The objective of this article is to contribute to an understanding of Hannah Arendt’s special place in present-day political theory by means of a contrast between her Origins of Totalitarianism and four important political science studies of National Socialism and totalitarianism, three written by authors who shared the status of involuntary emigrant with Arendt, that are offered as constituting the original context of her work. A critical appreciation of the seminal works by Ernst Fraenkel, Franz L. Neumann, Sigmund Neumann, and (...) Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brezinski, with special emphasis on questions of method, opens the way to a reconsideration of the distinctly philosophical character of Arendt’s work, and its shocking challenges to the scientific orientations of political science. (shrink)

In all major Western countries except France and Spain, conservative governments have come to power by proposing policies opposed to the interests of the majority of the people. This reversal challenges democratic legitimation processes since democratic consensus today is used to justify cutting back the welfare state, to reduce real income to strengthen inner and external security forces instead of developing public services. Apparantly, most people accept this reversal — at least insofar as electoral results reveal what people want. The (...) implementation of last decade's neo-conservative ideologies is a reaction to the international economic crisis. Neo-conservative politics attempts to manage an economic crisis which even a retired Realpolitiker like Helmut Schmidt recently compared to the situation of the Thirties. (shrink)

To discuss under this tide the early writings of authors, who a few years later would be numbered among the members of the exiled Institute for Social Research, is a kind of provocation. The political culture of the Weimar Republic was initially re-appraised in West Germany primarily in light of totalitarian theoretical principles. Later this picture changed to the extent that research abandoned the right-left equation. Should this progress, in view of a new wave of nostalgia, be undone? Can anything (...) other than a scandal result if one considers the fact that prominent representatives of the leftist intelligentsia — the jurist Fritz Neumann, the political scientist Otto Kirchheimer, and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse — had been students of even more well-known representatives of the academic right? (shrink)