Abstract

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt reads Hobbes’ Leviathan as a prefiguration of totalitarian politics. She does so in a unique manner, criticising not his overbearing sovereignty, but the incessant accumulation of power, which turns into an unstoppable process of destruction. Arendt claims that the ultimately self-annihilating accumulation of power is necessitated by bourgeois societies’ pursuit to increase property. This paper first clarifies the methodological assumptions which allow Arendt to read Hobbes’ theory as a clue to bourgeois history in general. It then reconstructs her portrait of the “power-hungry individual” as a result rather than starting point of Hobbes’ political model, and examines her verdict that the Hobbesian sovereign is inherently unstable. With the help of passages contained only in the expanded German version of Origins, Arendt’s more familiar Luxemburgian critique of territorial expansiveness is completed by a Benjaminian analysis of the temporality of accumulation: colonial catastrophe.Dieser Aufsatz ist im Rahmen des durch Horizon 2020 finanzierten MSCA-Projekts PhantomAiD, EU-Fördernummer 896973, entstanden.