Of politics and social science 'totalitarianism' in the dialogue of David Riesman and Hannah Arendt

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 191-217

  Baehr, Peter ^a  

^a LINGNAN UNIVERSITY   (Hong Kong)

Author keywords

Concentration camps; David Riesman; Hannah Arendt; Social science; Totalitarianism

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847332444     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041047     Document Type: Article

References (161)

1. Wilfred M. McClay (1998) 'Fifty Years of The Lonely Crowd', WQ (Summer): 34-42, at 34.
2. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1982) Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 200.
3. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney (1950) The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press.
4. Hannah Arendt (1973 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace.
5. The literature is vast. A good place to start is Abbott Gleason (1995) Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. On 'totalitarianism' as a debate among the German left, see William David Jones (1999) The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
7. A persuasive critique of the essential identity of Bolshevism and Nazism as 'totalitarian' systems can be found in Ian Kershaw's '"Working towards the Führer": Reflections on the Nature of the Nazi Dictatorship', in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds) (1997) Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, pp. 88-107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. Arendt also recognized important differences, notably the phenomenon of the party purge in the Soviet Union for which Nazism had no strict analogue. (The destruction of the Röhm clique in 1934 was sui generis.) See Arendt's contribution to Carl J. Friedrich (ed.) (1954) Totalitarianism, pp. 337-8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
9. This deliberately minimalist definition approximates the one provided by Arendt herself in (1959) 'Reflections on Little Rock', in Peter Baehr (ed.) (2000) The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 231-46. New York: Viking.
10. cannot here pursue an extended discussion of Arendt's theory of 'society' or the 'social'. Suffice it to say that her frequent characterization of 'the social' as an entity of conformity (rather than distinction) and behaviour (rather than action) severely diminished her ability to see the potential dynamism and creativity of this sphere. Relevant in these respects is Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (1998) The Attack of the Blob. Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
11. For a more systematic analysis of Arendt's evaluation of the social sciences than I offer here, see Peter Baehr (2002) 'Identifying the Unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Critique of Sociology', American Sociological Review 67(6): 804-31.
12. Arendt, 'Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, pp. 232-47, at p. 232. New York: Harcourt Brace.
13. Arendt (1945) 'Nightmare and Flight', ibid., pp. 133-5, at 133.
14. Arendt (n. 8), 233.
15. Arendt (1945) 'Nightmare and Flight', pp. 133-5, Ibid.
16. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, Ibid., pp. 239, 242.
17. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, Ibid., p. 238.
18. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, Ibid., pp. 240-1.
19. Arendt, Essays in Understanding, Ibid., pp. 241-2. Questioning Karl Jaspers's characterization of Nazi policy as 'criminal guilt', Arendt wrote: The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough. . . . That is, this guilt, in contrast to criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems. That is the reason why the Nazis in Nuremberg are so smug. They know that, of course. And just as inhuman as their guilt is the innocence of the victims. Human beings simply can't be as innocent as they all were in the face of the gas chambers (the most repulsive usurer was as innocent as the newborn child because no crime deserves such a punishment).
20. We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue. Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 17 Aug. 1946, in (1992 [1985]) Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969, eds Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, tr. Robert and Rita Kimber, p. 54. New York: Harcourt Brace.
21. See n. 15; Arendt (n. 3), 443 (on 'the appearance of some radical evil, previously unknown to us'); and Arendt [1954] 'Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, p. 318. New York: Harcourt Brace (on how totalitarianism has 'brought to light the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment').
22. Arendt [1953] 'Religion and Politics', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, pp. 368-90. New York: Harcourt Brace.
23. Blücher to Arendt, 23 July 1941, in (2000) Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, ed. Lotte Kohler, pp. 61-2; also pp. 64, 69, 71-3. New York: Harcourt Brace.
