Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt on the Nature of Totalitarian Regimes

Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin are two of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century. With similar background and stories (both Germans who fled from Nazism and established themselves in America), they differ on their account of the regime that made them immigrate. Their debate, however brief, can enlighten us not only about that dark period of human history but also some present predicaments that we face.

The debate began with the publication of the book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which for the first time made Arendt one of the most famous political thinkers of the 20th century. After the book’s release, Waldemar Gurian, founder of the magazine The Review of Politics, commissioned Voegelin to write a review of the book. In the same publication, a few months later, Arendt publishes her response. Before the formalization in the form of essays, Voegelin sends a letter to his compatriot anticipating some topics that would appear in the review and is answered with a brief letter.

CORRESPONDENCE

Correspondence begins in the 1950s, after Hitler’s defeat in World War II and at a specific point in their works. It was in the 1950s that, after the event that marked their youth, the authors published their great attempts to explain the catastrophe of totalitarianism.

On the part of Arendt, in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism is published, and throughout the decade other texts on the totalitarian issue such as “Ideology and Terror” and “The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism” are also released. In the case of Voegelin, in 1952 his most famous work on the process that culminated in totalitarianism was published, The New Science of Politics (based on lectures given in 1951) and, in 1959, Science, Politics and Gnosticism deepens the last part of the previous work on Gnosticism as the disease of modernity.

The debate, then, takes place on the one hand, at an opportune moment, as it is when the authors have their theories about totalitarian regimes well established. On the other hand, Arendt and Voegelin still had to develop fundamental parts of their works, which can be called positive aspects, since, unlike the texts on totalitarianism, they do not consist mainly of criticisms, but of propositional theories. This is the case of Arendt’s theory of human action and plurality which, at the time of the debate, between 1951 and 1953, was not yet developed as it was in 1958, with the publication of The Human Condition.

This exchange between the authors revealed certain affinities, but above all, their insurmountable differences about what the totalitarian movements of the 20th century were. Commenting on the debate, political scientist Peter Baehr said that the authors were “bound more by common dislikes than by shared enthusiasms.”^[1]

The first letter is dated March 1951 and in it Voegelin begins by thanking him for receiving the recently released The Origins of Totalitarianism. The content of their disagreements is already present in this letter. The German philosopher disagrees with one of the central theses of the book, that totalitarian regimes are new phenomena. For Voegelin, the emergence of totalitarianism is closely related to the decline of Christianity and this proposition permeates much of his work, from the book The Political Religions of 1938 to the Science, Politics and Gnosticism of 1959. By this point in the debate, Voegelin had already abandoned the concept of political religion and was about to present his refinement of that notion in the lecture that would become the book The New Science of Politics.

A little further on in the letter, the philosopher indicates spiritual fathers for the catastrophes of the 20th century and suggests that they are the historical causes of the events:

The liberal clergyman who disputes original sin, the secular intellectual who maintains that man is good, the philosopher who justifies utilitarian ethics, the legal positivist who disputes natural law, the psychologist who interprets the phenomena of the mind in terms of the life of the instincts—they, none of them, commit crimes like an SS murderer in a concentration camp—but they are his spiritual fathers, his immediate historical cause.^[2]

In this explanation, Voegelin’s main targets already appear, which later will all be seen by the author as fractions of the same phenomenon that plagues modernity: Gnosticism.

According to Voegelin, the book by the German theoretician fails to perceive the spiritual crisis of modernity that resulted in totalitarianism, since she makes a phenomenal analysis, which is concerned with facts and historical situations without looking for an essence between different events.

Failure to perceive the spiritual crisis causes Arendt to suggest that “new moral truths” must be found, and this reveals that the author suffers from the same crisis. For Voegelin, moral truths were already established by “Jewish prophets, Greek philosophers and Christianity,” and the crisis is due to the fact that these truths were forgotten. Arendt also suffers from this forgetfulness.^[3] In the essay “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” Arendt states that the mere fact that a totalitarian movement can influence individuals in the non-totalitarian world already demonstrates the failure of “every structure of morality” traditionally defined.^[4]

To exemplify moral truths that have been destroyed, Voegelin retrieves a passage from

Origins in which Arendt contemplates the possibility of a transformation in human nature. According to her, totalitarian regimes sought this transformation. But this suggestion alone, however critical, is sufficient for Voegelin’s commentary, for whom the concept of nature is equivalent to that of essence. If human nature is what defines the human being, a transformation of it would amount to a destruction of man as such. Anticipating later formulations by Voegelin, totalitarian regimes sought this change, but in all cases, they failed, as such a transformation is impossible.

