Totalitarianism, power and violence in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Totalitarianism, for Hannah Arendt, represented the most blatant and explicit identification between power and violence. Opposed to this, the author claims an understanding of power as essentially a political phenomenon, related to the action, speech, freedom, human diversity and the public sphere. This article presents how Arendt’s efforts to rescue the meaning of political power are placed in a situation where the fusion and confusion between power and violence have come to represent an actual threat of destruction to the sense of politics.