ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt major theoretical work, The Human Condition, however, is usually, and not altogether unjustifiably, treated as an antimodernist political text. Hannah Arendt did not engage in methodological reflections, and on those few occasions when she characterized her own work she appeared to confuse matters further, as in the case of her various prefaces to The Origins of Totalitarianism. The camps reveal elementary truths about the totalitarian exercise of power and about the structure of totalitarian ideology. For Hannah Arendt, writing about totalitarianism, but in particular about the extermination and concentration camps, which she saw as the most unprecedented form of human domination, presented profound historiographical dilemmas. The death of the juridical subject, of the person qua bearer of rights, is the story Arendt tells in the section on imperialism, when she traces the paradoxes of the nation-state and of the universal belief in the rights of man. Narrative then, or, in Arendt’s word, storytelling, is a fundamental human activity.
