Truth, Politics and Democracy
Jeff Malpas – Tasmania
ABSTRACT: This paper will explore the centrality of truth to a democratic politics through the work of
Hannah Arendt, but also Albert Camus and George Orwell. A key idea is that of truth as objective, and the
relation between such a notion of objectivity, and the idea of the public realm. It will be argued that in spite
of appearances to the contrary, Arendt, along with both Camus and Orwell, remained committed to an
objectivist conception of truth and that such a conception is integral to the possibility of a democratic
politics. It will be argued, in fact, that democracy is just that form of political organisation that is essentially
geared toward the primacy of truth, and so toward the primacy of the public realm as a realm that is
determined by, and open to, the truth.
Wherever knowing and doing have parted company, the space of freedom is lost
– Hannah Arendt1
Ordinarily one might think that a discussion of the nature of truth – whether it is
indeterminate, whether it belongs with the sentence or the proposition, whether
it is objective or relative – would be a topic of only abstract philosophical interest
disconnected from the realm of action. Yet not only the concept of truth, but our
understanding of it, is vitally relevant to the realm of the practical and the
political. The fact of this connection is something that becomes evident in
Hannah Arendt’s work in a particularly clear and important fashion, and this is
so notwithstanding her own comments on the antagonism between truth and the
political. I want to follow some of Arendt’s exploration of the issues at stake here,
especially in relation to the role of truth in democratic politics. What I will argue
is that democratic politics can be understood precisely in terms of the attitude it
takes towards truth, and that this is an idea that can be found, not only in
Arendt, but also in the work of two other famous opponents of anti-democratic
and totalitarian politics, George Orwell and Albert Camus.
To begin with, however, I want to consider two different conceptions
of truth, both of which seem to appear in Arendt’s work, but which seem already
to be present, in different ways, in Plato. One of the oddities in Plato’s
philosophy, at least on a certain reading of it, consists in the apparent tension
between the explicitly interlocutive character of the Platonic dialogues –
dialogues that aim to arrive at truth through the communicative engagement
between Socrates and those around him – and the characterisation of the
philosophical search for truth, especially as delineated in the famous story of the
Cave, in terms that make it an individual endeavour that may bring the
1
On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p.264.
1
philosopher into conflict with other citizens, and that is directed at the
attainment of a truth that may well prove impossible to communicate.
Sometimes Arendt refers to the second of these two conceptions as ‘philosophical
truth’; but sometimes she talks as if truth could only be understood in terms of
the first conception mentioned here, and so as essentially tied to communication.
In her 1957 essay of Karl Jaspers, ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World’,
Arendst writes specifically of the connection, which she claims is central to
Jaspers work, between truth and communication:
The point is that here for the first time communication is not conceived as “expressing” thoughts
and therefore being secondary to thought itself. Truth itself is communicative, it disappears and
cannot be conceived outside communication; within the “existential” realm, truth and
communication are the same. “Truth is what binds us together” [Cf. ‘Vom lebendigen Geist der
Universität (1946) in: Rechenschaft und Ausblick (Munich, 1951), p.185.] Only in communication
– between contemporaries as well as between the living and the dead – does truth reveal itself. A
philosophy that conceives of truth and communication as one and the same has left the
proverbial ivory tower of mere contemplation. Thinking becomes practical, though not
pragmatic; it is a kind of practice between men, not a performance of an individual in his selfchosen solitude.2
Here Arendt appears not only to be engaged in the exegesis of a point from
Jaspers, but also with advancing a view with which she herself is sympathetic.3 It
is a view of truth that is in contrast to the conception of philosophical truth that
can be seen as exemplified in Platonic philosophy, and it is also a view of truth
that bears some further examination and exploration.
The claim that truth is itself communicative can be expressed in more
formal terms as a denial that truth can be understood as attaching only or
primarily to propositions. Initially this may seem as way of talking that is
somewhat alien to Arendt’s terminology, and certainly it is to import to Arendt’s
discussion something of the more technical vocabulary of contemporary
philosophy of language. The point, however, is that the notion of truth as
attaching to propositions is integral to the idea of truth as existing in the Platonic
sense that is independent of communication. The idea of the proposition is the
idea of that which is expressed by a sentence such that the proposition
constitutes the ‘thought’ that might be common to, and expressed by, different
sentences. When Arendt writes that ‘communication is not conceived as
“expressing” thoughts and therefore being secondary to thought itself’, she can
be construed as rejecting just this propositional picture – there are no
Arendt, ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?’, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest/HBJ,
1968), p.86.
