Totalitarianism and the elimination of political freedom
Hannah Arendt:
Our most recent experiences with totalitarian dictatorships … have clearly shown us, if one is serious about the abolition of political freedom, that it is not sufficient to prohibit what we generally understand by political rights; that it is not enough to forbid citizens from being politically active, expressing opinions in public, or forming parties or other associations for the purpose of action. One must also destroy freedom of thought, as far as this is possible, and it is possible to a large extent; one must destroy the freedom of the will; and even the harmless-seeming freedom of artistic production. One must take possession of even those areas we are accustomed to regard as outside the realm of politics, precisely because they, too contain a political element. Or to put it another way: if one wants to prevent humans from acting in freedom, they must be prevented from thinking, willing, and producing, because all of these activities imply action, and thereby freedom in every sense, including the political. Therefore, I also believe that we entirely misunderstand totalitarianism if we think of it as the total politicization of life through which freedom is destroyed. The exact opposite is the case; we are dealing with the abandonment of politics, as in all dictatorships and despotic regimes, though only in totalitarianism do the phenomena of this abandonment appear in such a radical form as to destroy the element of political freedom in all activities, rather than resting content with stamping out action, the political faculty par excellence.
“Freedom and Politics,” in Thinking Without a Bannister, p. 223 (a lecture first published in 1961)
