This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Baehr, P. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Of Politics and Social Science

‘Totalitarianism’ in the Dialogue of David Riesman and Hannah Arendt

Lingnan University, Hong Kong Pbaehr{at}In.edu.hk

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, David Riesman and Hannah Arendt were engaged in an animated discussion about the meaning and character of totalitarianism. Their disagreement reflected, in part, different experiences and dissonant intellectual backgrounds. Arendt abhorred the social sciences, finding them pretentious and obfuscating. Riesman, in contrast, abandoned a career in law to take up the sociological vocation, which he combined with his own heterodox brand of humanistic psychology. This article delineates the stakes of the Arendt Riesman debate by examining Arendt’s critique of social science and Riesman’s defence of a sociological interpretation of totalitarianism. In addition, the article argues that Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism misdescribed the nature of Nazi and Bolshevik societies in ways that damaged her political account more generally. Riesman intuited that weakness and, as the following article shows, modern historical research has confirmed it.

Key Words: concentration camps • David Riesman • Hannah Arendt • social science • totalitarianism

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				N. Sznaider Hannah Arendt's Jewish Cosmopolitanism: Between the Universal and the Particular European Journal of Social Theory, February 1, 2007; 10(1): 112 - 122. [Abstract] [PDF]