Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt each claimed that Nazism and Marxist-Leninism were totalitarian ideologies, linked by the same underlying forces. However, the two linked each other for different reasons.
Hannah Arendt showed the links between Totalitarianism and Imperialism via looking at the actual history, writings, and events of that history. Ayn Rand basically states nonsense as if it were fact and writes fiction. Hannah Arendt traces the development of Anti-Semitism from its roots in Christian society through its evolution into a unifying principle of the Nazis. Along the way she examines the currents that led to Totalitarian. She examines the currents, forces, and concept shifts that led from the middle classes (businessmen; the so called "Bourgeoisie,") shifting from people believing in human rights and liberty to people who were Darwinian, Hobbesian, and divorced from even the pretense to an obligation to one another. (Radical individualism, what she calls the "emancipation of the Bourgeoisie."
Reading Hannah Arendt I actually learn something. Reading Ayn Rand I get entertained. For some reason Hannah Arendt is ignored while Ayn Rand is promoted. Why is that?
Well part of the answer is that reading Hannah Arendt requires one to do a lot of thinking. She defines terms and then uses them over and over again, and packs so much information into her paragraphs that they can almost give one a headache. I've spent the past months studying her (when I have time) and tracking down what she says using the index at the back of the book. Its not an easy read.
She traces: how the changes wrought with modernity led to the development of racial theories. She shows how Anti-Semitism developed from being a product of the ancient enmity between the [Totalitarian Catholic] Christian Church and its parent, to being a unifying principle in European circles. She goes on to show how one (Disraeli) Christian Convert's attempts to deflect enmity from Judaism led to the development of both increased Racism and conspiracy theories. She traces the development of German Racism from a theory to justify French noble pretensions to a generalized pseudo-science through the British and French. She also shows how Middle class liberal ideals devolved to a point where the bourgeoisie produced "criminals", "cranks" (people who are full of hate and bile), "crackpots" (people full of theories about life devoid of any connection to reality), "philistines" (people who are so alienated from society that all they care about is their private life), and a "mob", mostly made up of people thrown out of the middle class by the reality of unbridled capitalism and its tendency to concentrate "accumulation" into fewer and fewer hands. She shows how this concentration of money and power eventually led to a sense of powerlessness and alienation among both the people who lost their power over their lives and those who gained power without responsibility by increasingly deceptive and abusive methods. Nazism and Stalinism were just two faces of the final results of a European Society that could kill millions of people in places like the "Belgian" Congo without battting an eye.
This narrative also shows how society went from a place where business and workers could unite to overthrow aristocratic tyrants, to where business itself has become something tyrannical. She shows how European Culture broke down any sense of community and how the totalitarian movements took advantage of that already degraded situation to strip away all public individuality. She notes that much of the sloganeering of Jacobism was hypocrisy anyway, and what the Nazis wrought was to strip away the "hypocrisy" behind modern Capitalism and expose its naked essence. She showed how both Communism and Nazism broke down any genuine sense of community and replaced it with propaganda backed by personal competition and fear. How society de-evolved into a place dominated by fearful adherence to a mob dogmatics and a mob mentality. She also showed how Totalitarianism hollowed out ideology; People in Totalitarian groups can change dogmas or doctrines on a dime if directed to it by the "movement."
For instance, she showed how the worst of the Nazis was probably the most "normal seeming" of them because he was a "philistine;" Someone so divorced from a genuine identity with his community that all he was concerned about was his public status and his private family life.
Hannah Arendt takes some work to understand. Lazy people aren't going to bother to read her.
Ayn Rand on the contrary requires no thinking. She was engaging in propaganda. She preached her ideology to salesmen and chambers of congress. Her argument against Fascism and Communism tried to label both movements as socialist and to distance those two, especially Nazism, from any connection to Capitalist trends, social forces, or "bourgeois" thinking. On the contrary she promotes the fundamentally dishonest myth that capitalism is about the "entrepeneur"; a brave inventive fellow who is the heart and sould of capitalism. She paints a mythic reality of sole proprietorships when modern life is almost entirely more like her concession to reality with her depiction of Conglomerates. Her depiction of the corporation and rugged independents against the Government is mythical and fundamentally a lie. Even the rare genuine example of a great figure, has gotten there by playing the corporate finance game. On occasion they've recognized good bets, but the exception proves the rule, it doesn't deny it.
I'm trying to be fair to Ayn Rand. She's not totally off base. But she's enough off base so that she's enabling more of the same phenomena that drove Nazi. The difference is that under Nazism the drive was to use Nationalism, corporatism and centralization to turn Germany into an Empire. Now the goal is to use nationalism, privatization, decentralization and corporatism to create a feudal world order. Those goals aren't listed but they are openly stated and described by people on the right.
The reality of the "Hank Rearden's of the world" is that they get their power and money by the leveraging of Other People's Money and through the monarchical principle. If the result is dispersed it is still the creation of an aristocracy. A system that enables someone to rule autocratically cannot be expected to create a string of enlightened despots. There are no exceptions to prove the mythic alternative is anything but a lie. In every case where governments are organized as autocracy; whether at the Bonanza ranch, Enron, or even Ford Motors; eventually they display dysfunction and autocratic tyranny.
Posted by cholte at January 27, 2010 09:49 PM