The publication of The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr and released by Penguin Classics in 2003, is more than just a neutral scholarly act. It functions as an ideological intervention. The “Portable” series aims to establish a canon — guiding a broad audience, especially students, on which thinkers are important and how they should be understood. In Arendt’s case, this canonisation has a specific historical goal: to reinforce a Cold War liberal perspective that dismisses Marxism, revolutionary movements, and the legacy of October 1917 as morally illegitimate, categorising them under “totalitarianism.”
Peter Baehr’s introduction to The Portable Hannah Arendt adopts a familiar ideological stance: it depicts Arendt as a timeless, humane thinker unaffected by the Cold War context, emphasising her insights as universal rather than historically specific. This framing is deliberate. It embeds Arendt in the modern liberal canon, removing the political conflicts that characterised her work and recontextualising her for a post-Soviet academic environment eager to uphold the moral superiority of liberal capitalism.
Baehr’s introduction presents Arendt as a diagnostician of modern evil—including statelessness, totalitarianism, and the decline of political judgment—emphasising the continued relevance of her categories today. However, it notably omits the fact that Arendt’s theoretical framework was developed in opposition to Marxism, revolutionary politics, and any history based on class struggle. What is presented as a neutral, humane synthesis of a major twentieth-century mind is in fact the transmission belt for a historically specific — and historically discredited — Cold War category.
Baehr adopts Arendt’s thesis on totalitarianism without analysing its political role. He views it as an established idea rather than an ideological tool created during the early Cold War to equate communism with fascism and undermine the October Revolution. By doing so, he perpetuates the dominant myth of postwar liberal history: that the twentieth century was shaped not by the conflict between capital and labour, but by the struggle between “freedom” and “totalitarianism.”
Baehr’s discussion of Arendt’s opposition to the “social question” is equally insightful. He treats her distinction between the political and social as a philosophical nuance rather than a class-based stance—the perspective of an intellectual environment that could see politics as a realm of pure action, separate from hunger, poverty, and exploitation. The reactionary consequences of this view, most clearly seen in Arendt’s Reflections on Little Rock, are masked by the anthology format. The introduction presents Arendt’s categories as universal, hiding their incompatibility with any politics rooted in social struggle.
Baehr’s introduction performs two key functions: it sanitises Arendt’s political views and elevates her conceptual language into a normative framework for understanding the twentieth century. This aligns well with the demands of modern liberal scholarship. Arendt becomes a versatile thinker because her categories enable political theory to proceed without referencing capitalism, class, or revolution. She provides a way to discuss evil without addressing its social roots, politics without examining its material basis, and history without considering revolutionary potential.
Baehr’s introduction goes beyond being just an editorial preface; it functions as an act of ideological reproduction. It guarantees that Arendt stays at the heart of a historiography focused on moral clarity, neglecting social analysis, political theory disconnected from class struggle, and historical memory that avoids revolution. Her canonisation reflects a liberal order that depends on intellectuals who can describe modern crises without challenging the social systems that cause them.
The anthology’s structure starts with statelessness, then addresses totalitarianism, and ends with the vita activa, mirroring the progression of postwar liberal political theory. It serves as an educational tool to help students see the main conflict of the twentieth century as a struggle between “freedom” and “totalitarianism,” rather than capitalism versus the global working class. As the document explains: “It takes a thinker whose entire theoretical apparatus was constructed against Marxism and revolutionary politics, and repackages her as a ‘portable’ companion for the college-educated reader. This repackaging is not accidental. It is the essence of Arendt’s postwar function.
Arendt and the Historiography of “Ordinary Germans”
In current historiography, Hannah Arendt occupies a central but deeply contested position in debates over the role of “ordinary Germans” in the Nazi dictatorship. Her influence is unmistakable: the categories she introduced — “totalitarianism,” “the banality of evil,” the atomised mass — continue to shape how scholars and the public interpret participation in fascist crimes. Yet these categories obscure more than they reveal. They offer a moral‑psychological portrait of perpetrators that detaches their actions from the social, political, and class forces that produced Nazism.
