In her The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt explores the conceptual phenomenology of totalitarianism. In the
final part of her brilliant addition to political thinking, Arendt critically explicates the totalitarian political
system and its functioning. One such distinguishing feature of totalitarianism, Arendt
claims, is in fact a certain paradoxical lawlessness. This she pens as paradoxical
because of the exceptionally punitive, nasty, brutish and sadistic
terror-filled framework totalitarianism both generates and finds its conceptual
unity within. Nevertheless, despite the existence of a juridical framework at
play within totalitarian systems (and thus the ’presence’ of statute, common or
decree-issued law) an embedded lawlessness is a key conceptual quality of
totalitarianism.
For Arendt, the lawlessness that is the
essence of tyranny - in contradistinction to the lawfulness of non-tyrannical
government – became a necessary condition of the phenomenological origins of
totalitarianism. This resulted subsequently from both imperial administration and
governance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being part of Arendt’s
now famous ‘boomerang effect’ thesis.[1] She explains the
totalitarian concept of law in the following passage:
“At this point the fundamental
difference between the totalitarian and all other concepts of law comes to
light. Totalitarian policy does not replace one set of laws with another, does
not establish its own consensus iuris, does not create, by one
revolution, a new form of legality. Its defiance of all, even its own positive
laws implies that it believes it can do without any consensus iuris
whatever, and still not resign itself to the tyrannical state of lawlessness,
arbitrariness and fear. It can do without the consensus iuris because it
promises to release the fulfilment of law from all action and will of man; and
it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind itself the
embodiment of the law.”[2]
Such a lack of consensus iuris is
what makes totalitarianism appear tyrannical in its immediate experience,
despite its surpassing of such a condition to the institution of government by the
twin pillars of ideology and terror. Nonetheless, being ultimately within the discipline of political theory, this stipulation by Arendt lacks any particular illustrative flourishes in historical evidence.
Interestingly, in the final part of his
seminal and famed trilogy, The Third Reich at War, Professor Sir Richard
Evans indeed evidences Arendt’s claim. In this, Evans details and lays out the very
lack of consensus iuris at the heart of the Nazi legal system. Here, Evans
affirms:
“Hitler was unable to provide any kind
of overall direction of domestic affairs, so that government departments found
it increasingly necessary to issue their own regulations on matters of detail,
often without consulting other departments about their contents. In 1941, for example,
12 formal laws were passed, after consultation with ministries, 33 decrees
issued by Hitler, 27 decrees were ordered by the Ministerial Council for the
Defence of the Reich, and 373 regulations and orders were issued by individual
government departments. In the absence either of a formal cabinet or of any
consistent direction by Hitler, government was becoming more and more fragmented.”[3]
Such a ‘fragmentation’ is here synthesised,
for Evans, with the legislative gaps, cracks and openings that arise as a result
of ‘the leader principle’, i.e. the absolute and god-like authority of the
leader and the full juristic legitimation of their illocutionary utterances.[4] This principle gained mass-meaning
and recognition through the signifier ‘der Führer’; a uniquely attributable and
meaning-creating representation of Hitler over a century since his first appearance
on the political stage. Consequently, as a result of the very effect of the leader
principle, its modality of authority generates the very gaps and cracks that the
totalitarian governmental and legislative machine seeks to fill, both causing
and generating further fragmentations of its own edifice.
This, unsurprisingly, is already disclosed
by Arendt herself, although without the empirical and positive historical
evidence that Evans provides; at least in the case of Nazi Germany. Arendt maintains
that:
“The Leader principle does not establish
a hierarchy in the totalitarian state any more than it does in the totalitarian
movement; authority is not filtered down from the top through all intervening
layers to the bottom of the body politic as is the case in authoritarian
regimes. The factual reason is that there is no hierarchy without authority and
that, in spite of the numerous misunderstandings concerning the so-called ‘authoritarian
personality,’ the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically
opposed to that of totalitarian domination. Quite apart from its origin in
Roman history, authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to restrict
or limit freedom, but never to abolish it. Totalitarian domination, however,
aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in general,
and by no means at a restriction of freedom no matter how tyrannical.
Technically, this absence of any authority or hierarchy in the totalitarian
system is shown by the fact that between the supreme power (the Führer) and the
ruled there are no reliable intervening levels, each of which would receive its
due share of authority and obedience. The will of the Führer can be embodied
everywhere and at all times, and he himself is not tied to any hierarchy, not
even the one he might, have established himself.”[5]
As such, we are able to see
that lawlessness, the leader principle, bureaucracy, terror and the boomerang
effect in relation to imperialism all constellate and manifest within the totalitarian
juridical and legal structure, opening the space for atrocities to occur.
[1] For the sake of notation, it is often
forgotten that Arendt details a distinction between two modes of boomerang
effect: of (a) national imperialism, and (b) totalitarian imperialism. The
boomerang effect most often discussed in association with Arendt concerns the
former, wherein the racialised and lawless character of the imperial political
episteme is mechanised against the citizen population of the nation-state from
whence it initially came, adding to the development of totalitarianism. What is
often neglected or forgotten is the latter. Here, the boomerang-like causal
relationship of the latter is the inverse of the former. Namely, the multitude
of individual acts of resistance in the imperial satellites of totalitarian
states - which would be grasped by Arendt as belonging to the realm of the vita
activa and political action par excellence in world defined by the
foreclosure of the political itself – lead to ‘stirrings’ of unrest and
resistance in the homeland. Such action forces a totalitarian government to
take combative measures against further unrest. Concerning the boomerang effect
of national imperialism, it is the episteme and agency of the imperialist that
boomerangs back to rigidify and manifest such logic and action within its ‘home’
nation-state, becoming a necessary basis and foundational quality of
totalitarian rule. Whereas, for totalitarian imperialism, it is the resistive agency
of the imperial subject as an active political agent in the face of
the foreclosure of the political, which boomerangs back to the totalitarian
homeland, generating attempts at the re-ignition of a previously extinguished political
sphere. Hence, it is salient to recall that although Arendt highlights the
boomerang effect as a necessary condition of totalitarianism, she indicates
that it forms a quality of phenomenal resistance to totalitarian governance in
equal measure. Thus, it would be wrong to cast Arendt’s thesis as a value
judgement against ‘boomerang effects’ in the main as a whole. For more
information, see: Hannah Arendt. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books. pp.504-505.
[2]
Hannah Arendt. (1958). The
Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books. p.462.
[3] Richard Evans. (2009). The Third
Reich at War. New York: Penguin Press. pp.510-511.
[4] As a side note, if the central disciplinary
revelation of political theology is to declare that the state takes on the role
and function of (a) god in modernity, then the ideological demagogue or leader
is, perhaps Christ-like or messianic in quality in the same vein that Kantorowicz
lays out the French medieval kings as.
[5] Hannah Arendt. (1958). The Origins
of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books. pp.404-405.