ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt's theoretical construct of totalitarianism united party structure and government, and the brutality of modern dictatorship as such. More importantly, totalitarianism concerns an illicit fusion of power and personality that makes political legitimacy dangerous and at times impossible. Arendt's conception of the dynamics of historical change is little more than a confused mishmash of the structural, the social psychological and the conspiratorial. In all areas of social, political, and military affairs, Arendt is so ignorant, at least according to Professor Wasserstein, that the great wonder is that anyone has paid attention to her past and present. Perhaps the final straw in Wasserstein's accusatory judgments against Arendt is her presumed perverse reliance on Nazi historians as authorities on modern Jewish history. Arendt's life was a testimonial to the open transparencies of the Jewish and American traditions as well as the disastrous fall from grace of German liberalism.
