The objective of this article is to show that Hannah Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism is indebted to the analysis of National Socialism elaborated by Franz Neumann in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. It is argued that Arendt adopted the central thesis of Neumann according to which Nazi Germany is a ‘non-state’ and that this thesis as well as its presuppositions are discernible in her overall approach, developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The starting point of this paper is Hannah Arendt's positive comment on Simone Weil's La condition ouvrière, in The Human Condition. I first offer a brief reconstruction of Arendt's interpretation of Marx's analysis of labor which is the context in which the above-mentioned comment appears. This interpretation is based, I claim, on a (mis)reading which consists in a rather systematic blurring of the distinction between labor as a universal and irreducible human activity and labor in its historically determined capitalist form, (...) which is the object of Marx's critique, i.e., alienated labor. Following that, I discuss Weil's construal of labor and I shed light on its affinities with the Marxian problematic. My aim is to show that Arendt's comment does not do justice to the problems that Weil addresses both with and beyond Marx. (shrink)