In fact, my philosophy does not allow of the fiction which has been so cleverly devised by the professors of philosophy and has become indispensable to them, namely the fiction of a reason that knows, perceives, and apprehends immediately and absolutely. (Arthur Schopenhauer, The world as will and representation, 1844 (1966: xxvi)).

Introduction
These notes from the frontier challenge management approaches at all levels, from the management of international relations to the management of an enterprise. Building on a growing literature which questions the so-called Eurocentric approach, this essay challenges the adequacy of political correctness in this furious debate, which has come to so dominate the globalisation thrust of the developed world. These notes from the frontier are presented from the particular frontier in which the author lives and works. To some extent it is a personal observation, but one grounded in research, scholarship and participant observation. The notes bring together a number of observations both of the particular frontier of the author as well as those in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia, Mexico and elsewhere in Africa. It is a work in progress that attempts to reflect upon the dynamics that underlie the emerging crisis of cultural understanding and misunderstanding in order to find ways to ameliorate the inevitable conflicts if something does not change.

These notes attempt to draw a broad picture of a myriad of complex dynamics as well as ground these thoughts in the nitty-gritty of management in a rural context. It is clearly incomplete as such broad tapestries always are. It is broad, not for the sake of being grand, but because the view of the world from the tribal frontier is very different, and questions some of the widely held beliefs that may seem true from the centres of modernity or other particularities. That globalisation is the mobilization of elites worldwide is not in doubt; however, it faces a danger of losing touch with the feelings and thoughts of those on the ground. It is a dangerous game to play that is, perhaps, begetting a growing reaction to Eurocentrism in general. These notes talk to the issues involved with resolving this basic conflict of the 21st Century, perhaps, contributing to the search for the right questions. This chapter, therefore, roams from the global to the local, intertwining a number of threads, but from a perspective based in a frontier of globalisation.

The notes present the view from a particular context, the particular frontier between globalisation and tribalism in the northernmost province of South Africa, Limpopo Province. It reports the observations of a participant observer, an urban born white South African who has had the fortune to work and live on this frontier for the past 15 years, as well as travelling widely over that time. It also draws on research conducted on specific issues underlying management in this rural context, such as the issues of identity and migrancy as they impact both this rural particularity and other frontiers, including migrants to the so-called developed countries and their particularities worldwide.

This chapter is presented as a contribution to furthering the broader conversations concerning management on the frontiers of globalisation. The frontier is where globalisation and particularities interface, whether in a First or Third World context. More narrowly this contribution forms part of a conversation towards the development of a management style appropriate to the rural Southern African context, in which particularity the author is immersed. The notes contribute to the debate around Afrocentric management. It is somewhat of a heuristic montage attempting to bridge the gap between local and global perspectives and especially the perspective of the particularities vis-à-vis the forces of globalisation. In a sense these are notes from the frontier between modernity and tribality, in this particular case.[i] It is not a clash of civilizations as Huntington (1993) would have us believe; rather it is a clash of histories and trajectories, a clash of values on a myriad of fronts. One must be careful not to trivialize this complex dynamic between cultures and values to a good guy – bad guy scenario. Difference is a matter for respect and not for the cheap politics of maligning the other. The crux of the matter is that you cannot expect others’, cultures, societies and particularities, to accept the dominating culture in its entirety. Management at all levels needs to urgently acknowledge the ‘other’, the particularities’ right to self-determination.

Coming to terms with particularity
In the 21st century, we are all confronting different complexes of a multitude of processes variously called individuation, socialisation, urbanisation, globalisation, nomadisation or whatever. However, we are all ‘modernising’ in our own way, variably influenced by others, but with clearly different starting points, histories, trajectories, cultures, values, perspectives and contexts. These constitute a people’s particularity.

The Boers
South Africa provides a unique window on these processes. South Africa’s rainbow of particularities is unique, partly because of South Africa’s rich and diverse cultural mix, but also, because of the Apartheid Regime’s maintenance, manipulation and ‘preservation’ of traditional societies, or tribalism. It must be recognised that for all its ills, Apartheid resulted from two impulses. First, to keep power in white hands, safe from the so-called ‘Swart Gevaar’ (‘Black Danger’): second, and perhaps more significantly, because it is so often ignored, and because it is so post-modern, its concern with cultural autonomy and integrity; a concern for self-determination. This impulse arose from the successive Boer experiences under British imperialism. History works in cunning ways. Apartheid, for all its negativity, swam against the liberal stream. At the same moment that Apartheid died, liberalism has come to be condemned for its cultural imperialism, or as Highwater (1981) puts it, a ‘self-serving fallacy’. Perhaps, it is significant that with the decline of Apartheid the liberal phantasm declines also? As Chabal (1997) states:
We. Them. ‘We can’t impose our values on them’. The great racist lie at the centre of Western liberalism. The great sophisticated lie which in the century ahead will kill, maim, starve, rob and beat to death tens of millions more Africans than the primitive little lies of Afrikaners ever did.

The Boers’ suspicion of British Imperialism was based in the threat to their integrity made by successive British administrators’ attempts to anglicise them. This experience left an indelible mark on the psyche of the Afrikaners. They were sensitive to the implications of cultural imperialism as they too lived on the frontier. On many other frontiers the settlers solved this problem by a holocaust of extermination, tempered with restricting native peoples to reservations. This is well exemplified by the following dialogue between the Boer Cilliers (Siljay) and the Barolong Chiefs from Sol Plaatje’s 1930 epic, ‘Mhudi’ (1957).

‘But,’ asked Chief Moroka, ‘could you not worship God on the South of the Orange River?’
‘We could,’ replied Siljay, ‘but oppression is not conducive to piety. We are after freedom. The English laws of the Cape are not fair to us’.
‘We Barolong have always heard that since David and Solomon, no king has ruled so justly as King George of England’.
‘It may be so,’ replied the Boer leader, ‘but there are always two points of view. The point of view of the ruler is not always the view point of the ruled. We Boers are tired of foreign Kings and rulers. We only want one ruler and that is God, our creator. No man or woman can rule another’.
‘Yours must be a very strange people,’ said several chiefs simultaneously (1957: 82-83).

The Boer, Siljay, aptly expresses a complex question of the right of people to their own values and world views in the face of a dominating power. It is a question that is so contemporary in this globalising world. Yet he was speaking more than 150 years ago.

Tribal frontier
The new South Africa’s policy, in an attempt to be the most ‘progressive’, has embraced an ideology of modernism, and acted somewhat blindly to the advantages of harmonising with the traditional sectors as they too develop. Lately this has been acknowledged and processes have been set in place to acknowledge the role that traditional structures can play. However, the mistrust of tradition and custom by the ideologues still lingers and hinders the full participation of such sectors or a serious attempt to come to terms with the issues involved.

Concomitantly there has been somewhat of a denial of the multiple perceptual universes that all people live in, and which are particularly complex in South Africa. People are trying to live by both modernity and tribality while denying the one when in the other, and too often compromising the one for the other. To some extent, people ‘accept’ the requirements of modernity, while secretly paying homage to ‘tribality’ and adhering to its customs and practices whenever summoned to do so.

The Limpopo Province of South Africa is particularly interesting as a case study since it is one of the most culturally complex Provinces in South Africa. Limpopo has three dominant ethnic/tribal groupings dominating vast swathes of the province, each with their own internal divisions; the Venda, Northern Sotho and the Shangaans. In addition there are the Ndebele who are less populous yet the most widely distributed throughout the Province, Indian South Africans, Zimbabweans, Motswanas, Mozambicans, a smattering of white South Africans and recent migrants from all over Africa and the world.

In 1996 a list of issues of concern in public management was presented to the Provincial Government’s Human Resources Committee. One of the issues highlighted was ‘the conflict between the demands of custom and tradition and the demands of modern work’. No one on the committee denied the veracity and importance of the issue, but it was taken off the list of issues to be presented to the Provincial Cabinet, because it was seen as embarrassing. Yet the very same person, who censored the list, had adamantly confirmed that even for someone as ‘modern’ as himself, such summonses were ‘non-negotiable’.

The embarrassment of the emerging middle class at their multiple allegiances and their conflictual dominant frame of reference all too often means that there is a lack of action and dialogue toward finding an appropriate way to deal with this dilemma. This further contributes to the confusion of the issues involved and processes affected. In a context in which people desperately want to show that they can function in a bureaucratic society of mediated consumption (after Lefebvre’s 1976 notion of a Bureaucratic Society of controlled consumption), people do not want to acknowledge that they are tribal at heart. If denial or rejection continues we will all face the uncertain yet inevitable consequences. The possibility of conflict between globalisation and a vast number of particularities could unfold. Shane (2006: 4) notes that terrorism, rather than being global has a ‘provincial soul’. War on too many fronts is always dangerous. Inayatullah (2000: 816) argues for this recognition as follows:
What I argue for is a layered self, which does not discount ego, family, nation, religion, race or ideology but progressively moves through these various aspects of identity, until humanity is embraced, and then finally a neo-humanist self, wherein nature and the spiritual are included. Identity thus has depth but is not shaped by the dogmas of the past.

But this has to happen in a way determined by the people of the particularity. She continues to warn of the serious consequences that could arise from this frustration of a people’s right to self-determination:
If we do not go this way then the long-term result will be depression. … By the year 2020, non-communicable diseases such as depression and heart disease are expected to account for seven out of every ten deaths in the developing regions, compared with less than half today. Death becomes the future since hope is lost.

The real danger is that we will continue creating conflict between particularities and modernity, fuelling the dangerous dynamic in world affairs signalled by 9/11 and the increasingly uncertain global environment. Yes it may be reactionary, but it has to be recognised as an honest reaction to a globalisation which is primarily concerned with seducing the elites of the particularities. The world is in danger of warring about cultural diversity on a number of different fronts for the foreseeable future. A modus operandi needs to be found that can harmonise this diversity and pacify and allay potentially destructive forces. Traditional society promises to hinder development, unless some way is found to harness the energy released by ‘tribality’ and its values. In turn these particularities can temper and enrich the process of globalisation, harnessing it for the cultural integrity of the particularity, keeping faith to the basic values and spirit of that particularity, while adapting to the changed historical circumstances. The debacle in Iraq serves as a warning to those who would tamper with seemingly weaker traditional forces.
This is both a challenge and an opportunity. Can a dialogue on culture and management be incubated? The Afrocentrism debate seems to be one part of such a conversation, which could only release creative energies and perhaps do more to reduce terrorism than anything else.
Instead of seeing ‘tribality’, particular traditional societies, indigenous knowledge, values etc. as reactionary or, at least, simply resistant to change, they should be approached with respect, sensitivity and circumspection. There is an urgent need to confront this issue and nurture conversations in all the particularities towards taking ownership of development in the face of a rampant globalisation. In other words, particularities need to guide and decide on the direction of their particular development trajectory, i.e., self-determination. A first step is to bring the issues into the open. At all the frontiers, conversations need to find ways to harmonise the diversity, not just manage or attempt to merely co-opt it.

Confronting tribality
Stated in the starkest possible way, and with some obvious caveats, my concern is with the inescapable fact that the West seems today no nearer to understanding Africa than it was a hundred years ago, on the dawn of the colonial enterprise (Chabal 1997).

A voyage of discovery
I am an African, of Ashkenazi Jewish cultural origins whose grandparents came from near Vilnius in present-day Lithuania, arriving in the Cape Colony in the 1890s, with whatever cultural roots and/or ‘hybridisations’ that lie unknown back in the mists of time. I grew up in the privileged upper middle class of modern Johannesburg of the 1950s and 1960s. Johannesburg was the frontier of the world mining industry, a typical mining town. It grew very rapidly into a cosmopolitan city with all the accoutrements of modernity. Johannesburg under the rise of formal Apartheid, and despite it, was a very vibrant place. Sophiatown and Alexandra were centres of this vibrant emerging urban community, and its Great White Way on Commissioner Street boasted theatres to match anything around Times Square in New York City or London. Art Deco and later Bauhaus left still visible marks on the city’s landscape.

Johannesburg, and other South African cities, are characterised by a mix of many cultures even if dominated by the modernizing urban culture. European and American fashion and music mixed with the indigenous strains through Mbaklanga, Kwela, township Jazz and now kwaito. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the streets were alive with music. Kwela bands roamed Johannesburg performing guerrilla style in the streets with people throwing coins in their caps on the pavement in appreciation. A tea box bass, two or three penny whistlers and a guitarist, would break and run when the police arrived as they routinely did.
Safely walking these streets as a child was an exciting adventure, despite the clouds of Apartheid hanging over it. The Apartheid regime wiped out Sophiatown and tried to empty Alexandra unsuccessfully.
The rural hinterland was ever present in the dress, languages and style of the people. But the rural context was somewhat mysterious to a young white boy growing up. Like another world, that intruded into my everyday life in almost every way, but remained afar. I would travel through rural South Africa and Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was called in those days), seeing the traditional grass and mud huts, mingling with the people, immersed in differences and similarities I did not understand but felt and perceived.

I spent 12 years studying and working in the United States and Canada, and in all that time I never felt truly at home; ‘home’ was always calling. It was only years later that I realized that I, too, had been a migrant per se. I returned to South Africa in 1982 believing change was more possible. It had become apparent to me that the only solution for the Nationalist Government, the African liberation movements and the Captains of Industry, was some sort of negotiated resolution. However, I was greeted in South Africa not by vibrant analysis of the possibilities for South Africa but rather by a growing hegemony of thought, soon to be spearheaded by the campaign to make the country ungovernable and the widespread school boycotts. Instead of vibrant analysis one was met with calls for solidarity, and intellectuality was reduced to mobilizing slogans.

It was very different to the lively climate of disciplined theoretical and policy debate that had so characterised the period of Biko and others that had been so influential in the 1960s South Africa I had left. In the South Africa of the 1980s one was even castigated as a reactionary for suggesting that negotiations were even a possibility, let alone inevitable. It seemed that people were so caught up with actions and events, and in the rush to identify with the ANC and UDF, that they could no longer discern trends. Discussion and dialogue had become narrow and confined to the politically correct, on the left at least. Freethinking was no longer encouraged.

Reflecting on this now one is awed by the fact that a little over twenty years later the rule of ‘political correctness’ is incarcerating debate and conversation on a world-wide basis. Perhaps South Africa, one of the models of ‘regime change’, was a pivot around which the whole world was changing from a cold war dialogue between Communism and Capitalism to the ‘War on Terror’.

Around 1984, in an informal seminar at a prestigious South African university, a paper was presented concerning research conducted with migrant labourers in Johannesburg. The author had found that to the migrants ‘home’ was not Johannesburg where these migrants spent the overwhelming majority of their time and where they earned a living, but rather, ‘home’ was the village from which they originated and where their ancestors were buried, that is, their traditional frame of reference. A discussion broke out between two distinguished professors who were present as to ‘Why “these people” relate to the “homelands”?’ It was pointed out by someone that it was not the Apartheid homeland the migrants were referring to but their spiritual ‘home’. People get their ontological security from their spiritual relatedness to their ancestors, through traditions, customs and communing with the spirits as a community. One of the professors inquired, rather condescendingly, ‘but why do these people need spirit?’ Someone replied, ‘If you don’t know I can’t tell you!’ This awakened me to the fact that many modernists, although highly educated, had difficulty accepting the world view of the other.

I worked for 10 years at the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) which was incorporated into the Human Sciences Research Council in 1986. During this period I had the opportunity to conduct Human Relations Climate Investigations in Public, Private and Civil Sector organisations during a period of rapid social change. My work was not limited to organisational investigations but was also directed at broad policy issues in a variety of sectors and disciplines.

In 1992 I was headhunted to the University of the North in Limpopo Province and have worked there ever since, through its merger with the Medical University of Southern Africa to become the University of Limpopo. Only when I moved to Limpopo was I confronted directly by tribality. It took quite a while before I began to come to grips with the social dynamics. They were so different to what my anti- Apartheid ideas and urban prejudices had led me to expect. The left wing urban ideology of the time had no place for tribalism and ethnicity. These were judged merely as products of Apartheid. The reality I found forced a very difficult and painful reappraisal of these ‘truths’. As Dean, Executive Dean and then Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Campus Principal at the University of Limpopo’s Turfloop Campus (previously University of the North) I have through participant observation and focused research been able to explore the implications of the rural context on management processes.

The Apartheid Legacy
At the inauguration of Mr. Mandela as the Chancellor of the University of the North in 1993, a Venda chief sent the ‘Tshikona’, (the Venda Men’s Dance), performed when the community celebrates rights of passage rituals, to perform in honour of the occasion. It was a great honour for President Mandela. The dance involved at least a hundred male dancers of all ages, moving as one snake to wondrous music from their simple pipe flutes to the beat and rhythm of the Dumbula, the massive Venda sacred drum. It was a marvel to behold for it so completely integrated anarchy with order. While the dance was continuing on the field in front of the stands, a student leader attempted to take the microphone so as to call the dancers to end. Mr. Mandela was moved to intervene and had to tell the student leader to desist. To the student leaders this was something to be tolerated and its meaning and beauty were somehow lost on them, though not on the vast majority of students, visitors and dignitaries gathered there who watched in awe, clearly moved by the spirit of the dance. There is a strong tradition among African intellectuals of distancing themselves from their traditional roots, at least in their writing.

In the 1960s and 1970s young Black Consciousness intellectuals consistently spoke against their traditional cultures and traditions. This political imperative was clearly expressed, for example, in the early work of Prof. Njabulo Ndebele, now the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town. He wrote in the early 1970s:
… the blacks must set about destroying the old and static customs and traditions that have over the past decades made Africa the world’s human zoo and museum of human evolution. When customs no longer cater for the proper development of adequate human expression, they should be removed. Almost all the so-called tribal customs must be destroyed, because they cannot even do so little as to help the black man get food (1973: 81).

The problem with cultures is the unassailable fact that you cannot understand them fully, as an outsider. It was widely held that local ethnicity and culture were creations of the Apartheid state and that when Apartheid went so would any talk of these ‘survivals’. This reflects the a-historical view which has so dominated academic debate in South Africa, a perspective that believes that people want to leave their traditional roots behind for ‘development’ or modernity.
However, sentiments have changed since Ndebele made this reflection of a particular moment in the history of the struggle. Mafeje (1996: 20) identified the negative effect of such thinking among African intellectuals and others as:
… to devalue traditional institutions in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World and to give the impression that ‘modernisation’ was necessarily a reproduction of European institutions in Third World countries. The latter assumption has proved unwarranted …

Things have now changed as Wole Akande (2002) concurs:
In the fifties and sixties, the peoples of the newly independent African countries were told Western values would inspire modernization and lead oppressed people to demand the human rights enjoyed by people in the Western World. Today Africans find it ironic that the values broadcasted from the West represent oppression of the poor and the decay of civilization. Consequently, Western values are fast becoming discredited and devalued in the eyes of many Africans.

As I (1984: 1) previously wrote:
The racial dimension has been so overemphasised that it makes any discussion of cultural differences, within this context, appear as a justification for the policies of Apartheid. Without negating the basic similarities between all human beings there is still a need to come to terms with the various aspirational paradigms of our varied peoples.

However, at the time, this was deemed ‘politically incorrect’. Dialogue in South Africa has been dominated, distorted, dissuaded and outlawed by the repressive Apartheid state’s rigid censorship, bannings, pass laws, forced removals, detentions, and violence. On the other hand, in progressive circles, ‘political correctness’ in the service of ‘solidarity in struggle’, sometimes distorted and dissuaded dialogue as well. In the words of Howe (1993: 4) ‘Apartheid has given ethnicity a bad name’. In April of 1993 scholars from all disciplines and all corners of the world gathered in Grahamstown for a conference called ‘Ethnicity, identity and nationalism in South Africa: Comparative perspectives’. McAllister, one of the convenors, noted:
Just a few years ago it would have been impossible to hold a conference of this kind in South Africa, or even to address the kinds of questions and issues which it raised. Not only was there a boycott which prevented intellectuals from other countries from visiting our shores, but within South Africa itself the feeling was that ethnicity was purely a creation of the Apartheid state.

Furthermore, as he clarifies, ‘To discuss ethnicity was somehow to legitimate its existence, and thus to legitimate the Apartheid state. There are still South Africans who feel this way, but the tide has turned’ (1993: 7).
Hopeful words, but unfortunately the issue of culture, Afrocentric management included, is still something that is difficult to discuss without raising emotions and memories of the vicious social engineering of ethnicity under Apartheid.

The view from the tribal frontier
The view from the tribal frontier is very different to the view from the heart of modernity, be it Johannesburg or any other capital anywhere in the world where modernity is dominant. In Limpopo and other parts of the rural Southern African subcontinent, ‘tribality’ is the dominant. Even the Afrikaners see themselves as a tribe. At this frontier of tribality, the modern is only emerging, somewhat dominating only in urban or peri-urban nodes against a complex tribal backdrop. This is very different to viewing the tribal against the overwhelming backdrop of New York, London, Moscow, Beijing, Amsterdam or even Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town.

This difference of perspective is common to all situations in which what Baudrillard (1995) calls ‘particularities’, are in contact with the modernising impulse called globalisation, or what has been called the new imperialism (Escobar 2001). There is also a frontier in the midst of the centres of modernity with the hoards of immigrants who arrived during the latter half of the last century and who are still arriving. That is a frontier too, but somewhat blurred by the political correctness of notions of melting pots and hybridisation which have so dominated the imagination until recently. It was presumed, and hardly questioned, that the immigrants were being transformed into citizens, almost totally absorbing the dominant culture as their own. The jury is still out on this question. It was certainly given a jolt by the fact that the London suicide bombers were British born in most cases. Perhaps, many of the new immigrants to the first world are only role-playing the ways and means of their new host country, while maintaining their own historico-cultural-spiritual roots and identity.

One of the key concepts in traditional society is the ‘ancestors’. In the West one can ask the question, ‘Do you believe in the spirit of the ancestors as a guiding force in everyday life?’ as a somewhat abstract question, assuming that one may or may not believe. In other words it assumes that there is a choice for an ‘individual’. To someone immersed in traditional society from birth, the ancestors are a given that people accept unstintingly. The question of whether or not one believes in the ancestors is nonsensical in this context. There is no question. This is, perhaps, what makes it embarrassing to admit. What will the Western other think of me? It is safer to deny it.

The ancestors are so intertwined with so many aspects of the persons being, at a totally assumptive level, it may not even be possible to, in fact, reject, as it may be in the West, the primary difference being that all people become ancestors when they die. In a sense, immortality lies ahead of everyone. Judeo-Christians do not become gods. Chief Seattle, beginning his 1854 Oration put this difference of perspective and values very elegantly:
Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers, its magnificent mountains, sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays, and ever yearn in tender fond affection over the lonely hearted living, and often return from the happy hunting ground to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.

He concludes: ‘Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds’ (Oration of 1854: verse 1). Tribal people are not merely exotic remnants of a dead age, ‘noble savages’ as it were, but real human beings living now. As Inayatullah militates:
As American Indians have told New Age appropriators, if you desire to use our symbols, our names, our dances, our mysticism, then you must as well participate in our pain, in our defeats, in our anguish. You must also see us in our humanity, good and evil, and not as noble savages. It is the arbitrary exclusion of certain dimensions of history and self that become problematic (1999: 816).

Immortality is hard to give up. People relinquish the histories passed down to them only very reluctantly. Identity is rooted in history and culture, and is not simply an outcome of the environment. In a world where the particular is dominant, it is foolish to deny it and even more foolish to ignore it. One cannot assume that all people really want to embrace modernity uncritically. The resistance coming from particularities cannot be disregarded as mere resistance to change, for it draws from the wisdom that has been handed down through the ages. People recognise their particular culture, tradition and history as their birthright.

It is worth noting the seminal founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres’ ‘La société contre l’état’ (1974) published in English as ‘Society against the State’ (1989). He points to the, albeit unconscious, ethnocentric judgments made of primitive societies, ‘… their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack – the lack of a state – which, try as they may, they will never make up’ (189). He contends that this ethnocentrism has an ‘… other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization’ (190). He concludes his argument as follows: ‘It might be said, with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the state’ (218).

The attempt at hegemony by the state unites but, at the same time, also destroys the dialects, cultures and languages that do not gain dominance. This homogenisation is resisted by particularities to various degrees. How many dialects and languages has the world lost already? Perhaps we will never know. Griggs and Hocknell (2005) estimate that what they call the ‘Fourth World’ consists of between 6,000 and 9,000 particularities and accounts for more than a third of the total population of the world. The implication of all of this for the case of management in Africa and other regions with vibrant particularities with a strong allegiance to traditional societies is that they ‘conspire’ against developments if they perceive them to threaten the core spirit of their traditions, customs, land and autonomy. People accept change which they perceive as beneficial. One must never presume ignorance and any lack of intelligence among people from particularities, or tribals, because of their lack of formal education. Rural people are very clever and can very quickly identify the weak points of any system and abuse, exploit, corrupt or deflect it. The ignorance and blindness of the so-called ‘educated’ may even be much greater. Andre Gide who took a trip down the Congo in 1925 wrote in 1927:

But people are always talking of the Negro’s stupidity. As for his own want of comprehension, how should the white man be conscious of it? I do not want to make the black more intelligent than he is, but his stupidity, if it exists, is only natural, like in animal’s, whereas the white man’s, as regards the black, has something monstrous about it, by very reason of his superiority (124).

Gide’s observation unfortunately still captures the way the Globalisers still look at the particularities. The world is still suffering from these self serving misperceptions and misconceptions.

Identity and migration
There is a growing awareness of the difference between the migration of Europeans and even Eastern Europeans and Jews to the United States of America prior to Second World War. These immigrants sought after the American Dream and, while in fact maintaining an identity from the home country, quickly integrated into the culture of their adopted home. However, the newer waves of immigrants are perhaps different both in their origins outside of the common European culture of previous waves of immigrants, but also in their strong ties to the culture of their particularity. A recent article in Pravda highlights a particularly radical perspective on these recent immigrant waves to the United States and Europe. Mikheev (2006) puts it succinctly: ‘The world which the West has been ruthlessly transforming for years, has started to transform the West in return’. He continues to explain:
Many respectable politicians acknowledge nowadays that massive immigration may destroy the Western civilization in the end. Immigrants continue to conquer the world promoting their own needs and values. … As a rule, immigrants preserve their national identity, which gives them a reason to defend their rights and needs. … Immigration has become a serious problem for the USA too. Non-white Americans have become much more socially and politically active than they used to be in the past. There are US experts who think that immigrants and their growing families will eventually create one of the most serious problems for the USA’s internal security in the 21st century. This view was recently echoed by the Republican Senator for Tennessee in the United States, Lamar Alexander, who said: ‘A lot of the uneasiness and emotion over this immigration debate is from Americans who are afraid we are going to change the character of our country’ (Reynolds 2006).

While the Democratic Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, commenting on the legislation making English the official language of the USA, put it slightly differently:
I think it’s very important that people who want to spend the rest of their lives in this country become identified with American ideals … It’s important people learn to speak the language, learn to respect the democracy, want to abide by the rule of law and that this country shouldn’t be little ghettos. Learning English is symbolic of buying into that ideal (Reynolds 2006).

This recognition of the fact that migrants may not take on the culture of the host country as their own through assimilation or integration is dawning all across the developed world. Commenting on the Danish experience, Toksvig (2006: 23) writes:
What seems to have surprised Denmark is that many of the people arriving in need of relief wanted to bring their own culture. They did not want to be Danish in the way the Danes did. Even today it is estimated that, instead of assimilating, 95 per cent of thirdgeneration Turkish-Danish males import their spouses from Turkey.

The colonial powers did not consider their settlers taking on the cultures of the countries they occupied; after all, they had invaded. So why should immigrants assimilate? Or rather, why should their adherence to their home culture surprise the Europeans and Americans as it seems to? Some migrants may try and divide their worlds, holding traditional society as some kind of static entity which they like to visit in order to show the people, from the village, how successful they have become. But most have no choice but, to some degree at least, to accede to custom and tradition’s demands as they intrude into their everyday life. Demands such as being summoned to the village for funerals, weddings and other community rituals are generally not negotiable. Other demands, such as those for support of extended family members or the requirement to fund ostentatious funerals and weddings may drive the person to any lengths to satisfy these demands and requirements, so as not to lose face.

This is not to say that traditional societies, as such, are unchanging. They are changing with time and context like everything else. The question is whether the particularity is going to be able to protect values and customs dear to their hearts, and play the role they should in guiding the conversation towards a future modus operandi maintaining the integrity of their history and values. Perhaps this will lead to a range of ‘hybrids’ for this southern tip of Africa. Maybe something else will emerge through a blossoming of diversity and mutual respect. Or is something to be imposed?

It is, of course, always difficult to understand what is happening in other parts of the world, as it is to understand why it is that ‘others’ do not behave as we would expect them to do. Nevertheless, our deficiencies in making sense of what is taking place in Africa seem to me to go far beyond the usual problems which we may justifiably have about understanding other peoples and continents. What is puzzling to me is not just that our failure to comprehend Africa is extraordinarily acute but that, in this age of supposed rationality, we seem content to accept failure on such a scale when it comes to the African continent – as though the curse of the Dark Continent should forever obscure our vision and impair our ability to understand (Chabal 1997).

On the other hand those living in the First World view traditional society from a dominating perspective, considering traditional cultures as simply remnants of a distant past, as survivals. This arrogance of domination, presumed superiority, risks trivializing these cultures as quaint and interesting, and not really taking them seriously. Some even attempt to adopt a co-optive paternalism. That is, ‘simulating’ an accommodation through the adoption of the symbols and trappings of the particular cultures. This unfortunately leads to the marginalisation and denial of the more profound questions being asked by the leaders of particularities worldwide. This only serves to drive them to more covert levels. Espey (2002), while categorically emphasizing that he does not promote this, notes:
… There is no doubt that poverty in the south and the clash between the dominant Western civilisation and other subservient civilisations is fertile breeding ground for global terrorism. This is a security issue for the north and is already being acknowledged by leaders in the north (in Macfarlane 2002).

Much of the third world, in contact with modernity, either at home or abroad, has, perhaps, been operating at this covert level over the past century, living in their multiple worlds and keeping their true identity within their community. Unlike Third Worlders (i.e., those from particularities) or is it Fourth Worlders, First Worlders, the moderns and post-moderns as they like to term themselves, have a notion of an integrated unified identity striving for self-actualisation, which to a Third Worlder looks a lot like self-indulgence. This hyper-individualism is hard for most Third Worlders to understand. Etzioni comments on a 1993 meeting of Asian leaders in Bangkok:
The purpose of the meeting was to formulate an Asian stance on human rights which would be represented at the upcoming World Conference on Human Rights. According to one report, ‘What surprised many observers … was the bold opposition to universal human rights … made on the grounds that human rights as such do not accord with “Asian values”’. Asian intellectuals justify this opposition on the grounds that Western notions of human rights are founded on the idea of personal autonomy, which Asian culture does not hold as a fundamental virtue, if it embraces autonomy as a virtue at all (1997: 179).

Third Worlders on the other hand are used to living in many very different cultures and are comfortable in each of them, or at least can appear to be. What is masquerade and what is real only the actor may know, but possibly only viscerally, in many cases. Migrants learn quickly to move seamlessly between their worlds without any inner contradiction.

Cornejo Polar (2000) counters notions of hybridity with the notion of cultural heterogeneity. Grandis and Bernd (2000) summarise Polar’s view as follows:
Rejecting the belief that migration results in a synthesis of the urban with the rural, and the present with the past in the identity of the immigrant, he asserts that migration leads to the formation of dual, or multiple identities. Although these often appear to oppose one another, they are able to coexist without tension in the migrant, and allow the articulation of multiple and apparently contradictory perspectives in the discourse of the migrant (2000: xx).

This concurs with research conducted among migrants in Limpopo Province (Franks 1994) which found that the migrant’s world is one in which it makes sense for him/her to live and work in Johannesburg, while ensuring the survival of ‘home’. Above all, ‘home’ remains the migrant’s primary source of identity while s/he can move easily between these worlds.

To someone who does not know of the subtle varieties of world views that are possible, isolated in their narrow confines (albeit hypermodern or post-modern), it is difficult to understand the sensibilities of the other as anything but frivolous. They are clearly foreign. Middle class urbanites of our global cities cannot even move among the denizens of their own cities without culture shock, let alone understand the sensibilities of a sangoma.[ii] in South Africa. This inability to understand the legitimacy of the other, no matter how strange and foreign they may appear is the root danger of the present crisis in world affairs. It is not that traditional cultures are unchanging. As Garcia Canclini (1995: 155) proposes:
… What can no longer be said is that the tendency of modernization is simply to promote the disappearance of traditional cultures. The problem, then cannot be reduced to one of conserving and rescuing supposedly unchanged traditions. It is a question of asking ourselves how they are being transformed and how they interact with the forces of modernity.

Viewing issues of management from this perspective does not accept the superiority of modernity in its assumptions but rather resents its seemingly inevitable domination. As we see, the resistance to this domination in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East, has resorted to open terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Perhaps, this will force a realization that the voices of the particularities demand recognition and respect, and demand that their concerns are addressed. Their capitulation cannot be forced without their annihilation. Luyckx (1999: 979) reports the plea of one of the non-Western participants at the Brussels Seminar in 1998, as follows:
There is already a dialogue and cross-fertilization going on between Asian cultures and Western culture. The same thing is true for the historic role of Islam. But we are urging the West to change, and go into a real dialogue. There is no shortage of noisy words in the field of management (Mintzberg 1999).

Reality is far too complex for these buzzwords to be more than very partial analyses, no matter how holistic they claim to be. Here one must remember the caution of Schopenhauer against the professors and their ‘… fiction of a reason that knows, perceives, and apprehends immediately and absolutely’ (1966:xxvi).

In the investigation of social situations, that is, in trying to grapple with understanding the complex dynamics of situations, contexts and people, there is great danger in the application of predetermined understandings. The error of such applications is systematic. This systematic error may, down the line, create more problems than the initial intervention was intended to solve.

Humankind will always (continuously and forever) have to find appropriate ways to manage in the ever-changing situations and contexts and with the people whose interests and concerns are diverse and also always changing. All the models and buzzwords have something to teach us, but in the particular moment in a particular situation, with particular people, the appropriate thing to do cannot be predetermined. It is always a matter of fit, in terms of time and space, yet there is seldom an abstract fit; it always involves judgement. However, this is not to belittle the importance of models and ‘loud words’ in enriching management and leadership vision and understanding. There is always a need for praxis and knowing one’s context and people.

The danger of ‘error’ in all theories and models is that it is systematic. Error systematically fetishises one aspect of a complex and dynamic situation, ignoring others. Following Schopenhauer (1844) and Baudrillard’s (1983) notion of the ‘precession of the model’, Giri (1998) draws upon the Upanishads:
Let us begin with the Upanishadic insights where it is believed that reality is beyond our categorical formulation and comprehension. Whatever categories and concepts we use to make sense of reality, they are not adequate to provide us with a total picture. The Upanishadic insights refer to the simultaneous need for concept formation as well as the abandonment of concepts. … It is only when one fully and thoroughly disengages oneself from superimposition, that one opens oneself to an experience of reality.

A strategy may be appropriate in the abstract but may not be appropriate in the particular moment in a particular situation in the particular context with those particular people.

For example, after the changes in South Africa, the application of participation as a panacea, as a visible sign of the new democracy, had a particularly detrimental effect on the running of the very institutions that the country needed in order to build itself for example. In Higher Education, where I have been an active participant, it certainly contributed to the ungovernability which characterized the sector, especially the historically Disadvantaged Institutions, for many years. Leadership was cowed before an orgy of participation, and corruption of all sorts followed. This is still continuing. Participation, when introduced into a very volatile and politicised situation ends up allowing the domination of any organised minority. Participation, too, has to be managed. The challenge is to find the appropriate way to manage in particular situations with particular mixes of people and values, in full awareness of the nuances of the particular moment in time. We need to learn how best to manage in our particularity.

