From Totalitarianism to The Human Condition

Readers of Arendt's published work are often puzzled by the lack of apparent connection between The Origins of Totalitarianism and the books that are usually thought of as her major works of political theory, The Human Condition and On Revolution. One of them has gone so far as to say that her work ‘seems to divide sharply into two parts’, while others have gained the impression that after writing Totalitarianism Arendt turned thankfully away from the horrors of the twentieth century to indulge herself in idealisation of the Greek polis. But although the connection between her earlier and later work is not obvious on the surface, it is in fact very close. This is one of the points at which her unpublished writings shed most light on the interpretation of her published work, for when we read her lectures and essays from the early 1950s we can follow her trains of thought and see the organic connection between her reflections on the human condition and her attempt to come to terms with totalitarianism. The connecting link, and the subject of this chapter, is her work on Marx.

The Origins of Totalitarianism was, as critics pointed out from the start, a lop-sided book, in which the attention paid to the antisemitism and racism that gave birth to Nazi ideology contrasted sharply with the book's silence on Marxism–Leninism.