Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance - Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought 1st edition

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt?s political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt?s political theory and seeks to illuminate certain ambiguities, limits, weaknesses, and inconsistencies in her understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination. While Arendt?s focus was on examining the perspective and motivation of the perpetrators, Michal Aharony argues that we can gain a better understanding of the concept of total domination through the experiences of the victims.

The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt?s concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book both confronts Arendt?s political theory of totalitarianism and calls for integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U. S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world.

Contrary to Arendt, Aharony argues that the failure of Nazi totalitarianism to achieve total domination demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions. Her book seeks to show that humanity can be salvaged amidst the most inhuman of circumstances, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book.