Culture and Management
A Saudi Arabian public manager’s resort to disciplinary measures to control his subordinates’ performance and behaviour is severely restricted by the civil service code and the strong traditional inhibition on causing someone to lose his face or means of livelihood. Consequently, he is obliged to try informal methods of persuasion and social pressures before turning to punitive steps. In assuming the role of the paternalistic leader, the manager is expected to look after the financial, social and professional welfare of his subordinates who will return this in the form of personal loyalty, obedience and acceptable standards of behaviour and performance (Atiyyah 1999: 9).

The Saudi public servant, as with his South African counterpart, is forced into roles that a global manager would consider an abuse of his/her freedom. How would these same global managers respond to the KwaZulu Provincial Minister of Education’s refusal to be in her office for three weeks because her office was bewitched? As her husband told the media, ‘There is a common belief that she is being bewitched by her predecessor’. The predecessor responded: ‘I don’t know anything about muti. I am a Christian. I don’t want evil to affect anyone’. The culture of the context infiltrates every organisation or institution to some degree. For instance, the old school tie, Broederbond, Lodges, etc., can all influence organisational functioning. This is no better or worse, only different, in its extent and domination. On the tribal frontier traditional culture dominates in fact.

Ouchi (1981: 40) noted the crucial point when he wrote that ‘… an organization cannot convert new employees into a firm specific culture deviant from the surrounding society – so instead it adopts an organisational culture with central values identical to those of the surrounding society’. Sinha (1992: 5) reported on this situation in the Indian sub-continent, which harbours so many ancient particularities:
Other scholars (e.g., Ganesh 1982; J.B.P. Sinha 1990) confirmed that Indian work organisations remain embedded in the socio-cultural milieu. Modern technology is often compromised with social compulsions to the extent that in some cases automatic machines and plans are rendered manual (either by neglect or inept handling) for creating more job points. Work forms remain Western in description, but work relationships are permeated with cultural ethos. The organisational chart as given by the supplier is kept neatly in the drawer, but hierarchy is culturally shaped. The organisation may have high tech but the identity remains social (Parikh 1979). Ganesh (1982: 5) observed that ‘… organisations in this country [India] have fuzzy boundaries. Essentially organisations have come to represent settings in which societal forces interact. Thus, our organisations have provided settings for interaction of familiar forces, interest groups, caste conflicts, regional and linguistic groups, class conflicts, and political and religious forces …’. He further pointed out: ‘In some cases, the sociocultural factors adversely affect organisational vitality and productivity. However, in some other cases, they are effectively utilized to maintain high productivity (J.B.P. Sinha 1990; J.B.P. Sinha and D. Sinha 1990).

More recently Kao, Sinha and Sek-Hong (1995), published an important work, Effective organisations and social values, which was succinctly reviewed by Professor Gandhi of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, expanding on Ouchi’s basic premise as follows:
People’s behaviour in different social settings, whether at home or at work is largely determined by their values, attitudes and beliefs. To a large extent the culture one belongs to determines these. In organisations people belonging to the same culture have similar social values and therefore display similar patterns of behaviour. Managers who recognise these social values and design appropriate work systems tend to create more effective and successful organisations.

Instead of functioning as the global manager would expect, decisions in the organisation are overridden by interests outside the organisation. A chance meeting at a funeral can undo all the plans made by an organisation in its planning. Decisions can be made by the collective behind the scenes.

Sinha provides the key to sustainable development, through harmonising the cultural nuances of the social context with the needs of the organisation. Rather than attempting to co-opt, suppress or merely wish them away, the customs and traditions of the cultural particularity have to be negotiated if sustainable development is to be arrived As Mazrui (1974: 17) has pointed out, the failures of African Governments perhaps follow from a dependent stratification system, in which the selection of leaders and the conferring of privilege are ‘based on values and skills drawn from a dominant foreign source’. They have been those most Westernised, and not those with the vision and capability to develop their historical context. In a sense what Mazrui is alluding to is the fact that African development has followed a Western rather than an African template, a template foreign to the third world context and therefore an imposition. Afrocentrism arises as a counter to the Eurocentrism that has dominated the world for so long. Afrocentrism arises from the interaction between the domination of the socalled global over the local, or what Baudrillard (1995) calls particularities. These notes from the frontier understand Afrocentrism as viewing the world from and within Africa.

Much of the management-in-Africa literature seems to focus on how one should motivate and manage people, relying heavily on notions of participation which is where first world management happens also to be, the learning institution etc. However, until we face the deeper issues of values and identity, honestly and openly, we are not going to find an appropriate modus operandi for management in Africa or any other particularity.

Even champions of globalization increasingly fret that it may damage or destroy the diversity that makes the human race so fascinating, leaving nothing but homogenized, least-common-denominator forms of creativity. In the wake of September 11, there is a new urgency to these concerns. The fury of the terrorists – and of the alarming number of people around the world who viewed the attacks as a deserved comeuppance for an arrogant, out-of-control superpower – is sparked in part by a sense that America is imposing its lifestyle on countries that don’t want it. And one needn’t condone mass murder to believe that a new world order that leaves every place on the globe looking like a California strip mall will make us all poorer (Weber 2002).

The view from the particularities is pretty unanimous. Sohail Inayatullah (2000: 12) suggests:
As the intelligentsia for hyper capitalism search for new legitimating factors, the challenge for the anti-systemic movements, in this possible window of opportunity, will be to create visions and practices of a more multicultural society with an alternative economics that is spiritually grounded.

Wole Akande (2002) echoes a similar sentiment:
But what is there to fill up the vacuum of decaying Western values? The expression ‘African values’, now typically propagated by Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe, is generally discredited as being the government propaganda of dictators. There is indeed a general confusion about which set of values might take the place of the once universal Western value set. However, the search for new or old values is ongoing. A search for historic, cultural roots can be observed in all non-Western societies. Predictably, any revivalist movement is bound to meet resistance especially since ‘Asian’, ‘African’ and ‘Muslim’ values have also been questioned as a result of their use of the most repressive parts of their cultural roots. Even so, the peoples of Africa nowadays act more self-confident on behalf of their roots than only a decade ago. Local cultural expressions, beginning with the arts, lead on a path towards cultural autonomy, which again should influence the value set.

On the other hand, all the talk of multiculturalism in the West risks becoming merely an exercise in containing particularities within modern and western constraints, all the time maligning the particularities. Just as the West uses extreme events to malign entire thousands-of-years-old cultures, this ‘hegemony of the new’ can have terrible consequences.

Many writers have contributed to an important dialogue towards ubuntu and African-based Management. Notable among them are Koopman (1991), Mbigi and Maree (1995), Boon (1996), Lessem (1996) and Mbigi (1997) among others (cf. as Mbigi (1997) describes in his book entitled ‘Ubuntu: The African Dream in Management’). While one appreciates their pioneering work one has to agree with Manning (2001: 3):
The first question, then, is how to bring in new thinking and at the same time preserve valuable experience. Secondly, how can the performance of new teams be enhanced? Answers to both questions are closer to hand than most managers think. They lie not in ill-defined notions of ‘African management’ or drawn-out diversity training, but in much more pragmatic ‘strategic conversation’.

One of the greatest problems with all the amelioratives (and Afrocentric management can be viewed as such, not that that is all it is) is that they have seldom been evaluated by neutral research. This does not have to be quantitative research, or what Mbigi denounces as ‘empirical research’. But, if others cannot confirm the claims, we are in the realms of ‘puff’. This goes for the legion of buzzwords that have each had their fifteen minutes of fame. One is reminded of Mintzberg’s question: ‘Are we so numbed by the hype of management that we accept such overstatement as normal?’ (Mintzberg 1999)

Thinking that ubuntu or some African or Afrocentric management can capture the essence of Africa is as absurd as thinking one could typify the West through its humanistic philosophies. These typifications are always limited to a few if not a single dimension of the issue. When used in that way these useful exercises become reduced to nothing more than buzzwords adding to the noise. It risks becoming the worst form of reification or rather commodification, more to do with commerce and business than with any real understanding of the complex dynamics faced at the frontiers. The question is whether it furthers our understanding and ability to find a way forward. However, despite these dangers, all buzzwords do have something to contribute to the conversation.

Issues of managing on a tribal frontier
Living and working on the tribal frontier in South Africa I can only attempt to draw on my research and management experience within this rural context to try and elucidate the issues that beg for understanding in terms of the issue of culture and management for a particularity in the face of rampant globalisation. The following anecdotes illustrate the general flavour of the issues unique to the tribal frontier:
A Director of a School appointed a woman lecturer as the supervisor of a student’s dissertation work. He was approached by a number of people to change the appointment because the student was a Venda male, and a ‘Venda male’ could not be supervised by a female. This is common to all the tribes in the Limpopo and beyond although it is slowly changing. Adherence to such views depends on the degree of urbanisation more than anything else. Perhaps, the lower the degree of formal education, the higher the so called chauvinism, at least publicly and by word, however,the deed may contradict this.

Rightly or wrongly the Director decided to accede to the request in this case. However, it illustrates the dilemma of offending local values or those of modernity in the attempt to find an accommodation which allows processes to continue. What if a white requested not to be supervised by a black. This we could not accede to as custom is not at issue, or is it?

Recently the Ministry of Education reported that its highly publicised programme to incentivise excellence in teaching had run into problems. The programme for bonuses was based on peer review scores given by colleagues. The minister of Education said the programme had run into problems because ‘they all just give each other 100 per cent’ (Hogarth 2006: 38). To which a local satirist, Hogarth, responded: ‘Gosh. What did she expect?’ (ibid.).

A Human Relations Climate Investigation conducted in the Limpopo Provincial Public Service (Franks, Glass, Craffert and de Jager 1996) indicated the following major issues:
– Lack of mobilisation of skills and expertise towards a common vision;
– Classism. A feeling among some public servants that they are ‘professionals’ and therefore superior to those they are supposed to serve;
– Confusion of political and administrative purposes;
– Historical and contemporaneous favouritisms (from baasskap to broerskap to sexism to comradeship);
– Inadequate performance evaluation systems;
– Inadequate supervision and management;
– Inadequate training and development;
– Covering-up, excusing, or simply just not recognising, incompetence;
– Conflict between the perceived demands of tradition and custom versus the demands of modern administration.

The core issue underlying all other issues and exacerbating the situation is what the authors termed ‘the conflict between the demands of custom and tradition and the demands of modern management’. The inadequacy of this conception is acknowledged, despite its descriptive accuracy and heuristic potential. It is important to understand that this conception represents a complex dynamic of interacting forces some of which have been sketched above.

To give an example: A public servant sits at a desk with a pile of work to do. S/he receives a phone call. It is someone from his/her village summonsing him or her ‘home’ for a funeral, marriage or other such responsibility. Culturally, and in terms of custom, this is ‘non-negotiable’, and takes precedence over any other responsibilities. Invariably the public servant puts his or her pen down, locks the office and goes ‘home’ for anything up to two weeks. The work must wait.

This is not something that can easily be changed. However, what can be done is to pro-actively put procedures in place for such an eventuality, whereby the public servant contacts someone else to take over the workload while s/he is away. S/he should brief the respective people as to what is to be done and what is urgent. In this way it would be ensured that work would at least continue and important things get done.

Unfortunately, at present we resist even acknowledging the issue. As a Chief Director said to me, ‘it is embarrassing!’ It is only embarrassing because we are trying to deny cultural differences, partly because Apartheid made such a fetish of them, and secondly because we are presently so concerned to prove we are modern.…

It is urgent that difference needs to be recognised and celebrated. It is certainly not something to be embarrassed about. Let us put appropriate procedures in place to handle these legitimate responsibilities. The conflict between the demands of custom and tradition and the demands of modern enterprise, overtly or covertly affects all work processes at each and every level of enterprise. For instance this conflict or dilemma:
– Affects all processes of selection, and placement of staff can be influenced by agendas extraneous to the goals of the organisation. Pressures to hire the home boy or girl is just the tip of this iceberg of nepotism;
– Work and modern enterprise are secondary to ‘home’ and all it stands for. That is, the spiritual frame of reference influenced by the ancestors, in the legends of the mass of the workforce;
– Interrupts work flows: funeral interruptions; absences without replacement, and/or delegation. In some cases access to the absentee’s office may not be possible and if faxes arrive there they will wait till the absentee returns. This has the effect of clogging work processes. Even high level executives have to attend numerous funerals on Saturdays disturbing their focus and limiting their work;
– Strengthens informal networks: encourages the formation of tribal, clan, political, or whatever based informal networks which compete with the formal decision-making processes. Because of this, partial interests tend to be served above those of the organisation as a whole. Generally it creates disruptive networks that exacerbate organisational politics hindering organizational functioning;
– Complicates discipline, and makes it impossible to implement performance management. Managers cannot act procedurally against a home boy or girl who is not performing without having to face his family and clan at the funeral every Saturday. It is not like in the city where, if a manager fires someone or disciplines them, the manager probably never sees the person again. In the rural context it is much more personal. Strategies and procedures need to be put in place that can help people face these very real and emotional processes, decisions and dilemmas;
– Encourages favouritism of all sorts: nepotism, clanism, tribalism and caraderie flourish. Hire the home boy or girl;
– Compromises security and confidentiality: the impossibility of implementing security protocols as they will be overridden for a ‘home-boy or girl’, or even a comrade.

Perhaps most important is the notion of ‘face’ affecting all processes. For instance it is never made apparent that an appointee is an affirmative action appointment because of the damage it would do to that person’s ‘face’ as such. Therefore no development processes are put into place to assist the appointee. Nor can such an appointee ask for assistance or mentoring lest they be seen as an affirmative appointee and lose face. These factors can end up subverting well-meaning processes such as affirmative action by reducing it to nepotism, ethnicism or tribalism, or just plain camaraderie among members of the ruling party. The strategy of favouritism has its downside, which only emerges in full strength once the third or fourth generation of affirmative appointments have settled in. What emerges is a struggle for positions and organisational politics rules supreme with merit being pushed aside. There is no reward for those who do their job, as they will not be noticed in the cocktail lounges in their expensive clothes or in their extravagant automobile nor in their mansion.

In addition the Public Service in South Africa is riddled with a confusion of political and administrative purposes. This can best be illustrated by looking at the hierarchy of trust found among the respondents in the Northern Province survey. The respondents were asked: ‘How well do you think the following people/organisations/departments can be trusted to look after your interests at work?’ The respondents could indicate ‘good’, ‘fair’, ‘bad’ or that they did not know. Generally the higher the education the less they trust any of the role-players. The current position clearly illuminates the morale situation in the Public Service.

It is not surprising to find that 50 per cent of respondents in the Labour category trust the union and that trust in the unions declines for clerical workers and Administration Officers and is lowest with the Middle Managers. Surprisingly, for the Senior Management the trust in the union (48 per cent) is almost as high as for the labourers. This indicates that Middle Management can often be overruled by their Senior Managers. They find themselves in the middle of a political alliance which cuts across the administrative procedures. The confusion of roles evident in the hierarchy of trust in the Limpopo Province Public Service explicates a parallel process to that of cultural identity and solidarity.

The further from the centres or nodes of modernity the greater the influence of tradition and custom, the more tribality dominates. However, the influence at the centre should not to be underestimated, as much of it is covert, and denied. But it is clearly a matter of degree.

Many of these influences are covert. Exacerbating the situation is the denial around such issues. This denial stems from the elites buying into the global paradigm as well as embarrassment and playing of roles to accommodate the demands of modernity. Sometimes the application of so-called African Management can collude with the disruption of organisational functioning rather than helping.

This is not going to change unless we recognise and acknowledge the competing value systems and do something to harmonise them. At present we are merely allowing them to find their own way, damaging organisational and institutional growth.

The central problem is the confrontation between merit and organisational politics that really arises from outside the organisation itself. Merit builds respect while a politically riddled organisation builds contempt. And this is something that all the spin doctors cannot gloss over. If these processes are left unchecked it eventually leads to situation of a war of all against all for position. The following caricature illuminates the situation that arises from the abuse of Affirmative Action: ‘If I have a job that I cannot do, and you have a better position, with better pay and perks, that you cannot do, then why can’t I not do your job?’

We desperately need to come to terms with the fact that as soon as we allow interests external to the goals of the organisation to influence decisions within the organisation we encourage the fudging of roles and interests. External interests can influence all levels of functioning, from CEOs to streetsweepers. All decisions at all these levels can be influenced allowing policies to be hijacked for interests other than those of the organisation as a whole. The organisation can be hijacked by any of a multiplicity of interests whether they be political (i.e., camaraderie), tribal, ethnic, clan, family, broerskap or whatever kind of favouritism. It merely depends on who the home boys or girls are. Favouritism opens the possibility for self-interested motives to corrupt processes, masked in the rhetoric of the ruling policy environment. For example:
– Appointment of unqualified homey is sometimes masked as affirmative action;
– Taking kickbacks or giving oneself contracts is even rationalized as empowerment;
– Hard decisions are not taken and incompetence is excused for a myriad of reasons.

In rural areas, especially, we have to find a way to work with the traditional structures, if we are to make organisations work. It is necessary to deal with the social and psychological impacts of rapid urbanisation on people. If we do not talk about the conflicts in people’s minds, caught between the demands of custom and tradition and the demands of modern enterprise conflict may be exacerbated. Denial fosters the conflict between tradition and modernity undermining morality and subverting all enterprise. There is a dire need to assist people to change in a way that is consistent with their values and more importantly allow and encourage so-called tradition to develop the wealth it contains for the benefit of society. As Mafeje (1996: 20) comments, noting the growing number of voices raising the issue of ‘… the relationship between culture and development in Africa’:
The underlying presupposition is that Africans have not fared well so far precisely because they have abandoned their own cultures and languages in favour of alien culture and language. While the correlation might not be as simple as such presuppositions imply, there is an obvious need for re-evaluating African experience so as to discover what went wrong, and how best it could be corrected, relying on homegrown remedies.

While the assimilation of alien culture and language has been led by the elites, its absorption further down has been far weaker. It is urgent that African intellectuals incubate a dialogue between tradition and modernity, as is happening in India and other third world countries that are successfully resolving this complex of difficult issues and find ways to come to terms with modernity. All particularities need to find a modernization that begins to harmonise with their indigenous knowledge and value systems.

These notes talk at the micro level to the need for an African management that can synergise management principles with the demands of custom and tradition as well as for custom and tradition to harness the management of human capital towards African solutions to Africa’s problems.

Towards the future
There is a rising awareness of the need to deal with the cultural question. The frenzied attempt to deny cultural relativity is waning. A Brussels Seminar at the European Commission (1998) proposed a ‘double hypothesis’:
– ‘That we are in transition to a transmodern way of thinking that combines intuition and spirituality with rational brainwork;
– That 21st century conflicts will likely be not between religions or cultures but within them, between premodern, modern, and transmodern worldviews’.

Luyckx continues: ‘Non-Western thinkers find this framework useful: it opens a door to criticism of the worst aspects of modernity without being ‘anti-Western’ (1998:974).

Inayatullah (2000: 7) comments that ‘like death, the West has become ubiquitous. But will hegemony continue and are there any signals of possible transformation from within and without?’ Inayatullah proposed the following four alternatives for the West: A dramatic ageing population leading to a future where immigrants are required for survival, however, once in the holy land of Disney, multiculturalism may make porous the West itself;
– Genocide against the Other, resisting internal transformative processes;
– The Artificial Society, wherein diversity and the Other are pushed back since high productivity can be achieved through the new information and genetic technologies, that is, through reductionist science and linear economic progress; While the latter technocratic scenario is most likely, there are possibilities that a more multicultural, Gaian, communicative, globalist future may emerge.

While, perhaps, a little idealistic, Inayatullah captures the possible futures before us. Perhaps we will negotiate future hybrids. But socially engineered simulations will simply not wash. Perhaps, hybrids with integrity? But this will be a rocky path and the warning made by Jan Christian Smuts more than a century ago, during another outbreak of a particularity resisting colonialism, the Boer War, reflects this:
History will show convincingly that the pleas of humanity, civilization, and equal rights, upon which the British Government bases its actions, are nothing else but the recrudescence of that spirit of annexation and plunder which has at all times characterized its dealings with our people (Smuts 1900: 3).

Can the global heed the warnings, or will it arrogantly attempt to impose its will, annihilating all particularities? Baudrillard, echoing Inayatullah’s second alternative, warns somewhat prophetically:
Our wars thus have less to do with the confrontation of warriors than with the domestication of the refractory forces on the planet, those uncontrollable elements as the police would say, to which belong not only Islam in its entirety but wild ethnic groups, minority languages etc. All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. In this sense, the Iran-Iraq war was a successful first phase: Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of the anti-Western challenge, even though it neverdefeated it (1995: 86).

Dialogue needs to escape the ‘good guy – bad guy’ level of political discussion so predominant in world affairs today. This is accurately reflected in the exposition of the goings on at Abu Graib Prison in Iraq as well as other interviews with US troops in Iraq. The American troops vilify and hate the people they are fighting. Also, the congressman who, after viewing pictures from the prison showing Iraqi women having to display their breasts, noted that he had not seen any violence. That is violence to the Iraqi women.

Politics is not about good guys and bad guys, or ‘good and evil’ as President Bush would have us believe. Politics is about conflicts of interests, whether they be spiritual, cultural, social, political and/or economic. Unless particularities are taken seriously, acknowledging conflicts of interest for what they are and respecting their histories and aspirations, little progress can be made in management or in world affairs. More problematically, if we are to stop the terrible talk of good and evil as unleashed by the dangerous dialogue world leaders are flirting with in their ‘War on Terrorism’ from spiralling out of control, the world will have to act swiftly or the chance for dialoguewill dissolve in mistrust, loathing and the maligning of the ‘other’. As Wole Akande (2002) has noted:
Politically, the 20th century was a battle between left and right. In the 21st century the contest will pit localists against those struggling to manage globalisation. The former will seek control over the local economy; the latter will continue to see globalisation as inevitable as gravity. Their role will be to attempt to make it a better balance for all of us.

At the local level, what is required is a willingness to know our contexts, the values, customs and traditions, and a willingness to respond honestly in finding ways to effectively manage in multicultural contexts. We need to firstly acknowledge ourselves in all our complexity. All urbanizing populations experience this confusion. What is needed is a willingness to know our contexts, the values, customs and traditions, and an honest response in finding ways to synergise multiculturality in vastly different contexts.

No simple solutions will solve the problems raised by globalisation’s penetration and domination of particularities. This is a political issue, no matter whether at the level of managing an organisation or international relations. The same principles apply. Unfortunately political issues cannot be reduced to technical solutions; they have to be negotiated or someone sabotages the implementation of the solution. They clearly cannot be imposed. As the author has previously written (1984: 1): ‘Without negating the basic similarities between all human beings there is still a need to come to terms with the various aspirational paradigms of our varied peoples’.

European modernization required the urbanisation of people under the myth of a full-employment economy. Now we know this was never achieved and, further, that the information society has destroyed jobs and allowed them to go offshore, and that the possibility of full employment recedes, even more drastically.

We therefore need to develop traditional society as a social net (cf. Russian survival on potatoes grown in the countryside) and recognise the benefits of rural connectedness (not having to pay rates and taxes on tribal land makes retirement very affordable and therefore the need for less disposable income in retirement). Perhaps we could set the economy going if we decreed that only pine boxes can be used for funerals, rather than the very expensive coffins presently demanded. People invest in the dead. They can pay for expensive funerals but not for their children’s schooling. It is a clear indication of priorities. It is clear that South Africa’s consumption patterns will make development difficult.

If one is sensitive to the nuances of imperialism in a global world, its pros and cons, one is forced to look on the efforts to modernize the South African population with some trepidation. One can be afraid for two reasons, opposite yet complementary. The two reasons for trepidation are:
– That it will beget a resistance (especially now the Middle East resistance is fanning the fires), preventing a process of harmonization from even beginning;
– That these efforts will damage irreparably the psyche of the particularities in South Africans, and other countries, by overpowering the ancient frameworks, and extinguishing their flames.

Unless some way is found to ameliorate the confusions people have, one risks polarization such as we are now witnessing between Muslims and the so called modern world (some even reduce it to the Christian world).

A people which holds its custom and tradition so dear as Africans do, needs to share their confusions if they are to find ways to harmonise their tribality with modernity and inventing an acceptable modernity. Sindane (1998: 18) argues for the survival of the traditional leadership as an institution. ‘The sooner it is utilised effectively, the better for all concerned, particularly rural communities’.

At the moment there is a growing effort in this regard although many people are pretending to be part of one framework while not, in fact, being free of the other to do so. Some of us are living a pretence, but a pretence with dire consequences. A pretence that will engender psychological conflicts as well as those between elites and the traditional societies they wish to will away. And this is true for any particularity. A number of authors and practitioners have pioneered models and dreams of African Management and/or Management in Africa. These pioneers of an Afrocentric vision are enormously important. However, some of them verge on the utopian. The use of the concept ubuntu, notwithstanding its rich history and authenticity, has sometimes been presented as a blanket solution to all the problems faced by South African organisations. Ubuntu is an admirable concept, just as is humanism in western philosophy. However, when it attempts to posture a superiority for Africans, it ends up being as delusional as that of the superiority of the West. In any case ubuntu is always limited by ‘mona’ (envy and jealousy).

Despite such weaknesses, including the fact that a clearly African Management is still to emerge, these efforts need to be complemented, supported and assisted by a generalised conversation to handle the nuances of the cultural dimension in management on the frontiers of modernity and tribality.

When the Afro-pessimists raise the spectre of corruption, they are in part misunderstanding the pressures and dynamics faced by African leaders and people. It is not so much that people are corrupt but that they are caught between competing demands, values, temptations and desires. People need help dealing with this confusion of roles and values; primarily they need to help each other find a way forward. Without such dialogues and conversations on these issues people are left to their own devices. They therefore fall back on their tribality for comfort. Tribality and modernity have to converse or conflict will abound. The issue must be dealt with in the open.

There is already a rich and diverse literature on culture and management from many and varied particularities. The basis is in place to engender an honest understanding of the issues involved at the management level. It is possible to incubate a dialogue towards appropriate policies as well as the processes and strategies for implementation. The following are some of the things that need to be facilitated at the local level:
– Acknowledge the issues involved, the integrity of all views, values and conflicts of interest and resist maligning the ‘other’;
– Support managers in handling the complex situations they face;
– Find ways to support the people trying desperately to come to terms with contradictory demands on them, through some form of group work, perhaps;
– Move beyond denial in our everyday lives. Shake off the ‘shame’- the real legacy of colonialism and Apartheid;
– Incisive research and dialogue concerning the issues involved;
– Break away from the politically correct and face the murky reality;
– Strategic conversations at the coal face;
– Reject entitlement and face our responsibilities. Strengthen the social fabric;
– Embrace meritocracy as the only way to cut through the webs of favouritism and become productive. Any exceptions made will open a loophole for favouritism of all sorts.

Recently, a debate has arisen in the South African Sunday papers which seriously criticises affirmative action as it has been practiced in South Africa. The debate was opened by Prof. Malegapuru Makgoba, Vice- Chancellor of the University of Natal. He has been supported by Prof Sipho Seepe (2005) who concurred with the last point above when he wrote:
Surely we cannot continue to maintain policies that assume that black people are mentally inferior and incapable of competing on their own merit! In addressing the historical imbalances, we should continue to be guided by principles in which advancement is based on merit and a single standard of excellence (Sunday Times, Letters Section, 6 February).

Others accused Makgoba of selling out to whites. Nevertheless this is, perhaps, a sign that South Africa is losing its innocence. Hopefully, critical and intellectual conversations are becoming more and more possible at a local as well as a global level. The ‘No’ vote in France and the Netherlands concerning the EU Constitution, which Baudrillard describes as the ‘No to the unquestionable Yes’ (2005: 24), is perhaps a sign of the unravelling of the hegemony of political correctness (Arrighi 2005). The people who source their identities in particularities cannot relinquish their birthrights as long as they survive, whether at home or in some far-off First World country. How we choose to handle the interface of cultures at the frontiers of globalisation, whether in the heart of the modern or in some particularity, can halt the negative spiral. Conversations need to take place across all frontiers. Zhao (1999: 918) asks a relevant question as follows:
The West and the East have two different kinds of historical experiences, reflecting two differing philosophies: one of confrontation and the other of reconciliation. Now, adding the fresh experiences of two world wars and a third cold war in the passing century, is it not the time for us to ask ourselves, in the face of cultural divergences, which kind of philosophy would be better for us to follow?

The fact is that there is a resistance to talking of matters of culture by all sides. As long as some are blinkered by their fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim or whatever, while many are blinkered by the politically correct negation of cultural relativism, and the religious belief that the issues surrounding Human Rights have all been honourably resolved, the misunderstanding will continue to subvert the best laid social engineering plans of the policy makers whether they have modern, tribal or migrant origins.

In South Africa this resistance is very clear. Because Apartheid took the idea of cultural difference to the extent of attempting their so-called separate development policies, creating homelands for the various ethnic groupings, this made any discussion of cultural difference extremely limited, limited especially by the understandable wish to negate anything that could have justified such a ‘crime against humanity’. However, one has to recognise that even though the mode of implementation of a policy can become abhorrent to world opinion, there could still be a grain of truth in it. It gets us back to logic and the limits of the bifurcating Aristotelian logic which is used as a dominating dialogue to capture people’s minds on the side of good as against evil. The forced choice is of course manipulated by the horror stories one can tell about another culture, while one’s own crime statistics on abuse of women and children tell another story of horror. No society has found a way to eliminate such abuse. None can stand on a tower of moral superiority, the so-called high ground. Until we acknowledge our equality, truly, we will not be able to sort out these very deep and important questions of cultural difference and harmony. The arrogance to think that the First World has solved these problems is a very dangerous standpoint, fuelling the arrogance of political correctness, and furthermore one which makes the holder of such beliefs weaker and poorer, in their ignorance of the powerful explosive forces simmering in their societies.

When one reads Prime Minister Blair saying that ‘if people want to come here, either fleeing persecution or seeking a better life, they play by our rules and our way of life’, it raises serious concern that a leader of Blair’s stature can so simplistically view this complex situation. Where is hybridity in that? Thankfully, at the same time he announced the setting up of a Commission that would ‘examine multiculturalism and explore measures to integrate better those who deliberately separate themselves from British law and culture’ (Donaldson 2005: 13). Blair and other world leaders would do well to examine the situation carefully before embarking on misguided actions. First they will obviously need to adjust their mindsets. It requires that people recognise the legitimate in that which they instinctively consider illegitimate. This is a difficult challenge.

Conclusion
I would hope this paper contributes with the others in facilitating a conversation towards building on our cultural strengths and finding solutions appropriate to our particularities and our world. The problem always remains that one is understood by those who already see the issue; for many of the others it is a case of ‘if they don’t know, you can’t tell them’.

In February 2004 the author was invited to share these ideas at a special seminar on ‘Building Capacity for the Future’ held by the Minister of Public Service and Administration, in South Africa. Everyone acknowledged the issues as important but politely shied away from discussion. They described them as so-called soft issues. These issues are often dismissed as soft issues. But in fact they are the hard issues, in the sense of being most difficult to resolve. They can only be resolved if we face our realities for what they are, rather than viewing them through Eurocentric lenses. This Eurocentrism rather than imagining a possible future, hopes for traditional structures to just wither away. History shows that they will not for, in fact, this has been the strength of Africa’s cultural and linguistic survival in the face of the ravages of colonialism. There is no option but to face these realities and a growing awareness of them. While elites can, perhaps comfortably dream of modernity in the urban centres, it is much more difficult here on the interface between tribality and Modernity. However, it is just as real a quandary in the urban as the rural contexts, just not as visible.

It is not that these processes are not present in the so-called developed world or in the urban centres of modernity in the Third World; they certainly are. However, a certain degree of domestication has been achieved such that members of particularities are only known to those that are part of them, to academics who sometimes study them, and to some of their neighbours. To the vast majority of their fellow citizens they hardly exist, if at all. To many moderns, particularities are merely quaint reminders (survivals) of a ‘primitive’ time long past.

Members of a particularity know that their particularity exists in all its contemporaneity and that it is not primitive in the least. If forced to make a judgement they would see modernity as more savage than any particularity they may be aware of. They are also aware of the contemporaneous existence of other particularities and respect them for that, knowing they are not mere survivals, but have their own historical missions. In their recognition of ‘others’ they are strengthened while the moderns are weakened by their ignorance. Particularities are stronger and healthier than they may at first appear to be.

Everyday the urgency for dialogue seems to increase as the world spirals dangerously towards its future. The world has moved from a bipolar world dominated by the dialogue between Capitalism and Communism to what many people think is a unipolar world symbolized by the emergence of the United States as the, so-called, lone super-power. As with all things, the world is rapidly changing to a multipolar world signalled by the growth of the European Union, China and India to name only the largest. As all particularities aspire to self-determination this will increase exponentially. One no longer lives in a centralized universe but it is fast becoming nodal, where each node is a particularity with its own unique core and modernizing trajectory. Nodes have a right to self-determination, which is not to say they are retreating to racial purity and that there should be no mixing, only that it should happen with respect for the origins of partners, factoring this into the relationship. It is rather a recognition of the right of particularities to find their own path and resolve the issues that confront them in a way that satisfies their particular values, customs and will. It is not about superiority but recognising the value of all humanity and the contributions all can make. It respects the recognition that there is always more that we do not understand and that what may appear retrograde presently may become exemplary in the future, and vice versa.

All paradigms have their errors. Let us not wipe out what we do not understand. This sketch is unashamedly based in an acknowledgement of cultural relativism and the necessity of factoring the cultural dimension into all our deliberations.

NOTES
i. This chapter uses the term tribal in its descriptive sense. It is not meant to be derogatory in any way. The problem with political correctness is that it cannot handle such realities in its ideological antagonism towards tribalism and particularity in favour of global domestication and modernisation. Mafeje (1996) differentiates tribe from state as follows: ‘Therefore, analytically and historically, the line of demarcation between tribe and state is crossed only when those who rule are no longer governed by kinship principles of recruitment into public office nor for their subsistence and that of their staff and retinue …’ (p. 33).
ii. Traditional healer.

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Introduction
In 2003 one of the authors of this article visited a historically disadvantaged university in South Africa where a colleague – a well known South African specialist on ubuntu – lectured in the Philosophy department at that time. The author gave a presentation on Genomics and Africa in one of the lecture rooms of the School of Molecular and Life Sciences of this university. On the wall outside the lecture hall there was a show case, containing a brochure of the school that stated:

Vision
The school of molecular and life sciences strives to be an internationally recognised afrocentric centre of excellence in biotechnology, arid zone studies, and related disciplines.

The author was struck by the use of the word ‘afrocentric’. Surely, molecular biology as such cannot be Afrocentric. Or can it? In Cell Biology International 2001, an article written by Barry Fabian was published. The title of his article was Cellular ubuntu: Umntu Ngumntu Ngabanye Abantu, and other problems for cell biologists in the new millennium. Fabian looked at the self-organisation of developing cells. He noted that the complexity of cells is not only related to the cell itself but also to the functional whole of cells leading to an ordered operating system. Fabian concluded: ‘To this end, cell and developmental biologists must continue to honour and explore the adage that “a cell only becomes a cell through other cells”’. So ‘molecular ubuntu’ in the metaphoric sense of the word is possible after all.

Afrocentricity is a concept that has gained popularity both in Africa and among African-Americans in North America. In this article we will first focus on the problems with regard to the definition of this concept. We will then argue that the popularity of the – loosely defined – concept is probably related to its metaphoric power, constructing an opposition to Eurocentric, and creating its own authenticity. We will try to demonstrate that this construction of opposition and authenticity, i.e. this construction of identity, can potentially mask other – possibly more relevant – dichotomies, notably the dichotomy between the rich and the poor.