24. On Gerth, see Arendt (n. 17), 378, 388, n. 24. Arendt (n. 3), 361-2, n. 57. Hans Gerth, a pupil of Karl Mannheim, was a former student friend of Arendt's first husband, Günther Stern (alias Günther Anders). A former friend, because Stern later turned on Gerth, claiming him to be a Johnny Come Lately who had emigrated in 1938 only after attempts to ingratiate himself with the Nazi authorities, as a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt, had failed. That assessment is almost certainly a caricature, if not a travesty, of Gerth's conduct. Yet the taint of being 'the Aryan latecomer', in Gerth's bitter phrase, meant that a position in the New School for Social Research was ruled out: see Guy Oakes and Arthur J. Vidich (1999) Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, pp. 3-5. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
25. Perhaps Arendt shared Stern's hostility to Gerth. Yet, in a letter to Gerth in April 1945, C. Wright Mills cites Arendt's support for Gerth's going to Germany, on State Department business, to trace postwar Nazi communication networks. C. Wright Mills (2000) Letters and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, p. 94. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
26. Hans Gerth (1940) 'The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition', American Journal of Sociology 45: 517-41.
27. Franz Neumann ([1942/4] 1966) Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, p. 81.
28. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944, Ibid., p. 465.
29. Digitized Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress Correspondence File, 1938-1976, n.d., David Riesman, 1947-1956, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/mharendtFolderPo2.html, images 1-63, at image 1. Hereafter this source will be cited as Riesman-Arendt Correspondence, followed by the pertinent digitized image number.
30. Daniel Bell, a colleague at the University of Chicago, prompted Riesman's letter by passing on to him some of Arendt's writings from Partisan Review.
31. David Riesman (1983) 'Some Personal Thoughts on the Academic Ethic', Minerva 21: 265-84, at 283.
32. David Riesman (1983) 'Some Personal Thoughts on the Academic Ethic', Minerva 21: 265-84, at 283, Ibid.
33. Over a seven-year period, as a boy, Riesman attended the Wednesday Quaker Friends Meeting sessions at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. See Riesman, 'Becoming an Academic Man', in Bennet M. Berger (ed.) (1990) Authors of their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists, pp. 22-74, at p. 26. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, where he majored in biochemical sciences, Riesman was a pacifist but, during the 1930s, came to favour American intervention. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was a watershed in his political views: from then onwards, 'the theme that unifies my political attitudes has remained that of the danger of nuclear war and the destruction of entire populations, perhaps of half the planet'. Yet there was to be no return to pacifism. During the Cold War, Riesman supported 'the strategy of a minimum deterrent' as a basic insurance policy against a Soviet first strike.
34. He observed that 'the danger of nuclear weapons is the principal danger facing the planet, and that all other hazards, whether the greenhouse effect, or desertification, or world hunger, are, in comparison, manageable by human intelligence and ingenuity'. 'A Personal Memoir: My Political Journey', in Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins (eds) (1984) Conflict and Consensus: A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis S. Coser, pp. 327-64, at pp. 339, 344, 348. New York: Free Press.
35. See also Riesman, 'Academic Man', p. 68, n. 18.
36. On this experience, Riesman, 'Academic Man', ibid., pp. 38-40. 'The very first case I worked on dispelled any illusion that Brandeis himself would be influenced by empirical data when in pursuit of the larger goals of creating precedents for federal judicial restraint' (p. 39).
37. Riesman, 'Academic Man', Ibid., p. 54.
38. Riesman, 'Academic Man', Ibid., p. 58.
39. 'Preface to the Fourth Printing' (1965) of David Riesman in collaboration with Nathan Glazer (1952) Faces in the Crowd, p. v. New Haven: Yale University Press.
40. Glazer knew Hannah Arendt independently of David Riesman. He met her when she first came to the US and while she worked as an editor of Schocken books, as well as during the time she was writing for Commentary, on which Glazer was an editor, and for other Jewish publications such as Menorah Journal and Jewish Frontier (personal communication with Professor Glazer).
41. The original, 1950 edn of The Lonely Crowd opens with the illustration of 'political apathy'. The abridged paperback Doubleday 1953 edn omits this and other examples but offers many clarifications of method and substance. It shows the underestimated influence of Nathan Glazer and also some subtle updating by Riesman. As Riesman remarked (p. 6), the 1953 Doubleday edn was 'not only an abridgement' (approximately four-fifths as long as the edn of 1950) but 'to some extent a new edition, for many passages have been rewritten and others rearranged'. Parenthetically, while the listing of authors in the Ist edn of The Lonely Crowd is Riesman, Denney, Glazer, in the Doubleday paperback and all subsequent paperback edns of the book, it is Riesman, Glazer, Denney. Glazer's important role in abridging and rewriting the original text probably explains this switch in authorial sequence.
