Abstract

Accusations that some political movement or policy is totalitarian or is pushing a nation towards a totalitarian state are always popular in the speech of political firebrands, but this is obvious hyperbole. This was, broadly speaking, the political project that Hannah Arendt engaged with in the middle of the 20th century. Using her worry about mass society as the starting point for my analysis and contrasting that with Herbert Marcuse’s critique of mass consumerist society I will argue that the worry facing modern consumer capitalism is what I term the ‘complete’ domination of all modes of human activity by the social realm and the activity of work. Moreover, the crystallization of this domination (and potentially any sort of total domination) results in the creation of a State that is necessarily violent.