Afrocentric: A definition problem
Trying to answer the question what afrocentric management is about, will undoubtedly induce problems of definition. Generally speaking, we find the term afrocentric difficult to handle because a clear and unambiguous definition of the concept seems to lack. Are we, for instance, talking about an African Afrocentrism or perhaps an African-American Afrocentrism, or are they both the same?

Afrocentricity is a concept that has a long history. It has been the subject of many discussions among African-American scholars in the United States for many years already. There is a wealth of literature related to this subject. One of its major advocates is the African-American scholar Molefi K. Asante. The Department of African American Studies of Temple University, where Asante has been working for many years, has been a leading place in spreading this concept. However, the concept of Afrocentricity has met with severe criticism from scholars, including Stephen Howe in his Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes (1999).

One of the African American scholars, Jerome H. Schiele, has tried to connect Afrocentricity explicitly with organisational theory. Back in 1990 he wrote an article entitled Organisational theory from an Afrocentric perspective.

Even if we agree that African and African-American Afrocentrism are identical, we are still faced with definition problems. What exactly do we mean by ‘Afro’? Does this part of the concept refer to a geographical entity, to a mental creation, or to a cultural trait of a given society? Is it at all possible to speak of ‘Africa’ as a unity?

We encounter the same problem when using the word ‘African’. Trying to define the adjective ‘African’ will take us into politically highly sensitive discussions. Christopher Marx (2002) rightly points at the strategies of inclusion and exclusion when using concepts such as African or ubuntu. We argue that the concept Afrocentric necessarily indicates the exclusion of something that is not Afro. Does it perhaps mean that we want to exclude Eurocentric? Still, other questions can be raised. What exactly do we mean by Eurocentric? What do we refer to, if we use the concept ‘Euro’? Does ‘Euro’ refer to the colonial period, or does it perhaps extend to a neo-colonial domination? It could also refer to a global spread and domination of a neo-liberal market-ideology, originating in the North Atlantic region. In this sense ‘Euro’ refers to both the (colonial) empire and to ‘Empire’ as defined by Hardt and Negri.

Centric’ apparently wants us to put something in the centre. But in the centre of what exactly? ‘Centric’ may refer to a tendency of domination; i.e. domination of a periphery. What then would qualify to be the periphery to the ‘Afrocentre’? From the perspective of reflective methodology (see Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000), we take a fundamentally critical stance with regard to the concept of Afrocentric, preventing us from essentialising and defining the ‘true’ and fixed essence of this concept. However, based on the literature it is still possible to detect some integrating notions that seem to claim a central position in the concept of afrocentricity. These concepts are integration, harmony, communality, consensus as opposed to difference, individualism, atomism, fragmentation, etc. This dichotomy seems to run parallel with the old opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies already in 1887. But using these concepts induces the danger of a strongly essentialist perspective.

Therefore, for us the more interesting and challenging question is related to strategy: why do people emphasize the use of the concept of Afrocentricity? In their contribution to the conference on Afrocentric Management in 2004, Karstens en Illa stated that ‘the popularity of management concepts has much more to do with the quality of the source providing the concept than with its truth’. They put much emphasis on the importance of management concepts, concepts that are full of ambiguity. They call them mental creations.[i] For us this is a very important and interesting observation.

Following this line of reasoning, one may argue that afrocentric management is a mental creation. That means that the relevant research question is not so much related to content, to the ‘what-is-afrocentric-management-all-about’ question. The examples that we gave from the field of molecular biology lead us to suggest that the instrumental use of labels such as ‘Afrocentric’ or, as it is fashionable in Southern Africa nowadays, ubuntu, is mainly due to metaphoric reasons. Let us take the following definition of metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The famous French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote extensively about the function of metaphor. He commented that ‘[..] a discourse which makes use of metaphor has the extraordinary power of redescribing reality’ (Ricoeur 1973: 110). ‘[….] we must then assume that this reality as it is redescribed is itself novel reality’. According to Ricoeur the effect of using metaphors is ‘compared to stereoscopic vision. Several layers of meaning are noticed and recognised in the thickness of the text’. Following Ricoeur we need to look for another, almost hidden, meaning behind the use of the word afrocentric. The use of the concept of Afrocentrism may be another way of redescribing reality; of constructing a novel reality.

In this chapter we deal with the concept of Afrocentric management. It was Gareth Morgan, amongst others, who elaborated on the powerful use of metaphors in the way we conceptualise management and organisations. Morgan said: ‘Metaphor encourages us to think and act in new ways’ (Morgan 1997: 351). One of the metaphors he outlined is that of organisations as cultures; organisations ‘as in essence socially constructed realities’ (ibid.: 142). In the next paragraph we want to ask ourselves what this ‘novel reality’ (Ricoeur), or these ‘socially constructed realities’ (Morgan) might look like.

Power of opposition
Using the oppositional dichotomy of Afrocentric versus Eurocentric makes the ‘case’ of an afrocentric management look like a powerful one. It seems to give the concept of afrocentric management a prominent position.

This dichotomy consists of two sides of the same coin that reinforce each other. One side is that of denial, i.e. denial of the part that we want to exclude (see Marx 2002). The negative meaning of Afrocentrism is not-being-Eurocentric. The other, positive, part of the coin is (re-)appropriation. Using Afrocentrism means that Africans apparently want to (re)-appropriate their authentic identity.

In this sense the use of the concept of afrocentric management pertains to a long history of wanting to escape from a Eurocentric hegemony, combined with a long history of searching for an authentic African identity. Not without reason, the subtitle of Howe’s critical analysis of Afrocentricity reads as follows: Mythical pasts and imagined homes. Seen from this perspective there is continuity between concepts such as Pan-Africanism, Négritude, African Personality, Ujamaa, Ubuntu, Afrocentrism, African Renaissance, etc. Du Bois, Senghor, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Tutu and Mbeki meet in this ‘Quest for the authentic African’.

In afrocentric management one can discern a strong tendency to search for authenticity. And this search for authenticity is at the same time a denial of a hegemonic colonial and neo-colonial past. There is a rejection of a Eurocentric hegemony and a re-appropriation of alleged authentic, African ‘Mythical pasts and imagined homes’. According to Schiele (1990), mainstream organisational theories reflect the conceptual framework of Western social science, being derivates of Western ideology and thought, thereby negating the worldview of African people.

Afrocentricity serves as a tool for redescribing reality, for constructing a novel reality. Referring once more to Ricoeur, one may argue that ‘afrocentric’ could then well serve as a metaphor for liberation, liberation from a hegemonic Eurocentric science and technology; liberation from a hegemonic rationalist and instrumental organisational theory; liberation from a neo-liberal market ideology with the commercial interests of Global Big Business. In short, liberation from ‘Empire’, ‘this new global form of sovereignty’, ‘Empire’ with its ‘lack of boundaries’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: xii-xiv). Applying this line of arguing to the field of molecular biology, Afrocentric molecular biology would then mean a biotechnology that addresses the real needs of the people in Africa, irrespective of the commercial value of the scientific endeavour. In the sense of constructing an authentic African past, afrocentric molecular biology has one interesting and particularly strong case: advanced DNA-research techniques conclude irrefutably that human beings originate from ‘Out of Africa’; a molecular African authenticity par excellence.

In the first part of this chapter we discussed the problematic nature of the definition of ‘Afrocentric’. This problematic nature will become more and more salient in a globalising world; certainly in a field that is in the heart of ‘Empire’ (some may say the heart of ‘Darkness’). One of the classics of postcolonial literature is entitled The empire writes back, by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin. Borrowing their title one could argue that afrocentric management is about The empire that manages back. Afrocentric management is a powerful tool, claiming its own, authentic, place in the series of management-ideologies. At the same time, in the next part we will demonstrate that the use of this management-concept may have consequences that run counter to what it wants to accomplish.

The myth of opposition
We argue that putting an emphasis on the ubuntu concept potentially mystifies actual developments in southern Africa today. To what extent are present developments based in the opposition between African and western ways of thinking and doing? Taking a Marxist point of view, former Apartheid can be seen to be the highest form of capitalism. And although after 1994 major changes have occurred, the poor masses have hardly been favoured. In many comments we read that some progress has been made in the last ten years, but at the same time high levels of poverty and inequality appear to have persisted (see e.g. various contributions in the State of the Nation, South Africa 2004-2005, edited by Daniel, Southall and Lutchman, 2004). Bond states (2004: 2/3): ‘South Africa has fitnessed the replacement of racial apartheid for what can be accurately described as class apartheid’. However, another thing that has become apparent after 1994 is ‘the aspiration of the emerging black bourgeoisies’ (Lazarus 2004: 9).

Ubuntu serves as a concept in management ideologies in the transnational stages of post-apartheid. The situation of post-apartheid is aptly characterized by Van Binsbergen (2002: 1) when he writes about:

Africa’s most viable economy; a highly complex, largely urban and industrial society; an overdeveloped state apparatus originally geared to oppression of the majority of its population; caste-like intra societal divisions in terms of wealth, education, information, and concrete social power; the newly-gained constitutional equality of all South African citizens; the rising expectations among Black people who have historically been denied the White minority’s privileges of class and colour; the majority’s simmering resentment, both about past wrongs and about the slowness of present compensations and rewards; a drive among individual Blacks to gain financial and occupational security as quickly as possible; and the highest rates of violent crime in the world today.

It is in this present world of persisting structural inequalities that we should analyse the values of the ubuntu concept. Neglecting this world of different and fragmented meanings and interests in a highly urban and globalised economy by pinpointing at the alleged historical-authentic background of all black Africans will probably rather favour the emerging rich and powerful ones instead of the have-nots.

Focusing too strongly on the ubuntu concept and the philosophy of the African Renaissance can result in a process of depoliticisation and thereby mystification of the everyday struggle of people living in a state of poverty. We argue that it is not so much the opposition between African and Western management concepts that is at stake but the opposition between the instrumental, individualistic, profit-seeking, managerial class and a more humanized social democratic form of living and working together. ‘The attention is to reclaim conflicts suppressed in everyday life realities, meaning systems, and self-conceptions and the enhancement of local forms of resistance’ (Deetz 1996; see also Grey 2005).

Some people speak about a ‘caste of managers’ that is mainly interested in measuring and controlling, thereby neglecting questions that deal with quality. This global discourse of a managerialism combined with a profit-seeking mentality will influence large sectors of society; a tendency that runs counter to the integrating concepts of ubuntu and its propagators.

Since this is a global phenomenon, the Western world and most of (South) Africa are part of the same neo-liberal market relations of ‘Empire’. We argue that ubuntu concepts stressing African authenticity and Africa’s imagined pasts – paradoxically – strengthen these existing relations, probably (and hopefully) against their intentions.

Conservative dimension of ‘ubuntu’
In the work of authors including Mbigi, Mangaliso and Franks, the concept of ubuntu seems to be strongly related to a classical anthropological concept of culture. It is a concept that stresses shared values, harmony and consensus. It stresses the interest of the community, of the group, of the tribe (Louw 2001). Anthropologists have known for a long time that this use of the culture concept is one-sided, since it overlooks the many contradictions, ambiguities and power relations which are always part of cultures.

For Mbigi and Mangaliso, ubuntu as African philosophy par excellence serves as a basis for management. However, does the way they conceptualise the philosophy not fit seamlessly into the tradition of bestseller writers like Ouchi (1981), Peters and Waterman (1982) and Deal and Kennedy (1982) when they articulate a form of corporate Gemeinschaft (community) that tells a lot about the myths of North American capitalism, not about what really happens in organisations, i.e., that is prescriptive instead of descriptive? (Parker 2000). These authors point at the importance of shared values, consensus, harmony and even mention the idea of corporate tribes.

Undoubtedly, an African context differs from a Western (or should we say Eurocentric?) one. But since we are all part of a global ‘Empire’, the differences match striking similarities. Both worlds strongly appeal to the managers’ homogenizing credo, ‘all noses in the same direction’. In some way, it is ironic to see that Mbigi, Mangaliso and others appeal for the same values as do their Western counterparts whom they criticize so badly.

In his polemical and critical article on ubuntu, Christopher Marx (2002: 59) writes:
Ubuntu is the self-description of a society that is in the wake of a transformation from an intimate pre-modern into an anonymised and urbanized industrial society, marked by a division of labour. Ubuntu is an invented tradition, whose task it is to minimize historical chasms and fractures. Ubuntu aims to contrast society and community, Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft.

According to Marx ubuntu suggests a cultural essentialism: the essence is the African village and chiefdom, a pre-modern, idyllic world with a community spirit of belonging and social security. In essence, that is what Africa is, contrary to ‘the West’, a world of egotism and emotional coldness, by definition. In general ubuntu refers to ‘tradition’, that world of belonging, security, solidarity, togetherness, etc. But does that tell the whole story about African villages and chiefdoms in former times? Idealizing community and communalism as the main signifiers of African identity (Marx 2002: 52) masks the real struggles of people in former days, like undemocratic power relations, poverty, and the like. Nation building positioned in such an image of the past is deeply conservative and naïve: it glorifies an imagined past.

Ubuntu adepts such as culturalists might fail to notice the implications of their political statements in the economic domain. Political statements deal with identities, the economic domain deals with interests. In their view politics ‘centers around identities, which are to be expressed and represented, not around interests, which compete for power and resources’ (MacDonald 2004: 637). The take-over of power by the ANC administration did not harm the business elite too much so far, as has been indicated in many publications in recent years (Marais 2001; Lodge 2002; Daniel et al. 2004).

Racial solidarities do influence elections, in spite of formally ‘non-racial’ political institutions, and the ANC does trade on racial identity, representation, and politics. But what white liberals, whether culturalists or individualists, do not see is that the material interests of whites – at least of prosperous ones – benefit from emphasis on representing African identities, that Africanizing state leadership serves as the condition – the camouflage – for instating the material interests of prosperous South Africans (who are disproportionately white). Emphasizing racial identities allows the party of Africans to represent poor Africans symbolically, while putting them off economically (MacDonald 2004: 639).

Ubuntu philosophy informs us about many aspects of past and probably even of contemporary village life in Southern Africa. But the danger of stressing these traditional values of Gemeinschaft is that this mystifies and obscures (‘camouflage’) other conflicts in the present globalised South African Gesellschaft. The image of Africa is the paradox of deeply felt friendliness and hospitality of people versus the struggle for life and profound inequalities of resources, of power, in the past and today.

Ubuntu and the western management concept
Since the early 1980s many western organisations, more in particular the executives of these organisations, have been identifying new perspectives on management. Although not for the first time in organisational theories, culture and cultural differences became a key factor, not in the last place because of Japanese successes and management experiences. That the interpretation of these experiences is rather one-sided and distorted does not alter the fact that the Japanese success stories were very popular. Western managers find support in concepts such as consensus and harmony that (supposedly) exist in the Japanese business world (Ten Bos 2000). Looking back, it becomes clear that one may question the so-called lifetime employment and the element of collectiveness (Bax 1991). However, the culture concept offered relief to many in the sense of ‘shared values’ answering the pressing question: how do we achieve a situation in which everyone is pulling in the same direction?

This perspective has continued to dominate discussions until today, at first mainly in the business world, but later, in the 1990s, in the not-for-profit sector as well. Everyone started to look for shared values with which to re-determine and share deadlocked identities. Because of fundamental societal transformations, managers and executives are continuously struggling with change, complexity, differentiation, and fragmented meanings. Various management courses come up with the instruments and models with which to achieve this, both to identify conflict via a quick scan, and to change this into a more desirable situation. There is a continuous search for shared core values and a common identity as the expression. Ubuntu refers to (traditional) values. In that sense it is seen to be a concept of culture. It serves as a concept in management ideologies in the same manner as the integration perspective on (organisational) culture did in the West.

Just like the integration view on culture, the concept of ubuntu with regard to culture essentialises and thereby mystifies existing (cultural) differences. Any generalization on Western and on African management concepts necessarily misses out on the contradictions and conflicts in everyday life. Confronting these concepts with each other is only possible in a rather theoretical or abstract manner, not based on solid empirical research. Differences within the concepts probably outweigh differences between the concepts. And with respect to similarities, it may well be the other way around. Life in rural areas in the Netherlands is very different from urbanized life. The same holds for South Africa, as Franks shows in his comparison between Johannesburg and the countryside. Moreover,
… we must realize that in many other contexts, outside Southern Africa, the appeal to human-ness or humanity occurs in ways very similar to those proclaimed by ubuntu. The very term ‘human rights’ suggests so much: it defines not primarily – for such would be superfluous – the ontological entities to whom these rights apply (humans), but especially the extent of their application: universal, applying to all humans (Van Binsbergen 2002: 9).

We argue that, in principle, the discussion should not concentrate on further delineating differences between Western and African management concepts, but on management (concepts) and their pre-suppositions in general. Managerial ubuntu adepts fit in the tradition of publications that focus on the practitioners’ perspective on (organisational) culture. This perspective has yielded a major quantity of so called ‘how to’ books from the early 1980s onwards (with first bestsellers of Peters and Waterman and Deal and Kennedy). Parker (2000: 25) places these books in context, and concludes that
… the most relevant element of that context is that which frames the culturalist movement as an attempt to intervene in the identity of the employee just as all organisational control strategies from (at least) Taylor onwards have done.

He rightly warns that this should not be taken too seriously, as the claims made are, to a great extent, normative. These claims are far less about what actually happens in organisations: ‘Most of this work is hence an amalgam of mythologizing and mystification couched in marketable quasi-anthropological language’ (ibid.). It raises the question of whether the current (renewed) interest in diversity (like the supposed differences between Western and African management), identifications, commitment, loyalty and binding also contains a large degree of normativity, and wishes to provide managers with instruments with which to increase efficiency and productivity, and manageability. Cavanaugh (1997) talks about diversity’s rhetorical contribution to the reproduction of organisation. He suggests that diversity may have more to do with ‘affirming the given than changing it’.

Are management scholars perhaps more concerned with ideal and thereby intangible situations, or do they seek to express what everyday situations and experiences are? In the latter case it would be advisable not only to study organisational processes and management from an integration point of view, but also from a differentiation perspective and a fragmentation or even conflict perspective (Martin 1992; 2002).

Opposition is between rich and poor
If we claim that the opposition between Western and African management is nonexisting in the sense that it relates to novel realities, or at least is not relevant, we may focus on what concerned scholars (and management consultants) could better attend to. It is the dominance of the instrumental rationality model in the service of the powerful that is at the heart of organisational studies taught in most management and business schools in the USA and in Europe, and indeed even in many other parts of the world nowadays (Grey 2005). Studying organisations is inseparable from political choices. Focusing on cultural differences (ubuntu, traditional or otherwise) without explicit political choices is a way to conceal who controls the access to resources.

The increasing gap between rich and poor does not have its primary basis in cultural differences, between a ‘Western’ way of thinking and doing, and its African counterpart, but in the harshly unequal in access to, and control of resources. No one will deny the fact that structural power relations between the West and Africa are out of balance. But it is probably more important to recognise that in our globalised world the same inequality can be found within nation states, within institutions and within organisations.

Economists and the international institutions that employ them routinely ignore differences of power; by prioritizing poverty over inequality, relations of power, and responsibilities these entail, are eliminated from the picture (Nederveen Pieterse 2002: 1027).

Global capitalism and the market ideology of ‘Empire’ have replaced national market capitalism and their local impact is felt at every level transgressing the borders of nations and continents. Discussions about ubuntu can only be valued when placed within this view on structural power relations that relates to center and periphery. This implies that we need to look for comparable positions between people in the West and in Africa. Solidarity on the national level is important, but is necessarily seen in the context of relations between global inequality and domestic inequality, since the effects of globalising economies and their ideological legitimacies by (international) management and business schools and their gurus cannot be underestimated. At the heart of ubuntu lies solidarity. But what does solidarity mean when on the one hand people are expelled from their homes because they suffer from AIDS or live in deep poverty in slums, and on the other hand their ‘brothers’ drive around in their Mercedes or BMW and lock themselves every night in their palaces with huge walls and gates around it? Is this way of living simply copied from the West? Is it just an integral part of African culture as it is in the West as well? Therefore, if ubuntu adepts want to promote solidarity with poor masses and favour the democratic participation of all, they should point their arrows at the present South African political situation.

South Africa’s version of capitalist democracy, as advanced by the ANC under President Thabo Mbeki, uses racial nationalism to undergird democratic government; uses democratic government to ratify capitalism; and completes the circle by using capitalism to materialize the significance of racial nationalism, the predicate for the ANC’s strategy of legitimating democratic capitalism and capitalist inequality (MacDonald 2004: 632).

One may argue that the colour of the elites in South Africa is changing; it is ‘blackening’ bit by bit. And maybe on the other side, the colour of the poor masses is ‘whitening’ a little bit. But at the same time MacDonald points at the logic of the political economy:
The new African bourgeoisie, because it shares racial identities with the bulk of the poor and class interests with white economic elites, is in position to mediate the gap between rich and poor and black and white by creating cross-cutting cleavages. Cutting in the African bourgeoisie without providing for the African poor changes the racial character of economic inequality, but it does not narrow it much; it enlists new elites in collusive businesses, but it does not expose them to much new composition; and it rewards racialists political strategies of legitimization and stabilization, but it does not allow the African poor effective institutional recourse. It changes the beneficiaries of and justifications for the political economy, but not its logic (ibid.: 651).

The logic of structural inequality seems to be colour-blind. By focusing on so-called African traditional values like collectiveness, consensus and solidarity as a solid basis for African management, and in opposition to Western management, ubuntu culturalists miss the point that causes the ever-growing gap between poor and rich South Africans and withhold the poor masses from developing a higher standard of living. If they do not connect their cultural-philosophical discourse with the existing political-economical inequality, the trap of inequality will be sustained. In this respect, we agree with Christopher Marx when he writes:
All cultural and historical differences within Western societies are ignored, and, instead, ‘the West’ becomes an adversarial image, the ‘other’ against which a description of ‘Africans’ can be contrasted. A conservative critique of culture framed in these terms, and presented under the banner of ubuntu, is unable to use social historical analysis to learn more about the opposition between individualism and community in South Africa (2002: 62).

If African management, and ubuntu in particular, is going to make a difference to Western management, it needs to incorporate a broader analysis of structural political and cultural inequalities. This would imply solidarity with the poor and powerless masses in the first place. Such a human factor would add something that (western) management in general lack is in dire need of.

From dichotomy to dialogue?
Tom Lodge writes:
There is nothing wrong with codes of behaviour such as ubuntu. The concept expresses a compassionate social etiquette which, if everybody adhered to it, would make life most agreeable. It might prove quite difficult, though, to reconstruct a political order on the basis of collective solidarity rather than civil liberties. Besides, not all traditional belief systems are egalitarian or benign. What constitutes tradition is always a contestedissue, but tradition is often invoked to justify oppression and cruelty. Whether the tradition that is invoked existed or not is a rather academic question (Lodge 2002: 235).

Moreover, (South) Africa is changing and rapidly becoming part of a globalised world. Ubuntu codes, whatever their intrinsic values, can only be taken serious if they become a weapon in this changing arena with all its complexities. But is this what the ubuntu adepts strive for by means of reinforcing the concept? In such a world
… ubuntu may serve as a liberating transformative concept in the hands of those who wish to build the country, but it can also be wielded as a mystifying concept in the hands of those who, after the post-apartheid reshuffle, were able to personally cross over to the privileged side of the huge class divide, without being over-sensitive to the wider social costs of their individual economic and status advancement. This process is widely noticeable in South Africa today. It is what people euphemistically call the Africanisation of that country’s economic and public sphere. Those using the concept of ubuntu selectively for their own private gain, seem to be saying to their fellow participants: ‘How could you possibly question the way in which this specific situation is being handled by us, whereas it is clear that we appeal to our most cherished common African ancestral heritage, to our ubuntu! … (Van Binsbergen 2002: 16).

It is exactly this warning that is at stake here. Instead of longing for traditional values it would be advisable to analyse what is happening nowadays in South Africa (and elsewhere in Africa). As regular visitors, researchers and readers we see a deeply divided society in many ways on all levels, only partly informed by ubuntu values. Using concepts like meaning, power and context will show that society needs to be defined as a (multicultural) arena of multiple identities and interests, and so is every organisation within society. It will explain that consensus is lacking with regard to many issues and strategies because management and work floor for instance may have different interests. It will teach us that sometimes unexpected coalitions are formed between historically strongly divided people. That poor people, like many of their ‘brothers’ are longing for the same fruits of present developments, if necessary at the cost of their neighbours or even relatives. It will, at the end of the day, show us that the similarities between western societies and African societies are probably stronger than the differences. The same goes for a comparison of ‘African’ management with ‘Western’ management, whether inspired by ubuntu or not.

Therefore we invite ubuntu culturalists to join hands with critical academics, both in the West and in Africa, who have been studying and discussing management and organisational processes for many years now. From an academic perspective it would be more accurate and more correct to concentrate on the analysis of current organisational processes and management concepts, without continually wishing to indicate how they could be different or better. This would prevent us from falling back into the pitfall of functionalism and normativity. It is our academic task to help those who want to increase their capacity to reflexivity, by teaching them, and by learning together to ask the relevant questions in organisational practices, whether they are consultants or managers themselves. Daily practice requires rapid decisions and changes. There is hardly time for reflection, or at least this time is rarely taken.

In the analysis of organisational and management processes, there should be a focus on the process of sense- and meaning-making, as this is the basis for collective actions. The analysis will thus have to concentrate on retrieving the origin of these meanings.

Meanings are formed by a mix of earlier experiences (like traditional values) and present (globalisation-informed) opportunities, and therefore continually (re)produced in interactions between people. At the same time, this sense- or meaning-making is a process of negotiation. Thus, what is necessary is an analysis of these interactions, realizing that it is an arena in which people take part who come from different positions and who have different (and possibly conflicting) interests.

We argue that we find ourselves present in an arena in which cooperation goes hand in hand with conflict, unmasking existing differences and inequalities, unveiling the illusion that organisational practice could be a haven of consensus and harmony in a heartless world of poverty and inequality, as ubuntu seems to suggest. We, as academics, argue that we need to be critical, by the nature of our profession. ‘The dialogic outcome requires a constant dedifferentiation and redifferentiation for the sake of demythologizing and enriching natural language and consequently opening to reconsideration the most basic and certain experiences of everyday life’ (Deetz 2000: 136). The basic perspective is that of difference. It is not about resolving differences, but about the extent to which the struggle can be fought openly, and the extent to which the other is taken seriously, especially when the voice of the other is not heard otherwise. Therefore it is less important whether these differences have a Western or an African background.

We argue that ubuntu as a management tool cannot work in a ‘traditional’ environment of a ‘traditional’ community. We live in a world that is globalising, differentiated, fragmented, diverse, full of contradictions and paradoxes, etc. Gemeinschaft, referring to the authentic communal living, and Gesellschaft, referring to the modernist, rationalist society cannot be seen as separate things. We do not live in a world that is characterized by separate, essentialised, cultures that meet, including a Japanese, a North American, an African, but in a world characterized by different ‘cultural orientations’ (Van Binsbergen) that interact, that contradict, that reinforce, that should listen to each other. And in such a dialogue, ubuntu and Afrocentric management need to find their rightful place. Then both can be seen as integral parts of a process that Robertson has called ‘Glocalisation’. Only then can ubuntu perform its transformative role.

NOTES
i. See also Karsten and Illa 2001.

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The book ‘Prophecies and Protests: Ubuntu in Glocal Management’ provides a wealth of information on the unique Africa-centered management style based on ubuntu. While it is a monograph about anagement in Africa, it stops short of making the bold claim that Africa-centered management could be wider applicable, for example, in the Western world. However, the book alerts Western companies working in Africa to pay attention to the practices of ubuntu in African companies and its effects on the workforce. Since by definition ubuntu is a human condition, its emphasis on the social interactions of humans as a source of strength and meaning, provides a unique perspective on how leaders can create powerful organisations. A brief overview of the chapter contributions is captured in Table 1 for ease of reference.

In essence, ubuntu accentuates the notions of humaneness, sharing, and respecting all by creating great value for a group above pure individual desires and actions (Mangaliso 1992; 2001). It is a self-reinforcing set of beliefs that revolves around the core concept that the strength of any group resides in the relationship of its members. Behind this core concept are beliefs such as:

1. People are not just rational, self-interested beings, but are social beings whose interactions have implications for both the group and individuals within the group;
2. Unity of the whole is more fundamental than the distinction of the parts. Individuals do not act not in theoretical isolation – there is a reciprocal impact experienced within a network of social relationships;
3. Relationships are more important than any given decision or outcome;
4. Inclusiveness in decision-making is more important than speed or efficiency;
5. The broader context is always important, and ‘context’ could be on many levels: overall culture, human dynamics in a meeting, or non-verbal cues in a conversation;
6. The wisdom that comes with experience as valuable as the vigorous energy of youth;
7. Group performance is more important than individual ‘stars’; Strong individual performers are those that help the group the most.

Ubuntu shares some similarity and yet stands in contrast with both the Western and Eastern traditions of management. Similar to ubuntu, Eastern traditions emphasize connections and caring as represented in guanxi in China (Tsang 1998) and kyosei in Japan (Kaku 1997), but unlike ubuntu they tend to strive for constant improvement through highly directive and hierarchical management. Western practices generally emphasize individual achievement, speed, and decisiveness. Relationships tend to be contractual, and true value is measured and rewarded at the individual rather than at the group level. This is in contrast to ubuntu with its emphasis on non-linear, mostly familial relationships which sets it apart as a ‘third way’ of management.

It is useful to view ubuntu as a fully coherent management philosophy rooted in African traditions, not merely as a response to Western thought. As Weir (in this volume) notes, the regions that uphold the philosophy of ubuntu should not be viewed by foreigners as being stubborn, stagnant in the past, or a failed attempt at imitating Westerners. Those regions respect ubuntu because it preserves the values, beliefs, customs, and traditions of its people. Franks (in this volume) points out that ‘improvements’ to traditional societies from the West may be met with resistance because they are an assault to the societies’ customs and traditions. The West and Africa have much to learn from each other, and need to respect the cultural context in which business takes place.

What are the implications of ubuntu for management practice?
Ubuntu gives foreign firms a view into how they will need to adapt to have a successful business organisation in Africa. But beyond enhancing the ability of foreign companies to effectively manage in the African context, ubuntu also has implications for managing in Western and Eastern settings as the authors in this book have pointed out. But quite to what extent the practices of ubuntu can be applied in non-African environments remains to be seen. For one thing, ubuntu collectivism may be confused with the European brand of collectivism which is regarded as too socialistic for most Western companies (Senghor 1965). It might also be considered too non-hierarchical for most Eastern companies. However, these companies can pay heed to the lessons of ubuntu as described in this volume. Several lessons can be applied to Western and Eastern companies like:

Relationships are a source of competitive advantage
Ubuntu philosophy holds that the strength of a group lies in its relationships. Stronger relationships allow for better decisions to be made because people understand each other and can more effectively debate the nuances of an issue as the Mangaliso and Mangaliso chapter shows. Ubuntu views decisions as a point in time, and their outcomes as short-term. Individual skill sets are important, but those skills manifest themselves in most roles only when humans interact. The long-term success of a group is thus based on the relationships within that group. Competitive advantage is traditionally defined as a company having a cost advantage, differentiated value proposition, or domination of a niche. But what capabilities in an organisation enable such a competitive advantage? Ubuntu gives a new view on competitive advantage – relationships provide the organisational capability for competitive advantage. While Western management would cite individual (e.g., executive talent) or organisational skills (e.g., Wal-Mart and low cost inventory management), ubuntu would focus on the actual relationships of executives, managers and workers, suppliers and customers as the capability that enables competitive advantage. Organisations should thus focus on identifying the crucial relationships and fostering them. Western companies tend to focus on building individual skills or ‘teamwork’ – but teamwork is really just combining individual skills.

Relationships are much deeper: they depend on mutual respect and understanding rather than just working with each other. Building relationships focuses on process, not outcome. Similarly, management must make decisions not simply based on facts, but how those facts play out in the context of complex relationships within a firm and with the firm and external parties (e.g., customers).

Meaning conveys more than just rational words
Ubuntu emphasizes the context of words as much as the words themselves. As authors in this volume (e.g., Karsten and Mangaliso and Mangaliso) note, the role of language usage is important, but so are non-verbal cues (e.g., tone, body language), context, and discourse of conversation. In fact, the conversation itself is often just as important as its content. The conversation serves as a means of discerning the underlying relationships between the concepts or criteria used so that a clearer understanding, a vital semantic network, can emerge (Hallen 1997). Ubuntu holds that management must understand the context of the words people use in conversation, as oppose to just the content, in order to establish and strengthen relationships. Western managers can utilize this to make more effective decisions, by understanding the nuances beyond the spoken word. Western managers tend to focus on rational thinking and boiling down information to a few key bullet points to make decisions. By taking more time to understand context, western managers may be able to make more effective decisions. Several of the authors in this volume, including Karsten, point out that management should also encourage conversations amongst individuals in a non-hierarchical manner as this fosters cooperation and establishes a sense of community.

Decisions are stronger when they are inclusive
Ubuntu stresses the importance of looking at an issue from a circular view (e.g., different angles) as oppose to a linear view (e.g., one decision leads to the next). While Western managers emphasize speed and efficiency in decision-making, ubuntu emphasizes improving the effectiveness of decisions by including more people. In both the Mangaliso and Mangaliso and the Mbigi chapters, the point is made that management should favour collective learning and consensus-based decision-making rather than command-and-control. Decisions are stronger when more people are brought into them because new and different perspectives are brought into the decision-making process. Involving people who are not directly ‘responsible’ for a decision will result in better decision-making from incorporating different perspectives. Ubuntu recognises that this will result in slower decision-making – but the long-term effectiveness of decisions is more important the efficiency of speed (which is emphasized in Western cultures). Western management can learn to balance effectiveness/inclusiveness with speed. While certain decisions require a fast decision (e.g., competitive pressure, time-sensitive opportunities), many decisions in business can be slowed down and made more inclusive.

Not just about outcomes – building relationships is important
Being inclusive in decision-making is not just about better decisions; it is about strengthening relationships. Ubuntu downplays the importance of individual decisions in the ultimate success of a firm. The relationships that are forged through the decision-making process are the core to the long-term success of a firm. The principles of ubuntu consider time as a unifying construct that emphasizes interdependence and shared heritage. The Mangaliso and Mangaliso chapter describes how time is not just a series of deadlines, but should be viewed as opportunities to enhance the social network of individuals. Management should emphasize building relationships rather than making quick decisions – this is the secret to long term success. Western management can thus adapt these ideas by paying conscious attention to the process of decision-making. Western managers focus on making the ‘right’ decision and generating the best outcome. However, they can simultaneously focus on building relationships while decisions are being made through encouraging debate, pausing to make sure people understand each other, and fostering a culture of collaboration.

Further perspectives on ubuntu in management
As a management concept with Africa-centered roots, ubuntu can also be considered from an economics and organisational behaviour perspectives. From an economics perspective, organisations – hence management concepts in general – are analysed in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. This perspective is has been overemphasized in management literature to the point of obsession. Mangaliso and Mangaliso cite the Prahalad and Hamel concept of ‘denominator management’ that serves as a guide for profit generation at the expense of all else. Often that leads to a search for the holy grail of the perfect profit-generating machine, that top managers and shareholders dream of for their companies. However, just as the holy grail has never been located, the perfect profit generating machine has not yet been found. The evidence that striving for that goal leads organisations toward a futile direction is vividly depicted in the recent demise of companies such as Enron, Worldcom and Ahold. The chapters in this volume demonstrated that the economic point of view should be balanced with human considerations such as ubuntu.