42. The data were incorporated into C. Wright Mills (1951) White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press. On the contrast between Riesman's concept of 'veto groups' and Mills's notion of a 'power elite',
43. see 'Foreword: Ten Years Later', pp. xxxi ff. to the 1960 edn of The Lonely Crowd, and also The Lonely Crowd, ch. 11.
44. Riesman also drew on work from Erich Fromm, Ernest Schachtel, and others on the political views of German workers. On this study see Fromm ([1941] 1965) Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon, p. 237.
45. On the concept of 'social character', Fromm ,Escape from Freedom, ibid., pp. 304-27.
46. Denney's specialty was popular culture. The division of labour among Riesman, Glazer and Denny is clarified in Riesman et al. (n. 33), pp. xlvii-xlviii.
47. Some of this material constituted the 21 portraits, composed of 180 interviews, delineated in Riesman and Glazer (n. 30).
48. Riesman et al. (n. 33), p. xiii.
49. Shortly before Riesman had left Chicago to begin his research at Yale, he had been busy working up a course on 'Culture and Personality'. See Riesman (1990: n. 26), 57.
50. In the Doubleday edn (p. 48), the authors emphasize the heuristic nature of their discussion, saying that 'the types of character and society dealt with in this book are types: they do not exist in reality, but are a construction, based on a selection of certain historical problems for investigation'.
51. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 27.
52. '[B]ecause this type . . . is to be found today in such Catholic countries as France, Italy and possibly those in Latin America, a much greater extent than in Protestant countries'. Riesman, Culture and Personality, Ibid., image 5.
53. Riesman et al. (n. 2), 184-209.
54. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), images 4-5, letter of 21 May 1948.
55. Riesman, [B]ecause this type... is to be found today in such Catholic countries as France, Italy and possibly those in Latin America, a much greater extent than in Protestant countries, Culture and Personality, Ibid. This letter also includes the observation that 'modern philosophy has long had a tendency to destroy every idea of man as an autonomous being: You are what life makes of you; you are your destiny; etc.', image 5.
56. Riesman, [B]ecause this type... is to be found today in such Catholic countries as France, Italy and possibly those in Latin America, a much greater extent than in Protestant countries, Culture and Personality, Ibid.
57. 'Masses', in Arendt's lexicon, are equivalent neither to economic classes nor mobs, but instead refer to people of all classes who have been uprooted by war, revolution and unemployment from a stable 'world' whose atomization conduces to an erosion of a sense of reality. These people, made 'superfluous' through social dislocation, are, Arendt argues, the prime candidates of totalitarian movements. See Arendt (n. 3), 351-2, and the discussion in Margaret Canovan, 'Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism: A Reassessment', in Dana Villa (ed.) (2000) The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, pp. 25-43, at 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
58. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 9, letter of 9 March 1949. Arendt would not have known that Riesman himself was active in the defense of Japanese Americans immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He described this involvement as 'my first directly political action' (1984: n. 26), 337. On Riesman's campaigning in Washington against the deportation of West Coast Japanese Americans, see Riesman (1990: n. 26), 66, n. 6.
59. The connection is a leitmotif of The Lonely Crowd but is especially emphasized in the subsection on 'The Adjusted, the Anomic, the Autonomous', pp. 287-91. Arendt must also have found the psychoanalytic language ('superego controls', 'clinical symptom') and metaphors that pervade The Lonely Crowd particularly grating. Following a quotation on the emotional condition of soldiers hospitalized for apathy, Riesman remarks (n. 2), 290: My own belief is that the ambulatory patients in the ward of modern culture show many analogous symptoms of too much compliance and too little insight, though of course their symptoms are not as sudden and severe. Their lack of emotion and emptiness of expression are as characteristic of many contemporary anomics as hysteria or outlawry was characteristic of the societies depending on earlier forms of direction.
60. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 9, letter of 9 March 1949.
61. The Lonely Crowd, The Adjusted, the Anomic, the Autonomous, pp. 287-291, Ibid.
62. Later, Arendt spelt out the concept of 'world' that is implicit in this letter to Riesman: e.g. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. While 'the earth' designates the terrestrial sphere of physical and organic life, 'the world' refers to the cultural, technological, and political artefacts that lend human existence a modicum of stability. People relate to this world analogously to how people sit around a table: the world is common but we see it from different vantage points; the world both brings us together and separates us; this separation is a condition of human freedom and diversity. The world (civilization) is produced primarily by work ('fabrication'). 'Worldlessness' is that condition in which people lose the sense of a common world; they become cynical, lose their grasp on reality, mistake the world as it is for their own feelings about it. In short, worldlessness is a condition of unreality, acutely felt by modern 'masses', and generally produced by social meltdown (the status of the refugee or the superfluous person) attendant on massive disruption (e.g. the breakdown of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires after the First World War).
63. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 10, letter of 9 March 1949. In a later comment on the 'other directed type', Arendt speculated on people who live under the misapprehension that normalcy 'is something in the flesh' (as distinct from a medium of measurement) and who are not satisfied with the respect of their community but want 'the impossible [namely] the active approval, amounting to friendship, of exactly everybody', a craving that paradoxically makes friendship impossible too. Arendt to Riesman, 13 June 1949, image 21.
64. Perhaps a reference to Henry Friend, whose portrait appears in Riesman and Glazer (n. 30), 441-84.
65. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 6, letter of 25 May 1948.
66. Riesman's assumption that Arendt was a historian, rather than a political theorist or philosopher, is a common refrain of the early letters.
67. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 3, letter of 11 Nov. 1948. (The image, in the digitized archive, is out of chronological sequence.) See also images 6 and 7, letter of 25 May 1948.
68. On the sociology of knowledge, see Arendt (1930) 'Philosophy and Sociology', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, pp. 28-43. New York: Harcourt Brace.
69. (1953: n. 32), 5. See also (n. 30), p. v: 'In fact, the concepts of social character set forth in The Lonely Crowd were developed almost accidentally in working with the vignettes of a few individuals'.
70. Riesman (n. 33), p. xvii; (1990: n. 26), 61.
71. Arendt and Jaspers (n. 15), 236, letter of 21 Dec. 1953. For Arendt's conviction that the 'social sciences, as "behavioural sciences", aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal', see Arendt (n. 51), 45; cf. 43, 323.
72. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 2), image 8, letter of 28 Feb. 1949.
73. Part III of the version that Riesman read encompassed chapters on 'The Classless Society' (Arendt's distinction among 'classes', 'masses', and 'the mob'), 'The Totalitarian Movement' (on totalitarian propaganda and organization), and 'Totalitarianism in Power' (the nature of governance, the secret police, and total domination). In the 2nd enlarged edn of 1958 and in the 3rd edn of 1966, Arendt added a new chapter on 'Ideology and Terror' (based on (1953) 'Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government', Review of Politics 15[3]: 303-27).
74. The 1958 version of Origins also contained a chapter on the Hungarian insurrection (based on (1958) 'Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution', Review of Politics 20[4]: 570-90);
75. it was excised from the 1966 edn. The two edns that followed Origins' 1951 publication witnessed a number of interpolations into the main text and included additional prefaces. We lack a full concordance but for some helpful preliminary observations see Roy Tsao (2002) 'The Three Phases of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism', Social Research 69(2): 579-619.
76. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 17, 13 June 1949.
77. Roy Tsao, Social Research, Ibid., image 47, 6 Oct. 1949.
78. 'Totalitarianism', in David Riesman (1954) Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays, pp. 409-13, at p. 410. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
79. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 15.
80. Totalitarianism', in David Riesman (1954) Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays, pp. 409-13, Ibid.
81. David Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays, Ibid., image 12, letter of 7 June 1949; image 26, letter of 27 June 1949; image 35, letter of 26 Aug. 1949.
