The Arendtian Idea of Totalitarian Elements After the Defeat of Totalitarianisms

Authors

  • Agustín Serrano de Haro Instituto de Filosofía del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

Keywords:

post-totalitarian elements, war, technique, opression

Abstract

Arendt's lucidity in describing the novelty of totalitarianism should not obscure the thinker's judgment that, after the military or political defeat of Nazism and Stalinism, factors persist in the contemporary world that can lead to heterogeneous crystallizations of totalitarian phenomena. There are at least three circles of situations in which Arendt seems to detect potentially totalitarian elements: the warlike use of nuclear energy; the power of contemporary science-technology to redirect natural processes on and against the Earth; the persistence of extreme forms of oppression and misery, tempting to "totalitarian solutions". As the reverse of the origins analyzed in the great work of 1951, they would be factors given in the present and operable in an uncertain future, which, however, keep intrinsic analogies with the formulas more typical of the totalitarian phenomenon: "everything is possible-everything is necessary-everything is recreable". In scattered places in her work Arendt alludes to each of these circles and their connections, which would show how totalitarianism is not an archived event.

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Published

2022-09-20

How to Cite

The Arendtian Idea of Totalitarian Elements After the Defeat of Totalitarianisms. (2022). Pescadora De Perlas. Revista De Estudios Arendtianos, 1(1), 205-228. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/pescadoradeperlas/article/view/36592