The organisation behavioural perspective analyses organisations in terms of cooperation and social relations between human beings. The dominant themes are in line with that focus on power, leadership, communication, culture and conflict between groups and individuals in organisations. Among the studies in this genre at least two approaches can be discerned. The first is an emancipatory approach with a focus on the improvement of the position of women, blacks and other minority groups. The second is a status quo approach, which tries to improve human relations within a company instrumentally using structurally and functionally accepted techniques. In the preceding chapters most of the attention has been focused on the first organisational behavioural just mentioned: emancipatory studies into the potential of Africa-centered management.

This book has shown how difficult it is to define precisely, sharply and concisely what Africa-centered management is about, taking into account the multiple perspectives on a central theme like ubuntu. Can a unique management perspective called ‘Africa-centered management’ be found. Opinions of various scholars will differ on this question since a kaleidoscope of ever-changing sub-concepts comes to life most vividly when Africa-centered or Afrocentric management is mentioned. In reality several sub-concepts of what is here called ‘Africa-centered’ are already known and practiced in Western companies. A few examples are discussed below.

From the research on management we can see how complex it is to define management. The whole scale between laissez-faire and authoritarian leadership has been analysed and matched to all kinds of success stories and to many fundamentally different types of organisations. One of the first authors to debunk management into a series of chaotic acts was Mintzberg, in his book the Art of Managerial Work (1980). This disenchantment of ‘management’ left us with a heap of shatters where no real correlations between a certain management concept and the success of a company could be drawn. There is a respectable number of popular management stories about top managers having rescued their business, for example Jack Welsh at General Electric, Lee Iaccocca at Chrysler and Jan Timmer at Philips Electronics. These examples by no means prove the everlasting success of these companies, let alone their styles of leadership. When the top manager in question leaves, the company often slides back into its former problems. In short: the field of management concepts is chaotic. In the preceding chapters we have seen comparisons with Japanese management, which made a victory tour along Western companies in the 1980s. What helped Japanese management tremendously was on the one hand a central focus on delivering quality products for a low price and on the other hand showcases like Toyota, Honda and Sony. In that respect it is lamentable that there is no real showcase to promote Africa-centered management as a management concept. We do not believe that the inclusive, bottom-up orientation is a decisive disadvantage against Africacentered management, because there are several successful Western management concepts with a similar starting point. Quite the contrary, under the rubric of the term ubuntu, it could even be even a strong point in promoting the Africa-centered management style.

Similarities between Africa-centered and Western management
What is fascinating to learn from the preceding chapters is, of course, how many differences exist between Western management and Africa-centered management. Still, we think the similarities are quite as important. To name a few:

– The attention of management thinkers has been focused on human relations, even after the Hawthorne experiments of the 1930s. In these experiments, a greater emphasis on human relations led to better working results (Mayo 1933);
– The advent of the Western school of Organisation Development in the 1950s, with authors like Argyris, Beckhard and Bennis, based on the principles of social dynamics, stresses the importance of social relations within organisations. They claimed that better social relations within an organisation led to a better output of the organisation and to a greater chance of survival for such a company;
– The Peters and Waterman (1982) book, In search of excellence, stressed the importance of culture and values for excellent businesses, instead of high-tech marketing or investment tools;
– Lately, David Maister (1997) did research in the service industry with the same outcome: if more attention is paid to human relations, people are more motivated to work in the organisation and better results will be attained;
– Quite a lot of management thinkers concentrate on the old couple Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft (in the terminology of Tonnies 1887), although sociologists consider these terms to be old-fashioned and inappropriate. Gemeinschaft stands for warm village-like relations within companies, whereas Gesellschaft represents impersonal, bureaucratic relations, where people feel alienated, misused and exploited;
– Fukuyama (1995) distinguished ‘high-trust’ and ‘low-trust’ societies, but did not do this according to the distinction of Western versus non-Western. For example, France and Italy are in his view ‘low-trust’ societies;
– The ‘newer’ forms of organisation, like Mintzberg’s adhocracy (1979), in which the mechanism of coordination is in fact back where it started: mutual adjustment, just like in newly started family businesses. People know each other quite well and communicate almost permanently about what has to be done;
– In the Western world there is an abundance of training and coaching companies that train employees in new ways of cooperation, improved communication, and a style of management with more attention and respect for human nature.

Does Africa-centered management have the same potential as Japanese management?
In the 1980s we learned quite a lot from Japanese management. The principles of lean production, quality circles, responsibility for quality positioned in every employee, thorough management development programs to improve communication between departments, management by walking around, being humble as a manager and listening carefully to customers have been picked up almost everywhere in the Western world and perhaps even more in other Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan and China.

This interest in Japanese management faded away in the Western world after the Japanese economy had declined in the early 1990s. This is in fact remarkable, because this decline cannot be attributed to failing Japanese management. Principles of Japanese management have lost nothing of their actuality and accuracy; one only needs to look at the larger Japanese companies in 2006: Sony, Toyota and Canon represent the top of their economic sector. They are very healthy companies with abundant innovations.

At first people in the Western world were hesitant: can we learn anything from the Japanese? Their culture is so different, Japanese mentality is poles apart from that of people in the United Kingdom or in the United States. Look at the so-called ‘transplants’, Japanese factories in these two countries with mostly indigenous employees working along the lines of Japanese management. The results sometimes even exceed those of their Japanese sister factories. Many Western companies have learned a lot from Japanese management and other companies would have benefited greatly had they learned from these Japanese lessons.

Are these lessons only management concepts passed from the top to the workers in a ‘tell and sell’-way? By no means; the interesting phenomenon in Japanese management is the blending of top-down and bottom-up communication such as Nonaka and Takeuchi’s ‘middle-up-down’ model of organisational knowledge creation. Next to that and fundamental to Japanese management is a long-term time horizon instead of the short-term focus of many Western firms. This means that Japanese management has an eye for long-term opportunities, that is, for durability and sustainability.

Does Africa-centered management have a similar potential for universal use in business as Japanese management does? From reading the foregoing chapters we conclude that it is possible, although it is a pity that really successful company that are run on Africa-centered management principles have still to come to international prominince. Some examples ready for universal use are:

– Ubuntu is beginning to gain international prominence in the scholarly literature with a lot of good ideas and the right flavour of humanness attached to it;
– Bridging conflicts in organisations. Nelson Mandela is an outstanding example of eminent conflict resolution in his country. This can be a powerful learning point for Western organisations, especially when conflicts between sub-groups in society are heating up, as we can watch nowadays;
– Attention for the unemployed, which is very important because of the loss of job opportunities for thousands of employees whose companies are transferred to Eastern Europe or to the Far East;
– Redefinition of the relationship between work and family life;
– A more thorough humane approach to organisations, understanding the differences between people from different backgrounds;
– A less one-sided rationalistic approach to organisations;
– More attention to non-verbal communication within organisations;
– Spirituality in organisations: since Weber’s (1920) Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Western organisations have lost their spirituality. Some people even think many Western companies are ‘soulless’.

Concluding comments
Throughout this book we have witnessed the rising of a powerful new species of Africa-centered management applicable to African circumstances, in contrast to Western management, which tries to be universalistic and culture-free. To develop an African way of management is entirely in accordance with the contingency school in management thinking: there is no ‘best’ way of organising and managing. It is a matter of applying the organisational structure, style of leadership and communication required by a certain situation. It takes a lot of fine-tuning to find the right organisational parameters for a certain country and a certain culture, but this is not a problem. Problems arise when general management principles are applied to a specific situation. Local management, however, does not necessarily entail a submitting to irrational beliefs or behaviour that is in conflict with the aim of the organisation.

Having said that, it is not easy to maintain particularistic forms of management in a globalising world where the pace is set by the most efficiently structured and the most effectively run organisations. This means that the bulk of the ‘make’ industry has been and will continue to be transferred to Asian countries, whereas only service and repair industry is left behind in countries that cannot or will not abide with these strict rules. As a good book should do, this book raises more good questions than it provides solutions! We think that we should consider the questions and solutions that Africacentered management has to offer very seriously, because we have to think across borders of countries and continents to solve these problems.

The contributors to this book have offered its readers a unique opportunity to become aware of and better understand the Africa-centered concept of ubuntu. The authors acknowledge ubuntu’s significant role in African society and African style of management and discuss how understanding its principles can benefit and influence both Western and Eastern management thought. It is also worth reiterating that the fundamental essence of ubuntu is very difficult to fully interpret if one is an ‘outsider’, or, to quote Kimmerle in this volume, trying to understand ubuntu from the point of view of a ‘westerner’. Boessenkool and Van Rinsum found that only through an active effort to learn the ‘spirit’ of its underlying values and history, in addition to participation in open conversations, can one begin to grasp ubuntu. Hopefully this book has served to reveal to that spirit.

References
Fukuyama, F. (1995) Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity, New York: The Free Press.
Hallen, B. (1997) African meanings, Western words, African Studies Review, 40(April): 1-1.
Kaku, R. (1997). The path of kyosei (cooperation), Harvard Business Review, 75(4), July-August: 55-9.
Maister, D. (1997) Managing the professional service firm, New York: The Free Press.
Mangaliso, M.P. (2001) Building competitive advantage from ubuntu: Management lessons from South Africa, Academy of Management Executive, 15(3): 23-33.
Mangaliso, M.P. (1992) Entrepreneurship and innovation in a global context, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Change, 1: 437-50.
Mayo, E.G. (1933) The human problems of an industrial civilization, New York: MacMillan.
Mintzberg, H. (1973) The nature of managerial work, New York: Harper & Row.
Mintzberg, H. (1979) The structuring of organisations: A synthesis of the research, New York: Prentice-Hall.
Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation, New York: Oxford University Press.
Ntumba, M.T. (1985). Langage et société. Primat de la Bisoité sur l’intersubjectivité, Recherches Philosophiques Africaines, 2, Kinshasa.
Peters, T. and Waterman, D. (1982) In search of excellence, New York: Harper & Row.
Senghor, L. (1965). On African socialism, New York: Stanford.
Tönnies, F. (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen, Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag (R. Reisland).
Tsang, E.W.K. (1998) Can guanxi be a source of sustained competitive advantage for doing business in China? Academy of Management Executive, 12(2): 64-73.
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Weber, M. (1934) Protestantische Ethik und die Geist des Kapitalismus, Thübingen: Mohr.
Weber, M. (1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Scribner.

Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1949, by which time the world had been confronted with evidence of the Nazi apparatus of terror and destruction. The revelations of the atrocities were met with a high degree of incredulous probing despite a considerable body of evidence and a vast caché of recorded images. The individual capacity for comprehension was overwhelmed, and the nature and extent of these programmes added to the surreal nature of the revelations. In the case of the dedicated death camps of the so-called Aktion Reinhard, comparatively sparse documentation and very low survival rates obscured their significance in the immediate post-war years. The remaining death camps, Majdanek and Auschwitz, were both captured virtually intact. They were thus widely reported, whereas public knowledge of Auschwitz was already widespread in Germany and the Allied countries during the war.[i] In the case of Auschwitz, the evidence was lodged in still largely intact and meticulous archives. Nonetheless it had the effect of throwing into relief the machinery of destruction rather than its anonymous victims, for the extermination system had not only eliminated human biological life but had also systematically expunged cumulative life histories and any trace of prior existence whatsoever, ending with the destruction of almost all traces of the dedicated extermination camps themselves, just prior to the Soviet invasion.

Although Arendt does not view genocide as a condition of totalitarian rule, she does argue that the ‘totalitarian methods of domination’ are uniquely suited to programmes of mass extermination (Arendt 1979: 440). Moreover, unlike previous regimes of terror, totalitarianism does not merely aim to eliminate physical life. Rather, ‘total terror’ is preceded by the abolition of civil and political rights, exclusion from public life, confiscation of property and, finally, the deportation and murder of entire extended families and their surrounding communities. In other words, total terror aims to eliminate the total life-world of the species, leaving few survivors either willing or able to relate their stories. In the case of the Nazi genocide, widespread complicity in Germany and the occupied territories meant that non-Jews were reluctant to share their knowledge or relate their experiences – an ingenious strategy that was seriously challenged only by Germany’s post-war generation coming to maturity during the 1960s. Conversely, many survivors were disinclined to speak out. Often, memories had become repressed for fear that they would not be believed, out of the ‘shame’ of survival, or because of the trauma suffered. Incredulity was thus both a prevalent and understandable human reaction to the attempted total destruction of entire peoples, and in the post-war era the success of this Nazi strategy reinforced a culture of denial that perpetuated the victimisation of the survivors. In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi records the prescient words of one of his persecutors in Auschwitz:

However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. (Levi 1988: 11)

Here was unambiguous proof of the sheer ‘logicality’ of systematic genocide. The silence following the war was therefore quite literal, and the publication of Origins in 1951 could not and did not set out to bridge that chasm in the human imagination. It did, however, establish Arendt as the most authoritative and controversial theorist of the totalitarian.

The path leading to Arendt’s first major published work was nonetheless a long one. From being a somewhat politically disengaged youth, Arendt during the early 1930s experienced the world as a German-Jewish intellectual confronted with the Third Reich, first as a citizen escaping into exile in 1933 and later as a New York intellectual receiving news of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. As a refugee in Paris from 1933 to 1941 Arendt was dispatched to an internment camp, an experience that forever impressed upon her the inherently tenuous status of the ‘new kind of human being created by contemporary history’, those who ‘are put into concentration camps by their foes and into internment camps by their friends’ (Arendt in Young-Bruehl 1982: 152). However, the much-noted emphasis given National Socialism in Origins cannot be wholly ascribed to Arendt’s German origins and experience of Nazism.[ii] Rather, it is partly a function of the wealth of documentary evidence captured by the conquering Allies, together with the extensive first-hand accounts, memoirs, and interviews of Nazis in the immediate post-war period. Of course, the personal does inform Arendt’s writing. From an early stage in its development, Arendt was sensitive to the inherent danger of dismissing Nazi ideology as an incoherent form of virulent nationalism. She viewed Nazi ideology, as indeed all totalitarian ideologies, as both coherent and internally consistent. These characteristics, combined with a relentless ‘logicality’, underpinned the capacity to inspire a superstitious mass resignation born in terror.

As we have seen, Arendt was not the first theorist to reject the generic concept of ‘fascism’, nor was Origins the first work to explore important similarities between the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships. In both of these respects, Carl Schmitt anticipates Arendt’s reflections by almost two decades. Nevertheless, Origins yields a whole range of innovative insights that Schmitt could not have developed beyond a preliminary analysis in the 1933 work Staat, Bewegung, Volk. In a 1957 postscript to the 1933 essay Further Development of the Total State in Germany, Schmitt acknowledges Arendt’s post-war interpretation as closely akin to his own theory of total dictatorship. Thus he argues that

In the sociological and ideological analyses of totalitarianism qua novel contemporary phenomenon (Hannah Arendt, Talmon, C. J. Friedrich, Brzezinski) a dialectical moment may be discerned in the evolution of terminology. If the concept of totality is not merely quantitative but instead consists of a specific intensity of organised power, then it is not the state, but strictly a party that constitutes the subject and protagonist of totalitarianism. In these circumstances, part of the erstwhile totality confronts the latter as a new totality and demotes the state to a mere quantitative totality. Accordingly, the historical dialectic brings about a negation of the erstwhile totality by a part thereof, whereas the latter asserts its status as something more than the pre-existing totality. In this sense, there are no totalitarian states, only totalitarian parties. (*) (Schmitt 1973: 366f)

My intention in this essay is to build on the thematic concerns present in Schmitt’s seminal writings on Fascism and National Socialism, whilst shifting the focus to Arendt’s distinctive totalitarianism thesis.[iii] Whereas Schmitt theorises the inversion of the party-state relationship, and the political primacy accorded the movement as incorporating both, Arendt integrates this defining structural innovation of totalitarian rule into her account of the role of ideology and terror in the actualisation of ‘total domination’. Schmitt’s prescient insights into the totalitarian assault upon the bourgeois nation-state manifests itself in his late-Weimar writing as a presentiment for ‘a most awful expansion and a murderous imperialism’ soon to engulf Europe (Schmitt 1999e: 205).[iv] Arendt, in turn, analyses that catastrophe in such innovative terms that her theory of totalitarianism has ever since defied easy categorisation, owing in no small part to her deeply philosophical premises only subsequently explicated in a series of important essays and her next major work, The Human Condition (1958). This is quite apparent in the central philosophical train of thought at work in Origins, which describes the progressive ‘de-worlding’ of the world by way of a ‘gigantic apparatus of terror … that serves to make man superfluous’ (Arendt 1979: 457). Equally important, however, is Arendt’s thesis of the foreclosure of the field of politics consequent upon the total claim that totalitarian regimes make on their populations. This will be the guiding theme of this chapter. Although that total ‘claim’ is backed by a coercive regime of terror, it also engages a dynamic of plebiscitary mobilisation unique to totalitarian regimes. The comprehensiveness of this control and manipulation ‘politicises’ all facets of social experience whilst simultaneously extracting the organised ‘consent’ of the populace in accordance with pre-set ideological goals. Totalitarian rule is thus distinguished from the mere imposition of an arbitrary personal will characteristic of tyranny, instead actively mobilising the population, even as it eliminates coexisting loyalties as well as autonomous institutional and social spaces.

Nazism and Stalinism
Writing in the immediate post-war era, Arendt enjoyed an obvious advantage over the pioneering theorists of the 1930s and early 1940s, for she was able to engage her philosophical training to gauge the existential impact of Hitler’s rule on German society. Arendt was guided in her analysis by the conviction that the political forces at work in post-World War One Europe were guided neither by ‘common sense’ nor by ‘self-interest’. These forces, epitomised by the ‘totalitarian movements’, were thus imbued with an unprecedented potential for destructiveness (Arendt 1979: vii). However, during the post-World War Two period, Arendt mistook a general mood of despair for her own sense of an ‘ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilisations is at a breaking point’ (ibid.: vii), for the world that survived the cataclysm of Nazi rule included many intellectuals who strained to portray Stalin’s pre- and post-war reign of terror as an unfortunate adjunct of the revolutionary transformation of society. The publication of Arendt’s comparative study of Nazism and Stalinism at the height of the Cold War meant that her views were interpreted, if they were noted at all outside America, through the distorting prism of the reigning ideological presuppositions of her age. Origins routinely elicited the charge of Cold War-mongering, not least of all by those least flattered by the comparison. In the ideologically charged atmosphere of global contest, little attention was paid to the resumption of terror in the post-war Soviet Union and Arendt’s interpretation of the ‘sheer insanity’ entailed in the ‘logicality’ of ideological thinking (Arendt,1979: 473) found little resonance in the Western academy, especially during the 1960s and 1970s at the height of a resurgent Marxist discourse. It was only with the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 that scholars would embark upon a fundamental reassessment of the Stalin years, a project that is still in process.

It was not without irony, therefore, that many partisans of the Soviet cause felt themselves compelled to defend all of Soviet history, as indeed the unfolding of the promise of the October Revolution, a view shared as axiomatic by anti-Communists. Arendt’s rejection of causal interpretations of history eluded minds more attuned to the great nineteenth century meta-narratives of liberal progress and historical dialectics. Her refusal to concede anything to the seed of totalitarian ideology, and its harvest of untold corpses, met with widespread incomprehension and hostility. If it would be another forty years before Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism would receive the serious consideration that it so richly deserves. Jerome Kohn identifies an important reason for the quite extraordinary animus of Arendt’s many critics. Arendt’s outrage at totalitarianism was, in his words,

… not a subjective emotional reaction foisted on a purportedly ‘value free’ scientific analysis; her anger is inherent in her judgement of a form of government that defaced the human world on whose behalf she sought to expose Nazism and Stalinism for what they were and what they did. (Kohn 2002: 629)

Reflecting on the question of ‘origins’ that has so excited several generations of her critics, one detects an element of ‘bewilderment’ in Arendt’s 1958 observation that

… finally, it dawned on me that I was not engaged in writing a historical book, even though large parts of it clearly contain historical analyses, but a political book, in which whatever was of past history not only was seen from the vantage-point of the present, but would not have become visible at all without the light which the event, the emergence of totalitarianism, shed on it. In other words the ‘origins’ in the first and second part of the book are not causes that inevitably lead to certain effects; rather they became origins only after the event had taken place (Arendt 1958: 1).

Arendt had thought it impossible to write ‘history, not in order to save and conserve and render fit for remembrance, but on the contrary, in order to destroy’ (Arendt,1958: 1). In that, fortunately, she was wrong. In fact she devoted the rest of her life to proving herself wrong insofar as all of her subsequent works are an intervention, a quite extraordinary flowering of ‘the human capacity to begin, that power to think and act in ways that are new’ (Canovan 2000: 27).

‘Working reality’
My analysis of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism begins where she did, briefly tracing the contours of her complex interpretation of nineteenth century anti-Semitism and imperialism. Arendt’s approach of prefacing her analysis of totalitarianism with lengthy excurses into nineteenth century European history has been much criticised, and misunderstood.[v] Thus her extensive analyses of anti-Semitism and imperialism in the first two parts of Origins are often misread as an argument for causality, as well as being held to account for the ‘imbalance’ in her treatment of Nazism and Stalinism. For her critics point to the markedly different forms of and roles played by anti-Semitism and imperialism in German and Soviet history. In this regard, Bernard Crick takes to task those critics who fail to grasp Arendt’s ‘general philosophical position’, which pointedly eschews the notion of a ‘unique and necessary line of development toward what occurred. This is where the “model-builders”, with their pretence at causality, go astray in reading her’ (Crick 1979: 30). Rather than seeking the ‘causes’ of totalitarianism, Arendt explores the ways in which totalitarian movements not only exploit ‘clichés of ideological explanation’ to mobilise their followers, but also how they transform these ideologies into a ‘working reality’ by means of novel organisational forms and devices (Arendt 1979: 384). In other words, Arendt has something to say of general theoretical and philosophical significance and she is not attempting to write a comparative history of the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships. Within the limits imposed by the acknowledged lack of reliable sources about the inner workings especially of Stalin’s dictatorship, Arendt is nonetheless able to construct a compelling case for viewing the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships as sui generis. At the heart of her account lies her insight that both dictatorships revealed a proclivity for transforming ideological systems of thought into deductive principles of action.

Critics on both the historical Left and Right have also, and quite rightly, stressed that the contents of the Nazi and Stalinist ideologies are fundamentally distinct; a fact of which Arendt was well aware. Arendt also concedes the ‘shocking originality’ of Nazi ideology, which, unlike communism, owed nothing to our ‘respectable tradition’ (Arendt in Young-Bruehl 1982: 276).[vi] However, whereas most commentators reduce totalitarian ideologies to their pedagogical functions, Arendt argues that in addition to being total ‘instruments of explanation’, these ideologies yield up the ‘organisational principles’ of the totalitarian system of government (Arendt 1979: 469). In other words, the organising principles of ‘race’ and ‘class’ in the Nazi and Stalinist ideologies respectively determine not just the organisation of the movement but of society as a whole. In this way, they identify categories of ‘objective enemies’ who are first isolated and then expunged totally from society. This process may generate both refugees and corpses. However, from the point of view of the leadership of the totalitarian movements, ideology is the basis of ‘organisation’, and these ‘men consider everything and everybody in terms of organization’ (Arendt 1979: 387).

In the final part of this essay, I address Arendt’s analysis of the relation between ideology and terror, widely acknowledged as the touchstone of her totalitarianism thesis, which leads directly into her interpretation of the phenomenon of the concentration camp system as the site of the experiment in ‘total domination’. Whereas the link between terror and the concentration camp system is hardly controversial, both the impact of terror on the general populace in totalitarian societies and Arendt’s concept of ‘total domination’ are far more so. We should note here that Arendt distinguishes between different forms of terror, arguing that the destruction of the public realm (and hence also of the capacity to act and to form relations of power) characteristic of tyrannical rule should not be conflated with the total destruction of the individual’s capacity to establish private and social relations, which is coincident with the novel totalitarian condition of ‘total domination’. Totalitarian rule transforms a condition of ‘isolation’ into an all-pervasive sense of ‘loneliness’ (ibid.: 474-5). Moreover, unlike solitude, which requires that the individual be alone, loneliness manifests ‘itself most sharply in company with others’ (ibid.: 476).

These distinctions have important ramifications for Arendt’s concept of power, which she defines as the acting and speaking together of individuals, as constituting a public realm. The destruction of the public realm of politics by tyrannical government condemns both the tyrant and his subjects to a condition of isolation, arbitrary rule and powerlessness. Conversely, although totalitarianism, like tyranny, eliminates the public realm, it also eliminates the ground for sustainable relations of power. By destroying the ‘inner spontaneity’ (ibid.: 245) of individuals, totalitarian rule dominates human beings from within. The destruction of the individual capacity for action complements a complex dynamic of ideological compulsion and popular plebiscitary rule that implicates the totalitarian subjects in the policies of the regime. Moreover, the incremental radicalisation of the regime’s policies is facilitated by the elimination of ‘the distance between the rulers and the ruled and achieves a condition in which power and the will to power, as we understand them, play no role, or at best a secondary role’ (ibid.: 325).

A declaration of war on ideology
Once the human collective is redefined in terms of the ideological imperatives of race or class – i.e., once the positive laws and stabilising institutions of political authority of the sovereign state are displaced by the primacy of a dynamic totalitarian movement – the impediments to total terror are removed and the reordering of society can proceed towards its preordained end. For Arendt, total terror constitutes a condition in which the ‘consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of the totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total… forcing them, in any event, to behave like murderers’ (ibid.: 452). Although the order of terror varied between totalitarian societies and within these societies over time, and although total terror was only ever approximated in their respective camp systems, Arendt’s concerns are of a different order. Certainly the Soviet purges and Nazi street massacres in Eastern Europe attest to the potential for a regime of violent terror. Nonetheless, Arendt argues that the relation established between the ruler and the ruled – established by the novel device of total domination – is both more complex and equivocal than it might appear. Thus the primary victims are only the most explicit target of the regime’s terror, for these categories of ‘objective enemy’ are wont to be changed, or supplemented, over time, and members of the general populace can never be quite sure that they will not fall into some future category of ‘objective enemy’. Moreover, unlike the tyrant, the totalitarian dictator is typically a popular figure and thus bound to his potential victims, who constitute society.

Ideology plays a crucial role in all of this. Moreover, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that Origins is a declaration of war on ideology. However, as Margaret Canovan has noted, it is also a proof of a profound and troubling paradox. For totalitarianism

… illustrated the human capacity to begin, that power to think and act in ways that are new, contingent, and unpredictable that looms so large in [Arendt’s] mature political theory. But the paradox of totalitarian novelty was that it represented an assault on that very ability to act and think as a unique individual. (Canovan 2000: 27)

Reading Origins, one has a strong sense that Arendt despaired of the obtuseness of a generation of European intellectuals enslaved to ideology; the ‘psychological toys’ that wrought unprecedented misery and destruction. Conversely, it is not difficult to imagine what she would have made of the fraught historians’ debates of the past two decades, both within Germany and about the Stalinist phase of Soviet rule, whose putative social scientific objectivity has done much to reinvent the wheel. In the process, old gripes about Origins have been rehashed rather unimaginatively and the ‘debunking’ exercise has gathered pace with ever more incognisant broadsides at a caricature of a work of extraordinary depth and brilliance.

In what follows, I will provide my own interpretation of the work followed, in chapter five of Hannah Arendt’s Response to the Crisis of her Times, by a critical assessment of Arendt’s most important detractors, whose ideological and personal biases in my view encumber their interpretation of a complex and difficult text. Throughout, my analysis of Origins will alert the reader to key elements of Arendt’s post-Origins theoretical project, introduced in chapter two. The most important of these elements is Arendt’s theorisation of totalitarianism’s radical assault upon human individuality. The latter constitutes the very fundament of Arendt’s post-Origins theoretical project, which articulates a pluralistic theory of the public realm that is both profound and topical. Whereas chapter two in Hannah Arendt’s Response to the Crisis of her Time was concerned with Arendt’s interpretation of the devaluation of politics in the long Western tradition of political philosophy, this essay will narrow the focus to her analysis of the destruction of the political in twentieth century totalitarian regimes. I address this aspect of Arendt’s political thought more explicitly in the final chapter six of Hannah Arendt’s Response to the Crisis of her Time, where I argue that one of the most perplexing and intriguing dimensions of Arendt’s political thought is her apparent antipathy for the Continental European nation-state. For on the one hand, she argues that the nation-state, which has become virtually synonymous with political modernity, constitutes a barrier to the anti-state ambitions of the totalitarian movements. On the other hand, however, she is scathingly critical of the nation-state, which she views as something akin to an excrescence of political modernity. It is my contention that it is by grasping this curious paradox in one of history’s greatest partisans of the political way of life that we may begin to understand and appreciate the true genius of Hannah Arendt’s ‘narrative’, as it winds its way from the unspeakable horror of our darkest age to the light of a simple truth: that ‘not one man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth’ (Arendt 1979: 476).

Totalitarianism and the nation-state
The modern European nation-state is accorded great significance by Arendt as an obstacle to totalitarian rule. Yet this fact, which is often overlooked, is also routinely misinterpreted as suggesting that Arendt was a proponent of the unitary nation-state or that despite herself, she embraced the Rechtstaat of her supposedly ‘erstwhile philosophical enemy Hegel’ (Villa 2007: 42). However, as I shall argue in the remainder of this study, nothing could be further from the truth. Arendt’s reflections on the nation-state do confirm that she regarded the stable institutions of the state as antithetical to totalitarian rule. However, in her attempts to come to terms with the totalitarian phenomenon, she embarked upon a fundamental reassessment of the modern nation-state that culminated in her embrace of the federal principle, as it emerged in the writings of the Founding Fathers and in the early political settlement that constituted the United States of America. It is nonetheless also true that this theoretical turn remained largely implicit in Origins. And it is this fact, in my view, that has led many commentators astray as they struggled to discern in this work just what Arendt proposed as an alternative to the sovereign nation-state in the wake of mankind’s greatest ever disaster. To understand why Arendt viewed the nation-state as part of the problem rather than as part of its solution, we need firstly to understand why Arendt rejected the nation-state as a basis for reconstituting the political in the wake of totalitarianism. Moreover, her most concise formulation of the fundamental problem underlying her totalitarianism thesis is not contained in Origins, but in a little noted but highly significant essay published shortly after the war.

The brief review of J.T. Delos’s book La Nation, which appeared in The Review of Politics in January 1946, is a tour de force of subtle argumentation and a seminal explication of Arendt’s totalitarianism thesis. Arendt, in terms strikingly similar to Schmitt’s late-Weimar works, analyses three phenomena of the ‘modern world’ that marked a break with Europe’s pre-modern feudal order. Arendt, as far as I am aware, for the first time, broaches the complex question of the relation between ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘nationalism’, and the changing nature of this relation in nineteenth century Europe – an analysis that is subsequently incorporated into Origins. In the latter work, Arendt introduces her classic analysis of the decline of the nation-state, which culminates in her account of the crippling impact of both European imperialism and the First World War on the comity of European nation-states. It is these latter historical developments that Arendt highlights in Origins, arguing that the disintegration of the nation-state under the impact of these events bore ‘nearly all the elements necessary for the subsequent rise of the totalitarian movements and governments’ (Arendt 1979: xxi). To understand how Arendt came to this view, the modest little essay in question proves to be highly instructive.

As with so many other seemingly jaded topics of political thought, Arendt breathes new life into the well-worn question of Europe’s transition from the feudal period to the modern age of the nation-state, even wresting from this question novel insights that were to constitute key elements of her theory of totalitarianism. She contends, firstly, that political modernity displaced traditional universal claims of civilisation with a ‘particular, national civilisation’. Secondly, she identifies a theme that was to play an important and controversial role in her analysis of totalitarianism: namely the emergence of ‘masses’ whose ‘atomisation’ was a prerequisite of both imperialistic domination and totalitarianism. Finally, she acknowledges that modern civilisation is grounded in the ‘reconstitution of the state (after the period of feudalism)’, which however ‘does not solve the fundamental problem of the state: the origin and legality of its power’ (Arendt 1946c: 207, 208). Arendt also contrasts definitions of ‘nation’ and ‘state’. Whereas a nation is defined as a people connected by past labour and a shared history, constitutive of a ‘closed society to which one belongs by right of birth’, the state is an ‘open society, ruling over a territory where its power protects and makes the law’. Conversely, Arendt argues, nationalism, or the ‘conquest of the state through the nation’, emerged simultaneously with the nineteenth century national state. Henceforth, the identification of nation and state generated a tension between the territorial state qua legal institution protecting the rights of citizens and the rights of nationals. As a legal institution, the state only recognises the rights of citizens, no matter what their nationality. As a ‘power institution’, however, the territorial state ‘may claim more territory and become aggressive – an attitude which is quite alien to the national body which, on the contrary, has put an end to migrations’. Thus, the melding of state and nation continually endangers the ‘old dream’ of a pacified community of sovereign nations, since it combines the principle of sovereign nationhood with the ‘enterprise of power’ (ibid.: 208), and which the ideology of nationalism imbues with a paradoxical urge towards nation-state imperialist expansion.

This brief review is fascinating for several reasons. Arendt engages an enduring preoccupation with the interrelation between nation, state, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism. There is an unmistakably Schmittian flavour in her description of the nineteenth century phenomenon of liberal individualism, which in its original conception envisages the state supposedly ruling over ‘mere individuals, over an atomised society whose very atomisation it was called upon to protect. But this modern state was also a ‘“strong state” which through its growing tendency towards centralisation monopolised the whole of political life’, drawing on the ‘cement of national sentiment’ (ibid.: 209) to reconcile the logic of a powerful centralised state and an atomised liberal society:

As the sovereignty of the nation was shaped after the model of the sovereignty of the individual, so the sovereignty of the state as national state was the representative and (in its totalitarian forms) the monopolizer of both. The state conquered by the nation became the supreme individual before which all other individuals had to bow. (ibid.: 209)

Up to this point, Arendt’s argument seems to be little more than a restatement of the common view of Western European ‘totalitarianism’ qua powerful state, infused with an extreme nationalist ideology, such as we find in the Fascist dictatorship. Arendt even provides us with a working definition of Fascism insofar as she speaks of a powerful national state ‘monopolising’ the sovereignty of the individual. What is interesting in this argument is the subtle shift from a sovereign state representing the sovereignty of the nation and individual, to a state transformed into an instrument of the nation, and as subordinating ‘all laws and the legal institutions of the state’ to the welfare of the nation. From this, Arendt draws the conclusion that it is ‘quite erroneous to see the evil of our times in a deification of the state’, rather than in the conquest of the state by the nation (ibid.: 209).[vii]

Although Arendt, in this review, does not yet make an explicit distinction between Fascism and National Socialism, she is nonetheless concerned with the emergence of totalitarian ‘movements’ and the ‘first forms of totalitarianism’ marking the transition from the ‘nation-state’ to the ‘totalitarian state’, as ‘nationalism becomes fascism’ (ibid.: 210).[viii] However, the real interest of this intervention lies in Arendt’s brief account of how this transition comes about by way of the transformation, or perversion, of the Hegelian concept of the state. Arendt argues that the conquest of the state by the nation was preceded by the adoption of the principle of the ‘sovereignty of the nation’, which in turn was modelled after the sovereignty of the individual. For as long as the state retained its sovereign power and political primacy, this development went unnoticed. However, the rise of nationalism during the nineteenth century undermined the sovereignty of the state until, finally, the nation asserted its sovereignty over the state. By successfully challenging the sovereignty of the state, the nation not only asserted its sovereignty over the state, but also fundamentally transformed the state. For it was distinctive of the Hegelian conception of the state that the ‘Idea’ existed as an independent entity ‘above’ the state, rather than being identified with the state. Conversely, whereas the identification of nation and state did not eliminate the Hegelian ‘conception as a whole’, it nonetheless replaced the Hegelian ‘Idea’, variously, with the ‘idea of the nation, the Spirit of the people, the Soul of the race, or other equivalents’ (ibid.: 209).

