The Origins of Totalitarianism was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1951, and it established Arendt as one of the major political thinkers of the twentieth century. The book is structured in three parts — “Antisemitism,” “Imperialism,” and “Totalitarianism” — each of which traces one strand of the historical process that produced the Nazi and Stalinist regimes.
The first section examines the history of antisemitism in Europe, arguing that modern political antisemitism (as distinct from religious anti-Judaism) emerged in the late nineteenth century when Jews lost their economic usefulness to the nation-state and became available as scapegoats for the dislocations of industrial capitalism. The second section traces European imperialism and its innovations in administrative massacre, racism as ideology, and bureaucratic rule over subject peoples — practices that Arendt argues were eventually imported back into Europe and turned against Europeans themselves. The third section analyzes the structure of totalitarian movements and regimes: the role of propaganda, the function of the secret police, the logic of concentration camps, and the systematic destruction of the legal person, the moral person, and finally the individuality of the human being.
Arendt’s central insight is that totalitarianism is not merely extreme authoritarianism — it is a new form of government that differs from all previous tyrannies in its aspiration to total domination of human beings, including the domination of their inner lives. The concentration camp, in her analysis, is not an instrument of punishment or deterrence but a laboratory for the totalitarian project of demonstrating that “everything is possible” — that human spontaneity and individuality can be completely destroyed.
The book was written in the shadow of Arendt’s own experience as a German Jewish refugee, and its urgency is personal as well as intellectual. She dedicated it to her husband Heinrich Blücher, with whom she had fled Nazism, and its emotional force derives from the knowledge that what it describes was not an abstraction but a lived reality.
Collecting The Origins of Totalitarianism
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1951): Blue cloth, dust jacket. A cornerstone of twentieth-century political thought.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $800–$3,000
- Without jacket: $100–$300
- Second edition (1958, with new material): $50–$150
- Modern paperback editions: $10–$20