In the essay “Mankind and Terror,” Arendt goes so far as to say that the men in the concentration camps are less than animals, as they behave like Pavlov’s dogs. Individuals in the camps simply behaved out of predetermined reactions to specific situations.^[5]

Arendt’s epistolary reply to Voegelin came on April 22, 1951. However, there is a letter from Arendt dated April 8, but which was never sent to Voegelin. According to the author herself, she wanted to have written a complete response to her interlocutor’s objections but realized halfway through that the content would go beyond the limits of a letter.

Three points of Arendt’s answer can be highlighted: “a) the questioning about the ‘failure’ of the tradition of political thought in ‘avoiding’ or trying to answer questions referring to totalitarianism; b) the consequences of this failure, such as the non-recognition of the importance of human plurality; c) the way it deals with ideologies.”^[6] The first and last points are present in both letters, as well as in the reply, but the second point, fundamental to Arendt’s later thought, is omitted in the second letter that was sent. Therefore, Voegelin did not have access to issues related to human plurality.

The first point arises in opposition to the Voegelian argument that totalitarianisms must be understood within the context of the decline of Christianity and, consequently, of secularization. Arendt inverts Voegelin’s proposition with a question: “How is it that in our tradition we were not able to answer and ‘solve’ the political questions and problems posed by our time?”^[7] That is, all the thought developed in the West, which permeated Antiquity, Christianity and Modernity, was not able to resolve the issues brought to light by the events of the 20th century. The tradition of thought, so dear to Voegelin, is challenged by Arendt, who saw it as unable to successfully face the catastrophes committed by totalitarian movements.

On the third of the points identified by Eccel, Arendt begins agreeing with Voegelin and says that “like you, I believe your origin can be traced in some measure to a part of the great tradition and continuum of ‘heresies.’”^[8] However, the author says she is concerned with the rupture promoted especially by the concentration camps and other totalitarian aspects, and not with a history of ideas that would explain their origins. For Arendt, these explanations are inadequate and the rupture (not a continuity) shaped the reality in which they found themselves.

In Voegelin’s letter, it is stated that the ideologies propagated by thinkers (the “spiritual fathers”) of the 19th century are not “harmless” as Arendt supposes. Here is the main divergence between the authors. By saying that Arendt treats ideologies as “harmless,” Voegelin refers to the fact that the problem for the author is the question of rupture and not of continuity. Arendt will explain this by differentiating thinking from acting, alluding to a distinction used by Herder between a possible crime and a real crime. For example, this distinction means that constructing racist theories is not the same as committing genocide. There is, for Arendt, an abyss between 19th-century ideologies and totalitarian regimes.

In short, for Arendt, the events of the 20th century, such as the concentration camps, were a novelty to which the tradition of Western thought was unable to respond. Therefore, the author answers Voegelin in relation to “new moral truths” in a very simple way: the crimes committed cannot be fitted into the “old religious and moral categories.”^[9]

VOEGELIN’S REVIEW OF THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

In 1953, Eric Voegelin’s critical review of Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in The Review of Politics. All the themes had already been anticipated in the correspondence between the two years before, but it is in the review and Arendt’s reply that the debate is developed in greater depth.

Right at the beginning of Voegelin’s review, the author’s perspective on events and the current state of affairs is clarified:

The putrefaction of Western civilization, as it were, has released a cadaveric poison spreading its infection through the body of humanity. What no religious founder, no philosopher, no imperial conqueror of the past has achieved—to create a community of mankind by creating a common concern for all men—has now been realized through the community of suffering under the earthwide expansion of Western foulness.^[10]

It is clear that the problem of totalitarian regimes is actually part of something larger. The review is a critique of Arendt’s book on totalitarianism. So if Voegelin saw a need to speak generally of Western civilization and its putrefaction, it means that totalitarianism is part of this general phenomenon. Voegelin’s main theme, that of the spiritual crisis, which permeates a large part of his work, and which is one avoided by Arendt, already appears, then, in the first paragraphs of the review. This finding is fundamental, as Voegelin’s view is the basis for the subsequent criticisms that the philosopher makes of Arendt’s book. All the distinctions that arise in the debate between the authors start from the observation that there is a spiritual crisis and that totalitarian regimes were, in their time, the climax of this movement.