Arendt’s most famous formulation, the “banality of evil,” has become a shorthand for understanding the perpetrators not as ideological actors but as bureaucratic functionaries incapable of thought. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she wrote that Eichmann was “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” This line has been repeatedly invoked in discussions of ordinary Germans, suggesting that genocide was carried out by men and women who were simply following orders, trapped in a machinery of total domination.
This interpretation has had enormous historiographical influence — but it has also provoked sustained criticism. Social historians, Marxist scholars, and historians of everyday life have shown that the Nazi project depended not on thoughtless obedience but on active participation, ideological commitment, and material interest. The scholarship of Christopher Browning, Ulrich Herbert, and the Bielefeld school demonstrated that ordinary Germans were not passive cogs but conscious actors shaped by nationalism, anti‑communism, racial ideology, and the social crisis of German capitalism.
Arendt’s framework cannot account for this. Her theory of totalitarianism posits a population rendered politically inert by terror and propaganda, incapable of autonomous judgment. This conception collapses under historical scrutiny. The Nazi regime did not rule a population of atomised subjects; it ruled a society mobilised through promises of national revival, social order, and the destruction of Marxism. The working class had been defeated; the middle classes radicalised; sections of capital actively supported the regime. These dynamics are absent from Arendt’s account.
The problem is not merely empirical but theoretical. Arendt’s hostility to the “social question” — her insistence that politics must be insulated from material need — makes it impossible for her to grasp why ordinary Germans supported fascism. She cannot see that fascism emerged from the crisis of German capitalism, the destruction of the workers’ movement, and the fears of a ruling class confronting revolution. Her categories reduce these forces to psychological dispositions: loneliness, thoughtlessness, susceptibility to ideology.
This is why Arendt remains attractive to liberal historiography. Her framework allows scholars to discuss perpetration without confronting class, capitalism, or the political economy of fascism. It transforms the question of ordinary Germans into a moral drama rather than a social analysis. The perpetrators become universal figures — bureaucrats, joiners, men who failed to think — rather than historically specific actors shaped by the collapse of Weimar, the defeat of the working class, and the counterrevolutionary aims of German capital.
In contemporary historiography, Arendt’s place is therefore paradoxical. She is cited constantly, but her categories are increasingly inadequate for explaining the historical realities uncovered by decades of research. Her influence persists not because her analysis clarifies the role of ordinary Germans, but because it offers a politically comfortable way of remembering fascism: as a warning about human frailty rather than as a product of social crisis and class struggle.
Arendt’s legacy in this field is thus double-edged. She remains central to public memory and political theory, but her framework obscures the very forces that made ordinary Germans participants in genocide. To understand fascism historically — and to understand the perpetrators as historical actors — requires moving beyond Arendt’s categories and returning to the material, political, and class foundations she systematically rejected.
Arendt’s *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951) exemplifies her rejection of a class-based view of fascism. The core idea—that Nazism and Stalinism are different manifestations of the same phenomenon—was embraced by Cold War thinkers to justify equating communism with fascism. This was driven not only by scholarly oversight but also by political motives. In *Stalinism and Bolshevism* (1937), Trotsky contended that Stalinism represented a bureaucratic decline of a workers’ state rather than its true Marxist essence. He depicted the bureaucracy as mimicking Bolshevism’s rhetoric while cultivating demoralisation and gangsterism. Arendt’s contribution was to remove this distinction from a liberal perspective, viewing Stalinism not as a betrayal of October but as its inevitable outcome.
This ideological move had two main aims: it validated the Soviet bureaucracy, allowing it to frame its crimes as a natural part of Marxism instead of a counterrevolutionary takeover; and it also justified Western capitalism, which could portray its global imperialism as defending “freedom” against a unified totalitarian menace. The document clearly articulates this: “It provided the Cold War liberal intelligentsia with a theoretical justification for treating the October Revolution and Auschwitz as points on the same continuum.”
