Hobbes protected private interests while totalitarianism proclaims privacy does not exist
Evidence
The coincidence of this identification with the totalitarian pretense of having abolished the contradictions between individual and public interests is significant enough (see chapter xii). However, one should not overlook the fact that Hobbes wanted most of all to protect private interests by pretending that, rightly understood, they were the interests of the body politic as well, while on the contrary totalitarian regimes proclaim the nonexistence of privacy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2215
Categorization
- XREF: Extends the scaffolding on how totalitarian ideology collapses individual and public spheres — directly relevant to the imagined-community material. — connects to: Totalitarian rule replaces external coercion with domination from within each person; The legal form of subjective rights fits private liberties but not political obligations — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 87; Lippmann framed totalitarianism as absence of private property rather than lack of democracy — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 108
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2215