82. Image 54. Images 51-62 comprise Riesman's typewritten review of The Origins of Totalitarianism for Commentary.
83. See David Riesman (1951) 'The Path to Total Terror', Commentary 11: 392-8.
84. The remonstration runs deeper because one of Riesman's criticisms of social science that it 'tended to imagine social systems as monolithic' - is also one of his criticisms of Arendt: see image 15, letter of 8 June 1949 and (1952) 'Some Observations on the Limits of Totalitarian Power', in Riesman (n. 65), 414-25, at p. 422; cf. p. 422, n. 6, for a comment on Arendt.
85. (n. 65), 410. 'In general . . . she tends to make totalitarianism appear as consistently fanatical; she therefore interprets specific actions in terms of long-range goals, and does not allow for any more or less accidental concatenations of bureaucratic forces, slip-ups, careerisms, as explanatory factors' (n. 69), image 61.
86. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 415.
87. Cf. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 46, 22 Sept. 1949.
88. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 415.
89. David Riesman (1951) 'The Path to Total Terror', Commentary 11: 392-8, Ibid. Thus Riesman anticipated Arendt's later concern that Adolf Eichmann not be elevated to a figure of Satanic grandeur but understood for the nonentity that she claimed he was.
90. Riesman's animus against Nineteen Eight Four looks jarring until one considers the kind of interpretation the book allows. So, for Richard Rorty, Nineteen Eighty Four lends credence to the claim 'that there is no such thing as inner freedom' and that there 'is nothing to people except what has been socialized into them': (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 177.
91. See Arendt (n. 8), 240, on the 'disintegration of the personality'.
92. Arendt (n. 3), 447.
93. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Ibid., p. 451. Also, p. 459: 'Human nature is at stake'.
94. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Ibid., pp. 453, 455.
95. For a contrary view, see Tsvetan Todorov ([1991] 1996), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. New York: Henry Holt, pp. 31-118. Tr. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak.
96. Arendt (n. 3), 459.
97. Tsvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, Ibid., p. 455.
98. (1946) 'The Image of Hell', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, pp. 197-205, at 198. New York: Harcourt Brace.
99. On the Nazi 'experiment' of eliminating spontaneity, see Arendt (n. 3), p. 438.
100. Essays in Understanding, Ibid., p. 457.
101. First published in 1953 (later appended to the 1958 edn of Origins), 'Ideology and Terror' post-dates the period I am examining but the essay's main line of argument is discernible in the drafts of Origins that Riesman consulted. Note that 'Ideology and Terror' refers principally to the 'inhabitants of a totalitarian country' (Arendt (n. 3), 468); it deals with concentration and death camps only by allusion.
102. (1951) The Burden of Our Time. London: Seeker & Warburg, p. 428. She remarked: . . . the chances are that total domination of man will never come about, for it presupposes the existence of one authority, one way of life, one ideology in all countries and among all peoples in the world. Only when no competitor, no country of physical refuge, and no human being whose understanding may offer a spiritual refuge, are left can the process of total domination and the change of the nature of man begin in earnest. The remarks were expunged from later edns.
103. Recall that I am talking about Origins. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt does give examples of resistance, though these overwhelmingly take place outside of Germany itself.
104. It is notable that Arendt's philosophical master work, The Human Condition (pp. 320-2) ends on a similar note of almost unreserved gloom: the 'victory of the animal laborans'. She remarks: . . . even now, laboring is too lofty, too ambitious a word for what we are doing, or think we are doing, in the world we have come to live in. The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning. . . . It is quite conceivable that the modern age - which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity - may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.
105. As Riesman observed about her view of totalitarianism as a whole: (n. 22), image 15, letter of 8 June 1949.
106. (1990: n. 26), 67, n. 10.
107. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 425.
108. The Human Condition, Ibid., p. 423.
109. The Human Condition, Ibid., p. 420.
110. On Arendt's reckoning, while Nazi Germany entered its totalitarian phase after 1938 (and thus five years after her own flight), the Soviet Union was totalitarian 'after 1930': see 'Mankind and Terror', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, pp. 297-306, at 297. New York: Harcourt Brace. In other words, Riesman, unlike Arendt, had actually witnessed in person a totalitarian society.
111. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 421.
112. Riesman (1990: n. 26), 67, n. 10.
113. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 416.
114. Mankind and Terror, Essays in Understanding, Ibid., p. 419.
115. (1952) 'A Grammar of Soviet Motives', Partisan Review 19: 242-6, at 246.
116. Heinrich Blücher, misquoting Riesman, contemptuously dismissed the charge: The book [Origins] will outlast the troublemakers, and you can set your mind at rest. Mr Riesman revenged himself with a swipe at you in a review of one of Margaret Mead's scribblings, where he felt that her work was so much more substantial than the 'mystical insights of Hannah Arendt'. Blücher to Arendt, 23 May 1952, in ([1996] 2000) Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968, ed. Lotte Kohler, p. 177. New York, Harcourt Brace. Tr. Peter Constantine. Riesman's Commentary review (n. 22: image 52) described Arendt as 'less mystical' and more attentive to historical data than Simone Weil, but this still suggests that Arendt was mystical to some degree.
117. The review prompted a disparaging reaction from Mary McCarthy who considered its 'strictures and pious exceptions terribly stupid; it seemed to me that he understood the book and the marvel of its construction very little', letter to Arendt, 26 April 1951, in (1995) Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, ed. Carol Brightman, p. 2. New York: Harcourt Brace. McCarthy appears to have taken an especially strong dislike to Riesman calling his work 'drivel' (letter to Arendt, 20 Jan. 1955, p. 32) and commending an article by Elizabeth Hardwick, a close friend of McCarthy's, that McCarthy deemed 'utterly ruinous to a man like that - a total loss of face.
118. think this is a good thing' (letter to Arendt, 16 Sept. 1954, p. 38). See Hardwick's sardonic (1954) 'Riesman Considered', Partisan Review (Sept./Oct.): 548-56.
119. Riesman (n. 98), 246.
120. It is worth noting that while the original edn of The Lonely Crowd (p. 296) states that 'modern totalitarianism . . . wages open and effective war on autonomy', the 1953 Doubleday edition (p. 288), omits the word 'effective', adds the rider that '[m]odern totalitarianism is also more inefficient and corrupt than it is often given credit for', and observes that while the aims of totalitarianism are unlimited, its 'effectiveness' is still unknown. The emendation likely reflected Riesman's criticisms of Arendt.
121. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 421.
122. This was a criticism of Arendt that emerged in the Commentary review, image 61.
123. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 16, letter of 8 June 1949.
124. 'The Seeds of a Fascist International', in Jerome Kohn (ed.) (1994) Essays in Understanding, pp. 140-50, at 147. New York: Harcourt Brace.
125. On 'factuality as fabricated' see (c.1952-3) 'On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding', Essays in Understanding, ibid., pp. 328-60, at p. 350.
126. Riesman-Arendt Correspondence (n. 22), image 23, letter of 13 June 1949.
127. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 419-20, n. 4. The statement I have quoted is not verbatim Arendt, but Riesman's abbreviated recollection. For a description of the 'underground struggle' in Buchenwald, see Eugen Kogon ([1950] 1998) The Theory and Practice of Hell. New York: Berkley Books, pp. 255-73. In the 1966 Preface to Part III of Origins (p. xxvii) Arendt stated that 'Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime'.
128. Arendt (n. 3), 439, n. 126. Cf. Tsao (n. 62), 601, 616, n. 28. Kogon (n. 107), pp. 239-41, does, however, describe gassings in the 'eastern camps'.
129. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz ([1947] 1986). New York: Simon & Schuster. This is a translation, by Stuart Woolf, of Se questo è un uomo (If this is a man). Though 'well received by the critics', the first printing sold only 1900 copies.
130. The book was reprinted in 1957. For details, see Primo Levi ([1986] 1989) The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, p. 167; tr. Raymond Rosenthal.
131. Levi (1986: n. 109), 98.
132. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Ibid., p. 78. See also pp. 87-100.
133. Todorov (n. 80), 40.
134. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Ibid., pp. 59-118.
