Totalitarian claims to totality merely reversed the bourgeoisie’s own political philosophy

Evidence

Against the class spirit of the Continental parties, which had always admitted they represented certain interests, and against the “opportunism” resulting from their conception of themselves as only parts of a total, the totalitarian movements asserted their “superiority” in that they carried a Weltanschauung by which they would take possession of man as a whole. In this claim to totality the mob leaders of the movements again formulated and only reversed the bourgeoisie’s own political philosophy. The bourgeois class, having made its way through social pressure and, frequently, through an economic blackmail of political institutions, always believed that the public and visible organs of power were directed by their own secret, nonpublic interests and influence. In this sense, the bourgeoisie’s political philosophy was always “totalitarian”; it always assumed an identity of politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only as the façade for private interests. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 798

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the totalitarian claim to ‘totality’ as taking possession of man as a whole, and shows its conceptual mirror in the bourgeoisie’s assumption that politics, economics, and society are one.
• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings that build on Arendt’s analysis of how totalizing ideologies absorb the state — the ‘fagade for private interests’ mechanism is a scaffolding concept. — connects to: Marcuse’s dialectical method treated totalitarianism as both reaction and continuation of liberalism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 404; Philosophy’s highest concepts fail precisely through their claim to totality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2540