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In 1954, political theorist Hannah Arendt published a paper entitled ‹What is Authority?›.¹ Arendt’s answer was surprising: authority is lost and there is no hope for its recovery. The story of the loss of authority, however, has much to tell us about our world, what we can demand of it, and the threats it faces.

The essay begins with a reframing; we should be asking what was authority, since authority, politically speaking, has completely vanished from the modern world. Authority is not, according to Arendt, simply that which makes people obey, for this is to conflate authority and violence. To be sure, the two may fulfil the same function, but to call a shoe a hammer just because both can hit a nail into a wall does not make the two one and the same.

Authority came from the Roman concept of auctoritas and did not feature in the Ancient Greek language or political experience that preceded the Romans. Auctoritas – and therefore authority – is a curious phenomenon that lies outside both coercion by force and persuasion. Where either is used, authority has failed or been suspended. Authority has people obey, but leaves them as free as before. In a word, authority is the ability to say ‹you shall do this› and have the other follow without either threatening consequences (explicit or implicit) or having to persuade them. It is neither a command, nor advice, nor incentive. 

In order to have authority, then, one must not rely on power, or common reason, but on a hierarchy that both parties recognise and see as legitimate. For the Romans, this authority sprung from the past – from Rome’s founding and the greatness of ancestors. In the Middle Ages, Christian authoritarian regimes derived their authority from God, but what is common to all authoritarian governments is that authority flows from an external source which is also superior to the government or authorities themselves. 

All this seems rather confusing, but it underlines the important point that in the modern world that since we no longer recognise an external and superior source of authority, there can be no authority at all. Authoritarian regimes, therefore, can no longer exist, or rather, what we call authoritarian no longer has any meaningful connection to authority. In this way, the term might be thought to flatter those so-called «authoritarians» since it implies that their rule rests on something other than violence. When the conservatives of Arendt’s time stressed that they wished to ‹restore authority›, Arendt saw that they were equating authority with violence, and would end up being simply content to restore the latter. And since authority is the mysterious ability to have another obey and yet have that person remain as free as before, conservatives sought to claim that they were restoring authority and thereby safeguarding freedom. 

It is a tribute to the ascendancy of liberal language, on the other hand, that the term ‹authoritarian› became a pejorative (and I assume it is so since no regime dares to describe itself as such). For Arendt, liberals ignore the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, focussing instead on ‹progress› which aims to throw off the shackles of all power, no matter its origin. They, likewise, equate authority and violence, showing a distaste for both; both threaten the liberal kind of freedom which is hostile to any power at all. 

For Arendt, both sides have a point: she saw a recession of both authority and freedom. She thought that liberals and conservatives had served to confuse the concepts, destroying the political meaning of both. Liberals fail to recognise the different relationships to freedom in authoritarian, tyrannical, and totalitarian regimes, while conservatives call «totalitarian» government the result of the recession of all recognisable authority, which they closely connect to democracy. This points to one of the more fundamental points she is underlining in her work: the common understandings of words have been lost. This «curious right» – the right of us all to define our terms – is, for Arendt, an indicator that we have ceased to live in a common world at all.² We cannot rely on the most important terms to discuss a common reality, but instead simply recognise the consistency of another’s reasoning. Such terms as «freedom», «authority», «tyranny», and «totalitarianism», then, have lost their public-political meanings, yet still continue to be invoked as they have not completely lost their significance or force.

This, I think, we can see in the political language of the «authoritarians» of our time; Orbán loves to invoke freedom and Trump called the imposition of tariffs «Liberation Day». George Orwell’s famous phrase from 1984, «Freedom is slavery»³ – meant quite plainly at the time to be a paradox offensive to common sense – seems like it could quite easily be uttered by a contemporary politician. One can almost imagine the journalists and lackeys alike rushing forth to explain that Mr Orbán, or Mr Trump, or whoever it may be, is simply using his definition of freedom and his definition of slavery, as if no regard ought to be paid to the ordinary uses of those terms or common understandings of them. Neither can they do otherwise, for in a world which has fractured into pieces and which no longer has any shared sense of different concepts, this is the only kind of understanding that we can manage. As this world continues to fracture, even the most elementary understandings of freedom (like the liberal’s suspicion of power) have begun to disintegrate. And since there is no common world, the absurd appears banal since we have no shared standard against which we might evaluate it. In other words, common (good) sense depends upon a common (shared) sense.