Arendt argues that what now occurs is that the ‘Idea’, deprived of its autonomous or transcendent character, becomes identified with an ‘absolute principle’, which in turn is realised in ‘the movement of history’ itself. Henceforth,

… all modern political theories which lead to totalitarianism present an immersion of an absolute principle into reality in the form of a historical movement; and it is this absoluteness, which they pretend to embody, which gives them their ‘right’ of priority over the individual conscience. (Arendt 1946c: 209)

The ‘individualisation of the moral universal within a collective’, conceived in Hegel’s theory of state and history, thus survives in a perverted form in the modern mass movements, once their ideologies are stripped of their Hegelian idealism. The totalitarian movements are ‘charged with philosophy’, taking possession of the ‘idea’ – be it of nation, race, or class – which is realised in the movement itself. Whereas liberal parliamentary parties typically pursue objectives or ends ‘outside’ of themselves, totalitarian movements effect the identification of means and ends. In Arendt’s quotation of Delos that ‘the characteristic of totalitarianism is not only to absorb man within the group, but also to surrender him to becoming’ (Delos in ibid.: 210), we encounter what was soon to become a fundamental tenet of her theory of totalitarianism. Against this ‘seeming reality of the general and the universal’, she argues, ‘the particular reality of the individual person appears, indeed, as a quantité négligeable, submerged in the stream of public life which, since it is organized as a movement, is the universal itself’ (ibid.). This extraordinary passage articulates Arendt’s sense of individuals in totalitarian societies surrendered to a process of becoming, actualised by their absorption into the totalitarian movement and swept along by the ineluctable laws of Nature or History, into the gas chambers and Gulags of her generation.

The relation between nationalism and totalitarianism
This brief review also presages the major themes of Arendt’s post-Origins political thought, and their relation to her yet to be articulated theory of totalitarianism. Thus, Arendt highlights the problem of reconciling the individual’s rights as man, citizen, and national; a paradox magnified rather than resolved by the ideology of nationalism, and one that is indeed a touchstone of early twenty-first century political thought. Anticipating a key finding of Origins, Arendt argues that totalitarianism has exposed the folly inherent in attempts to reconcile nation and state. In her view, the only justification of the state is its function as ‘the supreme protector of a law which guarantees man his rights as man, his rights as citizen and his rights as a national’, subject however to the proviso that ‘the rights of man and citizen are primary rights, whereas the rights of nationals are derived and implied in them’ (ibid.; emphasis added). She contends, accordingly, that the post-war refashioning of legal state institutions presupposes the distinction between the citizen and the national, between the political order and the national order. In an era characterised by the countervailing forces of ‘growing unity’ and ‘growing national consciousness of peoples’, Arendt, anticipating the central thesis of her 1963 work On Revolution, proposes the federal principle, whose logic transforms nationality into a ‘personal status rather than a territorial one’ (ibid.). This is a crucial dimension of Arendt’s post-Origins political thought that flows directly from her analysis of totalitarianism and her political pluralism, drawing on the experience of the only successful revolution of modern times – the American War of Independence.

Arendt concludes her review by criticising Delos for focusing on the relation between nationalism and totalitarianism, whilst occluding the question of imperialism. Critics have long decried Arendt’s ‘preoccupation’ with imperialism as an ‘element’ in the crystalline structure of European totalitarianism. This is especially true of historians, who mistakenly interpret Arendt’s analysis of imperialism as a history of imperialist politics, rather than a brilliant and highly original interpretation of a mentality – of ‘brutality and megalomania’ – that would ‘destroy the political body of the nation-state’ (Arendt 1979: 124, 125).[ix] This mentality, although hardly totalitarian, presaged the totalitarian conviction that ‘everything is possible’, a mode of apprehending the world that drew much of its energy from the limitless destructiveness wrought by the First World War. The notion of a ‘movement’ itself bespeaks the expansiveness of the imperialist mentality, and the historical forces unleashed by Europe’s orgy of violence – a universal becoming that is antithetical to ‘stable worldly structures’. I earlier noted Arendt’s notion of the identification of means and ends as characteristic of modern mass ‘movements’, a development that eliminates the distinct­ion between the institution of the political party and its objectives. In her view, the identification of means and ends goes to the heart of the totalitarian assumption of ‘eternal dynamism’, which overflows all spatial and historical boundaries, and the totalitarian conception of the political, which is stripped of all humanly recognisable utilitarian goals. The boundless dynamism of totalitarian rule is antithetical to the liberal institutionalisation of political rule as well as its territorially finite state, whose legal guarantees of civil and political rights presuppose a stable constitutional order. In his Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel, Hitler provides a succinct description of the liberal state’s dystopic opposite:

The foreign policy of the bourgeois world is in truth always only focused on borders, whereas the National Socialist movement, in contrast, will pursue a policy focused on space … The National Socialist movement … knows no Germanization … but only the expansion of our own people … The national conception will not be determined by previous patriotic notions of state, but rather by ethnic and racial conceptions. The German borders of 1914 … represented something just as unfinished as peoples’ borders always are. The division of territory on the earth is always the momentary result of a struggle and an evolution that is in no way finished, but that naturally continues to progress. (Hitler in Bartov 2004: 4)

Arendt could not have known this work when she wrote either the review in question or Origins, since the manuscript was discovered in 1958 and published only in 1961. Yet there is an uncanny resonance between her analysis of the internal contradictions of the nation-state and Hitler’s stated goals.[x] Hitler dismisses the bourgeois notion of a stabilised, territorially delimited state. Nazi expansionism, moreover, ‘knows no Germanization’ and therefore eschews the Roman model of a politically integrated and naturalised imperial domain, proposing instead an ethnically and racially exclusive movement, which eliminates obstacles to a continuously expanding Aryan realm. Rather than incorporating territories and their native populations into a proposed new Reich, Hitler envisaged an exclusive racial elite ‘cleansing’ territories for settlement by ‘our own people’. Thus ‘the National Socialist movement… will never see in the subjugated, so-called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our own people’ (Hitler 1961: 45). Hitler, it should be noted, wrote this in 1928.

From this perspective, the idealisation of the state is not only antithetical to the Nazi project but would in fact constitute a deliverance from its most radical objectives. Hitler early on identified the bourgeois territorial state first and foremost as an obstacle to his ideological goals. Conversely, Arendt theorises these objectives in terms of a totalitarian movement subordinating the state to the ‘ideas’ of nation, race, or class in pre-1925 Fascism, Nazism and post-1929 Stalinism, respectively:

The state, even as a one-party dictatorship, was felt to be in the way of the ever-changing needs of an ever-growing movement … while the ‘party above parties’ wanted only to seize the state machine, the true movement aimed at its destruction; while the former still recognized the state as highest authority once its representation had fallen into the hands of the members of one party (as in Mussolini’s Italy), the latter recognised the movement as independent of and superior in authority to the state. (Arendt 1979: 260)

The importance of this statement, in my view, exceeds the merely controversial claim that totalitarian regimes are, strictly speaking, not state forms at all.

Arendt is arguing that however imperfectly, the modern nation-state has performed the function of the ancient polis. By attacking the institutions of the state, the totalitarian movements gauged, correctly as it turned out, the one great vulnerability of the bourgeois nation-state in the post-World War One era; namely, its complete lack of defences in the face of extra-parliamentary and extra-legal challenges to state authority. In Arendt’s view, Western European totalitarian movements exploited the conditions of ‘mass society’ born of the ‘decay of the Continental party system [that] went hand in hand with a decline of the prestige of the nation-state … and it is obvious that the more rigid the country’s class system, the more class-conscious its people had been, the more dramatic and dangerous was this breakdown’ (ibid.: 261-2). The masses springing from the cataclysm of total war were distinguished from the rabble of former centuries by the fact that they were ‘masses’ in a strict sense, without

… common interests to bind them together or any kind of common ‘consent’ which, according to Cicero, constitutes inter-est, that which is between men, ranging all the way from material to spiritual and other matters. (Arendt 1953c: 406)[xi]

In Germany’s case, at least during the late Weimar period, the party system could no longer fulfil its function of ordering the public world and the class system had begun to disintegrate (Arendt 1979: 260-1). Developments in the Soviet Union were markedly different and more complex, although there too, war and revolution had shattered its neo-feudal class system. Yet Arendt’s central point in this regard is that Lenin’s ‘revolutionary dictatorship’, whatever its totalitarian elements and proclivities, remained bound to attempts to stabilise the revolution and restore a semblance of rational policy calculation. For this reason, Arendt stresses Stalin’s ‘second revolution’ of 1929 and the purges of the 1930s, which targeted residual class loyalties and social hierarchies in a campaign that was geared to securing Stalin’s unchallenged, total authority. However, before I address this dimension of Arendt’s totalitarianism thesis, we need to look more closely at Arendt’s controversial account of developments in nineteenth century Europe, which she addresses in the first two parts of Origins, and which many commentators have misconstrued as ‘causal’ elements in the genesis of Europe’s inter-war crises.

Anti-semitism and imperialism in nineteenth-century Europe

Bolshevism and Nazism at the height of their power outgrew mere tribal nationalism and had little use for those who were still actually convinced of it in principle, rather than as mere propaganda material. (Hannah Arendt)

In her introduction to the original edition of Origins, Arendt identifies the ‘spurious grandeur of “historical necessity”’ (Arendt 1979: viii) as the antithesis of political thought and action. For Arendt, comprehension does not entail ‘deducing the unprecedented from precedents’ but rather ‘facing up to’ events, without submitting to the view that they are somehow preordained (ibid.). The ‘emancipation from reality and experience’ (ibid.: 471) effected by ideological argumentation degrades our political faculties. For this reason, Maurice Cranston argues, Origins refrains from any ‘naïve empiricist notion of causality in history, and in looking for “origins”, seeks only to locate the factors which led up to totalitarianism and make it intelligible’ (Cranston 1982: 58).

This is not a view that is universally shared. Agnes Heller, for example, argues that Arendt views totalitarianism as ‘the offspring of our modern, Western culture’ (Heller 1989a: 253) and as such ‘could only emerge after all previous events of modernity had all unfolded’ (ibid.: 254).[xii] On the basis of these assumptions, Heller goes on to criticise Arendt for a residual evolutionism insofar as she allegedly ‘attributed [a] certain kind of necessity to the factual sequence of historical events’ (ibid.: 253).[xiii] The passage in question, referred to above in a different context, appears in the Preface to the first edition of Origins in which Arendt alludes to ‘The subterranean stream of Western history [that] has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition’ (Arendt 1979: ix). And yet this passage is deserving of a contextual reading. Heller, righting Arendt’s wrong, proposes an alternative perspective, suggesting that ‘the fact that history unfolds in a certain way does not prove that it could not have been otherwise’ (Heller 1989a: 254). Indeed, as Arendt repeatedly stresses, comprehension means

… examining and bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon us – neither denying their existence nor submitting meekly to their weight as though everything that in fact happened could not have happened otherwise. (Arendt 1979: xiv; emphasis added)

Arendt is arguing that we assume responsibility for events that have already unfolded, that past deeds are irreversible and future developments unknowable given the radical contingencies of life. From this perspective, and given what we know of the historical circumstances, totalitarianism was not an inevitable outcome of Europe’s long series of inter-war crises, although these certainly aided the formation and ascendancy of totalitarian movements. Still, for Arendt the lessons and conclusions to be drawn from Europe’s cataclysm of war and revolution do not include the surrender to a logic of inevitability, according to which totalitarianism is ‘explained’ as the preordained outcome of historical forces inherent in ‘political modernity’. The irreversibility of what happened does not mean that it could not have happened differently. It is Heller, after all, and not Arendt who ventures the opinion that the ‘totalitarian option had been present since the dawn of modernity’ (Heller 1989a: 254).

In the 1967 Preface to Part One of Origins, Arendt explains herself:

Since only the final crystallizing catastrophe brought these subterranean trends into the open and to public notice, there has been a tendency to simply equate totalitarianism with its elements and origins – as though every outburst of antisemitism or racism or imperialism could be identified as ‘totalitarianism’. (Arendt 1979: xv)

As countervailing undercurrents or tributaries of mainstream European developments during the nineteenth century the ‘elements’ that later ‘crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon’ – post-Enlightenment racism and nation-state imperialism – were scarcely noticed. Still, ‘hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence’ (ibid.) until, finally, the catastrophic impact and revolutionary afterlife of the First World War thrust them into prominence. In retrospect, Arendt regretted the choice of title, arguing that Origins ‘does not really deal with the “origins” of totalitarianism – as its title unfortunately claims – but gives an historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism’ (Arendt in Kateb 1984: 55). Accordingly, as Benhabib notes, the title of the book constitutes a ‘misnomer ’ (Benhabib 1994: 114), one that has played no small part in the misreading of Arendt’s central arguments.

The two key elements
The two key ‘elements’ that feature prominently in Origins are ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘imperialism’. Unsurprisingly, Arendt presents a novel interpretation of both, steering a wide berth around the prevailing clichés then current in the literature. This is especially true of her controversial account of the former, which distinguishes between historical forms of religious and social anti-Semitism on the one hand, and the Nazi ideology of biological racism on the other. She contends that prior to the advent of Nazism, anti-Semitism played a purely secondary role in European history and politics, and was of far less significance than the phenomena of imperialism and class politics. In this view, the first time the ‘Jewish Question’ assumed importance in the national politics of a country was following the Nazi seizure of power, and it was preceded by meticulous groundwork during the 1920s, that saw the Nazis elevate anti-Semitism from gutter politics to the organising principle, firstly, of the Nazi totalitarian movement, and subsequently of the Nazi dictatorship. None of this would have been possible, or at least very likely, would it not have been for the devastation of total war, which transformed the landscape of possibilities in post-war Germany much as the Bolshevik Revolution – itself no small miracle of history – blasted away the detritus of a reified tradition.

From a present-day perspective, the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, Sinti and Roma, and homosexuals seems all but inevitable. Yet despite the enormity and sheer horror of the Nazi mass crimes, they entered popular Western consciousness relatively late, and only began to play a central role in Western historiography more than a decade after the war. Arendt wrote and lectured extensively about the Nazi mass crimes during the final war years, whereas following the war her focus shifted to theorising the ‘radical discontinuity’ and novelty of the totalitarian system of government (Kateb 1984: 55; see 149; Benhabib 1994: 119). Arendt repeatedly returned to the theme of historical contingency; her view, that is, that ‘the story told by [history] is a story with many beginnings but no end’ (Arendt 1953b: 399). Her distinctive historical sensibility contrasts powerfully with what Villa terms ‘Hegelian-type teleologies, whether of progress or doom’ (Villa 1999: 181). In various different contexts, and in all of her works, Arendt challenges deterministic philosophies of history that reduce the unprecedented to precedents. In the aforementioned 1967 Preface, Arendt describes all such approaches as no less ‘misleading in the search for historical truth’ as they are ‘pernicious for political judgement’. She illustrates this point with a startling analogy. If we were to reduce National Socialism to racism, moreover employing the latter term indiscriminately, then we might reasonably conclude from the racism characteristic of government in the Southern states of the United States that ‘large areas of the United States have been under totalitarian rule for more than a century’. Hence, to grasp the radical novelty of Nazi ideology, we need to acknowledge the distinction between ‘pre-totalitarian and totalitarian’ forms of racism and anti-Semitism. Only in this way will we be able to understand the role played by Nazi biological racism in the regime’s ideological and organisational innovations. For the cataclysm that was Nazi rule was a fusion of novel forms of ideology and political organisation, which attained its most concentrated expression in the death factories for the production of human corpses. If this destructive phenomenon could now seem to have been predictable, this is only because we have recovered our senses following the first shock of discovery.

The complexity of Arendt’s analysis of anti-Semitism mirrors the welter of conflicting social and political forces at work in nineteenth century Europe, which were all tied, in one way or another, to the emergence of modern European imperialism and the concomitant decline of the nation-state during the last quarter of the century. Arendt contends that the acquisition of empire undermined the national political institutions of the imperial states and fundamentally transformed the balance of forces and interests that had sustained the latter for much of political modernity. This was particularly evident in changing popular attitudes towards Western European Jewry, which mirrored the declining influence of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Europe’s royal houses. Arendt cites an interesting precedent in this regard. For Tocqueville’s analysis of revolutionary France similarly pointed to the coincidence of popular hatred for the aristocracy and the dissolution of the latter’s political power. In other words, resentment was a function of the growing disjunction between the aristocracy’s great wealth and privilege on the one hand, and its rapidly declining political power on the other. For the state of ‘wealth without power or aloofness without a policy’ are felt to be parasitical by masses accustomed to associating wealth with sovereign power, even if that association often enough consists in a relation between oppressor and oppressed (Arendt 1979: 4). Similarly, European Jewry was tolerated within the national body politic for as long as its pseudo-bourgeoisie served a demonstrable public function in the comity of European nation-states. This ‘function’ was derived from its close economic ties to Europe’s royal houses and state institutions. When Continental Europe’s class system began to break down and her nation-state system began to disintegrate during the late nineteenth century, the various Jewish bourgeoisies lost their public functions and influence without suffering a concomitant loss of material wealth. Moreover, unlike the Christian bourgeoisie, the class of privileged Jews had never been accepted into Europe’s class system, which itself contradicted the principle of equality upon which the modern state was founded. In other words, the Jewish elite did not even belong to a class of oppressors, whereas ‘even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order’ (ibid.: 5).

Arendt is suggesting that hatred of Europe’s Christian bourgeoisie stemmed from its role in the exploitation and oppression of the masses. Conversely, their Jewish counterparts were, first and foremost, ethnic and religious outsiders whose tenuous social status was an exclusive function of their economic usefulness. Once they had been deprived of their privileged access to the aristocracy, they were bereft of any ‘useful’ function. Henceforth, growing anti-Jewish sentiment could be exploited by a new class of political parties and movements, whose anti-Semitism was no longer merely social or religious in nature, but now assumed a distinctive ‘ideological’ character. Arendt cites the Dreyfus Affair as emblematic of this new mentality and of the changed political circumstances; a ‘foregleam of the twentieth century’, insofar as the domestic politics of a modern state ‘was crystallized in the issue of antisemitism’ (ibid.: 93, 94). This signified the transformation of social and religious anti-Semitism into a political creed that served as the organising principle of mass political movements. These movements were now able to exploit and manipulate popular anti-Semitism as they propagated their ideologies of the ‘alien Jew’ and a Jewish world conspiracy. Arendt notes the striking fact that persecution of European Jewry intensified in an inverse relation to its declining political influence, for Europe’s Jewish communities had become ‘powerless or power-losing groups’ (ibid.: 5).

Ideological scientificality
Anti-Semitism had become infected by what Arendt terms ‘ideological scientificality’ or a form of political discourse that was released ‘from the control of the present’ by positing an inevitable historical outcome, which is by its very nature immune to all tests of validity (ibid.: 346). This mode of ideological argumentation was but one step removed from its totalitarian incarnation, for the Nazis infused this device with a prophetic quality whose infallibility derived from the fact that their policies were geared to realising their stated ideological goals. By transforming the ‘idea’ – race in racism – into an all-encompassing explanation of the unfolding ‘movement’ of history, which in turn was realised through the application of ‘total terror’, the Nazis eliminated all competing ‘ideas’, as well as all contradictions and obstacles that might stand in the way of an ideological vision and reality (ibid.: 469). I will address the relation in Arendt’s thought between totalitarian ideology and total terror in greater detail below. In the present context, however, I should like to stress Arendt’s related argument that the ‘only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism’ (ibid.: xv). For Zionism emerged as a form of ‘counter-ideology’ and a political response to the age-old problem of European social and religious anti-Semitism. Conversely, such relation as there was between Zionism and Nazi racism was limited to the exploitation of Zionism and conventional anti-Semitism by the Nazi movement to foster and underscore its claims of a global Jewish conspiracy. In this way a peculiar triangular dialectic was established between anti-Semitism, Zionism and Nazism, that was only finally resolved with the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Thus, pre-Nazi anti-Semitism served as a virtual palette for propagandists, who manipulated the history of Jewry in ways that reinforced the urgency of the so-called ‘Jewish question’ (ibid.: 6-7, 355). Moreover, the Nazi movement revolutionised the function of ideology, and ideologized the ‘Jewish question’, by transforming mere anti-Semitic ‘opinion’ into an immutable ‘principle of self-definition’ (ibid.: 356). Identity, rather than being a social, religious or economic category, was redefined in objective, ‘scientific’ terms as the biological-racial characteristics of the individual on the one hand, and as the imperative of conserving the racial characteristics of the master species or Volk on the other. For the first time in history, racism had become the organising principle of a mass political movement, and would soon also become the binding ideology of a totalitarian system of government. By displacing sovereign political authority from the state to the totalitarian movement, the German state was redefined as a ‘”means” for the conservation of the race, [just] as the state, according to Bolshevik propaganda, is only an instrument in the struggle of classes’ (ibid.: 357).

One other aspect of Arendt’s engagement with the question of anti-Semitism in Origins should be noted here. Although Arendt’s interpretation of Nazi racism focuses quite heavily on the question of anti-Semitism, this is largely a reflection of the status of European Jewry as the principal target of the Nazi genocide. However, once her focus shifted to the broader category and implications of Nazi biological racism, she stressed that there were also other categories of victims of the Nazi genocide, which moreover reveals the truly unprecedented nature of Nazi ambitions. Thus for example, in the 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt argues that Eichmann was guilty of the extermination of Sinti and Roma ‘in exactly the same way he was guilty of the extermination of the Jews’ (Arendt 1964e: 245). This is still regarded by many as a controversial statement, although it should not be. Nazi racism did not just envisage the extermination of European Jewry but aimed at a total reordering of the racial demographics of occupied Europe. Hitler had already begun to implement his ‘Generalplan Ost’ prior to Germany’s defeat. The policy envisaged the resettlement of millions of SS cadres, beginning with the elite ‘Order of Heinrich Himmler’, and entailed ‘ethnic cleansing’ on an unprecedented scale and the expansion of the camp system across the occupied territories of the East (Schulte 2001: 287, 307-09, 334-51, 376-8; Browning 2004: 240-1). Hence, the ultimate goal of Hitler’s race-ideology entailed even greater horrors and considerably greater numbers of potential victims. It was only Hitler’s defeat in 1945 that spared the world from the broader goals of the ‘Final Solution’.

Imperialism, the topic of the second part of Origins, played a more direct role in mainstream European politics between 1884 and the outbreak of World War One. It was, moreover, the most significant element leading Europe into the catastrophe of total war. Arendt focuses on the anomalies of nation-state imperialism, which set the stage for a global war, in whose wake social and political institutions were shattered and entirely new categories of ‘superfluous’ humanity were generated. However, Arendt’s interest does not lie in the history of imperialism’s warmongering as much as in its hubris of intent. She argues that conquest and empire are destined to end in tyranny unless they are based primarily upon law; law, that is, as understood by the Roman Republic as integrating, rather than merely assimilating the heterogeneous conquered peoples as subjects of a common polity. The dilemma posed by overseas conquest was that it contradicted and ultimately undermined the national principle of ‘a homogenous population’s active consent to its government’, which ever since the dawn of political modernity had constituted the raison d’être of the nation-state. Thus Europe’s imperial ambitions, propelled by the economically driven rush for resources and markets, were not matched by a viable political model of imperial rule. The exclusion of the extra-national territories and peoples from the body politic of the conquering powers meant that rather than grounding their rule in the principle of justice, the imperial states were reduced to forcibly extracting the ‘consent’ of the subject peoples to their own subjugation (Arendt 1979: 125). This device of rule impacted most directly on the colonial entities. Nonetheless, in the wake of the First World War, Europe, too, experienced the condition of ‘statelessness’ and all that went with the loss of constitutionally guaranteed national rights. Millions of displaced refugees were generated by policies of expulsion from former national territories and the loss of these territories. This was accompanied by widespread economic crises, which in turn generated social conflict and dislocation. These conditions were antithetical to Europe’s Enlightenment understanding of a socially integrated and politically secured citizenship. They also resembled conditions that had been generated by the imperial powers in their colonial possessions.

Arendt’s analysis of modern imperialism investigates the parallels between the impact of empire on the subjugated peoples and the impact of total war on the peoples of the imperial powers. Moreover, it targets modern imperialism’s idealisation of ‘power’, which went hand in hand with the instrumentalization of violence. In other words violence, rather than serving the ends of law and its enforcement, ‘turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate’ (ibid.: 137). If we recall, for Arendt violence and force are antithetical to her concept of power, which she defines as the acting and speaking together of the citizenry. In Europe’s imperial domain, however, the ‘power export’ mobilised the state’s instruments of violence, the police and the army, which were liberated from the control and constraints imposed by national institutions, becoming themselves ‘national representatives’ in undeveloped countries (ibid.: 136). Therefore, at the outset of the imperialist adventure, institutions that performed constitutionally proscribed and prescribed functions in Western societies were deprived of their proper function and invested with enormous sovereign powers. Restricted to the realm of empire, these developments were destructive enough, since the logic of unlimited expansion forestalls the establishment of enduring and stabilising political structures, and ‘its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at home’ (ibid.: 137). Still, in the relatively short life span of the European empires, the national institutions of the imperial states, though corrupted by empire, withstood its corrosive effects. The same cannot be said of their totalitarian successors. In their expansionary phases, both Germany and the Soviet Union

… dissolved and destroyed all politically stabilized structures, their own as well as those of other peoples. The mere export of [imperialist] violence made the servants into masters without giving them the master’s prerogative: the possible creation of something new. Monopolistic concentration and tremendous accumulation of violence at home made the servants [of totalitarianism] active agents in the destruction, until finally totalitarian expansion became a nation- and people-destroying force. (ibid.: 138)

Whereas European imperialism legitimated the violent excesses of an anti-political conception of power reduced to a function of political domination, totalitarianism eliminated the political institutions which control the exercise of power, and which are intended to serve the political community.

Arendt’s analysis of imperialism’s pre-totalitarian power principle is complemented by a novel interpretation of what she terms ‘race-thinking’, whose key elements are traceable to various strands of eighteenth century European thought, but whose emergence during the nineteenth century brought it into conflict with the competing ideologies of ‘class-thinking’. These two dominant strains of political thought now competed for dominance in the collective consciousness of European peoples. Around the time of the ‘Scramble for Africa’, following the Berlin conference of 1884, race-thinking flourished as a corollary of imperialistic policies. Arendt cites Count Arthur de Gobineau as the most important progenitor of all modern race theories. His ‘frankly ridiculous’ doctrine is described as the product of a ‘frustrated nobleman and romantic intellectual’. But for all that Gobineau may have ‘invented racism almost by accident’ (ibid.: 172), his ideas proved particularly influential fifty years after their formulation, in 1853 – at a time, that is, when European dominance of the globe was at its height. Gobineau’s ‘doctrine of decay’ was never biological in the manner of Nazi racism, since it posited that mere acceptance of the ideology of race was proof positive that an individual was ‘well-bred’. Nonetheless, it inspired a generation of European intellectuals, amongst whom may be counted very respectable figures indeed. Arendt’s point, however, is that Gobinism’s amalgamation of race and ‘elite’ concepts energised ‘the inherent irresponsibility of romantic opinions’, since it resonated with the latter’s preoccupation with the ‘self’ and the romantic yearning to impart ‘inner experiences’ with universal ‘historical significance’ (ibid.: 175).

Race-thinking
In re-functionalising pre-modern ‘race-thinking’, National Socialism installed ‘a race of princes’ as the subjects of this history – a substitute aristocracy, the Aryans, whose function was to rescue society from the levelling effects of democracy. Conceived in these social terms, Gobinism, though distinct from Nazism’s biological racism, appealed to turn-of-the-century intellectuals preoccupied with the problem of decadence and overwhelmed by a pessimistic mood that revolved around the notion of the inevitable decline of Western civilisation. Gobineau’s ideas would also find considerable resonance in a later generation of Germans, whose trauma of despair in the wake of the Great War gradually made way for a radical ideology of redemption, which adopted Gobineau’s category of race and adapted it to the biological ‘necessities’ underpinning an ideology of ‘racial hygiene’. For this generation of racial thinkers, the logic of purity henceforth demanded that the pure be rescued, that the impure must be destroyed as a matter of course, thereby actually setting in motion ‘the “inevitable” decay of mankind in a supreme effort to destroy it’ (ibid.: 173).

For race-thinking to make the transition to racism, and thence to becoming a fully-fledged ideology in Arendt’s sense, the preoccupations of nineteenth century romantics and intellectual adventurers underwent, firstly, a political marriage of convenience with imperialistic policies and, secondly, were seized upon by ‘“scientific” preachers’:

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe’, or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. (ibid.: 159)

Ideologies in this sense are not theoretical doctrines but come into existence and are perpetuated as a ‘political weapon’. Their ‘scientific aspect’ serves as a foil for the spurious basis of supposedly infallible arguments, whose great power of persuasion derives from their logical construction. None of the nineteenth century ideologies, Arendt argues, were predestined to triumph over the others. Instead, they coexisted as a matter of course in the liberal polity, some gaining prominence with unfolding events such as the ‘Scramble for Africa’, others emerging as fully fledged ideologies in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the First World War. Arendt nonetheless acknowledges the predominance in early twentieth century Europe of the secular ideas of ‘race’ and ‘class’, whose ascendancy was a function of their appeal to the experiences and desires of the masses engaged in or affected by political conflicts between Europe’s nation-states and amongst its social classes. These ideologies thus enjoyed the advantage that they resonated with existing social and political realities, predating and preceding the adoption by the totalitarian movements of the ideas of race and class as the mobilising and organising principles of their revolutionary movements (ibid.: 159, 160).

Arendt’s extensive analysis of race-thinking and racism, like her treatment of colonialism and imperialism, targets the political dimension and impact that modes of thought, immersed in the historical experiences of conquering and dominating, being conquered and being dominated, were to have on post-war Europe. To the extent that race-thinking was an historical adjunct to European imperialism, it had already become politicised, although none of the imperial powers had adopted the notion of racial domination itself as a core value of the national political culture of their countries. Still, Arendt argues that the destructive potential of these ideologies was prefigured in the thinking of the modern imperialists and in the mentality of the imperial elites and bureaucratic foot-soldiers. Arendt views the injunction ‘exterminate the brutes’ as more than a literary device, whereas Conrad’s Heart of Darkness conveys the brutish mentality of the times, which was put to devastating effect in ‘the most terrible massacres in recent history’. Particularly Germany’s African domain and the Belgian Congo were the scenes of ‘wild murdering’ and decimation. Ignorant settlers and brutal adventurers responded ruthlessly to a humanity that ‘so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species’ (ibid.: 185). Racism and bureaucracy developed on parallel tracks, and they converged in the practice of ‘administrative massacres’.

The key factor here is that race-thinking and racism fulfilled a legitimating function vis-à-vis imperial policy without of its own accord generating new conflicts or producing ‘new categories of political thinking’ (ibid.: 183). In Arendt’s view, even champions of the ‘race’ idea, such as Gobineau and Disraeli, were ill-equipped to fathom the true significance of the novel experiences of European settlers, whose ‘brutal deeds and active bestiality’ were neither acknowledged nor understood, but which nonetheless had a pernicious effect on the European body politic (ibid.: 183). Race-thinking and racism were home-grown European ideologies, yet they gathered an ‘unexpected virulence’ in the context of colonial policy, and the conflicts between the colonial powers, for whom the lives of the indigenous populations counted as little more than expendable labour power. In other words, ‘an abyss’ had opened up ‘between men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds and active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge’ (ibid.). Viewed as a justification rather than as a principle of political action, race-thinking did not become the driving force of European imperialism during the nineteenth century. Still, whether defined culturally, linguistically, geographically, or biologically, once a particular race seized upon racial domination as the organising principle of its national polity there was no predicting the inherent force of its destructiveness. In this sense, ‘class-thinking’ was a variation on the theme of radical identity politics, and following the Bolshevik Revolution the idea of class made its transition from a Marxist critique of relations of class domination to a policy of exterminating so-called counter-revolutionary classes.

The gradual substitution of race for nation was set in motion during the late imperial era. Conversely, the advent of modern bureaucracy as a substitute for government shattered the constraints against power accumulation that had been put in place by a liberal regime of limited government (ibid.: 186). In other words, modern bureaucracy revolutionised the state, expanding its reach and ability to control society (and colonies) in ways not envisaged by the proponents of the modern European nation-state. When applied to Europe’s imperial domain, a regime of ‘aimless process’ (ibid.: 216) provided the colonial administrator with an effective device for instilling order, without having to resort to the customary homeland practice of enforcing the rule of law. Once the enormous power potential of an administrative regime was freed of legal constraints and was placed in the hands of colonial administrators, a limitless horizon of administrative decrees replaced the customary legal and institutional constraints that form the basis of all forms of civilised government. This was a new experience for modern man, one that introduced into politics the ‘superstition of a possible and magic identification of man with the forces of history’ (ibid.). ‘The law of expansion’, the boundless terrain of imperialistic ambition, and the belief that the realisation of empire entailed entry into ‘the stream of historical necessity’ – of being ‘embraced and driven by some big movement’ (ibid.: 220) – promoted a new sense and intoxication with serving a power greater than oneself. Arendt quotes revealing passages from T. E. Lawrence, who at the end of his career seemed as uncomprehending of his true ‘function’ as he was desolate in its absence (ibid.: 218-21).[14]

Still, in Arendt’s view, even this archetype of the modern adventurer ‘had not yet been seized by the fanaticism of an ideology of movement’ (ibid.: 220), although he did seem to believe that he was an instrument of ‘historical necessity’ – a functionary of secret forces prevailing in the world independent of human will or design. Although Lawrence was very much a product of his era, for Arendt he also represents a transitional figure, whose willing participation in a cause transcending individual interest and purpose heralded a later generation of adventurers thrown into prominence by the First World War. In the wake of Europe’s disaster, novel political movements emerged armed with both fully fledged ideologies and forms of bureaucratic organisation that would prove more destructive than anything produced by Europe’s imperialist ambitions. The power potential of these new entities resided in their discovery that ideologies become ‘political weapons’ in the hands of totalitarian movements. The Bolshevik Revolution was of particular significance in this regard, since it manifested, for the first time, the new power structure of a modern revolutionary dictatorship, which although pre-totalitarian in Arendt’s sense, saw ideology assume the role once played by ‘opinion’ and ‘interest’ in the handling of public affairs. Ideologies in their totalitarian forms are by definition impervious to the ‘undetermined infinity of forms of living-together’ (ibid.: 443). Arendt contends that what the Soviet Union lacked under Lenin was a leadership devoted, as a matter of principle, to a policy of mass terror (see especially ibid.: 305-23, 379-80). The levelling and equalising force of totalitarian terror targets individuality, plurality, natality, spontaneity, and freedom – our distinctly human traits – reordering human relations in accordance with the ideological imperatives of ‘total domination’. A philosophical term which is commonly misunderstood in the secondary literature as suggesting an idealistic conception of ‘total power’, ‘total domination’ constitutes the touchstone of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and the mirror image of her post-Origins theorisation of action and politics. Ideology and terror constitute complementary devices in the hands of totalitarian movements, which always seek to fabricate ‘something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species’ (ibid.: 438). In other words, the complex relation between ideology and terror goes to the heart of Arendt’s account of ‘the event of totalitarian domination itself’ (ibid.: 405). I will explore the important relation between ideology and terror below. Firstly, however, I would like to make certain preliminary observations about Arendt’s reasons for emphasising the ‘function’, rather than the distinct contents of various totalitarian ideologies, for one of the most persistent criticisms of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism is that she disregards the important differences, notably, between the Nazi and Stalinist ideologies.

