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Arendt’s judgment of totalitarianism must first and foremost be distinguished from its common identification as an insidious form of tyranny. Tyranny is an ancient, originally Greek form of government which, as the tragedy of Oedipous Tyrannos and the historical examples of Peisistratus of Athens and Periandros of Corinth demonstrate, was by no means necessarily against the private interests and initiatives of its people. As a form of government tyranny stands against the appearance in public of the plurality of the people, the condition, according to Arendt, in which political life and political freedom–“public happiness,” as the founders of the American republic named it–become possible and without which they do not.
In a tyrannical political realm, which can hardly be called public, the tyrant exists in isolation from the people. Due to the lack of rapport or legal communication between the people and the tyrant, all action in a tyranny manifests a “moving principle” of mutual fear: the tyrant’s fear of the people, on one side, and the people’s fear of the tyrant, or, as Arendt put it, their “despair over the impossibility” of joining together to act at all, on the other. It is in this sense that tyranny is a contradictory and futile form of government, one that generates not power but impotence. Hence, according to Montesquieu, whose acute observations Arendt drew on in these matters, tyranny (which he does not even bother to distinguish from despotism, malevolent by definition, since he is concerned with public rather than private freedom) is a form of government that, unlike constitutional republics or monarchies, corrupts itself, cultivating within itself the seeds of its own destruction (see “On the Nature of Totalitarianism”). Therefore, the essential impotence of a tyrannically ruled state, however flamboyant and spectacular its dying throes, and whether or not it is despotic, and regardless of the cruelty and suffering it may inflict on its people, presents no menace of destruction to the world at large.