When investigating the general problem, Voegelin states that “in time the inquiry will have to trace the genesis of the movements through the course of a civilization that has lasted for a millennium.”^[11] This implies that the author not only wants to seek out the source of the crisis, but also sees this as a necessary task.

Furthermore, the expression “in time” already indicates that Voegelin believes that the tools are not available to investigate the genesis of the crisis in a first moment. Such work could only be done later. The realization that there are no tools to deal with the totalitarian phenomena of the 20th century may seem at first like what Arendt had answered in the letters. For her, the concepts developed by the tradition of thought are insufficient to face these catastrophes in their originality. That is why she suggests the search for “new moral truths,” which Voegelin repudiated in letter. Tradition would not be able to understand the horrors of totalitarian regimes.

But Voegelin’s argument is the opposite, despite starting from the same assertion of insufficiency to deal with recent phenomena. For the German philosopher, the tradition of thought could solve the problems of the time. The point is that part of the spiritual crisis he detected was precisely the forgetting of certain teachings of ancient thinkers. The tools exist, but they are not easily accessible. It is clear, then, why in the letters this was a point of fundamental disagreement.

This disagreement is the result of the different views the thinkers have on the phenomenon. For Arendt, totalitarianism is an unprecedented phenomenon, which the tradition of Western thought has been unable to understand. While, for Voegelin, the totalitarian phenomenon is the culmination of a spiritual disease that has infected the West at large. But in addition to totalitarianism, another related symptom is precisely the conscious forgetting of moral truths, discovered by authors of tradition. Oblivion is conscious, because, for Voegelin, these truths were neglected in the centuries that preceded totalitarianism. Just as Arendt seeks “new moral truths,” the positivists of the 19th century, for example, also did so, claiming that the old theories were no longer valid. With this parallel, it is possible to realize one of the reasons why Voegelin accuses Arendt of suffering from the same condition that resulted in the 20th-century catastrophes.

Voegelin not only criticizes Arendt’s work, he also praises certain aspects of it. For instance, the historical research, especially in the first two parts of his book: Imperialism and Anti-Semitism. There is in Arendt’s account an increase in intensity from anti-Semitism and pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements that culminates in the atrocities of totalitarianism. Voegelin welcomes this as these early parts reveal the “essence of totalitarianism” in its “incipient eighteenth-century forms.”^[12]

What bothers Voegelin is not the search for the origins of totalitarianism, but that such a search as done by his compatriot is insufficient. Arendt’s analysis focuses on institutional aspects that led to the rise of totalitarian regimes, such as the emergence of the masses, the fall of the nation-state, and other economic and social situations.

Voegelin criticizes Arendt’s institutional approach. According to the philosopher, social and economic situations provoke changes and, consequently, people’s reactions to these changes. But such reactions are not determined by social causes. A certain historical event can trigger innumerable and diverse reactions in individuals. The focus, therefore, should not be on social situations, but rather on individuals’ responses to situations:

If conduct is not understood as the response of a man to a situation, and the varieties of response as rooted in the potentialities of human nature rather than in the situation itself, the process of history will become a closed stream, of which every crosscut at a given point of time is the exhaustive determinant of the future course.^[13]

Arendt’s book is interpreted by Voegelin as containing a historical causality, in his words an “aura of fatality,” precisely because it does not account for the possibilities of individual reactions in each historical event.

According to Voegelin, Arendt also admits that there is a spiritual illness and that horrors like the concentration camps were derived from this spiritual loss. To demonstrate her interpretation, Voegelin cites a passage in which Arendt distinguishes the current masses as individuals who have lost faith in the Last Judgment and started to seek the fabrication of an earthly paradise. The masses, according to the citation, were attracted by promises of the “paradise they so yearned for.” The result, however, was man-made earthly hells. The concentration camps were true “pictures of hell.”

This quote shows why Voegelin claims at the beginning of his review that The Origins of Totalitarianism “abounds with brilliant formulations and profound insights — as one would expect only from an author who has mastered her problems as a philosopher — but surprisingly, when the author pursues these insights into their consequences, the elaboration veers toward regrettable flatness”^[14]. This sentence summarizes the analysis as a whole: Arendt, according to Voegelin, has good insights, but she does not take them to their ultimate consequences — that it is a deep crisis triggered by a process of secularization. The adequate study of the phenomenon of totalitarianism must, therefore, seek the origins of the spiritual crisis.

