Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Ruth Starkman (University of San Francisco)
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Racism will carry out the doom of the western world and for that matter, the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a

force noire

, when Englishmen have turned into “white men”, as already for a disastrous spell all German became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity, but its end, not the origins of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man, but his unnatural death.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Passionate, genre-defying and encyclopedic, sometimes maddeningly so, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) makes grand prophetic statements

2542 words

Citation: Starkman, Ruth. "The Origins of Totalitarianism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 April 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14454, accessed 19 March 2024.]

14454 The Origins of Totalitarianism 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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