The totalitarianism thesis became the intellectual foundation for every subsequent attempt to equate communism with fascism — from the Black Book of Communism to the European Union’s “Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes.” Arendt’s work is the template for this entire genre.
Arendt’s political philosophy rests on a rigid separation between “the political” and “the social.” For her, politics is the realm of free action among equals; the intrusion of economic need — hunger, poverty, exploitation — corrupts this realm. This is not a philosophical distinction. It is a class position. For Arendt, the intrusion of economic need… into the public realm corrupts authentic politics.
This hostility towards the social question reflects the worldview of a bourgeois intellectual who views politics as a stage for aristocratic self-display. It fundamentally clashes with Marxism, which sees politics as inherently linked to the struggle over conditions of production. Arendt’s controversial essay, Reflections on Little Rock, highlights the reactionary consequences of her approach. She opposed using federal authority to enforce desegregation, claiming that Black children should not be “used” to serve social goals. Ralph Ellison and others criticised the essay because it exposed the limitations of a political theory that dismisses mass social struggles as illegitimate. The anthology features this essay but does not address its implications, presenting a form of depoliticisation disguised as humanism.
Eichmann, Banality, and the Evacuation of Historical Causation
Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” has long been admired as a deep insight into how modern bureaucratic crimes work. However, its real purpose has been to psychologize fascism—making the Holocaust seem like a result of thoughtlessness—and thus hiding its class roots. Historically, this idea has served to individualise and psychologize Nazi crimes, neglecting the political and economic analysis of German fascism. In reality, German fascism was not just bureaucratic banality; it was a tool used by a segment of German capital facing revolutionary upheaval. Its anti-Semitism was tied to anti-communism, and its genocidal policies were not due to ignorance but were a calculated response to counterrevolution.
Arendt’s opposition to class analysis, her disputes with the Frankfurt School, and her hostility towards Marxism were fundamental to her entire theoretical framework. She replaced traditional political economy with concepts such as will, judgment, and the human condition. This approach produced a philosophy capable of describing fascist crimes but not explaining their causes.
Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg: Two Incompatible Conceptions of Politics
Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg stand at opposite poles of twentieth‑century political thought. Their divergence is not simply theoretical but rooted in fundamentally different conceptions of freedom, politics, and the forces that shape history. Luxemburg represents the revolutionary Marxist tradition, grounded in class struggle and the working class’s self-emancipation. Arendt represents the liberal tradition, grounded in separating politics from social need and a suspicion of mass movements.
For Luxemburg, politics emerges from the material conditions of life. The struggle against exploitation underpins democratic action, and the working class is the central historical agent. Her insistence that “freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently” was inseparable from her belief that genuine political freedom requires abolishing capitalist social relations. Mass strikes, revolutionary upheavals, and collective action were not threats to politics but its highest expression.
Arendt’s framework rejects this entirely. She insists on a strict division between “the political” and “the social,” arguing that politics must be insulated from economic necessity. Movements rooted in social struggle — including the workers’ movement Luxemburg championed — are, in Arendt’s view, bound to necessity and therefore incapable of sustaining political freedom. This hostility to the social question leads Arendt to treat revolutionary Marxism as inherently dangerous, culminating in her claim that attempts to transform society through mass action pave the way to totalitarianism.
The contrast is clearest in their views of revolution. Luxemburg saw the Russian Revolution as the opening of a new epoch of human emancipation, despite her criticisms of Bolshevik policy. Arendt saw it as the beginning of total domination. Luxemburg’s revolution aimed to abolish exploitation; Arendt’s preferred revolutions — American, council‑based, constitutional — leave social relations intact.
Their place in contemporary historiography reflects present needs. Arendt is canonised as a philosopher of political action precisely because her categories exclude class struggle and revolutionary transformation. Luxemburg remains marginal because her politics expose the limits of liberalism and insist that freedom cannot be separated from equality.
In short: Luxemburg represents politics as social transformation; Arendt represents politics as its renunciation. Their opposition marks one of the central ideological fault lines of the twentieth century — and of our own.
