Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the same year she received American citizenship. She had begun working on the book in 1941 and finished it in 1949. It is an epic work that stretches nearly six hundred pages, offering an account of the phenomenal appearance of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. When she began working on Origins, Hitler was dead but Stalin was alive, and because Arendt was writing in the moment, the shape of the manuscript changed over time, as new information became available about what had happened in Europe and what was happening in the Soviet Union.
Origins was the first extensive account of the rise of Hitlerism and Stalinism. It was published during the era of McCarthyism in America. The American and European right read the book as a testament against the dangers of communism and totalitarianism, and the American and European left criticized Arendt for collapsing Marxism with Stalinism, arguing that Stalinism was a perversion of Marxism.
At the heart of Origins is the chapter on “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie” in the second section on “Imperialism.” There Arendt discusses the collapse between the public and private realms of life, which were preceded by the liberation of private economic interests into the public political realm, what today we might call the privatization of politics. Where once businessmen were concerned with their families and private lives, enjoying a life of consumption, they now entered into the public sphere, bringing their business models with them. In this section on “Imperialism,” Arendt details how private business interests increasingly took over the functions of the state, because they needed new markets in order that they could continue to grow: “Businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.” In order to reach new markets they needed the support of the government to step outside the nation-state borders. As a result, businessmen slowly replaced politicians, and matters of private economy became matters of the state. But the principle of unfettered growth that drove private interests was incompatible with the need for stable political institutions. Arendt turns to Thomas Hobbes as a theorist of power to think about the principle of expansion for expansion’s sake, which elevates private economic interests to the level of politics. Ultimately this leads to the socialization of the private and public realms, leveling class difference, while destroying stable political institutions by doing away with the public sphere.