Why Hannah Arendt’s Ideas on Totalitarianism are Heterodox?

Article

Abstract

[In English]

The paper discusses the impact and present relevance of H. Arendt’s work on totalitarianism for the field of the political science known as «Communism Studies» or «Soviet Studies». Competing with the theory of modernization (since the 1960s) and historical institutionalism (since the 1980s), theory of totalitarianism dominated these fields in the 1950s, and was partly rehabilitated in the 1990s after the demise of communism. However, H. Arendt’s ideas on totalitarianism were never accepted without important reservations by the champions of the totalitarianism theory like Carl F. Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Juan J. Linz, and others. H. Arendt’s work on totalitarianism is unorthodox by its antipositivist methodology: her account of totalitarianism contains not only scientific, but also poetic truth on totalitarianism like that in the great antitotalitarian fiction works (by Georg Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Vasily Grossman and others). H. Arendt deviates from the presently prevailing view of Nazist totalitarianism as the reaction against and imitation of Communist totalitarianism. According to H. Arendt’s genealogy, totalitarianism in Western Europe would remain real possibility even given the preemption or early demise of Communism in Russia, being rooted in the pathologies of the advanced Western modernity – anti-Semitism, imperialism and mass society. Among other deviations from orthodoxy, her separation of Stalinism from Leninism is most conspicuous, and can be explained by H. Arendt’s Leftist backgrounds and influences from the 1930s.