Ideology: Eliding the great left-right divide
Arendt’s analysis of ideology in Origins engages with the complex interplay between nineteenth century European anti-Semitism, race-thinking and imperialism, a perspective that has attracted the charge of ‘Eurocentrism’. The broadly European context of Origins is a function of its historical and theoretical subject matter, rather than evidence either of historical bias or of an indifference to the violence wrought on non-European societies. For better or worse, Europe’s global hegemony was a fact of its imperial reach and economic power. Arendt emphasises throughout that modern European imperialism was distinct from both classical empire building and assimilationist conquest. Instead, the European powers subjected conquered territories and peoples to a novel form of colonial administration, that was quite distinct from, and subordinate to, the domestic institutions of the imperial powers (Arendt 1979: 130-2). Arendt’s analysis of European ‘colonial imperialism’ thus weaves a complex tale of some of the key trends and events in European history that were coincident with the disintegration of the nation-state, a process that contained within itself ‘nearly all the elements necessary for the subsequent rise of the totalitarian movements and governments’ (ibid.: xxi). The argument mounted by some critics, that Arendt’s extensive analysis of anti-Semitism points to an imbalance between her analyses of Nazism and Stalinism overlooks an underlying strategy of Arendt’s book, for what she is attempting to do is to chart the transformation of nineteenth century ideologies into fully-fledged totalitarian ideologies. Having brutally suppressed its imperial domain and twice unleashed world war it is, Arendt argues, precisely in Europe that ‘a new political principle’ was most urgently to be sought, one that would complement a ‘new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity’ (ibid.: ix).

Against this historical and theoretical backdrop, the third and final part of Origins takes up the question of totalitarianism per se. The whole question of totalitarianism seems first to be intimated in Arendt’s essays of 1944, at a time when Germany’s military defeat was a foregone conclusion, whereas the full extent of its mass crimes remained hidden. Moreover, whereas Arendt’s focus shifted to the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War, this was true of most observers and theorists, irrespective of their political views and ideological biases. While many Western Marxists earnestly debated Stalin’s putative Marxist credentials, Arendt was more interested in what the Stalinist dictatorship was actually doing rather than what it said it was doing. With the benefit of hindsight, it is indeed striking that very few Western intellectuals were troubled by the relation between terror and ideology in the Stalinist system of government, which constituted the central focus of Arendt’s analysis. The absence in Origins of a sustained analysis of the fraught relationship between Marx’s thought and Stalin’s totalitarian ideology is indicative of Arendt’s view that Stalinism was not principally a problem for Marxist theory. Instead, she focuses on the perceived manifestation of a phenomenon with which Hitler had just acquainted Europe and much of the world. For a world at war was preoccupied with defeating the Nazi regime, of which far more was known, both during the war and throughout the entire post-war era, than with the sprawling Soviet behemoth. But even the Nazi terror enjoyed little attention from academics in the immediate post-war years, the energies of a few dedicated researchers notwithstanding. Although this phenomenon is not unrelated to the fragmentary evidence of the extermination machine that had once existed in occupied Europe, it cannot be wholly explained in these terms.

Arendt’s concerns, then, were of an altogether different order than the polemics on either side of the post-war ideological divide. In her view, both the proponents and critics of the Stalinist phenomenon failed to grasp the sheer novelty of Soviet totalitarianism and hence neither side in the ongoing controversy understood what was at stake, theoretically and politically, in the Cold War conflict. Debate especially in the Western academy revolved around the question of Stalin’s Marxist credentials, whereas his regime of terror was more often than not hijacked for propaganda purposes. Arendt’s approach was both more balanced and nuanced. On the one hand, she dismissed the notion of a direct line of descent between Marx’s political thought and Stalinist totalitarianism. On the other hand, however, she acknowledged the Enlightenment inspiration of Bolshevik ideals, whilst nonetheless arguing that Lenin had perverted the ideals for which he had fought. This complex link between Lenin’s ideals and Marx’s thought and Lenin’s construction of an apparatus of terror that was to be the defining feature of the Stalin years, is a major subtext of Arendt’s post-Origins philosophical inquiry. In Arendt’s view, the absence of any such link between Nazism and the Enlightenment was manifest. Moreover, she took to task all those commentators who equated Nazism and Fascism, for in her view they thereby grossly underestimated the novelty and virulence of Hitler’s ideology and system of rule. Origins owes much of its emphasis upon Nazism to this concern, which also entailed refuting a direct line of descent between Europe’s history of Church-inspired anti-Semitism and Nazi race ideology – an approach that earned Arendt quite a number of enemies. If the Dreyfus affair in late nineteenth century France affirmed the potential that Jew-hatred held as the motor of annihilation, that potential was actualised only once a totalitarian movement had seized upon biological racism as the organising concept of its ideology.

Arendt’s totalitarianism thesis has been targeted most especially by those writing in the Marxist tradition. In my view, the reasons for this are not difficult to fathom. Those loyal to the Bolshevik revolutionary project were forced either to abandon their revolutionary ideals to the Stalinist involution, or to concede that the revolution had failed. Since Arendt clearly viewed the Bolshevik Revolution as a failure, her critics were wont to dismiss her views as indicative of her ignorance of Soviet politics and history at best. Arendt was neither a historian nor a specialist in Russian history. Nevertheless, Arendt makes a convincing case for a comparative analysis of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, even if it would be more than a generation before many of her erstwhile critics would grudgingly (and as we shall see in the next chapter, also often unwittingly) concede that she had grasped the essential dynamic of Stalinist rule. Origins, therefore, is not a work of history, but a study of the nature of totalitarian ideologies, the emergence of totalitarian movements, and their transformation as governing parties. Only if we grasp her general approach does it become possible to integrate her arguments in the first two parts of Origins with the third part dealing with totalitarianism per se. In short, Arendt would like us to see that just as Hitler’s biological racism constituted a fundamental break with nineteenth century anti-Semitism and race doctrines, Stalin cannot simply be viewed merely as consolidating Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship, but that he in fact radically transformed it. What I think is important here is the sense in which any ‘idea’, once seized upon by a totalitarian movement, becomes the basis not only of its ideology but also of its total reorganisation of society.

Arendt could not have known in detail the course of events in the Soviet Union any more than her Western colleagues did. Still, there was sufficient evidence of mass terror for any fair-minded observer to conclude that the self-image of the dictatorship was hardly an appropriate basis upon which to write history, still less to make judgements about the nature of Bolshevik rule. It also needs to be stressed that Arendt held a concept of totalitarian ideology that was not principally concerned with the ‘content’ of the ideology, but with its function within the totalitarian system of rule. Although ideologies are not unique to totalitarian regimes, they perform a very particular function.

Ideologies
Arendt defines ideologies as ‘isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise’ (ibid.: 468). Although these ‘isms’ can be traced to the worldviews and ideologies of the nineteenth century, they are not in themselves totalitarian. Still, by force of historical events and social trends, racism and communism had come to dominate the ideological landscape of twentieth century Europe. Arendt argues that neither ideology was any more totalitarian than the many non-starters, which either lacked an appreciable following or did not possess a sufficient degree of popular resonance. Nonetheless, all ideologies have totalitarian ‘elements’ and become totalitarian only insofar as they are mobilised by a totalitarian movement and transformed into instruments of totalitarian domination (ibid.: 470). In their totalitarian forms, racism and communism became political weapons and devices of rule. Hence, Nazi

… race ideology was no longer a matter of mere opinion or argument or even fanaticism, but constituted the actual living reality … The Nazis, as distinguished from other racists, did not so much believe in the truth of racism as desire to change the world into a race reality. (Arendt 1954a: 351; emphasis added)

Similarly, Stalin transformed Lenin’s dictatorship of a vanguard party into a terror regime targeting all social layers and remnants of classes that had survived the first decade of Bolshevik rule, therewith realising, ‘albeit in an unexpected form, the ideological socialist belief about dying classes’ (ibid.: 351). Seized by totalitarian movements as templates of a future perfect, ideological systems of belief are transformed into deductive principles of action. Whereas the axiomatic ‘idea’ underpinning these ideologies varies, in practice the ‘ideas’ of race or class perform the same organising and reductive function and are therefore virtually interchangeable. Of course historically the distinction between race- and class-thinking is of great relevance, determining, inter alia, the primary victims of the terror. Arendt acknowledges that Nazi ideology was historically unprecedented and perhaps also uniquely destructive insofar as it tended by its very nature to be genocidal. Stalin’s terror, although more complex and ideologically fraught than the Nazi regime of terror, proved to be no less destructive for those reasons.

Les Adler and Thomas Patterson long ago challenged Arendt for ‘avoiding’ what they term

… the important distinction between one system proclaiming a humanistic ideology and failing to live up to its ideal and the other living up to its antihumanistic and destructive ideology only too well. (Adler and Paterson 1970: 1049)

In other words, the authors wish to stress the supposed Marxist pedigree of Stalin’s ideology, an approach that has the no doubt unintended effect of impeaching Marx’s philosophy rather than demonstrating the humanist content, or even intent, of Stalin’s rather bloody path to enlightenment. Whereas these critics distinguish between two ostensibly unrelated systems of ideas, Arendt was more concerned to explain how it was that Stalin transformed Lenin’s one-party dictatorship into a totalitarian dictatorship, and why Stalin’s terror regime cannot be portrayed merely as a failure to live up to Bolshevik revolutionary ideals. In her view, the premise of all such argumentation – that Stalin somehow unleashed successive waves of terror in order to achieve humanist ideals – betrays an unwillingness to face up to the true nature of Stalin’s rule.

Others, such as Robert Tucker, charge Arendt with misreading the apparent close relation between Stalinism and the general category of ‘communist ideology’. Tucker acknowledges Arendt’s concept of totalitarian ideology and concedes Arendt’s view that the totalitarian dictator fulfils a largely functional role in the totalitarian regime, as the initiator and driving force behind the practice of totalitarian terror. Tucker nonetheless posits a category of the paranoid ‘personality type’ of the totalitarian dictator (Tucker 1965: 564), arguing that if Stalin’s terror was a function of his ‘paranoid personality’,

… then the explanations of totalitarian terror in terms of functional requisites of totalitarianism as a system or a general ideological fanaticism in the ruling elite would appear to have been basically erroneous – a conclusion which derives further strength from the fact that the ruling elite in post-Stalin Russia remains committed to the Communist ideology. (ibid.: 571)

The problem with this interpretation is twofold. Firstly, Tucker implies a degree of continuity between the ruling elites under Stalin and during the post-Stalin era that is contradicted by the evidence of the decimation of Stalin’s inner-circle immediately following his death. For Arendt, moreover, the ‘ruling elite’ in totalitarian dictatorships is not coterminous with the formal state or party hierarchies, but consists of the dictator’s ‘inner-circle’ whose control of the levers of power is dependent on the unpredictable calculations of the Leader, who presides over a ‘fluctuating hierarchy’ that keeps ‘the organisation in a state of fluidity’ (Arendt 1979: 368, 369). The pecking-order within this inner-circle, as well as of the movement more generally, is determined by the dictator. It follows that any change of leadership would potentially dramatically alter the nature of the regime itself.

Secondly, Tucker does not define ‘Communist ideology’; he merely argues that Stalin ‘wove’ his private vision of reality

… into the pre-existing Marxist-Leninist ideology during the show trials of 1936-1938, which for Stalin were a dramatization of his conspiracy view of Soviet and contemporary world history. The original party ideology was thus transformed according to Stalin’s own dictates into the highly ‘personalized’ new version of Soviet ideology. (Tucker 1965: 568)

In other words, Tucker displaces the functions of total terror and ideology onto the person of the dictator, who is after all the author of both. There is common ground here between Tucker and Arendt, but there is also a fundamental disagreement. Clearly any form of dictatorship is by definition highly ‘personalised’ and it is notoriously difficult to assess the impact on any given dictatorship of the personal motives and personality traits of the dictator. Tucker may well be right that ‘paranoia’ played an important role in both dictatorships. Still, we can no more think our way into Stalin’s mind than we can into Hitler’s. But we can examine the nature of their dictatorships and analyse the role played in both by formal state structures, ideology, terror, and so on. In other words, it would seem obvious that neither Hitler nor Stalin was ‘rational’, insofar as their political decisions were solely determined by their ideological preconceptions and ‘paranoid’ tendencies. Still, if ‘paranoia’ did play a key role in the mass crimes of their dictatorships, and even if it is a distinguishing criterion of totalitarian rule, the nature of a dictatorship is not simply an extension of the personality of the dictator.

Revolutionary and totalitarian dictatorship
It falls to Tucker to explain the relevance of his observation of the post-Stalin regime’s continued commitment to the ‘Communist ideology’, when he nonetheless adopts Arendt’s distinction between Lenin’s ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ and Stalin’s ‘totalitarian dictatorship’ (ibid.: 556). Tucker, moreover, draws a distinction between ‘dictatorial terror’ and ‘totalitarian terror’ (ibid.: 561) and in an earlier article makes the same case for Stalin’s organisational innovations, arguing that ‘what we carelessly call “the Soviet political system” is best seen and analysed as a historical succession of political systems [Leninist, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist] within a broadly continuous institutional framework’ (Tucker 1961b: 381; emphasis added). But if Stalin’s dictatorship was both organisationally and ideologically distinct from both antecedent and successor regimes, moreover introducing ‘totalitarian terror’, the ‘ruling elite’s’ ‘continued’ commitment to ‘Communist ideology’ could only be interpreted as a renewed commitment to Marxist-Leninism, purged of Stalin’s ‘personalised’ reworking of the ‘pre-existing’ doctrine and accompanied by the abandonment of his system of rule. To be clear on this point, it is not my intention here to refute Tucker’s view that we need to better understand the personality type of the totalitarian dictator, if such a thing is possible. Nevertheless, Tucker cannot elevate the personality of the dictator, Stalin, to a position of primacy, argue that Stalinist ideology and terror were distinctively totalitarian, and simultaneously claim that the process of detotalitarianization following Stalin’s death belies the continuity of the ruling elite’s Communist ideology – without drawing the implicit conclusion. Either Stalin’s personal rule was totalitarian, or it was not. Either post-Stalin Communist ideology was also Stalin’s ideology, or it was not. In other words, either totalitarian rule came to a (virtual) end with the dictator’s death, or it was never truly tied to the person of the dictator in the first place.[xv] Arendt consistently rejects the view that totalitarianism can be understood in terms merely of personalising the evil of the regime. This is particularly evident in her analysis of the novel organisational devices of totalitarian rule.[xvi] She nonetheless does insist upon the central role of the dictator in all totalitarian regimes, although she views Hitler and Stalin as a new breed of dictator. Moreover, she recognises the sheer force of will that drove these men along their chosen trajectories,[xvii] and her account does suggest that the regimes they created disintegrated upon their deaths. But we have only the Stalinist case as evidence of this, since Hitler’s death coincided with Nazi Germany’s total defeat and occupation.

If Arendt’s concept of totalitarian ideology is often misinterpreted, nonetheless the mainstream anti-Marxist camp was never quite reconciled to the view that the Stalinist dictatorship faithfully reflected the project of emancipation that Marx, especially in his more youthful writings, had envisaged. Still, both sides to the Cold War dispute exploited Stalin’s putative Marxist credentials for propaganda purposes. Western anti-Communist propaganda seized upon Stalin’s supposed faithful adherence to Marxist doctrine as evidence that Marxism is inherently terroristic. Western Marxists, and especially adherents of the so-called ‘New Left’ during the 1960s, clung to the notion of a historically determined transition to true democracy. This indefinitely-postponed future provided a foil for challenging any attempt to critique the actually existing practices in the Soviet Union, which in the case of the Stalinist period were more often than not simply denied, and in subsequent years subjected to tortuous and inconclusive historical and doctrinal debates. In that sense, writing in the late 1940s to early 1950s, Arendt was challenging an impregnable edifice of denial, itself a function of the circus going on in Washington at the time. Arendt rightly dismissed both sides as ideologically blinkered and intellectually dishonest, stressing not only that which was known about Stalin’s terror but also his relation to the Marxist-Leninist tradition, to which he laid claim but to which he also did extreme violence. Marxism was an alibi rather than a basis of Stalin’s political programme, and if he paid little more than lip service to the ideals of the Bolshevik revolutionary programme itself, there were few pre-war Western Marxists willing unambiguously and unconditionally to point this out, not least of all to themselves. Still, Arendt’s central point was that the Nazi and Stalinist systems of government were comparable, and that their ideologies, although clearly distinct, were important not for their presumed content, but instead for their narrow political function. This is a view echoed, for example, by Martin Broszat who similarly argues that the comparative analysis of the National Socialist and Stalinist systems of government is theoretically justified, despite important differences between their societies and ideologies (Institut 1980: 35).

Arendt challenges the thesis of a continuity between Marx’s thought and Stalin’s ideology, whilst nonetheless highlighting the totalitarian elements of Marxism-Leninism that formed the basis of Stalinism, without collapsing the former into the latter. This was bound to be controversial. The purpose of this essay has been to stress Arendt’s general approach rather than to provide an in-depth analysis of her controversial view that Stalin fundamentally transformed the system of government spawned by the Bolshevik Revolution. In the following section, I will analyse Arendt’s even more controversial contention that rather than their content, totalitarian ideologies are principally distinguished by their function in the establishment of a regime of total domination.

Read Part Two: http://rozenbergquarterly.com/?p=3115

Ideology and terror: The experiment in total domination
In chapter two of Hannah Arendt’s Response to the Crisis of her Time it was argued that Arendt’s typology of government rests on the twin criteria of organisational form and a corresponding ‘principle of action’. In the post-Origins essay On the Nature of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that Western political thought has customarily distinguished between ‘lawful’ and ‘lawless’, or ‘constitutional’ and ‘tyrannical’ forms of government (Arendt 1954a: 340). Throughout Occidental history, lawless forms of government, such as tyranny, have been regarded as perverted by definition. Hence, if

… the essence of government is defined as lawfulness, and if it is understood that laws are the stabilizing forces in the public affairs of men (as indeed it always has been since Plato invoked Zeus, the god of the boundaries, in his Laws), then the problem of movement of the body politic and the actions of its citizens arises. (Arendt 1979: 466-7)

‘Lawfulness’ as a corollary of constitutional forms of government is a negative criterion inasmuch as it prescribes the limits to but cannot explain the motive force of human actions: ‘the greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one should do’ (ibid.: 467). Arendt, accordingly, lays great store by Montesquieu’s discovery of the ‘principle of action’ ruling the actions of both government and governed: ‘virtue’ in a republic, ‘honour’ in monarchy, and ‘fear’ in tyrannical forms of government (Arendt 1954a: 330; Arendt 1979: 467-8).

In all non-totalitarian systems of government, therefore, the principle of action is a guide to individual actions, although fear in tyranny is ‘precisely despair over the impossibility of action’ since tyranny destroys the public realm of politics and is therefore anti-political by definition. Nevertheless, the state of ‘isolation’ and ‘impotence’ experienced by the individual in tyrannical forms of government springs from the destruction of the public realm of politics whereas the mobilisation of the ‘overwhelming, combined power of all others against his own’ (Arendt 1954a: 337) does not eliminate entirely a minimum of human contact in the non-political spheres of social intercourse and private life. Thus, if the fear-guided actions of the subject of tyrannical rule are bereft of the capacity to establish relations of power between individuals acting and speaking together in a public realm of politics, the ‘isolation’ of the political subject does not entail the destruction of his social and private relations (ibid.: 344). Therefore, in all non-totalitarian forms of government, the body politic is in constant motion within set boundaries of a stable political order, although tyranny destroys the public space of political action (Arendt 1979: 467).

Arendt argues that totalitarianism is distinguished from all historical forms of government, including tyranny, insofar as it has no use for any ‘principle of action taken from the realm of human action’, since the essence of its body politic is ‘motion implemented by terror’ (Arendt 1954a: 348; see 331-3). In other words, totalitarianism aims to eradicate entirely the human capacity to act as such (Arendt 1979: 467). For totalitarian rule targets the total life-world of its subjects, which in turn presupposes a world totally conquered by a single totalitarian movement.[i] Hence, only in

… a perfect totalitarian government, where all men have become ‘One Man’, where all action aims at the acceleration of the movement of nature or history, where every single act is the execution of a death sentence which Nature or History has already pronounced, that is, under conditions where terror can be completely relied upon to keep the movement in constant motion, no principle of action separate from its essence would be needed at all. (ibid.)

This important passage contains several key ideas that need to be carefully unpacked. Firstly, we encounter Arendt’s conception of society reduced to ‘One Man’ or a single, undifferentiated Mankind as a condition of a ‘perfect totalitarian government’. We may note here that totalitarianism thus conceived constitutes the very antithesis of the political in Arendt’s sense of men acting and speaking together in a public realm of politics. Secondly, Arendt contends that only in such a perfect totalitarian system would terror, which she views as the ‘essence’ of totalitarianism, suffice to sustain totalitarian rule. Hence, in all imperfect totalitarian dictatorships, terror in its dual function as the ‘essence of government and principle, not of action, but of motion’ (ibid.), is an insufficient condition of totalitarian rule. For, insofar as totalitarianism has not completely eliminated all forms of spontaneous human action, freedom, or the inherent human capacity to ‘make a new beginning’, exists as an ever-present potential within society (ibid.: 466).[ii] Totalitarian movements must therefore strive to eliminate this capacity for political action, and any form of spontaneous human relations. Hence:

What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behaviour of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology. (ibid.: 468)

However – and this is a crucial point – Arendt stresses that it is

… in the nature of ideological politics … that the real content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which originally had brought about the ‘idea’ (the struggle of classes as the law of history or the struggle of races as the law of nature), is devoured by the logic with which the ‘idea’ is carried out. (Arendt 1979: 472)

In other words, ‘the preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu’s principle of action is not the ideology itself – racism or dialectical materialism – but its inherent logicality’ (ibid.: 472). In Arendt’s view, the device of ‘logicality’, which underpins all ideological thought processes, draws its strength from a simple human fact; ‘it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves’ (ibid.: 473).

Arendt’s concept of totalitarian ideology is linked to her category of totalitarian ‘lawfulness’. She argues that totalitarian rule ‘explodes’ the opposition between lawful and lawless government, since although lawless in the conventional sense that it disregards even its own positive laws, unlike tyranny, it is ‘not arbitrary insofar as it obeys with strict logic and executes with precise compulsion the laws of History or Nature’ (Arendt 1954a: 339-40). This means, for one thing, that totalitarianism is not an exaggerated version of the arbitrary and self-interested rule of the tyrant and the laws of Nature or History are not the ‘immutable ius naturale’ or the ‘sempiternal customs and traditions of history’, from which positive laws governing the actions of men customarily derive their authority. In its totalitarian incarnation, ‘law’ no longer signifies the stabilising legal framework governing human actions, but instead transforms individuals into the living embodiments of the laws of movement, ‘either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels’ (ibid.: 341). Since ‘totalitarian government is only insofar as it is kept in constant motion’ (ibid.: 344), the comparatively stable positive legal framework guiding the actions of ruler and ruled within the finite territorial realm of the modern nation-state is antithetical to the requirements of a totalitarian regime. Individual subjects of totalitarian rule either surrender to the dynamic process of becoming, or they are consumed by it: ‘”guilty” is he who stands in the path of terror, that is, who willingly or unwillingly hinders the movement of Nature or History’ (ibid.: 342). The qualification is significant, since the automatism of the impersonal and dynamic forces of Nature or History enjoy complete primacy over the individual members of society, who either join the movement or are swept away by it.

Ideology’s function
Totalitarian lawfulness applies the laws of Nature or History ‘directly to the “species”, to mankind [and] if properly executed, are expected to produce as their end a single “Mankind”’ (ibid.: 340). Ideology’s function is to transform Nature and History ‘from the firm soil supporting human life and action into supra-gigantic forces whose movements race through humanity’ (ibid.: 341). This function, rather than the substance of the ideology, distinguishes totalitarian ideologies from their antecedents in the nineteenth century. As we have seen, in the first two parts of Origins Arendt foregrounds the phenomena of race-thinking and class-thinking, both of which were general trends in nineteenth century European thought and politics, whereas only Marxism could lay claim to a respectable philosophical lineage. Race-thinking and racism, which interpret history as a natural contest of races, springs from the ‘subterranean’ currents – that is, the gutter – of European political thought (Arendt 1953f: 375). Still, both resonated with a substantial body of popular opinion and sentiment since both doctrines derived their potency and persuasive power from actual historical trends. For ‘persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs’ (Arendt 1979: 159).

The transition to the twentieth century coincided with the ascendancy of racism and Marxism and their emergence as the dominant ideologies in inter-war Europe, a dominance that was a function of their coincidence with the century’s two most important elements of political experience; namely, ‘the struggle between the races for world domination, and the struggle between the classes for political power’. Racism and communism triumphed over competing ideologies both because they reflected dominant currents in society and politics and because they were seized upon as the official ideologies of the most powerful and successful totalitarian movements (ibid.: 470). Their totalitarian character, moreover, presupposed emptying racism and revolutionary socialism of their ‘utilitarian content, the interests of a class or nation’ (ibid.: 348), generating a precedence of form and function over content, of infallible prediction over interest and explanation, driving ‘ideological implications into extremes of logical consistency’ (ibid.: 471).[iii] In this way, totalitarian ideologies manufactured a total explanation of reality freed of inconsistencies, unhampered by mere facts, and independent of all experience.

For Hitler, Arendt tells us, this process was set in motion by a ‘supreme gift for “ice cold reasoning”’, for Stalin, by the ‘mercilessness of his dialectics’ (ibid.); for both bespeaking a determination to effect controlled changes in human nature as the primary impediment to total domination. Total domination, in turn, guided by totalitarian ideology and actualised by the application of terror, invariably results ‘in the same “law” of elimination of individuals for the sake of the process or progress of the species’ (Arendt 1954a: 341). Nevertheless, whereas the application of terror is initially aimed at eliminating opposition, total terror also serves the important function of ‘stabilising’ men to permit the unhindered movement of Nature or History, eliminating ‘individuals for the sake of the species’ and sacrificing ‘men for the sake of mankind’ (ibid.: 343). Having discovered the laws of motion of totalitarian ideologies – that is, having mastered the intricacies of totalitarian organisation –, the dictator eliminates all obstacles to the fulfilment of the objective laws of movement. Unlike the tyrant, who, as a ‘free agent’, imposes his arbitrary subjective will, the totalitarian ruler acts in accordance with the logic inherent in the idea, freely submitting to his function as

… the executioner of laws higher than himself. The Hegelian definition of Freedom as insight into and conforming to ‘necessity’ has here found a new and terrifying realisation. For the imitation or interpretation of these laws, the totalitarian ruler feels that only one man is required and that all other persons, all other minds as well as wills, are strictly superfluous. (Arendt 1954a: 346)

In the popular attraction of totalitarian ideologies, which derives from their all-encompassing explanation of life and the world, secures the leader in his role as ‘the functionary of the masses he leads’ (Arendt 1979: 325). Once seized upon by totalitarian movements, notions of a classless society or a master race presuppose ‘dying classes’ and ‘unfit races’. The ‘monstrous logicality’ inherent in such ideological constructs dictates that whosoever accepts their initial premise but does not draw the logical conclusion of exterminating ‘class enemies’ or ‘inferior races’, is ‘plainly either stupid or a coward’ (ibid.: 471, 472). Still, without the Leader’s genuine gift for mobilising the masses and implementing the novel methods of totalitarian organisation, ideological intent could not be translated into historical reality. Thus, despite the fact that neither Hitler nor Stalin added anything of substance to the ideologies which they adopted, it is they who discovered the principle of logical process which ‘like a mighty tentacle seizes you on all sides as in a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter defeat’ (Stalin in ibid.: 472).

If Arendt regards neither class-thinking nor race-thinking as inherently totalitarian, this is because any ideology or system of ideas, insofar as it is articulated as a definite theoretical or political doctrine or formulated as a party program, is incompatible with totalitarianism. For doctrines and programs, like positive laws, set limits, establish boundaries, and introduce stability (ibid.: 159, 324, 325). Nevertheless, all ideologies have totalitarian ‘elements’, for every ideology adopts an ‘axiomatically accepted premise’ that forms the basis of a logically or dialectically constructed argument, whose absolute consistency is a function of its complete emancipation from all observable facts, contrary evidence or life experience (ibid.: 470, 471). This is a crucial aspect of Arendt’s argument, for she stresses that the ‘arrogant emancipation from reality and experience’ points to the nexus between ideology and terror characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, and accounting for their unprecedented destructive power. The key to unlocking this power resides in the totalitarian organisation of society. Freed of the customary standards of lawful action and verifiable truth claims, totalitarian movements unleash terror in accordance with the imperatives of the ideological reconfiguration of society. All members of society are now the potential targets of a regime of terror that functions independently of both the interests of society and its members (Arendt 1954a: 350).

Ideology and terror

The link thus established between ideology and terror, although only realised by totalitarian organisation, is nonetheless implicit in all forms of ideology, for ideology ‘is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea’ and it treats the course of history in all its contingency and complexity as a function of the ‘logical exposition of its “idea”’.[iv] The strict logicality with which an ideological argument is extrapolated from an axiological premise is termed ‘totalitarian lawfulness’ by Arendt. Thus the ‘ideas’ of race and class ‘never form the subject matter of the ideologies and the suffix –logy never indicates simply a body of “scientific” statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change’ (Arendt 1979: 469) – the ‘idea’, that is, as instrumental in calculating the course of events. Ideology in this sense is a strictly closed system of thought since the vagaries and contingencies of history are presumed to be subject to an overarching, ‘consistent movement’ of history which can explain all contradictions and resolve all difficulties ‘in the manner of mere argumentation’ (ibid.: 470).

All ideologies therefore appeal to a putative ‘scientificality’ that purports to reveal the motor of history with the same precision and logical consistency to be found in the natural sciences. Arendt stresses, however, that the scientificality of ideological thinking is distinct from ‘“scientism” in politics [that] still presupposes that human welfare is its object, a concept that is utterly alien to totalitarianism’. Thus ‘modern utilitarianism’, whether socialist or positivist, is imbued with the interests of class or nation (ibid.: 347) and strives to either transform the outside world or bring about a ‘revolutionizing transmutation of society’. The evaluation of interest as an omnipresent force in history, together with the assumption that power is subject to discoverable objective laws, collectively constitute the core of utilitarian doctrines. Totalitarian ideologies, on the other hand, aim to transform human nature itself (ibid.: 458, also 440), since the human condition of plurality is the greatest obstacle standing in the way of the realisation of an ideologically consistent universe. For a view of history as a logical and consistent process of becoming, set in motion by a movement which is the expression of the ‘idea’ and which is unaffected by external forces, dispenses with the ‘freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think’ embracing, instead, the ‘straight jacket of logic’ (ibid.: 470). Thus, the ‘logicality of ideological thinking’ is both a template of an imagined society as well as the motor of a regime of terror, which is both means and end. Once seized upon by a totalitarian government, ideologies form the basis of all political action, not only guiding the actions of the government but also rendering these actions ‘tolerable to the ruled population’ (Arendt 1954a: 349). In this sense, ideology facilitates the extraction of ‘consent’ from the members of society whose standards of judgement are wholly informed by a closed system of thought and whose actions, or inaction, are judged solely by the requirements of the ‘objective laws of motion’.

The transformation of ideologies into fully fledged totalitarian ideologies is thus a crucial prerequisite of totalitarian rule. Anti-Semitism, for example, only becomes ideological in Arendt’s sense once it presumes to explain ‘the whole course of history as being secretly manoeuvred by the Jews’, rather than merely expressing a hatred of Jews. Similarly, socialism qua ideology ‘pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away’. By stripping away contingency and human agency as determinants of history, totalitarian ideologies point to irresistible forces that allegedly disclose the true course of events, past and future, ‘without further concurrence with actual experience’ (Arendt1954a: 349). Totalitarianism’s ‘supersense’ construes all factuality as fabricated, therewith eliminating the ground for distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Guided by ideology and goaded by terror, human beings lose their innately human capacity for spontaneity and action, which is to say their capacity for political discourse and the distinctly human capacity for creative and unconstrained thought (ibid.: 350).

Arendt argues that totalitarian rulers employ a deceptively simple device for transforming ideologies into coercive instruments: ‘they take them dead seriously’ (Arendt 1979: 471; Arendt 1954a: 350). This statement might seem self-evident, even trite. Yet Arendt means by this two very important points. Firstly, she contends that neither Hitler nor Stalin contributed anything of substance to racism and socialism respectively. Their importance as ideologists stems from their understanding the political utility of eliminating ideological complexity, by means of which they transform ideologies into ‘political weapons’. Conversely, the Leader’s image of ‘infallibility’, as propagated by the party, hinges on his pretence at being the mere agent of the ideological laws of Nature or History. The Leader reinforces this image by means of a simple but effective ruse, for it is customary for the Leader to reverse the relation of cause and effect by proclaiming political intent in the guise of a ‘prophecy’. Thus, for example, when Hitler in 1939 ‘prophesied’ that in the event of another world war the Jews of Europe would be ‘annihilated’, he was in fact announcing that there would be another world war and that the Jews would be annihilated. Thus, political intent concealed as ‘“prophecy” becomes a retrospective alibi’ (Arendt 1979: 349): the realisation of this ‘prophecy’ has the effect of reinforcing the Leader’s image of infallibility.[v] Similarly, when in 1930 Stalin identified ‘dying classes’ as the central threat to the consolidation of Bolshevik power, he was in fact merely identifying the targets of the coming purges. From this point of view the content of the ideology and its substance – the prophecies of ‘dying classes’ and ‘unfit races’ – are indeed of consequence insofar as they reveal the Leader’s political intentions by identifying the groups to be targeted by the regime’s terror. The ‘language of prophetic scientificality’ (ibid.: 350) also answers to the needs of disoriented and displaced masses, whose insecurity renders them susceptible to all-encompassing explanations of life and the world and whose membership of mass political movements releases them from the vagaries of an indeterminate fate (ibid.: 352, 368, 381).

Propaganda
Arendt wishes us to see that the totalitarian Leader’s ideological fervour has nothing to do with the fidelity of ideological discourse and everything to do with eliminating ideological complexity, which is antithetical to the organisational needs of the movement. Ideological complexity is also an obstacle to the effectiveness of propaganda, which is distinct from ideology and serves as a recruiting device (ibid.: 343). Propaganda creates conditions in which both the movement and society can be reordered into what Hitler termed a ‘living organisation’ (ibid.: 361). In the pre-power phase, propaganda holds the ‘real world’ at bay, whose complexity and contingency continuously threatens the integrity of the movement and the internal consistency of its ideological world-view. Propaganda thus shelters the movement qua proto-totalitarian society from a worldly reality (ibid.: 366), attracting masses already predisposed to discounting the evidence of their senses and who are thus susceptible to the ‘propaganda effect of infallibility’ (ibid.: 349). Once the movement has seized power, this ‘effect’ is amplified by the totalitarian reorganisation of society, at which point ideology ceases to be a matter of mere opinion or ‘debatable theory’ (ibid.: 362). Instead, the totalitarian movement organises the members of society into a race or class reality presided over by the ‘never-resting, dynamic will’ of the Leader, which is the ‘supreme law in all totalitarian regimes’ (ibid.: 365).

Propaganda is thus principally aimed at the non-totalitarian world. Its distinctively totalitarian character is expressed ‘much more frighteningly in the organisation of its followers than in the physical liquidation of its opponents’ (ibid.: 364). Propaganda thus serves the organisational interests of the movement while ideology facilitates the exercise of terror, which coincides with the reorganisation of society itself. Ideology and terror are thus the instruments of a revolutionary transformation of society, since ideology identifies the victims of terror, whereas terror realises the claim ‘that everything outside the movement is “dying”’ (ibid.: 381). Fabrication rather than followers is the key to the success of totalitarian rule. Indeed, a community of ‘believers’ implies an element of fidelity that hinders the Leader’s freedom of action. What is required is a complete absence of the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality (ibid.: 385). Henceforth, factuality and reality become a matter of mere opinion, whereas the truth of lies is affirmed by the actualisation of ideological goals. Hence, not ‘the passing successes of demagogy win the masses, but the visible reality and power of a “living organization”’ (ibid.: 361).[vi] ‘Prophecy’ realised is its own best guarantee.