Baehr’s anthology concludes by transforming Arendt into a “portable” thinker—a reliable, canonical guide to the twentieth century. Its structure is intentionally political, not neutral, framing a narrative: Statelessness as the human condition of displacement, Totalitarianism as the unified evil of Nazism and Stalinism, and The Vita Activa as a philosophy of action disconnected from material conditions. This sequence reflects the core ideological achievement of postwar liberalism: omitting class struggle from historical narrative. It convinces an entire intelligentsia that the twentieth century’s central drama was a battle between ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘freedom,’ rather than between capitalism and the international working class.
The anthology serves as a conduit for this worldview, intentionally aimed at undergraduate syllabi to promote a liberal interpretation of history. Students engaging with Arendt in this way will likely never explore Marx, much less Trotsky. This outcome is deliberate and reflects the curriculum’s explicit goal.
Hannah Arendt’s Place in Current Historiography
Arendt’s canonisation reflects a broader historical trend: the rise of a liberal intellectual class that opposes Marxism and revolutionary ideas. Her work forms the philosophical basis for this opposition, presenting politics as classless, history as devoid of revolution, and evil as having no causal roots.
In contemporary historiography, Hannah Arendt occupies a paradoxical position: she is simultaneously treated as a foundational theorist of the twentieth century and as a figure whose core analytical categories — “totalitarianism,” “the political,” “the banality of evil” — have been repeatedly challenged, revised, or discredited by serious historical scholarship. Yet her prestige endures. This endurance is not the result of empirical adequacy but of ideological necessity.
Arendt’s central historiographical function today is to provide a liberal, anti‑materialist framework for interpreting the catastrophes of the modern world. Her work offers a narrative of the twentieth century that is morally dramatic but politically safe: a struggle between “freedom” and “totalitarianism,” rather than between capitalism and the international working class. This narrative remains indispensable to a broad swathe of academic and political institutions whose legitimacy depends on erasing Marxism as a revolutionary alternative.
The persistence of the totalitarianism thesis is the clearest example. Despite decades of scholarship demonstrating the profound historical differences between fascism and Stalinism — their class bases, social trajectories, and political aims — Arendt’s conceptual fusion of the two remains hegemonic in political theory, Holocaust studies, and public memory culture. It is invoked in museum exhibitions, policy discourse, and university syllabi as a self‑evident truth. The category survives not because it explains history, but because it explains history in a way that stabilises the present: it delegitimises socialist revolution by associating it with genocide, and it sanctifies liberal capitalism as the only viable alternative.
Arendt’s hostility to the “social question” has likewise found renewed life in current historiography. In an era of rising inequality, collapsing welfare states, and intensifying class conflict, her insistence that politics must be insulated from material need has become attractive to a professional‑managerial intelligentsia anxious to preserve the autonomy of its own discourse. Historians and political theorists who adopt Arendtian categories often do so precisely because they allow political action to be conceptualised without reference to exploitation, class struggle, or the economic foundations of social life. Arendt’s framework offers a way to discuss “democracy,” “plurality,” and “public space” while avoiding the structural realities that make these concepts impossible under capitalism.
Her place in Holocaust historiography is equally fraught. The “banality of evil” thesis, though widely criticised by historians of Nazism, continues to shape public understanding of the perpetrators. Its appeal lies in its psychological minimalism: it transforms fascist genocide into a problem of bureaucratic thoughtlessness rather than of counterrevolutionary violence rooted in class interests and political aims. In doing so, it shifts attention away from the social forces that produced fascism — the crisis of German capitalism, the defeat of the workers’ movement, the alliance between big business and the Nazi state — and toward a universal moral lesson about human frailty. This depoliticisation is precisely why the concept remains popular.
Arendt’s current historiographical status, then, is not the result of scholarly consensus but of ideological utility. She provides a vocabulary through which liberal academia can confront the horrors of the twentieth century without confronting the social system that produced them. Her categories allow historians to speak of evil without speaking of capitalism, of politics without speaking of class, of freedom without speaking of revolution. In this sense, Arendt remains central not because she clarifies history, but because she obscures it in politically convenient ways.
