In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt attempted to analyze how totalitarian regimes gain such pervasive power over every aspect of the lives of individuals. The creation of omnipresent fear, the use of terror, and the ascription of quasi-divine salvific powers to the leaders all play a part. But in a way, all of these depend on one strategic goal: the destruction of all intermediate institutions in the society—clubs, local civic organizations, independent local governing bodies, churches, and the family itself—that stand between the all-powerful government and the naked individual.

In Arendt's words, "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals." The strange loyalty of the masses to the totalitarian government comes about precisely because everything else between the government and the individual has been ruthlessly removed. "Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from this belonging to a movement, his membership in the party."

Obviously, in speaking of the "party," Arendt is here referring to Nazism and Communism. As she makes clear in her analysis of these evil regimes, it was the destruction of all intermediate institutions that made possible "the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life." That is the essence of totalitarianism.

Aren't we in America immune from such evils? When the great Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to our country in the early 1830s, his answer was "yes and no." As for the "yes," in his Democracy in America, he applauds the sturdiness of all the myriad of intermediate institutions that enmesh individuals in each other's lives, weaving a strong social fabric beneath and before the national government. Here, we find the cradle of liberty, and defense against tyranny imposed from above. Tocqueville offers especial praise for churches and for the local governing body of the township. Religion provides the shared moral core that makes common life possible. Even more, it defines the value and purpose of human life in a way that sets absolute limits to government. The most local of governments, the township, is the original school of liberty where the habit of self-government is first and most deeply nurtured. Local government is most natural because it is focused on the immediate good of our family, our home, and our neighbors. The stronger our love of God, the love of our family, and the love of our local community, the less likely we are to fall prey to the atomizing forces of those with totalitarian aspirations.

And the "no"? Tocqueville also saw a possible dark side. Granted we had a long tradition of strong local institutions that stood guard against despotism from above, but he also thought that we had some weaknesses that could slowly undermine them. Americans, said Tocqueville, have a desire for equality that borders on an obsession, and an impatient passion for physical gratification. To combine the two, our fault is that we want stuff that other people have, and we want it now. This fault could lead us, step by step, into a kind of servitude to a government that would cater to our fault. Tocqueville called this "soft despotism." His words are well worth quoting at length, and have the air of a prophecy, in which he envisioned that

"an immense tutelary power is elevated [above the people], which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Obviously, this is a far different kind of totalitarianism than found in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but it is just as pervasive and deadly. The way that it destroys intermediate institutions is by neglect, by luring the individual away from the active love and care of his family and local community, away from the care of his soul and immortal destiny in his worship of God, to a life of menial toil in a tangle of bureaucratic regulations, punctuated with the reward of endless trivial amusements.

Tocqueville understood the vital role of religious institutions for sustaining a free society

Born in Paris in 1805, Tocqueville was a member of the petite noblesse. He was sent to the United States by his family to avoid the turmoil resulting from the Revolution of 1830, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. While the stated purpose of his visit was to study the American penal system, Tocqueville did much more during his nine-month journey (May 11,1831 February 20, 1832) that took him from Boston in the east to Green Bay in the west, Sault Ste. Marie in the north and New Orleans in the south. His account of this visit has become a classic work of social commentary and political philosophy. In critiquing 19th century America, Tocqueville points out her weaknesses as well as strengths. Democracy requires a moral base, he argues:

“When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the higher powers of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. When there is no longer any principle of authority in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?”

Acton Institute

http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_liberal_en_27.php

The authors of Habits of the Heart note that Tocqueville believed that citizens active in civic organizations would be the best hope for sustaining freedom and enriching the life of the republic

"Citizens can work for the betterment of society on a local level, but it is hard for Americans to envision what contributions they can make to the nation at large due to conflicting images of the public good. Bellah and his colleagues outline these images as establishment versus populism, neocapitalism versus welfare liberalism, and the administered society versus economic democracy. Religious communities can make an important contribution to the modern scene by clarifying that 'individuality and society are not opposite but require each other.' A spiritual understanding of reality entails a prophetic critique of the imperial self."

"Individualism has long been a part of American idealism but so has the vision of a helping and caring society espoused by biblical and republican traditions in the early days of the Republic. Bellah and company call for a revivification of these traditions as an antidote to selfish individualism and the ethic of materialism. They present the lineaments of a "new social ecology" based on community and commitment to restore meaning to work, legitimacy to politics, the significance of living tradition to education, and the impetus to civic activism."

spiritualityandpractice.com

http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/books.php?id=17884

Why was Hannah Arendt, a secular Jew, so concerned with a Christian saint?

Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political theorist, born of quite secular parents in Hannover Germany in 1906. She is the author of such monumental works of political theory as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

But here is an interesting fact that should surprise us. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg on St. Augustine’s understanding of love. The Nazis were firmly in power by then, and she was prevented from graduating because she was Jewish. She escaped first to France, and then to the United States (becoming a naturalized citizen in 1950). She had smuggled her dissertation on St. Augustine out of Germany, and began working on it again in the 1950s and 1960s. Obviously, she remained passionately concerned with Christian caritas, charity, love.

Why was this secular Jew so concerned with a Christian saint? Arendt saw in St. Augustine’s account of the will, and its love of God and neighbor, a deep clue to the right ordering of the human will. She also saw in his account of the will’s choice of evil, an illumination of the source of the large-scale evils that so plagued the 20th century. As her other books focusing on the horrifying disorders of the will that so marred the political landscape of the 20th century made clear, the right ordering of the will is the most critical problem facing human beings as such, and modern men and women in particular. Even more, St. Augustine helped her to understand how the choice of evil can be either deeply meditated or careless, thoughtful or thoughtless, epic or banal, tremendous or trivial. Ultimately, whether the will chooses good or evil, the point for Arendt (against the fatalists and determinists) is that the will does in fact choose one or the other. This understanding of the true freedom of the will to choose good or evil she found most cogently and profoundly articulated in St. Augustine.

This central point cannot be overstressed. Against every kind of materialism, every notion that our actions and thoughts are merely material reactions to material conditions, Christianity raises the battle cry, “The will is free,” and hence responsible for what it chooses. So many secular thinkers condemned Christianity because it held dearly to the belief that there was a heaven and hell. But heaven and hell—which are based on a judgment of our life’s choices—are the ultimate affirmation of the will’s real freedom to choose good or evil. It is, I think, no accident that the very secularists who rejected Christianity and its heaven and hell, set about creating the kinds of modern political utopias in the 20th century that created literal hells on Earth, the very hells that so absorbed Arendt’s attention in her books such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Saint-Augustine-Hannah-Arendt/dp/0226025977/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259787959&sr=1-1

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

http://mises.org/books/TRTS/

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century

Originally published in 1944—when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program—The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader’s Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.

The University of Chicago Press

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=206047

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