Yet I think most would agree that it is not just the words but also the actions of these governments that seem to defy comprehension. To understand this we might compare the authoritarian government to its tyrannical and totalitarian counterparts. For Arendt, the Christian kind of authoritarian government in the Middle Ages had a source of authority above itself. This authority filtered down from the top in a pyramid formation so that each lower level possessed some authority, but less than those above them. Tyranny, by contrast, consists of one person above a mass of «carefully isolated, disintegrated, and completely equal individuals» suspended by the «proverbial bayonets» such that they oppress everyone equally.⁴ Totalitarian regimes, however, have the structure of an onion. At the centre is the leader and each part of the movement is a different ‹layer› which is more radical the closer they are to the centre. Each of these layers has an outward facing facade which provides a fiction of normality, but also has an inward face of fanaticism and extremism. This means that those at the centre of the onion come to believe that they differ from others only in the intensity of their beliefs while those on the outside world can believe that the government is essentially a normal one. 

When we see governments behaving erratically and seemingly against good sense, this might be because the onion insulates them from the real world. The leadership and fanatics in the movement or government are therefore not actually forced to confront the facts of the real world, and instead believe the fictions of their own ideology, and pursue policies which, to outsiders, seem to defy logic. On the other hand, the outsider is also able to convince themself that there must be some rational process at hand since they can believe in the fiction that they have a normal government. It is, of course, quite correct to say that there is some rational process at hand, but since it follows the logic of an ideology, and begins from premises or ‹facts› that are insulated from the real world, it cannot be easily discerned or understood from the outside. If this description is correct, then when one witnesses policies like the arbitrary raising of tariffs justified to the outside world with a flimsy formula, it is hard to conclude anything but that such a system is in the process of totalitarian government formation. When such a government responds to outside pressure, we may conclude that this process is not complete. 

I have come this far and hardly spoken of the relationship between authoritarianism and democratic movements, except to say that authoritarianism no longer exists. It should be clear that I think the pertinent questions are about the relationship between totalitarianism and democratic movements. The truth is that Arendt was not a wholehearted supporter of what we today think of as ‹democracy›. To us, democracy means entrusting representatives with the powers to make laws over us – representative democracy. For Arendt, however, this is not us participating in politics, but instead us handing over our powers as political beings. Further, at the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism she argues that totalitarianism is not the failure of «traditional political forces – liberal or conservative, national or socialist, republican or monarchist, authoritarian or democratic» but is instead a new form of government founded on a basic human experience – loneliness.⁵

For Arendt, «liberal democracy» is not a simple antidote to totalitarianism, and elements of totalitarianism can subsist even in a democracy. So long as the experience of loneliness persists, democracy is liable to descend into totalitarianism. Loneliness, it should be noted, is quite different from mere solitude in that it arises when «all by myself I am deserted by my own self». In contrast, a man in solitude is not truly alone since he «can be together with himself».⁶ Loneliness is felt most keenly in the presence of others, although it is often preceded by isolation. Totalitarianism, in contrast to mere tyranny (which seeks only to leave people isolated and without public freedom), confirms this feeling of loneliness, asserts it as axiomatic, reinforces and organises it through terror such that there is no space for either public or private movement. What is more, loneliness, once experienced only by those on the margins, became an everyday phenomenon through the 20th Century with the rise of mass society, and with it the concomitant feeling of placelessness. In a lonely state, ideology – those ‹isms› that claim to explain nearly everything from simple premises – seize on the mind and replace thought with an «ice-cold reasoning» which robs people of the duty to think for, and discourse with, themselves.⁷ Similar threats, then, are present in all ideologies. Progressivism or conservatism, liberalism or socialism, fascism or nationalism; it matters little whether they support democracy. When I review our world today, I see that we are similarly place-less, similarly lonely, similarly without authority to guide us and similarly vulnerable to ideological thinking. And so it seems to me as though all the conditions necessary for totalitarianism lie on the table, like a disassembled rifle, waiting to be combined by some malign or ignorant ideology of the moment.

For those of us who wish to take Arendt as our guide, there are serious questions to ask of all movements, even democratic ones. What do these movements have to say about loneliness? How will they fight the influence of political conspiracy theories? How do they seek to penetrate or peel away at the totalitarian ‹onion›? Arendt compared the isolated world to a desert, and thought totalitarianism had, somehow, found a way to set the sand in motion and «let loose a sandstorm which threatens to cover all parts of the inhabited earth.»⁸ The task at hand, then, is not just how to weather the storm, but how to bring water to the desert.

1. Hannah Arendt: ‹What is Authority?› In: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future. London 2006, pp. 91-141.
2. Arendt, ‹Authority›, p. 95.
3. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four. London 2003, p.46
4. Arendt, ‹Authority›, p. 99.
5. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York 1976, pp.460-479, 460.
6. Arendt, Origins, p.476
7. Arendt, Origins, p.478.
8. Ibid.