Arendt’s distinction between ideologies of the nineteenth century and the totalitarian ideologies of the inter-war period remains one of the most controversial aspects of her theory of totalitarianism. Critics routinely deride Arendt’s alleged ‘equation’ of racism and communism, whereas I have argued that the distinct contents of these ideologies is both acknowledged by Arendt and irrelevant to her focus on the functions that they fulfil ‘in the apparatus of totalitarian domination’ (Arendt 1979: 470). The persistence of this criticism reflects the inability of her critics to break out of a deterministic frame of reference, which always already accounts for novelty as the ‘“product” of antecedent causes’ (Kateb 1984: 56).

Bernard Crick argues that descriptions of the formation of ideologies, the disintegration of the old systems, and ‘what then happens’ do not establish ‘inevitable connections between them’ (Crick 1979: 38). Many ideologies and political sects arising in the nineteenth century go unmentioned by Arendt. And if Arendt ‘gives all too few glimpses of the nonstarters and the ideologies of the salon and the gutter that got nowhere’, she is nonetheless, and

… quite properly, writing history backward: she selects what is relevant to understanding the mentality of the Nazis and of the Communists under Stalin, and she is not writing a general account of nineteenth-century extreme political sects. (Crick 2001: 99)

In response to a comment by Eric Voegelin in his 1953 review of Origins, Arendt provided a clear and rare statement of her method. Voegelin had argued that the true division in the crisis of contemporary (post-war) politics is not between liberals and totalitarians but between the ‘religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side, and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side’ (Voegelin in Isaac 1992: 71). Arendt’s A Reply to Eric Voegelin is unambiguous: ‘Professor Voegelin seems to think that totalitarianism is only the other side of liberalism, positivism and pragmatism. But … liberals are clearly not totalitarians’ (Arendt 1953c: 405). Arendt goes on to suggest that Voegelin’s misreading is rooted in their different approaches. Where she proceeds from ‘facts and events’, Voegelin is guided by ‘intellectual affinities and influences’, a distinction perhaps blurred by Arendt’s real interest in philosophical implications and shifts in spiritual self-interpretation. Nonetheless, Arendt formulates her general approach to the phenomenon of totalitarianism in quite distinct terms as follows:

But this certainly does not mean that I described ‘a gradual revelation of the essence of totalitarianism from its inchoate forms in the eighteenth century to the fully developed’, because this essence, in my opinion, did not exist before it had come into being. I therefore talk only of ‘elements’, which eventually crystallize into totalitarianism, some of which are traceable to the eighteenth century, some perhaps even farther back … Under no circumstances would I call any of them totalitarian. (Arendt 1953c: 405-06)

Arendt views totalitarianism as sui generis. To her mind, the totalitarian phenomenon derives its great force from the ‘ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition’ (Arendt 1979: 457) and ‘the event of totalitarian domination itself’ (Arendt 1953c: 405). It does not arise on the basis of a substantive ideological content nor is ‘total domination’ a variation of historical forms of tyranny and despotism.[vii]

The complexity of this point stems from Arendt’s view of totalitarian ideologies as ‘instruments of explanation’ (Arendt 1979: 469) whose logical deduction of the movement of history from a single premise does away with the need for a guiding principle of behaviour. Totalitarian ideologies are not a system of belief guiding the actions of their adherents but an instrument exploited by totalitarian movements in their drive to mobilise the masses. Klemperer portrays National Socialism in this sense as a manifestation of the ‘weariness of a generation. It wants to be free of the necessity of leading its own life’ (Klemperer 2000: 158). By answering to this need, totalitarian movements attract a following that constitutes the nucleus of a nation-wide reorganisation of society into three sub-categories of humanity, presided over by the leader – the elite formations, party members, and rank and file sympathisers. Whereas the elite formations typically evince a fanatical adherence to ideology, the mass following is characterised by malleability and gullibility (Arendt 1979: 367, 382-4). Arendt argues that the totalitarian system of rule presupposes a mass following disabused of ideals, convictions and mere opinions, since these are obstacles to the laws of motion governing the movement of history. For this reason, totalitarian education has never sought to instil convictions in the masses, but to eliminate the capacity to form any (ibid.: 468). It is also for this reason that Arendt stresses the novel organisational devices binding the various strata of the movement directly to its leader, and the role of terror as the substitute for a principle of action. The party membership is not expected to put much faith in the integrity of official public statements. Knowledge within the party of Hitler’s serial lies inspired trust in his leadership for the simple reason that Hitler repeatedly demonstrated his ability to manipulate his domestic audience and outwit his foreign adversaries. Without ‘the organizational division of the movement into elite formations, membership, and sympathizers, the lies of the Leader would not work’ (ibid.: 383).

The novel form of totalitarian organisation – it’s peculiar ‘shapelessness’ – derives from an ingenious and rather simple device that results in an immense administrative and structural complexity. Whereas the division between the leader, elite formations and masses is suggestive of authoritarian state structures, political authority in totalitarian regimes radiates outwards unmediated from the leader to the various levels of institutional and party structures. Thus, although Hitler delegated enormous powers to key ministers and party and state functionaries, these powers were contained within strictly defined areas of competence and were conditional upon Hitler’s continued favour. Moreover, whereas authoritarian regimes typically establish discrete institutional spheres of clearly circumscribed sovereign state authority, totalitarian rule is characterised by a multiplication of overlapping and conflicting party and state institutions that inhibit the formation of a stable, hierarchical chain of command. The concentration of power in Hitler’s Chancellery was therefore a function of Hitler’s sole authority to decide the outcome of conflict within and between competing party and state institutions, rather than of a centralisation of hierarchically ordered political power.

Power of command
Theoretically, this means that totalitarian regimes are resistant to conventional analytical frameworks, for al of these to some extent presuppose stabilising hierarchical structures of authority typical of military dictatorships, whose ‘absolute power of command from the top down and absolute obedience from the bottom up’ define these regimes as non-totalitarian:

A hierarchically organized chain of command means that the commander’s power is dependent on the whole hierarchic system in which he operates. Every hierarchy, no matter how authoritarian in its direction, and every chain of command, no matter how arbitrary or dictatorial the content of its orders, tends to stabilize and would have restricted the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement. In the language of the Nazis, the never-resting, dynamic ‘will of the Führer’ – and not his orders, a phrase that might imply a fixed and circumscribed authority – becomes the ‘supreme law’ in a totalitarian state. (Arendt 1979: 364-5; see also Schmitt 1947: 431)

The distinction between totalitarianism and tyranny or military dictatorship tells us something of the radical novelty of the former. Arendt wishes us to see that totalitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with the modern Western state, in any of its different forms. For all state forms are distinguished by their hierarchical structure, which rests on a principle of authority that simultaneously stabilises institutions and informs the actions of its members. In other words, the subjects of all non-totalitarian states are guided by a ‘principle of action’ that in one form or the other establishes limits. Even the fear-guided actions of the subjects of tyranny possess an element of calculability and predictability, whereas totalitarian regimes eliminate all immutable standards and predictable limits. A regime of terror that prepares its subjects equally for the role of victim and of executioner cannot permit the stabilisation of political relations, nor can it afford any element of predictability, since in either case terror would cease to be total. For this reason, the Leader’s function is indispensable, since it

... is only from the position in which the totalitarian movement, thanks to its unique organization, places the leader – only from his functional importance for the movement – that the leader principle develops its totalitarian character. (Arendt 1979: 365; see also Schmitt 1947: 435)[viii].

Once the movement has seized power, the ‘absolute primacy of the movement’ over both state and nation is complemented by the unchallenged power of the Leader over the movement who, unlike the tyrant, discards ‘all limited and local interests – economic, national, human, military – in favour of a purely fictitious reality in some indefinite distant future’ (Arendt 1979: 412). To sustain both the dynamism and primacy of the movement, moreover, the Leader must ensure organisational ‘fluidity’, which is by definition antithetical to structure and stability (ibid.: 368).

All authoritarian regimes, whether or not they are dictatorships, necessarily imply hierarchy, stability, and some limitation of absolute power, since the principle of ‘law as command’ establishes relations of authority that in some form or other limit the actions of the government (ibid.: 405; see also Schmitt 1947: 437). Conversely, totalitarian regimes imply fluidity, absence of a clear chain of command, and a nihilistic principle of totalitarian ‘lawfulness’ that inhibits the stabilisation of any law, any institution, and any way of life. The totalitarian leader, moreover, is the only member of society who is not bound by his own decrees and edicts, or by legality of any kind. For this reason, Arendt argues that totalitarian societies can have no genuine state form, since the institution of the state is by definition a reified, legally bounded and finite entity. The state, moreover, serves to establish a distance between the ruling elite and the rest of the population. Totalitarianism collapses all distance, introducing a total identity between leader and masses that is actualised in its most concentrated form in the practice of organised acclamation.

Given the ideological and organisational imperatives of the regime, ‘those who aspire to total domination must liquidate all spontaneity, such as mere existence of individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most private forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seem’ (Arendt 1979: 456). Conviction and even mere opinion are manifestations of the capacity for critical thought and spontaneous action. The greatest threat to totalitarian rule, and the main target of total terror, is human spontaneity or ‘man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events’ (ibid.: 455). Total obedience, then, springs not from a conventional authoritarian notion of obedience but derives from the totally isolated and lonely subject’s ‘sense of having a place in this world only from [one’s] belonging to a movement’ (ibid.: 324). ‘Total loyalty’ – the psychological basis for total domination – can only be expected from completely isolated human beings and is ‘only possible when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise’ (ibid.). In this regard Hitler certainly enjoyed a decided advantage over Stalin who inherited the Bolshevik party program, a far more ‘troublesome burden than the 25 points of an amateur [Nazi] economist’ (ibid.). In this sense, Arendt regards the New Economic Policy (NEP) initiated by Lenin as an ‘obvious alternative[s] to Stalin’s seizure of power and transformation of the one-party dictatorship into total domination’ (Arendt 1967: xv-xvi, also vii, xi, xii, xiii, xv, xix, 390f). This has broader implications for Arendt’s interpretation of Marxist doctrine itself, which even in its Leninist guise is acknowledged as an obstruction to Stalin’s totalitarian ambitions. In this view,

… the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. (Arendt,1979: 474)

Arendt’s description of the reactive totalitarian subject establishes a basis for her view that both Marxism and Social Darwinism had to be subjected to ‘drastic oversimplification’ (Stanley 1994: 23) before they could be exploited for totalitarian purposes. Only in totalitarian regimes does ideology effect a total rupture between reality and fiction by transforming reality through the actions of the subjects, who are the carriers of the ‘idea’ as well as the vehicle for its realisation.

Arendt’s view that twentieth century totalitarian ideologies are irreducible to their nineteenth century antecedents also goes to the heart of the controversy about her novelty thesis – her view, that is, that mid-century totalitarian regimes were both organisationally and ideologically unprecedented. This view is more aggressively contested in regard to the Stalinist regime. Andrew Arato is highly critical of Arendt’s interpretation of Lenin’s revolutionary one-party dictatorship, rejecting her view of it as authoritarian or ‘pre-totalitarian’. While he agrees that there were options for non-totalitarian development at the point of Lenin’s death, he argues that Lenin’s political organisation had unmistakable totalitarian elements (Arato 2002: 474-9), a claim that Arendt does not dispute. Contrary to Arato’s view, Arendt does not gloss over those tendencies and policy measures in Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship that presaged Stalin’s ‘Second Revolution’ of 1929. Nonetheless, she views Lenin’s NEP as a rational policy framework alternative to Stalin’s revolution ‘from above’ (Arendt 1979: xxxii, 319). Arato contests this, arguing that the NEP was both a necessary and a temporary intervention. Still, what interests Arendt is that Lenin was willing at all to place practical considerations above ideological commitments, when these seemed justified by circumstances. Whatever the merit of Arendt’s general analysis of Lenin’s dictatorship, her central point is that Lenin was not averse to the utility of rational calculation within the broader context of Bolshevik ideology. Arato himself concedes that there ‘were options for nontotalitarian developments at the moment of Lenin’s death’ (Arato,2002: 476), and he adjudges Bukharin’s strategy of an indefinite extension of the NEP as the basis of a real alternative to totalitarianism.

Conversely, Arendt’s contention that Lenin favoured inner-party democracy, albeit restricted to the working class, is problematic to say the least, for it was Lenin, after all, who disbanded the elected constituent assembly and combated pluralistic tendencies within the party.

Statesmanship
Nevertheless, Arato strains the spirit of Arendt’s analysis to match his reservations. Arendt, we are told, assures ‘us that the relevant actions were those of the great practical statesman (that is, a “Great Dictator”?) and not the Marxist ideologue’ (Arato 2002: 475). What Arendt actually argues is that ‘in these purely practical political matters Lenin followed his great instincts for statesmanship rather than his Marxist convictions’ (Arendt 1979: 319). Arendt does not equate statesmanship with dictatorship but points to Lenin’s undeniable leadership skills, nonetheless conceding that these were constantly being challenged by his dogmatic Marxist convictions. Arendt variously overstates and oversimplifies the content of Lenin’s political decisions, but she hardly endorses either Lenin’s dictatorship or his dictatorial tendencies, nor is she mistaken in her view that Lenin made important concessions to practical politics. These concessions may be of questionable historical significance, but then Arendt’s objective is to identify the totalitarian elements of the Leninist dictatorship; she was not engaged in writing a history of the revolution.

Arendt distinguishes between the Bolshevik movement, which in her view had definite totalitarian characteristics, and Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship, which did not constitute ‘full totalitarian rule’ in her sense (ibid.: 318). The distinction might seem trite taken out of context, but then it is Arato who concedes that Arendt ‘is surprisingly aware of the variety of autocratic forms of rule’ (Arato 2002: 473), and approvingly cites her postulation of ‘a post-totalitarian dictatorship in the Soviet Union’ (ibid.: 474) following Stalin’s death in 1953. Arato is willing to accept Arendt’s notion of ‘detotalitarianisation’ but unwilling to countenance the possibility of a Leninist pre-totalitarian dictatorship. His reasoning is that

… the ‘conspiratorial party within the party’ to which Arendt ascribes the victory of Stalin, was in fact the party that Lenin invented and institutionalised after 1917 as the all-powerful agent of dictatorship. (ibid.: 477)

Yet surely Arato cannot be suggesting that the Soviet Communist Party of 1917, 1924, 1929 and 1938 were one and the same institution? Of course it was always ‘the all-powerful agent of dictatorship’, but of what kind of dictatorship? If Stalin simply inherited a ready-made totalitarian regime, what then possessed him to purge and exterminate practically the entire Bolshevik elite?[ix]  Moreover, it is entirely wrong to suggest that Arendt apparently thought there were ‘totalitarian elements in Marx, but not Lenin’ (ibid.: 499n). Arendt certainly identified totalitarian ‘elements’ in Marx’s thinking, and Lenin was nothing if not Marxist, a fact accepted as axiomatic by Arendt. What she challenges is the assumption of a direct line of affinity between Lenin’s revolutionary thought and Stalin’s perversion of even his own ideas:

The fact that the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatsoever for political behaviour – that, on the contrary, one could follow the party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced the night before – naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the same concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what one was doing, that Himmler’s ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressed: ‘My honour is my loyalty’. (Arendt 1979: 324)

In short, Arendt stresses Stalin’s instrumentalist totalitarian logic that had as little to do with Marxism as Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft had to do with brotherly love.

Allusions to Social Darwinism as a precursor of Nazism can be quite as misleading as portraying Stalin as an authentic Marxist-Leninist, although in one important sense – man as the accidental product of natural development – Darwinism prefigures the Nazi penchant for irresistible natural laws. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, however, is in principle a theory of chaos, of chance. It describes a natural process characterised by an overwhelming tendency to fail; a becoming that is as much a product of that failure as it is of opportunity. One could liken the totalitarian ideologies themselves to the chance ‘successes’ of nature, emerging from a melange of genetic variants to become fully formed entities dominating the intellectual landscape of history, as have many species dominated their natural environments. Opportunity, genetic predisposition, circumstance; together these produce a chance crystallisation of a new political reality that however forever holds within itself the potential of decline and catastrophe. The allusion to the catastrophic events of nature that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs, throwing open the field of opportunity for other species to develop, is analogous of the historical catastrophe preceding the totalitarian movements. Indeed, it would not be stretching the bounds of credulity to portray the First World War as the historical equivalent of an asteroid striking earth, signalling the extinction of nineteenth century Europe and casting a pall over the familiar social and intellectual currents of European culture. Out of this disaster certain ideologies rose to prominence, but not without the catalyst of human agency. Human agency is thus also central to the historical process, and the Bolshevik Revolution is only the most notable and apparent instance of such agency in the twentieth century. The Darwinist metaphor might therefore elucidate Arendt’s interpretation of the constellation of ideologies vying for dominance during the late nineteenth century in historical circumstances that were as yet unfavourable to a final outcome. Bolshevism was already a fully formed contender prior to the First World War, whereas the elements of National Socialist ideology were condensed in the aftermath of Europe’s orgy of violence.

Arendt does not indulge in speculation about whether or not the Bolshevik revolution was foredoomed, given the impact of war, the violence of the revolution, and the brutal civil war that followed. But she does argue that the revolution could have taken a different course (see e.g. ibid.: 319). Similarly, whilst acknowledging the odds against a successful republican experiment in Weimar Germany, Arendt argues that National Socialism need not have triumphed in 1933. Nonetheless, once these movements had emerged victorious, the ground for autonomous human agency was eliminated by ‘stabilising’ men ‘in order to prevent any unforeseen, free, or spontaneous acts that might hinder freely racing terror’ (Arendt 1954a: 342). Law, understood as positive laws stabilising and delimiting a public-political realm of spontaneous human action governed by predictable moral, ethical, and legal standards, was now viewed as an obstacle to totalitarian ‘lawfulness’. The ‘law of movement itself, Nature or History, singles out the foes of mankind and no free action of mere men is permitted to interfere with it. Guilt and innocence become meaningless categories; ‘“guilty” is he who stands in the path of terror’ (ibid.). Indeed, there have been no instances of the enduring free action of men in the modern era outside of a public political realm governed by positive laws and guaranteed by the institutions of a sovereign territorial state. With all its impersonal power structures, the state was a final hurdle to be overcome en route to totalitarian rule.

Civil society
I have already drawn the reader’s attention to Arendt’s analysis of the novel strategy of the inter-war totalitarian movements, which by posing an extra-constitutional and extra-legal challenge to sovereign state authority prised open the most vulnerable aspect of the bourgeoisie’s formidable armour. The perceptiveness of Arendt’s analysis of the inter-war period is nothing short of prescient, once she turns this insight into an explanation of the vulnerability, in turn, of post-totalitarian dictatorships to a resurgent ‘civil society’. Although Arendt never uses the latter term, she clearly perceives the vulnerability of the post-Stalin dictatorships to the inverse strategy of undermining dictatorial authority by way of the popular reassertion of autonomous civic action, which constitutes the discursive basis of a reconstituted public realm. Whereas once the totalitarian movements had undermined the state by mobilising and organising mass social movements, the reified remnants of once dynamic totalitarian regimes are vulnerable to eruptions of spontaneous political action. Arendt, to be sure, regarded such political action as virtually impossible in full-blown totalitarian dictatorships. However, once a totalitarian regime undergoes a process of ‘stabilisation’, such as occurred in the post-Stalin era, the ground or ‘space’ for a reconstituted public realm re-emerges. All true totalitarian dictators guard against this development. Conversely, authoritarian dictators preside over institutionalised regimes of hierarchical power structures, which are by their very nature vulnerable to ‘extra-authoritarian’, popular interventions such as we witnessed in Poland in the early 1980s and throughout Eastern Europe in 1989. Post-totalitarian dictatorships, deprived of their former dynamism, can only react to concerted political challenges.

There was nonetheless an important difference between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that should be noted here. For whereas the pre-Nazi bourgeois nation-state was re-established in the wake of Hitler’s defeat, pre-Soviet Russia had never made the transition to bourgeois rule; that is, ‘the Russian despotism never developed into a rational state in the Western sense but remained fluid, anarchic, and unorganized’ (Arendt 1979: 247). Hence, the longevity of post-totalitarian (i.e. post-Stalin) Soviet rule owed as much to the absence of any alternative tradition of state power as it did to the hegemony of the Communist Party. Germany reverted to its pre-Nazi statism with relative ease whereas

… in Russia the change was not back to anything we would call normal but a return to despotism; and here we should not forget that a change from total domination with its millions of entirely innocent victims to a tyrannical regime which persecutes only its opposition can perhaps best be understood as something which is normal in the framework of Russian history. (Arendt 1975: 265-6)

The revolutionary upheavals of inter-war Europe were characterised by a wholly new brand of voluntarism and leadership that culminated in the formation of a range of autocratic and dictatorial regimes identified with the person of the dictator. In Hitler’s case, as Joachim Fest observed in 1973, what happened is ‘inconceivable without him, in every respect and in every detail. Any definition of National Socialism (or the system of government based upon it) that omits the name of Hitler misses the heart of the matter’ (Fest 1973: 19). This view is echoed by Raymond Aron, who argues that what happened in Germany is incomprehensible if we ‘omit the personal equation of the Führer and his combination of genius and paranoia’ (Aron 1980: 39). No doubt the same is true of Stalin, although as we shall see, historians are profoundly divided on this question. Whether we focus on the 1930s, Hitler’s glory years and Stalin’s nightmare of terror, or the war years during which Hitler’s mania of destruction was halted by wave upon wave of Soviet canon fodder, the personal imprint of the two dictators is unmistakable. But to say so merely elucidates a single dimension of a more complex reality. For equally important is the organisational dimension of the totalitarian system of rule that embraces a community of men who have become ‘equally superfluous’ (Arendt 1979: 457) and an ideological regime of terror that aims totally to eliminate the web of human relations.

The same case can be made for Stalin and in a somewhat qualified sense also for Mussolini. And indeed the case needs to be made. For to receive these historical figures as somehow preordained and hence irresistible entails surrendering to their logic, a fatalistic mind-set quite prevalent amongst exiled intellectuals of the inter-war years. Bertolt Brecht, for example, bitterly scorned Hitler’s barbaric regime, yet went to extraordinary lengths to justify in his own mind what was happening in Stalin’s utopia. Martin Esslin notes that in a man of Brecht’s high intelligence, this exercise in rationalisation amounted to ‘a kind of mental suicide, a sacrificium intellectus; and his letters show that he was only too well aware of it’ (Esslin 1982: 13). Conversely, the personality type of Hitler ‘teaches us something which, until his appearance, was unknown to history on this level: that utter individual nullity or mediocrity may be combined in one man with exceptional political virtuosity’ (Fest 1973: 20). Hitler played the political field with unparalleled skill, alone deciding on the nature and duration of tactical alliances, his thought and actions in this regard relatively free of preconceptions, at least during the pre-war period. In short, ‘he was no-one’s tool’. Still, Fest’s view that Hitler ‘coolly subordinated everything – people, ideas, forces, opponents, principles – to the goal that was the obsession of his life: the primitive accumulation of personal power’ (ibid.), seriously underplays the role of ideology in Hitler’s political universe. Hitler undoubtedly relished power, and certainly had no use for the trappings and amusements that preoccupied many of his satraps. Stalin, by contrast, could count on and exploit an existing system of power accumulation whilst contending with far greater forces of resistance, and far more difficult and unstable circumstances. ‘Class-thinking’ was nonetheless an altogether more respectable preoccup­ation of both the European masses and the intelligentsia than ‘race-thinking’ ever was. Hence, what Stalin lacked in the way of a socially cohesive and highly organised system of consensual complicity, he was able to make up for by ideological fiat and unfettered domestic terror. Yet Stalin, too, had to make a transition, transforming Marxist-Leninist doctrine into a deductive principle of action underpinning his totalitarian system of government.

The complex interplay of personal qualities and historical circumstances that determined the outcome of the revolutions-from-above carried out by Hitler and Stalin will be examined in greater detail in chapter five. In this section I have stressed the impact of World War One and revolution, which generated what Zeev Sternhell describes as a ‘break-away’; cataclysmic events ‘so disruptive as to take on the dimensions of a crisis in civilization itself’ (Sternhell 1979: 333). Pre-war ‘mob’ elements or militant residues of decaying classes – ‘the refuse of all classes’ (Arendt 1979: 155) – deprived of political representation and scornful of a society from which they were excluded, already dominated the political landscape of many European societies prior to the Great War (ibid.: 107, 108). More controversially, Arendt distinguishes between these mob elements, borne of nineteenth century street politics and the social dislocations produced by industrialisation, and twentieth century ‘masses’ springing from a disintegrating class society (ibid.: 326). With both common interest and ‘specific class articulateness’ (ibid.: 311) rendered ineffective as a basis for party or class political action, Continental Europe’s pre-war bourgeois hegemony, and its mood of generalised complacency, gave way to ‘anarchic despair’ (ibid.: 327), propelling rootless and ‘isolated’ masses into the organisational structures of totalitarian movements.

Isolation

Arendt defines ‘isolation’ in this sense as a pre-totalitarian condition, in which the human capacities for action and power are frustrated by the destruction of political life characteristic of tyrannies (ibid.: 474). ‘Loneliness’, on the other hand, is a consequence of totalitarian rule, which destroys the individual’s capacities for thought and experience (ibid.: 475). A state of loneliness coupled to a growing individual sense of ‘uprootedness’ and ‘superfluousness’ liberated these masses from their social attachments and class identities (ibid.: 311). In the case of Germany, Hitler was able to exploit a peculiar mix of pathos and hope engendered by the devastation of the Great War. Germany’s defeat was a defeat for continuity, and Hitler spoke to a hope for a new beginning that a disastrous series of inter-war setbacks had frustrated but not quashed; a new beginning, moreover, that also entailed a yearning for the restoration of certain ‘traditional’ values. Hitler’s genius, if that is what it was, lay in his ability to speak to this paradoxical public mood, at once promising a future devoid of class and party political divisions and their replacement by an ideal Volksgemeinschaft which, however, entailed the no less divisive ideal of racial purity. If the commitment to a classless and party-less society was to prove little more than a ‘theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses’ (ibid.: 263), given the already disastrous state of parliamentary politics and the social devastation wrought by mass unemployment, the commitment to the idea of race was to prove anything but flighty.

As I have argued in this essay, Arendt’s concept of totalitarian ideology as an instrument of terror rather than of persuasion gains fuller expression in conjunction with her discussion of the role of propaganda in constructing totalitarian rule. For Arendt the distinction between totalitarian ideology qua prosaic amalgam of borrowed elements, and totalitarian propaganda, the bearer of its fictional narrative, is primarily functional. The utility and intensity of propaganda is largely dictated by the nature of the threat posed by the non-totalitarian world to totalitarian regimes, and therefore serves the totalitarian dictator in his dealings with the outside world, although it plays an important role in overcoming such obstacles as freedom of speech and of association under conditions of constitutional government (ibid.: 341-4). Alternately, ideological indoctrination, invariably combined with terror, is directed inwardly at the initiated and ‘increases with the strength of the movements or totalitarian governments’ isolation and security from outside interference’ (ibid.: 344; emphasis added; see Arendt 1953a: 297-99). For Arendt, the real horror of the totalitarian application of terror, and by implication of totalitarian ideology, is that it not only continues to reign over populations whose subjugation has become absolute, but in fact intensifies over time. Whereas Miliband has argued that Stalinist terror operated in anticipation of opposition, constantly striking ‘at people who were perfectly willing to conform, on the suspicion that they might eventually cease to be willing’ (Miliband 1988: 145), for Arendt totalitarian terror was the function of the ‘idea’, its rationale.

Propaganda disappears entirely whenever the rule of terror has eliminated a sense for reality and factuality, and the ‘utilitarian expectations of common sense’ (Arendt 1979: 457). Together, ideology and propaganda, terror and fiction, weave elements of reality, of ‘verifiable experiences’, into generalised suprasensible worlds ‘fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized’ (ibid.: 362). In practice, this entails transforming movements into embodiments of ideology, ‘charged with the idea’, whether of race or of class. In other words, ideology is applied as an organisational principle to produce what Hitler aptly describes as a ‘living organization’ (Hitler in ibid.). The counterpart of the living organisation is the ‘special laboratory’ (ibid.: 392, 437, 458), the arena for the totalitarian experiment in total domination. Understood in these terms, the concentration camp is the ‘true central institution of totalitarian organizational power’ (ibid.: 438, also 456) in which propaganda has become as superfluous as humanity itself, and the extermination camp the monument to the totalitarian regime’s ideological consistency.

Towards the close of the war, mounting evidence of the existence and practices of the dedicated German extermination centres became a central preoccupation of Arendt’s writing. In 1945, she noted that ‘neither in ancient nor medieval nor modern history, did destruction become a well-formulated programme or its execution a highly organized, bureaucratized, and systematized process’ (Arendt 1945a: 109). Intimations of Arendt’s novelty thesis are already quite apparent, as is her view that the destructiveness of the Nazi regime cannot be comprehended merely as a continuation or direct consequence of the nihilism undoubtedly unleashed by the First World War. If the extraordinary and senseless destructiveness of the First World War provided the breeding ground for totalitarian movements, their ideologies manifested themselves as an ‘intoxication of destruction as an actual experience, dreaming the stupid dream of producing the void’ (ibid.: 110). The regulated death rate of the extermination camps was complemented by the organised torture of the concentration camps, whose purpose was ‘not so much to inflict death as to put the victim in a permanent status of dying’ (Arendt 1950a: 238). The interweaving of the human experience of death and a death-like existence in the extermination and concentration camps respectively were to Arendt’s mind a corollary of the totalitarian organisation of society.

Arendt’s sense of the ‘continuity’ of experience between life in totalitarian societies and death – or a death-like existence – in the camps, has been little discussed in the relevant literature. Commentators instead generally focus on the distinct dynamics of terror in German and Soviet society, pointing to the absence of dedicated extermination facilities in the Soviet Union and to a more pervasive regime of terror during the Stalin years. Michael Halberstam, for example, takes Arendt to task for seemingly disregarding the fact that ethnic Germans were not subjected to the level of terror that the constant threat of deportation visited upon even high party officials in the Soviet Union during the 1930s (Halberstam 2001: 106). Arendt was aware of this[x], explicitly arguing that the pre-war Nazi regime was not properly totalitarian and that it was only with Kristallnacht in 1938 and the outbreak of war that Hitler’s terror machine came into its own. Whereas terror reached its height in Germany with the long series of post-1941 military defeats, terror in the Soviet Union abated with the onset of war, only to resume with military victory, followed by the mass deportation of returning Soviet POWs (see e.g. Arendt 1979: xxv). It is the nature of total terror that concerns Arendt, a distinctive logic of total domination that aims to transform all of society, and

… to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual … The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species… Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal both through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror in the camps. (ibid.: 438)

Ideological indoctrination pervades all of society in an attempt to lay hold of the general population, but the experiment in indoctrination is complemented by the concentration camp regime, the existence of which is public knowledge. It is this knowledge that makes terror a palpable daily reality of the general populace.

Total domination
Despite their ‘cynically admitted anti-utility’, the camps are the key to sustaining totalitarian rule, for the camp system infuses society with an ‘undefined fear’ that is essential both to maintaining the totalitarian movement’s hold over the populace and to inspiring ‘its nuclear troops with fanaticism’. The camps also perform the important function of initiating the regime’s elite cadres into the techniques of ‘total domination’, which would not be possible outside of this context, at least and until total domination had been established over all members of society. Without the camps, ‘the dominating and the dominated would only too quickly sink back into the “old bourgeois routine”’ (ibid.: 456). The camp phenomenon is thus central to Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism, for the camp system constitutes the arena in which the innate logic of totalitarian rule reveals itself and in which the experiment in denaturing human beings is conducted. The ‘society of the dying established in the camps is the only form of society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely’. It would be a considerable understatement to describe as controversial Arendt’s rejection of the notion that ‘there was such a thing as one human nature established for all time’ as a ‘tragic fallacy’ (ibid.: 456). A clue to this statement, as indeed to the integral relation between Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and her post-Origins theory of politics, is contained in a 1953 essay in which Arendt argues that ‘the success of totalitarianism is identical with a much more radical liquidation of freedom as a political and as a human reality than anything we have ever witnessed before’ (Arendt 1953c: 408). In the following section I would like to trace the contours of this ‘liquidation of freedom’ as it unfolds in Arendt’s account of the threefold stages of the totalitarian assault on human individuality.

‘To dream the stupid dream of producing the void’: Denaturing the human individual

Man, this flexible being, who submits himself in society to the thoughts and impressions of his fellow-men, is equally capable of knowing his own nature when it is shown to him and of losing it to the point where he has no realisation that he is robbed of it. (Montesquieu)

‘Terror’ is not a generic term of reference in Arendt’s political thought. In a 1953 address published as

Mankind and Terror

, Arendt distinguishes between the principal forms of terror in Western political history. She argues that all forms of pre-totalitarian terror associated with tyranny, despotism, dictatorship, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, plebiscitary democracy and modern one-party states, have a clearly circumscribed goal, target genuine opponents and generally cease once the regime’s objectives have been attained. Thus, for example, tyrannical forms of terror eliminate opposition as well as destroying the public realm of politics whereas the chief goal of revolutionary terror is to establish a new ‘code of laws’ (Arendt 1953a: 298). Totalitarian terror, on the other hand, commences once the regime has eliminated all its real enemies and is therefore apparently ‘counter to the perpetrator’s real [utilitarian] interests’ (ibid.: 302-03)[xi].

Thus the proposition that Stalin’s terror regime was a manifestation of revolutionary violence belies the fact that by the late 1920s all active resistance to the new Soviet regime had been eliminated. Henceforth, terror no longer served ‘the utilitarian motives and self-interest of the rulers’ (Arendt 1979: 440). Nor does the relative scale of terror necessarily reveal its nature and purpose. Moreover, distinctions such as that between Stalin’s ‘labour camps’ and Hitler’s concentration camps tend to be misleading insofar as the language of terror – its formal designations – typically conceals more than it reveals of the functioning of the terror apparatus. In this regard Arendt cautions against liberal rationalisations about ‘fear’ and ‘submission’ (Arendt 1953a: 300)[xii], for total terror targets ‘objective’ categories of victim without reference to the individuation presupposed by the logic of crime and punishment. The most important characteristic of totalitarian terror, however, is that it functions independently from such positive laws as may exist, and is unleashed only once all active and genuine opponents have been eliminated.

Moreover, the totalitarian regime of ideology and terror does not presuppose a state of total compliance for the simple reason that compliance presupposes norms whereas ‘totalitarian regimes establish a functioning world of no-sense’ emptied of ‘[c]ommon sense trained in utilitarian thinking’ (Arendt 1979: 458). But this can hardly be a description of the broader society in either Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia. Arendt argues that these societies only very imperfectly resemble their most characteristic institutions, the concentration camps, whose experiment in total domination generates an ‘enforced oblivion’ of the social subject, a strategy that ‘is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses’ (ibid.: 447). The various stages in the destruction of the individuality of the totalitarian subject begin in society and are completed in the artificial environment of the camp system, which reduces the inmates to ‘bundles of reactions’ (ibid.: 441). Although the broader society in totalitarian regimes is infused with a distinctive totalitarian logic, there are limits to the application of totalitarianism’s ideological ‘supersense’, for as long as society has not been totally subjected to ‘global control’ (ibid.: 459).

