Hannah Arendt is largely responsible for a very very misleading concept: totalitarianism. Twentieth-century social science knows few worse.
And the reason it is such a bad idea is that it helps us to forget the specificity of fascism as a socio-political movement.
Instead it encourages us to compare Stalin and Hitler personally. It makes room for us to speculate about which of them was most evil? And that's a ridiculous, wholly reductive question: a sign of a significant loss of historical and political understanding.
At any rate, perhaps the largest hole in 2othc historiography is fascism itself, buried under our obsessions with the holocaust, totalitarianism, and military history, smothered under a will to aggrandize individual agency.
Books of the year 2024
6 days ago
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