Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt

In this chapter, we begin by studying Part 3, entitled Totalitarianism ( 1968a ), of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism ( 1973 ). In this text, not only the ‘total-itarian defiance of law and legality’ is highlighted but, equally – as has been noted already in the Introduction and Chapter 2 – the significance of the use by totalitarian regimes of the distinction between the ‘hostile enemy’ or opposition and the ‘objective enemy’ or opposition. An understanding of the political in relation to the scapegoat is thus to be found in Arendt’s illumination of the implications of the aforesaid distinction. As we can recall, in the former case, the regime is explicitly opposed by those ‘hostile’ to it; in the latter case, it is a matter of those who are deemed to be, objectively, enemies of the regime. Thus, the Jews become the ‘objective’ enemy in Nazi Germany, while the ‘Kulaks’, the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, become the ‘objective’ enemies under Stalin. The point is that a person designated as being an ‘objective’ enemy is necessarily perfectly innocent. Those designated as ‘objective’ enemies thus assume the status of scapegoats. To be sure, Arendt’s focus is ‘totalitarianism’, while the focus of this study is law and justice and the extent to which law and the political are inseparable. To be considered, by way of further clarifying our two terms, is what Arendt has to say about the ‘objective’ and ‘hostile’ enemy in the context of her analysis of totalitarianism.