What is true of the general populace of totalitarian societies thus scarcely hints at the wholly fabricated environment of the camps, the locus of the experiment in total domination. Arendt identifies three stages marking the journey into hell of the victims of total terror. The first stage entails the organised destruction of the ‘juridical person in man’ by removing objective categories of people from the purview of the law and establishing the concentration camp system as an extra-judicial penal system. The objective innocence of the latter’s inmates, and the extra-legal status of its institutional existence, place the concentration camp system as a whole outside the realm of rational juridical calculation, and in a universe wholly different from a rights-based utilitarian regime (ibid.: 447-51). The death of the juridical person, ‘of the person qua subject of rights’ (Benhabib 1996: 65), is pre-figured by the nineteenth century experience of imperialism which, as we have seen, pitted the institutions of the imperialist nation-state against the fragile belief, on the part of the imperialist nations, in the universal rights of man. Arendt argues that the Rights of Man were never ‘philosophically established’ or ‘politically secured’ and hence were inherently vulnerable to historical developments (Arendt 1979: 447). The decline of the nation-state and the corruption of the supposedly inalienable Rights of Man, concomitant with nation-state imperialism, were amplified by the experience of the First World War, which exposed the fatal nexus between Europe’s high revolutionary ideals and her naked political ambitions. Total war had generated refugees on an unprecedented scale and the post-war Minority Treaties merely formalised the ‘denationalisation’ of millions of displaced persons, effectively placing them outside of Europe’s supposedly rights-based legal and political order (ibid.). The totalitarian experiment in the disenfranchisement and destruction of the juridical person marked the passage from the corruption of the Rights of Man to the systematic elimination of the juridical subject in man. This occurs when even a ‘voluntarily co-ordinated’ population – a population that cedes its political rights under extremes of terror – is deprived of its civil rights, becoming ‘just as outlawed in their own country as the stateless and homeless’ (ibid.: 451).

Totalitarian rule thus targets both ‘free opposition’ and ‘free consent’, since individual autonomy of any sort undermines the principle of total terror that arbitrarily selects objective categories of victim, destroying the stability and predictability that is incompatible with a system of rule predicated on perpetual motion. The device of ‘arbitrary arrest’ eliminates the capacity for free consent, ‘just as torture … destroys the possibility of opposition’ (ibid.). In this context Arendt makes a threefold distinction between the initial phase of totalitarian terror, the subsequent targeting of ‘objective categories’ of victims, and, finally, the more generalised state of terror that takes hold of all of society at the height of totalitarian rule. Whereas totalitarian rulers initially target opponents and those construed as asocial elements – the ‘amalgam of politicals and criminals’ (ibid.: 449) – this is followed by categories of enemy, such as homosexuals, Jews, and class enemies, whose most outstanding trait is complete innocence. Thus ‘deprived of the protective distinction that comes of their having done something wrong, they are utterly exposed to the arbitrary’ (ibid.)[xiii]. On the other hand, the general populace is often indifferent to the fate of the victims, since the former are usually still beholden to the utilitarian notion (or alibi) that in order to be ‘punished’, one must necessarily have ‘done something’.

Therefore, ethnic Aryans could still take some comfort from the fact that they were Judenrein, heterosexuals that they were not ‘perverted’, the proletariat that they were not ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – rationalisations that become quite impossible once total terror lays hold of the broader society. Arendt stresses that in the case of Germany, total terror became anything like a generalised condition only at the height of the war and Nazism’s most terroristic phase, from 1942 to 1944[xiv].

… [a]ny, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of intellectual or erotic social behaviour, to certain freshly invented ‘crimes’, would render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude and no opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above all it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination. (Arendt 1979: 451)

Thus ‘[w]hile the classification of inmates by categories is only a tactical, organizational measure, the arbitrary selection of victims indicates the essential principle of the institution’ (ibid.: 450). ‘Arbitrary’ in this context, it is again stressed, does not mean that the Nazis did not target determinate or general categories of victim, but instead that these categories were constantly expanded in ways that eliminated rational calculation as the basis for the actions of the populace. Even anti-Jewish measures were initially restricted to certain categories of Jew. At the height of total terror, moreover, the regime begins to apply the organisational principles of the camp system to society as a whole, when even those people indispensable to the functioning of the regime are consumed by the terror.

Living corpses
A second phase in the preparation of ‘living corpses’ targets the moral person in man. This entails the ‘creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible’, since ‘organised complicity’ is constantly extended to include the broader society and the victims themselves (ibid.: 452). In its most extreme form, total terror coerces the participation of the concentration and death camp inmates in the extermination process itself. This is intended to destroy the capacity of the victims to form moral judgements. Thus, for example, a mother confronted by the ‘choice’ of which child immediately to send to the gas chamber is condemned not only to select death for the one, but also to internalise the principle of terror that always already dictates the ultimate death of the other. Her powerlessness to influence the ultimate outcome for either of her offspring means that the temporary reprieve for the surviving child is the source of an infinite torment that ceases only with the completion of the family murder. Under circumstances in which the distinction between persecutor and persecuted, killer and victim, is systematically undermined, the process of killing itself assumes the mantle of unreality corresponding to the existence of ‘living corpses’[xv].

However, the organised complicity of society in the crimes of the totalitarian regime begins with the political decision to proceed with exterminations. The decision, communicated to the bureaucracy of murder and presaged by public statements of intent, implicates the general population merely by dint of the fact that opposition to the policy would itself be a grave crime. To do good is to disobey the law, but to obey the law is to be complicit in the crime. Conversely, preparations for the mass crimes prey on civilian institutions, such as the Jewish Councils of Europe, which facilitated the identification and location of the victims, often knowing their intended fate. The process of dehumanisation of the victims thus encompasses the whole of their life experience and identity whilst embracing the entirety of the living world of the societies in which this process unfolds. Within the camps, a regime of Kapos institutionalises the dehumanisation of the victims, and participation by camp authorities in daily atrocities is deliberately limited to functions of oversight. With the mechanisation of the killing process in the Nazi death camps – that is ‘once the machine had replaced the man’ – ‘the executioner could avoid all contact with the victim’ (Todorov 2000: 162)[xvi].

Tzvetan Todorov argues that there is ample proof of the survival of the moral person even under the most extreme circumstances in the camps (ibid.). This fact is raised as an objection to Arendt’s argument that the camps to a significant extent accomplished a denaturing of man. But whereas Todorov is right that the camps were not devoid of virtuous acts, Arendt’s central argument is of a different order. She does not suggest, as Todorov seems to think, that the moral person in man is superficial, but rather that there are certain limits beyond which humanity cannot endure. The experiment in total terror probes these limits, and by relentlessly undermining the integrity of ethically grounded human relations, and notably the individual human capacity for spontaneously giving friendship, seeks to transform them, revealing to the world that indeed ‘everything is possible’, including the destruction of the most fundamental human bonds evinced in expressions of care, concern, support and friendship.

Nevertheless, the murder of the moral person and the annihilation of the juridical person are insufficient conditions of a thoroughgoing dehumanisation of the victims, for the production of ‘living corpses’ presupposes not only persons stripped of rights and of conscience, but also the suppression of an innately human individuality – of ‘the uniqueness shaped in equal parts by nature, will, and destiny’ (Arendt 1979: 454). This third and decisive step in the preparation of living corpses cannot be effected by torture conventionally understood, since the latter is aimed at individuals and entails a rational means-ends calculation (ibid.: 453). The camp regime, on the other hand, prepares otherwise ‘normal’ members of the SS to become elite cadres and bearers of Nazism’s principal mission. Conversely, the techniques employed to induce both perpetrators and victims to participate dispassionately in the systematic extermination of innocent people demonstrates the possibility of transforming men and women into ‘specimens of the human animal’ (ibid.: 454, 455). The experience of the homeland transit camps, and especially the brutality of the ‘transports’, delivered to the camps a mass of degraded and filthy humanity bordering on the ‘inhuman’. Exposed to such conditions – and this was by no means exclusively the experience of Jews but also, for example, of three million Soviet POWs – social conditioning was subverted and to some extent reversed, exposing brutalised populations to their own uninhibited and desperate acts[xvii].

To some extent, the breakdown of social values occurs wherever brutality and unpredictability characterise the individual’s common experience of daily life. In conditions of systematic and bestial cruelty, mere survival displaces all other considerations as a principle of action. From the point of view of the perpetrators – the Aryan and East European camp guards and administrators –, the condition of the victims resonates with their propaganda image, reinforcing psychological rationalisations and prejudice. In short, the camps create the conditions in which it is possible, even for the less ideologically driven and more psychologically functional perpetrator, to believe the lie – or rather the universal human truth – that unfolds before his or her very eyes: ‘lying was not enough. In order to be believed, the Nazis had to fabricate reality itself and make the Jews look subhuman’ (Arendt 1946a: 199; see Todorov 2000: 158-65).

It is an incontestable and remarkable fact, as Todorov and Primo Levi have argued, that moral life was never utterly extinguished in the concentration camps and Gulag. Levi has produced perhaps the classic account of an unrelenting horror that at times could be punctuated by gestures of humanity quite as unimaginable to us as the circumstances these small acts fleetingly transcended. Yet Levi himself stresses that only the most fortunate, skilled, strong, astute, or ruthless managed to survive the camp regime. There is a tortured awareness, a horrible ‘presence’ lurking in these remarkable accounts of camp life by no less remarkable individuals, such as Levi, who speaks of the ‘particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals, installed (following an investiture by the SS command, which showed itself in such choices to possess satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos, Blockältester, etc.’ (Levi 2000a: 105). A camp regime in which select victims were goaded into perpetrating sadistic acts on fellow prisoners was calculated to brutalise the moral instincts of even the strongest inmates, and produce the bestial mass portrayed in the regime’s propaganda.

Once human beings have been stripped of their individuality, of their capacity for spontaneously ‘beginning something new’, which capacity cannot be explained as mere reactions to environment and events, their extermination need no longer entail concessions to the humanity of the executioners, whose triumph consists in the tortured victim’s renouncing and abandoning himself ‘to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity’ (Rousset in Arendt 1979: 455). Once murder is released from all sense of a shared humanity, the way is thrown open to the creation of the most perfect totalitarian society inhabited by the ‘model “citizen”’. The death camps, whose size and manpower stood in an inverse relation to the number of their victims, had the limited function of processing superfluous human matter. Exposure of the SS to the more gruesome aspects of the very processes they commanded was relatively limited. It was the victims themselves who harvested the by-products of human matter, washing and packing hair, extracting teeth from the corpses, and so on (Müller 1999: 65-8). By contrast the concentration camp was the most nearly perfect realisation of a totalitarian society composed of the ‘human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions’ (Arendt 1979: 456). This, to be sure, was a reality that could only very imperfectly be reproduced outside of the camp system as a whole. It is for this reason that Arendt views the concentration camp system as essential to totalitarian rule, and as revealing its true nature[xviii] .

The death camps may have been historically unique, both in terms of their mechanised routines and their concentrated destructiveness. Nonetheless, the concentration camps were the heart of a system of rule, not only inspiring an undefined fear in society but actualising the logic of total domination in concrete organisational form.

Camp system
In other words, the phenomenon of the camp system is an integral facet and logical adjunct to the totalitarian system of government, rather than an ‘excess’ of this or that government or party agency. The concentration camps, rather than the camps dedicated to industrial genocide, were a palpable daily reality to ordinary citizens. These were not institutions situated in forests and backward provinces, but were often enough constructed within sight of or situated directly in German towns and cities. This was true, for example, of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Landsberg and hundreds of secondary and satellite camps. Each main camp presided over many sub-camps; in the Berlin area alone, there were 1 100 satellite camps of the main camp, Sachsenhausen. As Overy notes, ‘[n]o one in Germany could ever pretend that the camps were hidden from view’ (Overy 2004: 606)[xix]. The ‘uselessness’ or ‘anti-utility’ of the camps is thus in a certain sense only apparent (Arendt 1979: 456). Knowledge of the extreme is indispensable to a regime premised on an internalisation of terror and domination. For this reason, the existence of the concentration camps was never concealed from the civilian population, as the popular journalism and literature of the day amply attests[xx].

Reconciling the history and daily reality of these societies with what happened in the camps is therefore an impossible task if we proceed from the assumption that no government or political leadership could possibly have conceived the extremes of the camp regime. The historians whose functionalist interpretation of the ‘Final Solution’ caused such a ruckus in the 1980s seem not to have the same reservations about the intentions of the Euthanasia programme. The latter not only targeted ethnic Aryans for extermination in clinics on German soil[xxi], but also indisputably did so on the explicit instructions of Reichskanzlei officials, acting on Hitler’s direct orders[xxii]. This is not to suggest that incremental radicalisation of policy was not a key device of Nazi rule, since initial measures and categories of victims were expanded beyond the scope of early policy guidelines. But if the ambitions of the regime grew over time, Hitler’s pathological hatred of his racial and ideological victims preceded Nazi rule and was a constant feature of his speeches and writings at least as far back as 1918.

What the functionalists describe, in part, as ‘excesses’ and the evidence they adduce for their thesis stems in large part, and somewhat paradoxically, from Hitler’s order to suspend the Euthanasia programme. Hitler’s direct hand in this programme is well documented – his signed order of September 1, 1939 extant – and he utilised the power ‘radiating from the Chancellery of the Führer’, via the offices of Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack, to induct an ‘odd assortment of highly educated, and morally vacant humanity’ into the programme (Burleigh 1996c: 106). The programme was indeed ‘suspended’ in its existing form by Hitler due to adverse public reaction once news of the murder in German and Austrian clinics became common knowledge. But it is equally true that the programme merely changed tactics, engaging a far greater number of clinics in a campaign of starvation and lethal injections that lasted until the close of the war. Moreover it is true, as the functionalists argue, that the members of the Aktion T4[xxiii] staff gravitated from its activity of murdering the mentally and physically unsound to genocide in the extermination camps in Poland. This, in their view, suggests a progressive and somewhat uncontrolled, even ‘chaotic’ extension of the euthanasia logic rather than a logical exploitation of a ready-made and acclimatised genocidal elite.

Certainly the euthanasia programme did more than implicate Germany’s medical, academic and legal professions. It pioneered discoveries, notably that patients could be co-opted into killing fellow inmates, an innovation that was put to effective use in the death camps. Skills honed in the euthanasia programme were perfected in the extermination camps. But the latter belonged to a discrete programme infinitely more complex, expansive and inclusive than the clinical murder, inter alia, of ill and disabled children. T4 functioned within society and indeed enjoyed support, especially from those elders eager to be rid of their burdensome charges. Morally, there was no difference between murdering Jews and murdering disabled Aryan children[xxiv]. Nonetheless, the ‘Final Solution’ had an altogether more ambitious political and ideological dimension. Geographically, it encompassed all of occupied Europe and engaged all the resources of the societies in which it operated, most especially in Greater Germany itself. Moreover, beyond mere tactical manoeuvrings, Hitler would never have curtailed the programme in response to public opinion, nor would he permit his ministers or the military to interfere in its execution.

The camps were thus both a measure of the regime’s fanaticism and the theatre of the totalitarian experiment in power:

If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and refuse to be misled by the common-sense assertion that they are utopian and unrealizable, it develops that the society of the dying established in the camps is the only form of society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely. (Arendt 1979: 455-6)

In other words, Arendt was aware of the limitations which reality imposes on the totalitarian system of rule. Countless critics have formulated this point as a fundamental criticism of Arendt’s thesis, apparently and mistakenly believing that she had assimilated Nazi Germany and/or Stalinist Russia as ideal types, which in fact nowhere existed and which Arendt certainly did not set about inventing. Conversely, it has often been suggested that since neither Nazi Germany nor Stalinist Russia was entirely consistent with the theoretical construct articulated in Origins, Arendt ipso facto erred in describing them as totalitarian. Nonetheless, where such a system had fully manifested itself in localised pockets of organised and systematic bestiality, and notably in the camp systems of both societies, Arendt’s conception of totalitarianism finds in them its most nearly ideal historical examples. For it was here that totalitarianism’s incomparably destructive potential was realised. Nor is much comfort to be derived from Arendt’s insight that the totalitarian system of government is self-destructive by definition, for at some point the system would have run out of victims if it were not destroyed by some external intervention (Germany’s military defeat) or by some internal occurrence (such as Stalin’s death and the process of ‘detotalitarianisation’).

Radical evil
We may be unaccustomed to thinking in these contingent terms, preferring to view history in the light of comforting grand narratives, the ‘rise and fall’, ‘progress and reaction’, ‘good versus evil’. It is perhaps natural that we try to explain ‘radical evil’ as the manifestation of a historical epoch, a typical product of modern civilisation, of a specific culture, or as Götz Aly persistently argues, ‘a possibility inherent in European civilisation itself’ (Aly 1996: 153)[xxv]. In 1954, Raymond Aron dismissed Isaac Deutscher’s ‘superficial and erroneously objective book’ which seeks a comprehensive explanation of totalitarianism in terms of socio-economic circumstances (Aron 1993: 371). And yet he too insists that ‘the totalitarian essence did not arise mysteriously, fully armed, out of the mind of History or the mind of Stalin. Certain circumstances favoured its emergence, and others will foster its disappearance’ (Aron 1993: 373). Aron thus also evokes a grand explanation of how all of this could have happened, as well as implying that what came into being will necessarily exit the stage of history forever, due to certain unspecified ‘circumstances’. The disappearance of Nazi totalitarianism was not ‘fostered’; it was fought and defeated in the bloodiest war in history. Although Stalin’s death marked a fundamental shift away from total terror as practised in the Gulag and purge regime, Russia today still struggles to come to terms with her terror-filled past. Even after Stalin’s death, there was nothing preventing a continuation of his policies. Aron chides Arendt, suggesting that she had defined ‘a functioning regime by an essence [mass terror] that implies the impossibility of its functioning’ (ibid.: 374). But that is not at all what Arendt suggests; she posits the impossibility of that regime’s long-term em>survival (see e.g. Arendt 1979: 478). Totalitarian regimes are by definition self-destructive, but the destructive process can last for decades; it can be interrupted (the Soviet Union during the war years); and it can be channelled outwards (Germany during the war years). But just because a particular totalitarian regime has come to an end does not mean that the totalitarian phenomenon is no longer a threat. How many world wars must be fought before we learn this elementary lesson?

Arendt, then, is sensitive to the differing modalities of totalitarian rule, including the uneven intensity and virulence of that rule over time. None of this suggests that Arendt ‘presented totalitarianism as a kind of essence, invulnerable to the erosion of time’ (Aron 1980: 37). Her description of the transition to a post-Stalin Soviet regime stresses that Stalin’s death in 1953, rather than his total military victory eight years earlier, marked the passage to ‘an authentic, though never unequivocal, process of detotalitarianization’ (Arendt 1979: xxv; see xxxiv-v). In other words, unlike Germany, whose total defeat and occupation heralded a precipitous end of totalitarian rule, Stalin’s death inaugurated a process of detotalitarianisation that signalled a shift away from the extremes of Stalinism, without necessarily meaning that totalitarianism had run its course either in the Soviet Union or occupied Eastern Europe. Still, a moderation of Communist rule and a reduction of mass terror coincided with the ‘stabilisation’ of the Soviet dictatorship.

The ease with which these regimes were established, and the fact that no exceptional human qualities were required for their evils to flourish, suggests that ‘the wind had only to blow in the right direction, and the evil spread like wildfire’ (Todorov 1999: 125). Todorov quotes the former Nazi governor of Austria and Holland, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who responded in characteristic fashion to former camp commander Rudolf Hoess’s testimony in Nuremberg concerning the exterminations at Auschwitz:

There is a limit to the number of people you can kill out of hatred or lust for slaughter … but there is no limit to the number you can kill in the cold, systematic manner of the military ‘categorical imperative’. (Seyss-Inquart in Todorov 1999: 125)

Todorov takes up another of Arendt’s controversial themes, suggesting that the exceptional nature of perpetrators of these mass crimes derives from the political regime under which they live; ‘the explanation will be political and social, not primarily psychological or individual’[xxvi]. Moreover, Todorov shares Arendt’s concern that overemphasising ‘national character’ deflects attention from the novel system of government that made a regime of total terror possible. Totalitarianism, in Todorov’s view, borrowed the principle, common enough in the thought of nineteenth century imperialists, according to which ‘he who is not with me is against me’, and transforming it into the injunction ‘all who are against me shall perish’ (Todorov 1999: 126; see Arendt 1979: 380-1). Nor, argues Todorov, does the novelty of totalitarianism consist in this alone. For it was only once the ‘other’ of imperialist politics was redefined from being an external geographic entity to that of an ‘internal enemy’ that totalitarianism established itself as a novel system of government. Theoretically, it matters little, as both Arendt and Todorov argue, whether race and ethnicity define this enemy, or whether it is coincident with a social category, such as class:

Totalitarian ideologies always divide humanity into two groups of unequal worth (which are not coincident with the categories of ‘our country’ and ‘other countries’, for here we are not dealing with simple nationalism) and maintain that the inferior beings must be punished, even annihilated. (Todorov 1999: 127)

Class enemies in one case, race enemies in the other, the totalitarian regime lays hold on the capacity of the individual to make moral judgements about his own standards of conduct. The totalitarian regime imposes itself as an intermediary between the individual and his values, displacing humanity as the standard by which to distinguish good from evil. In this way the totalitarian system aspires to control the totality of human relations. Although this aspiration is only ever realised in anything like a ‘total’ form in the camp system, for Todorov this means that totalitarianism is a point of departure for analysing these regimes. Echoing Arendt’s sense of the camp system as the concentrated essence of these regimes, Todorov describes total terror as a ‘repudiation of universality’, a rejection of the notion of a common humanity, which most emphatically sets it apart from Western political and philosophical modernity (ibid.). Hence the importance of Arendt’s historical method of discerning the ‘elements’ of social and political modernity that are present in the ideologies and ‘crystalline’ structure of the uniquely totalitarian system of government. Yet Arendt does not share Todorov’s view that the logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinguishes total terror. Rather this logic is characteristic of the pre-power phase in which the totalitarian movement defines itself in relation to ‘the whole world’ (Arendt 1979: 367). Conversely, total terror posits the elimination of all distinction and the uniform subjection of all mankind to its overriding ‘idea’. The logic identified by Todorov is indicative of the initial stages of total rule (especially in Germany), but it is not coincident with a totalitarian regime in which ‘all men have become equally superfluous’.

Conclusion

They were zealots of meaning and haters of empirical truth. (George Kateb)

With the description of the concentration camps as the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule we are returned to the question of the relation between Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism and her post-Origins theoretical project. Origins has a rich array of philosophical subtexts, each of which is explored further in Arendt’s later essays, lectures and major works. However, the camp phenomenon is paradigmatic for Arendt’s understanding of the twentieth century. As Samir Gandesha argues, for Arendt the Lager constitutes the definitive experience of the twentieth century because

… as a sphere wholly fabricated by human beings, it is the space not simply where ‘everything is permitted’ in the moral sense but rather [where] ‘everything is possible’ in an ontological sense. The Lager represents the eclipse of zoon politikon by homo faber. (Gandeshi 2004: 446)

For Arendt, the sheer horror of the camps resides in the fact that they actualise the total negation of the political, both as a way of life and as an existential possibility, reducing the specifically human life to life as such.

Nonetheless, in my view Gandesha subtly misreads Arendt’s interpretation of both modernity and the Lager. For if Arendt detects a powerful anti-political undercurrent in Western modernity, she hardly argues that the latter ‘rests on the progressive eclipse of the political’, nor that the Lager represents the ‘culmination’ of a historical process (Gandesha 2004: 464). Arendt does not view history in this sense as a succession of discreet periods, each imbued with a unique telos. Totalitarianism was for Arendt a paradigmatic example of the ‘event’, which cannot be deduced from that which came before it:

I hinted at this in two short paragraphs of the Preface [of Origins], where I warned the reader against the concepts of Progress and Doom as ‘two sides of the same medal’ as well as against any attempt at ‘deducing the unprecedented from precedents’. These two approaches are closely interconnected (Arendt 1953c: 404).

To Arendt’s mind ‘phenomenal differences … as differences of factuality are all-important’ (ibid.: 404-05).

To conflate totalitarianism with Western modernity is to treat a novel phenomenon as some

… minor outgrowth of some ‘essential sameness’ of a doctrinal nature. Numerous affinities between totalitarianism and some other trends in Occidental political or intellectual history have been described with this result, in my opinion: they all failed to point out the distinct quality of what was actually happening. The ‘phenomenal differences’, far from ‘obscuring’ some essential sameness, are those phenomena which make totalitarianism ‘totalitarian’, which distinguish this form of government and movement from all others and therefore can alone help us in finding its essence. What is unprecedented in totalitarianism is not primarily its ideological content, but the event of totalitarian domination itself. (ibid.: 405)

Arendt rejects liberal notions of ‘Progress’ and Hegelian-Marxist dialectics as symptoms of a way of thinking that posits an end-point in history. Arendt regards this way of thinking and this understanding of history not only as misguided, but as positively dangerous. To her mind, as we have seen, the story told by history ‘is a story with many beginnings but no end’ (Arendt 1953b: 399). Diagnosing the ills of history in terms of ‘Progress’ or ‘Doom’, or any other meta-narrative or philosophy of history, submerges the particular in an ocean of ‘sameness’, distinguishable if at all merely by degree. It is to reduce totalitarianism to an essence of something else, in this case ‘modernity’, but also to equate it with that other. Arendt detects in this thinking the logic of ideological thinking whose search for historical essences aims to disclose the future unfolding of events. Dismissing ‘psychologism’ and ‘sociologism’ as the chief culprits in this regard, Arendt nonetheless also challenges contemporary trends in the historical and political sciences, and most especially their ‘growing incapacity to make distinctions’. The tendency to employ terms like nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism indiscriminately strips them of their meaning and extinguishes the particular and unique facets of any given historical event or context. The resultant generalisations consist of a confused agglomeration of analogies and reductionist arguments that conceal the ‘new’ and the ‘shocking’. Precedent substitutes for explanation, and novel historical phenomena are reduced ‘to a previously known chain of causes and influences’ (ibid.: 407). In my view, only if we comprehend Arendt’s sense of the sheer novelty of the totalitarian phenomenon are we able to appreciate the philosophical dimension and implications of her analysis, which I shall explore in the final chapter of Hannah Arendt’s Response to the Crisis of her Time. In the present context, and by way of concluding remarks to this essay, I should like to draw out certain important aspects of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism as a major contribution to twentieth century political theory.

Most importantly, and controversially, Arendt contends that totalitarianism constitutes the first novel form of government to emerge in the two and a half thousand years that separate the world of Plato from that of Kant. Her totalitarianism thesis rests on the relation between novel forms of ideology and terror on the one hand, and on the other on her distinction between law understood as the positive laws establishing a consensus iuris and her notion of totalitarian ‘lawfulness’. A regime of positive laws delimits a stable common world in which constant human motion and change unfolds; a space of freedom erecting boundaries and establishing ‘channels of communication between men whose community is continually endangered by the new men born into it’ (Arendt 1979: 465). This common world regulates the destabilising potential inherent in human plurality – the uniqueness of each human individual born into this world – and is sustained by a ‘people’s’ implicit act of consent to the regulating principle of universally valid moral and legal standards that govern all civilised societies, even in extreme circumstances such as war. The constitution of a ‘people’, then, is an act of political consent recognised as such by all its members, because they so regard themselves (ibid.: 462, 467). On this understanding, the highest good of all constitutional polities is the welfare of men.

Tyranny, by contrast, serves the interests of one man. The arbitrary lawlessness and fear coincident with tyrannical government presuppose the erasure of man-made laws, the arbiter in matters of human welfare. The arbitrary will of the dictator corresponds in practice to the elimination of individual liberties and the destruction of freedom as a living political reality, creating a ‘fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion’. Still, lawlessness does not entirely eliminate the individual capacity for purposeful actions, even if a regime of arbitrary rule means that actions are ‘fear-guided’ and ‘suspicion-ridden’ (ibid.: 466). For suspicion and fear are the principles of action in tyranny, and the use of terror in tyrannical forms of government serves the utilitarian purpose of frightening and exterminating real opponents (ibid.: 6). The very notion of tyranny would be incomprehensible were it not for the existence of an authentic opposition, whose provocation or resistance threatens the boundless will of the ruler. In these circumstances the self-interested ruler exercises terror in order to secure arbitrary power unrestricted by law and unopposed by human agency. Hence the relation between tyranny and terror is one of necessity, and it is general lawlessness rather than the instrumentality of terror that define tyranny (ibid.: 322). In all of Western history, then, the opposition between a government grounded in law and forms of tyrannical rule has constituted a fundamental principle of our political self-understanding. And this is one reason why Arendt rejects the view, as expressed for example by Carole Adams, that totalitarian regimes may be distinguished from historical forms of tyranny only insofar as they engage modern ‘technocratic methods’ to establish total control over their subjects (Adams 1989: 41).

In Arendt’s view, totalitarianism collapses the classical distinction between lawful and lawless government, legitimate and arbitrary power (Arendt 1979: 461). Historically the nature of government was susceptible to the distinction between lawful, constitutional or republican government on the one hand, and lawless, arbitrary, or tyrannical government on the other. Wherever totalitarian regimes come into being they obliterate social, legal and political traditions, evolving new political institutions in accordance with ‘a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict their course of action’ (ibid.: 460). Total domination, as distinct from despotic or tyrannical forms of political oppression, rests on the perverse but ‘seemingly unanswerable’ claim that,

… far from being ‘lawless’, it goes to the source of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimation, that far from being arbitrary it is more obedient to these suprahuman forces than any government ever was before. (ibid.: 461)

Totalitarian rule, like tyranny, is ‘lawless’ insofar as it defies positive law. Yet unlike tyranny, totalitarian rule is not arbitrary for it obeys ‘suprahuman forces’ grounded in a principle of legitimacy that transcends the utilitarian basis of positive law. An extra-historical principle of legitimation – in the case of Nazi Germany what Arendt terms the ‘law of Nature’, and in the parallel case of Stalinism the ‘law of History’ – governs everyone, including the Leader. The objective, impersonal character of totalitarian ‘lawfulness’ derives from the fact that these laws are applied to the ‘species’, rather than establishing standards of right and wrong for individual human beings (Arendt 1954a: 340). Arendt acknowledges that positive law plays a role in totalitarian societies, moreover that these regimes, too, pass new laws of this kind, as for example the Nuremberg laws (Arendt 1953a: 300). Nonetheless, these regimes defy not only those positive laws that they inherit but even those which are of their own making[xxvii].

Nature and History
The key to this dimension of Arendt’s totalitarianism thesis is her contention that totalitarian regimes invert the customary relation between law and men. The aim of terror is to unleash the law of movement which ‘races freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action’ (Arendt 1979: 465). The chief aim of the extra-legal device of total terror is to ‘stabilise’ men in order to release the forces of nature or history. The inversion of the relation between law and men in the totalitarian scheme of things thus targets the traditional association of law with the constitution of a stable polity, which establishes the legal boundaries of free actions and associations that are prerequisites of all civilised societies. Totalitarian ‘lawfulness’ targets this fundamental principle of legality that underpins the body politic understood as a consensus iuris. By eliminating the function of legality and recasting the concept of law in pseudo-natural terms, law is made to serve those who ‘understand the dynamic processes of nature or history and go along with them’ (Canovan 1996: 18).

Nature and History cease to be a source of authority and are transformed into ‘movements’. But since mankind is the sole carrier or embodiment of these laws of History or Nature, Arendt must account for a principle of action in totalitarian regimes. She argues, on the one hand, that the logicality of ideological thinking generates an all-encompassing system ‘of explanation of life and world’, which is actualised in the indiscriminate application of terror (Arendt 1954a: 349-50):

Terror substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men an iron band which presses them so tightly together that it is as though … they were only one man. (ibid.: 342)

Terror eliminates the space of free action by eliminating the space between men, executing the laws of Nature or History which have already decided the identity and fate of the victims, who are swept away by the stream of historical necessity (ibid.: 343). The complete elimination of spaces of political and individual freedom introduces both a new form of government and a new criterion of typological understanding. Our conventional understanding of the opposition between lawful and lawless is no more able to apprehend totalitarian ‘lawfulness’ than Montesquieu’s ‘principles of action’ can explain the actions of either government or governed in totalitarian societies. Under totalitarian conditions, both the function of law in constitutional polities and the principle of action in all non-totalitarian forms of government are displaced by terror, which ‘as the essence of government is perfectly sheltered from the disturbing and irrelevant interference of human wishes and needs … [so that] no principle of action in Montesquieu’s sense is necessary’ (Arendt 1954a: 343). This ‘essence has itself become movement – totalitarian government is only insofar as it is kept in constant motion’ (ibid.: 344). This is the reason why Arendt argues that law, human agency and stable political institutions are all antithetical to totalitarian rule. It is also why ideology and terror are essential to totalitarian rule. To be kept in motion, totalitarian societies must be deprived of all social and psychological markers, common sense expectations, and utilitarian calculations. Power thus serves different ends in tyrannical and totalitarian regimes. The tyrant exercises terror in order to eliminate his opponents and thereby secure and consolidate his power. The totalitarian dictator, on the other hand, eliminates all opposition as a prerequisite for establishing a condition of ‘total domination’, which entails a great deal more than securing mere personal power, since the Leader is the agent of the laws of Nature or History. In other words, the totalitarian dictator must himself conform to ‘laws higher than himself’. The Hegelian understanding of freedom as comprehension of ‘necessity’ is thus transcended by the totalitarian elevation of necessity to an absolute coercive principle – not of action, but of submission to the objective laws of historical movement (ibid.: 346).

The totalitarian ruler is possessed of an absolute ideological fidelity. This means that the Leader understands the objective laws of movement and the imperative of accelerating that movement towards a predetermined outcome. From this perspective, all principles and all motives, including the dictator’s self-interest, are subordinated to the imperative of actualising the ‘idea’ (ibid.: 353). This faith, grounded in an axiomatically accepted premise from which a total explanation of history is deduced, is the ‘totalitarian ideology’, which collapses the customary means-end calculation into a welter of bloody terror without any apparent end (ibid.: 302). In the camp system the ‘isolation’ of the fear-guided subject of tyranny becomes the ‘loneliness’ of the totalitarian subject. In the camps ‘terror enforces oblivion’ (Arendt 1979: 443) whereas even ‘one’s own death is no longer one’s own’ (Villa 1999: 19). The complete absence of even a semblance of strategic rationality is most usually viewed as a manifestation of the ‘irrationality’ of fanaticism, or of pathological hatreds, or of the ‘paranoid’ personality of the dictator. Arendt acknowledges that these passions and pathologies manifested themselves in both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Nonetheless, she insists that total terror, by shattering the means-end calculation, reveals itself as the ‘very essence of such a government’ (Arendt 1953a: 305; see 302-03). Positive law and political authority are deprived of their raison d’être. In a system in which total terror is employed for the purpose of actualising an ideological interpretation of reality at any cost, politics entails relentless destruction and equally relentless reconstruction. The fabricated universe envisaged by totalitarian ideologists is set in motion by the totalitarian movement, which seizes on the ‘idea’ and stumbles upon the reality that world-organising fictions can be realised. The proof of this lies in the many half-forgotten Polish forests and frozen Russian wastelands.

And yet it is precisely Arendt’s comparative approach to Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism that has elicited the most vociferous and enduring of all the controversies that have accompanied Origins into our century. This charge revolves around the notion that Origins is little more than a brilliantly conceived Cold War propaganda prop.

Read Part One: http://rozenbergquarterly.com/?p=3099

 

Hannah Arendt in the Rozenberg Quarterly

Anthony Court – Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism. Part One: http://rozenbergquarterly.com/?p=3099
Anthony Court – Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism. Part Two:  http://rozenbergquarterly.com/?p=3115
Nima Emami – Hannah Arendt and The Green Movement: http://rozenbergquarterly.com/?p=563