Cepdibi (On Arendt)

It would probably not be wrong to say that the 20th century was the most terrifying in human history. What made this century especially terrifying is not only the fact that its means of destruction reached a level of power beyond the imagination of its manufacturers, but also the experience of totalitarianism, which radically destroyed all institutions and structures shaped by mankind for centuries. Hannah Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism strikingly reveals that the origins that make Nazi totalitarianism new and unprecedented are, in fact, “right now happening” in the world. These constructions, relations, and situations that continue in the form of “undercurrent”—as Arendt calls it—did not die out with the defeat of Nazism. Here the idea of the “human condition,” which constitutes the second part of Arendt’s investigation, makes the phenomenological analysis of three forms of activity that underlie it. One of the most important theses of Arendt’s work is that there exists a dramatic relationship between the process of conquest of all human relation by the principles of utilitarianism and instrumentalism, which motivates all work and production, and the social climate in which totalitarian regimes can be shaped.

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