalitarianism grows may already be present.
From masses to citizens
- Masses and loneliness: Why does modern society produce isolated masses, and what can bring people together again?
- Hatred and politics: How do hatred, fear, and conspiracy theories become instruments of political mobilization?
- Obedience and judgment: When everyone obeys, how can an ordinary person preserve independent judgment?
- Citizens and the public world: How should we participate in public life amid both political apathy and political fanaticism?
These questions concern not only how totalitarianism governs, but how each of us can retain the capacity to judge and act politically.
What the course covers
- Unprecedented evil and the twentieth century’s totalitarian catastrophes
- The dilemma of the “banality of evil”
- Antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism
- Totalitarian power, centralized power, and total domination
- How entrenched prejudice became a project of extermination
- War fever and the birth of militarism
- The ambition to make one nation or system rule the world
- Confession and submission under totalitarian rule
- The silence surrounding the murder of six million Jews
- How political power is constituted and exercised
If totalitarianism came only from a few villains or monsters, anyone who was not a monster could feel safe. But if it requires countless ordinary people to cooperate with the system, the question changes: are you the kind of ordinary person who stops judging, abandons public responsibility, and says politics has nothing to do with you?
— Yang Zhao