Finally, a mistake by Arendt that Voegelin makes explicit is one already exposed in the correspondence between the authors, which is that totalitarianism seeks to change the nature of man. This observation is shared by both authors as already seen. The disagreement occurs because, according to Voegelin, Arendt admits that human nature can be changed.

For Voegelin, totalitarian regimes sought to change human nature, but invariably failed, like any movement that attempted this transformation. This happens because the concept of nature conceived by the German philosopher means essence, that is, it characterizes something as being specifically that something and not another. Therefore, the nature of something is immutable, for, if transformed, the something characterized by it ceases to be itself and becomes another.

ARENDT’S REPLY TO VOEGELIN

In 1953, Arendt writes a response to Eric Voegelin in order to respond to the objections pointed out in the review of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The author begins by answering the question related to origins. The analysis of anti-Semitism and imperialism is done to characterize elements that crystallized in totalitarian regimes. In that sense, there is no definite historical event that necessarily caused totalitarianism.

For Arendt, Voegelin treats “phenomenal differences” as minor or even irrelevant. This makes him not see existing differences. To treat movements as having “essential similarity” is to fail to see their specific distinctions. The “essential similarity” is what makes Voegelin place totalitarianisms in the category of Gnosticism, along with currents of thought such as positivism, communism and liberalism. But the equivalence of similar contents can erase a distinction in the scope of practice and also in the scope of phenomena.^[15]

In Arendt’s words, “what is unprecedented in totalitarianism is not primarily its ideological content, but the event of totalitarian domination itself.”^[16] That is, there is no originality in the intellectual content of totalitarian regimes. So much so that Arendt herself says that there are totalitarian elements in previous ideologies, and the search for a meaning in history that explains the past and predicts the future is not new to Nazism and Bolshevism. However, the form of total and global domination with the application of terror is an originality that cannot be overshadowed by a doctrinal similarity. Likewise, social and economic phenomena such as the rise of the masses, the decay of the nation-state, and imperialist practices, were a novelty that distinguished this era from others in history.

Both philosophers, then, agree on the content of totalitarian regimes. Nazism and Bolshevism used the ideologies of racism and socialism that existed earlier. It wasn’t the regimes that invented the idea of racial superiority, of a classless society, and that race and class provide the meaning in history. However, the claim of total dominance and its consequence of global expansion was unheard of, not in theory, as they were anticipated by authors such as Schmitt and Jünger in the interwar period, but in their attempt to apply them. Total control of individuals was only possible in an atomized society. Without the emergence of mass society and its characteristics, there would be no fertile ground for the practice of totalitarianism. Therefore, Arendt emphasizes social situations such as the emergence of the isolated and atomized individual in mass society.

For Voegelin, what differentiates the current masses is a spiritual illness that affects them and, therefore, the author draws attention to the responses of this mass to the situations in which they found themselves. For Arendt, masses are a new phenomenon, characterized by individuals who have nothing in common to unite them, they are compressed as “one-man.”

It is in relation to the novelty of the totalitarian form of domination that Arendt will say that our moral judgments and political categories are not enough to describe the phenomenon of totalitarianism.

In the essay “Tradition and the Modern Era,” Arendt points out that totalitarianism was the great rupture in history. Totalitarian movements crystallized into a form of government and domination that preceded elements such as the chaos of mass society. Moral judgments and traditional political categories do not apply, as totalitarianism “broke the continuity of Western history.”^[17]

Traditional moral judgments, for Arendt, did not account for the atrocities committed by the Hitler regime, which sought to transform human nature. What bothered Voegelin and made him place Arendt on the same side as totalitarianisms themselves, as already seen, was the fact that the author concedes that the transformation of human beings is possible.

Arendt’s theory of human action and plurality among men was not yet fully developed at the time of the debate. But in retrospect, they help us to understand why this transformation was possible.

For Arendt, action is a fundamental part of the human condition. Action, along with work and labor are the three activities of man’s vita activa. Labor concerns man’s survival needs, therefore, it takes place in his relationship with nature. In labor, no artifice is constructed, there is only the need for biological satisfaction. In work, however, there is production, that is, there is construction. If labor is man’s relationship with nature, work is man’s relationship with the world. This part of the vita activa generates products that survive after the death of their creator.^[18]

In work, man’s attitude is that of homo faber, who produces something from materials given by nature. In this activity, there is always a fixed beginning and end. The end of work is the product, which comes to exist independently of man. Action differs from work because it leaves nothing behind, no product as a determined mark of the end of a process.

