Totalitarian rule requires an atomized and individualized mass, not mere social structurelessness
Evidence
That totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass, can best be seen in a comparison of Nazism and Bolshevism which began in their respective countries under very different circumstances. To change Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship into full totalitarian rule, Stalin had first to create artificially that atomized society which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historical circumstances. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 761
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines atomization — the specific precondition of totalitarianism — and distinguishes it from structurelessness, a crucial distinction in Arendt’s scaffolding.
- XREF: Atomization as a manufactured precondition resonates with how race-thinking isolates individuals politically before mass exclusion becomes possible. — connects to: Mass man’s defining trait is isolation, not brutality or backwardness; Power cannot self-realize but depends on societal-structural conditions for legitimacy; Totalitarian domination requires reducing humans to interchangeable uniform reactions — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 980 (+2 more)
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 761