Abstract

Arendt did not intend to write a theory of totalitarianism. She was interested instead in identifying ‘elements’ of a form of government which she regarded as completely new in human history: new for the scale of distortion of politics and society and for the scope of mental and physical destruction. Famously, she spoke of radical evil. In the following, I will subsume her approach to a concept of totalitarianism as extermination. I will then introduce an alternative model, which I call totalitarianism as total control.¹ This latter model, because of its variability, may contribute to analyzing post-Stalinism, whereas Arendt's ‘elements’…