Legends explain concrete facts while ideologies claim universal hidden truths

Evidence

The flourishing of historical and political legends came to a rather abrupt end with the birth of Christianity. Its interpretation of history, from the days of Adam to the Last Judgment, as one single road to redemption and salvation, offered the most powerful and all-inclusive legendary explanation of human destiny. Only after the spiritual unity of Christian peoples gave way to the plurality of nations, when the road to salvation became an uncertain article of individual faith rather than a universal theory applicable to all happenings, did new kinds of historical explanations emerge. The nineteenth century has offered us the curious spectacle of an almost simultaneous birth of the most varying and contradictory ideologies, each of which claimed to know the hidden truth about otherwise incomprehensible facts. Legends, however, are not ideologies; they do not aim at universal explanation but are always concerned with concrete facts. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 538

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt draws a sharp analytic distinction between legend (concrete-fact-oriented, pre-Christian) and ideology (universalizing, modern) that will recur throughout her account of totalitarian thought.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding goal of distinguishing forms of explanation; this legend/ideology distinction parallels the later Orientalism reading’s account of how modern European knowledge produced the Orient.