135. Arendt (n. 3), p. 420. Nor was the regime as a whole able to drill its ideology (e.g. of anti-Semitism) into the entire population. For testimony, see Victor Klemperer ([1995] 1999) I Will Bear Witness 1933-1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years. New York: Modern Library, pp. 438, 442; yet see 441, tr. Martin Chalmers.
136. Eric A. Johnson (2000) Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans. New York: Basic Books, p. 485;
137. also pp. 20-1, 353-75. In a similar vein, see Robert Gellately (2001) Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 257 and passim.
138. Arendt (n. 3), 323-4. On p. 338, Arendt qualifies this picture by writing of the masses as 'good family men' who sacrificed 'belief, honor, dignity' for security.
139. Daniel J. Goldhagen ([1996] 1997) Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Abacus, p. 187.
140. See also Christopher R. Browning (1992) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins.
141. Sheila Fitzpatrick (1999) Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 9, 192.
142. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Ibid., p. 220.
143. Also Nadezhda Mandelstam ([1970] 1999) Hope Against Hope. New York: Modern Library, p. 340, tr. Max Hayward.
144. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Ibid., p. 339.
145. Fitzpatrick (n. 118), 222.
146. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Ibid., p. 227.
147. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Ibid., pp. 62-3.
148. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Ibid., pp. 65-6.
149. It is the persistence of this venerable institution, largely family-based but also involving reciprocal obligations to those of a similar (school, town, military) background, that partially explains how Chinese enterprise was able to grow so quickly once Deng Xiaoping's 'Open Door' reforms began in the late 1970s. Exiles from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and elsewhere returned to their home communities where, welcomed enthusiastically, they were able to invest and strike highly personalized deals with local leaders. See Lucian W. Pye (2000) '"Asian Values": From Dynamos to Dominoes?', in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds) Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, pp. 244-55. New York: Basic Books.
150. Also, on guanxi during the Cultural Revolution, see Ruth Cherrington (1997) Deng's Generation: Young Intellectuals in 1980s China. London: Macmillan, pp. 94-5.
151. The self-destructive consequences of a reign of virtue for protagonists and victims alike - indeed the protagonists become victims of their own rhetoric - are superbly delineated in Arendt's analysis of Jacobinism: (1963) On Revolution. New York: Viking, pp. 66-114.
152. Susan L. Shirk (1984) 'The Decline of Virtuocracy in China', in James L. Watson (ed.), Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China, pp. 56-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
153. J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning (1993) 'Introduction', Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 5.
154. On the same page, the authors describe the 'inclusion of society into the Stalinist equation' as 'revisionist' though in fact it marks a return to many of the issues identified in Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, with the assistance of David Gleicher and Irving Rosow (1959) The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The book employed the resources of Harvard's Émigré Interview Project (1951-3), the data of which consisted of just over 1000 in-depth interviews of Soviet emigrants resident in Germany and the US. For details, see pp. 4-40, and http:// daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/research_portal/soviet_archival/Collection/Emigre. htm
155. The state may have sought to 'swallow' society but, as Suny notes: . . . it was unable to realize the vision presented by totalitarian theory of [a] complete atomized society. The limits of state power were met when people refused to work efficiently, migrated from place to place by the millions, or informally worked out ways to resist pressure from above. Ronald Grigor Suny (1997) 'Stalin and his Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930-1935', in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds) Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, pp. 26-52, at p. 36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
156. Riesman (1984: n. 26), 335.
157. Riesman (1952: n. 70), 422-3.
158. Riesman (n. 65), 410-11, emphasis added.
159. Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Ibid., p. 411.
160. In 1954, Riesman and Arendt joined other participants in a conference on totalitarianism organized by Carl J. Friedrich but Riesman's contributions add nothing of substance to what he had already argued. See Friedrich (n. 5). For Riesman's contributions (the book has no index), see pp. 132-3, 227-8, 377-8. For Arendt's, see pp. 75-9, 133-4, 228-9, 336-8. Friedrich was Riesman's mentor on political matters. On their relationship, see Riesman (1990: n. 26), 30-1, 37-8, 42, 50
161. Commentary review (n. 22), image 62.