Snyder mentions Hannah Arendt several times in On Tyranny, which isn’t surprising since her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is one of the most famous works of political philosophy. We’ll look briefly at Arendt and that text in particular in order to understand why she is so important to Snyder’s own study of tyranny.
Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906 in a Jewish family. She received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1933, where she met and studied with philosopher Martin Heidegger, who later became a Nazi. When the Nazis came to power, the Gestapo briefly imprisoned her. Upon her release she fled to Paris, and in 1937 was stripped of her German citizenship. In 1941 she arrived in the United States, settling in New York and living there until her death in 1975. The text is about 600 pages and is separated in three sessions—antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism—and added a section in 1958 on “Ideology and Terror.” She added to the work as information about Hitler and Stalin came out of Europe. The following are a few interconnected themes of the text.
Loneliness
Arendt sees loneliness as a state of mind—Verlassenheit—and one conducive to making it difficult to critique our own beliefs or think that everyone else’s beliefs and experiences must conform to our own. It is a closing down of thinking that makes a political movement that offers them belonging or purpose very appealing. People feel like they have to make it on their own, and thus will feel comfort from a movement because they will then feel like they’re a part of history. She wrote, “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”
Ideology and Loneliness
Totalitarian movements need to isolate individuals to gain their power, doing so with ideology. Ideologies, Arendt notes, (here summed up by Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill), are “divorced from the world of lived experience, and foreclose the possibility of new experience… are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history… do not explain what is, they explain what becomes… rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality… [and] ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.” Totalitarian movements make people question their relationship to themselves and make them think they cannot trust their own judgments. Experience and reality no longer seem to impose on them, and thus experience conforms to ideology. Arendt claimed that the “ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.”
Negative Solidarity
This is the unorganized mass of “mostly furious individuals” who, in their loneliness and subsequent embrace of ideology, become linked in negative solidarity. Scholar Sean Illing calls this the “raw material of totalitarianism, because it’s a world without connection and friendship, where the only basis of collective action is some kind of awful combination of anger and desperation.” Lyndsey Stonebridge adds to that, saying “A term that’s just as important as loneliness is cynicism. Totalitarianism works through cynicism. It’s crucial because it allows people to say, ‘They’re all the same, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? It’s just politics, isn’t it?’ What cynicism allows you to do is be gullible and disbelieving at the same time.”
