Tag: Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism sheds light on today’s socially isolated world This article was first published in spiked on 2 July 2021. Can we understand the extensive range of draconian measures designed to contain the Covid-19 pandemic as being, in some way, totalitarian? By any historical standard, these measures were certainly hugely repressive. Although they varied from region to region, and nation to nation, in many cases they amounted to a system of mass house arrest. People were often forbidden to leave their homes, except under the most stringent conditions. And when they were allowed out, there were often strict limits on how far they could travel, what they could do and when they had to return. The freedom to demonstrate against such measures was also typically curtailed. And those who complained on social media against lockdowns were likely to find their posts removed or accompanied by a warning of some kind. So, in sum, the measures taken to tackle the pandemic curbed many of the key political freedoms enjoyed in liberal democracies, from freedom of movement and freedom of assembly to, increasingly, freedom of speech. And they curtailed and perhaps even abolished many everyday personal freedoms, too. Understandably, perhaps, some have been moved to describe the situation as ‘totalitarian’. But how useful is such a characterisation? It’s certainly true that the measures taken to contain Covid-19 impacted on almost every aspect of human life. But is today’s situation really comparable to that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union – the two societies to which the word totalitarian has been most often applied? No, not exactly. There are too many important distinctions to be drawn between the locked-down world of the past 18 months and 20th-century totalitarian societies. For a start, the Covid-containment rules clearly did not involve the terrible paraphernalia of what might be