Gomes Jewish method and question in Hannah Arendt.

Abstract

The article seeks to identify the methodological core of the Origins of Totalitarianism in the comparative structure between France and Germany, a kind of historical-comparative sociology in which Arendt write about the origins of Nazism and Stalinism. In this sense, the ideological origins of the III Reich and Stalinism must be sought in Racism, and not in the homology established between Nazism and Communism based on the equivalence between the ideology of class struggle and race struggle and the practice of Terror. So that the idea of rupture or novelty of Totalitarianism to which
this perspective is linked, must be articulated with the idea of historical delay”, a kind of articulation between the new and the conservation of the old order in the history of the Continental Nations. From this perspective, Arendt implicitly mobilizes the idea of historical backwardness, an idea that we originally found in Gramsci and Marx, in order to explain not only the homologies between Nazism and Communism, but also how they emerged historically in the National and European spheres as ideologies policies founded on mass movements. In order to make this perspective explicit, we seek to demonstrate how the idea of “historical backwardness” operates in book 1 of the Origins of Totalitarianism, dedicated to the rise of anti-Semitism.