ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relationship between totalitarianism and life taking. The publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 established Hannah Arendt as a major figure in post-war political theory. In that work Hannah Arendt attempted to provide a unitary approach to totalitarianism as such, seeing differences between National Socialism and Communism as of lesser significance than the organizational and cultural linkages that such systems have with each other. Arendt located the problem and her answer in terms of the nature of the bureaucratic mind—a world of operations without consequences, information without knowledge. In this strict sense, she felt that banality was the most appropriate single-word description of Adolf Eichmann. While On Revolution does not directly address issues of genocide, Arendt does illumine new directions. In coming to a psychological profile of political absolutism, a sense of how the "passions" and the "taste" for power lead to the genocidal state emerges.