Action always takes place between men and, therefore, is the core of politics. That is why plurality is the condition for human action. Labor and work can be pursued by a single individual, but the action always takes place in the presence of other equals.

There are many possibilities for discussing Arendt’s concept of action. But important here, in addition to human plurality, are two characteristics of the action that relate to the author’s view of history and her critique of determinism: first, the consequence of any action is unpredictable; and second, once done, there is no turning back.

These ideas exposed in The Human Condition are fundamental due to the fact that in totalitarian regimes, action ceases to exist. The plural terrain of action allows for novelty, seen as dangerous by a government claiming total control. Ideologies, with universal pretensions of explanation, are also in direct opposition to the innovation that the action presents, since they intend to seek a meaning in history and to discern future events.

In Arendt’s words, “a life without speech and without action…is literally dead to the world; ceases to be a human life, since it is no longer lived among men.”^[19] By suppressing this characteristic, people under totalitarianism cease to have a human life. Therefore, one can speak of a transformation of man, or a loss of what distinguishes man as such, since human action and its condition of plurality are extinguished.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Although both authors have clearly different theories on the nature of totalitarian regimes, some of them could be bridged if later developments in their works were known to each other. Let us begin by pointing out a misunderstanding that Voegelin had about Arendt’s work, that could have been avoided if she had sent the longer letter to her compatriot.

In his review, Voegelin criticizes Arendt for portraying an “aura of fatality” in the events of the 20th century and that individuals were determined by the economic and social situation. However, Voegelin’s interpretation is not faithful. There is no fatality in the course of history because there is in human action an unpredictability that makes the future unknowable. The theory of action in Arendt accounts for the criticism that Voegelin makes when he says that men’s reactions to social situations are innumerable and diverse and, therefore, were not predetermined.

In the case of Arendt’s reply, there is also a misunderstanding. In criticizing the spiritual fathers of the totalitarian movements, Voegelin exposes their philosophies for the error of trying to ascertain a meaning in pragmatic history. For Arendt, however, Voegelin’s own philosophy is a type of philosophy of history characteristically of the 19th century, only instead of progress, there is a decay.

That misunderstanding by Arendt was perhaps unavoidable, for the best answer came only later in Voegelin’s work. In the fourth volume of Order and History, he states beyond doubt that the process of history is not linear, which is why he doesn’t follow ideas (or symbols in his vocabulary) chronologically in the Ecumenic Age. In the same book, the linearity of history is criticized as a construction by the name of historiogenesis, a symbol developed to account for the origin and history of a society.^[20]

Both misunderstandings would be avoidable if Arendt and Voegelin had released their later works (respectively The Human Condition and The Ecumenic Age) earlier in the debate. Although their theories remain quite different as an assessment of the crisis of the modern world, they were together in their criticisms of regimes and ideologies that try to curtail freedom of action and thought.

NOTES:

^[1] Debating totalitarianism: An exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin, by Peter Baehr, 2014. p.365.

^[2] Op. cit., p.373.

^[3] Op. cit., p.374

^[4] Essays in Understanding, by Hannah Arendt, 1994, p.328.

^[5] Op. cit.

^[6] Debate sobre o Totalitarismo: A troca de correspondência entre Hannah Arendt e Eric Voegelin, by Daiane Eccel, 2017, p.159.

^[7] Debating totalitarianism: An exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin, by Peter Baehr, 2014. p.379.

^[8] Op. cit.

^[9] Op. cit., p.380.

^[10] The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin Volume 12: Published Essays 1953-1965, by Eric Voegelin, 2000, p.15.

^[11] Op. cit.

^[12] Op. cit., p.17.

^[13] Op. cit., p.20.

^[14] Op. cit., p.16.

^[15] Essays in Understanding, by Hannah Arendt, 1994.

^[16] Op. cit., p.405.

^[17] Between Past and Future: Six exercises in political thought, by Hannah Arendt, 1961, p.26.

^[18] A Condição Humana, by Hannah Arendt, 2014.

^[19] Op. cit., p.219.

^[20] The Complete Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17: Order and History Vol IV, The Ecumenic Age, by Eric Voegelin, 2000.

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