The so-called “Portable” Arendt isn’t just a handy summary; it functions as a tool for ideological perpetuation. It trains students to view politics through lenses that exclude the working class, material conditions, and possibilities for social change. Essentially, it offers a liberal response to 20th-century crises—a response that downplays capitalism’s role, dismisses revolutionary traditions, and venerates the Cold War era. Arendt isn’t about explaining modern catastrophes; she’s about shaping how those in power want them remembered.
Sources and Bibliography: The Portable Hannah Arendt
(Edited by Peter Baehr, Penguin Classics, 2000 / 2003)
I. Primary Source: The Anthology Itself
- Arendt, Hannah. The Portable Hannah Arendt. Edited with an Introduction by Peter Baehr. New York: Penguin Classics, 2000; reissued 2003.
This is the central text. All citations to the anthology should reference this edition.
II. Works by Arendt Included in the Portable Reader
(These are the texts Baehr selected and framed — essential for analysing the anthology’s ideological structure.)
1. Statelessness / Imperialism / Antisemitism
- The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) — selected chapters on antisemitism, imperialism, and statelessness.
2. Totalitarianism
- The Origins of Totalitarianism — Part III (“Totalitarianism”), including “Ideology and Terror.”
3. The Vita Activa / Political Theory
- The Human Condition (1958) — selections on labour, work, action.
- “What Is Freedom?” (from Between Past and Future, 1961).
- “The Crisis in Education” (from Between Past and Future).
4. Eichmann / Banality of Evil
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) — selected chapters.
5. Essays
- “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959).
- “Truth and Politics” (1967).
- “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964).
III. Editorial and Framing Material by Peter Baehr
These are essential for analysing the anthology’s political function.
- Baehr, Peter. “Introduction.” In The Portable Hannah Arendt. Penguin Classics, 2000/2003. The key text shaping the reader’s encounter with Arendt.
- Baehr, Peter. “The Portable Arendt: A Political Theory for the Liberal Imagination.” (Often cited in discussions of the anthology; published in academic venues summarising his editorial approach.)
- Baehr, Peter. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Question. (Relevant for understanding his interpretation of Arendt’s hostility to the social.)
IV. Secondary Scholarship Directly Discussing the Portable Reader
1. On Arendt’s Canonisation and Liberal Reception
- Benhabib, Seyla. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt.
- Villa, Dana. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political.
- Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.
- Wolin, Sheldon. “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political.”
2. On Arendt’s Totalitarianism Thesis
- Losurdo, Domenico. War and Revolution: Rethinking the Origins of Totalitarianism.
- Traverso, Enzo. The Origins of Nazi Violence.
- Fine, Robert. “Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism: A Reassessment.”
3. On Arendt’s Hostility to the Social Question
- Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social.
- Bernstein, Richard J. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question.
- Burroughs, Michael D. “Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock,’ and White Ignorance.”
4. On Arendt’s Banality Thesis
- Cesarani, David. Becoming Eichmann.
- Stangneth, Bettina. Eichmann Before Jerusalem.
- Bernstein, Richard J. Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? (sections on Eichmann).
V. Marxist and Trotskyist Critiques Relevant to the Portable Reader’s Ideological Function
1. On Totalitarianism as a Cold War Category
- North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left.
- Rippert, Ulrich. WSWS review of The Black Book of Communism.
- Trotsky, Leon. Stalinism and Bolshevism (1937).
- Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed (1936).
2. On Arendt’s Anti-Marxism
- Anderson, Perry. The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (contextual critique of liberal political theory).
- Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right (chapter on liberal anti-Marxism).
VI. Bibliographic Tools and Reference Guides
- Jerome Kohn (ed.), The Hannah Arendt Papers (Library of Congress).
- Hannah Arendt Centre (Bard College) — bibliographies and archival guides.
A Trumpet of Sedition 