UC Santa Cruz

Perplexity has often greeted hannah arendt's decision to place an extended historical reflection on anti-Semitism at the beginning ofThe Origins of Totalitarianism, her doleful 1951 postmortem chronicling Europe's twentieth-century descent into the abyss. Seyla Benhabib proposes that to “appreciate the unity of the work as Arendt herself intended it to be read” (64), one must begin not with part 1 (“Antisemitism”) but rather with the chapter in part 3 (“Totalitarianism”) about the extermination and concentration camps. Another of Arendt's best commentators, Margaret Canovan, observes that Arendt's arrangement is “not a very helpful one” because, among other reasons, Arendt's discussion of anti-Semitism deploys key concepts like “imperialism” whose particular meanings to Arendt are only later defined. Canovan chalks up Arendt's organizational decision to “her own initial preoccupation” with anti-Semitism, as well as to “reasons of chronology” (28-29).