3 This essay comes from a period in the 1940s in which Arendt is still very much engaged in an
argument against Heidegger, and there can be little doubt that her championing of Jasper’s
has to be read in this light (especially in relation to Jasper’s rejection of a ‘philosophy of
solitude’). Heidegger’s own position in relation to the issues at stake here is, however, more
complex than may at first appear.
2
2
propositions on this account, there are only sentences, that is, specific
communicative acts that are also acts of thinking (‘Thinking becomes practical,
though not pragmatic; it is a kind of practice between men, not a performance of
an individual in his self-chosen solitude.’)
As soon as one abolishes the proposition, and takes truth as always a
matter of the truth of some specific saying – of the uttered sentence – then one
also abolishes the idea of the Platonic realm of eternal truths that exist
independently of the human. There are then no eternal truths simply because
there are no eternal sentences – no eternally meaningful acts of communication.
Communication, which is also to say, thought (at least on Arendt’s account of
Jaspers), is always something that takes place in the actual context of human
engagement, and has no existence outside of that, and the same holds for truth.
This insistence on what might be called the ‘contingency’ of truth, is not the
assertion of any kind of relativisation of truth, since it can be seen to be based
solely in the observation of the fact that truth always attaches to sentences. For
there to be a sentence is for a certain pattern of sounds, gestures, marks, or
whatever, that are meaningful inasmuch as they are taken to belong to some
language, and so there are sentences only so long as there are the sounds,
gestures, marks or whatever, and only so long as there are languages. The truth
of the sentence then depends on what the sentence says and whether the world is
the way the sentence says it is, and we need say no more about what truth is than
just that.4
To understand truth as tied to communication in this way is already
to stand against the Platonic conception of truth that severs it from human
dialogue, from human engagement, and to place it firmly into the realm of
human action and contingency. Truth is no longer something remote to be
approached only by the solitary thinker, but is instead formed in the context of
the ongoing interaction between human beings, and between human beings and
their world. As such, there can no longer be said to be only ‘one’ truth – or, at
least, there can be no one set of sentences that somehow capture all the truths
that there are. There is always more to say, and there is always a different way to
say things, just as there is always something different about each act of
communication – just as there is also the possibility that the ‘same’ thing will be
said in many different ways. Truth, like communication, is always an openended game, constantly open to new modes of exploration and articulation.
Does this mean, therefore, that the widespread contemporary
tendency to regard all truths as relative, or, indeed, to regard truth as no
different from mere opinion (and so equating what is true with what is held
true), is thereby vindicated? Certainly it is not uncommon for Arendt herself to
be read as if she held to such a relativistic conception – I have heard Hans Sluga,
4
In this respect, the best definition of truth remains Aristotle’s: “To say that what is is, and what
is not is not”, Metaphysics 1011b1.
3
for instance, present Arendt in just this way – and it also seems commonly
assumed that to abandon the Platonic idea of truth I outlined above is already to
embrace the relativity of truth. Yet it is crucial to understand that the choice here,
if there is a choice, is not between a Platonic ‘Truth’ and a ‘truth’ that is merely
‘relative’ (whether to speaker, culture, place or time). Indeed, the only relativity
that arises in respect of truth, even when truth is understood as tied to
communication, is the relativity of sentence to world and of sentence to
language: if it is sentences that are true, then whether a sentence is true will
depend crucially on what the sentence means, and a change in meaning (which is
to say a change in sentence) may imply a change in truth; similarly, since the
sentences that are true or false are those that make some claim about the way
things are, that is, they make some claim about the world, then the truth of a
sentence must depend on whether the world is the way the sentence says it is,
and, indeed, a change in the way things are in the world may entail a change in
truth. This point holds, I would suggest, for all sentences, including, to use
Arendt’s terminology, both ‘rational’ and ‘factual’ truths,5 and it means that truth
must always retain a certain objectivity in spite of its multiple, indeterminate and
historical character. It is thus that Arendt can indeed talk of truth in ways that
might seem to affirm a certain ‘relativity’ (or better, ‘contingency’) that belongs to
truth, and yet also hold to the importance of truth, and of truth-telling – the latter
being an explicit theme in the essay ‘Lying in Politics’.
Arendt’s emphasis on truth as tied to communication does not, then,
imply that truth is secondary to and determined by communication – as if, for
instance, truth was to be understood as a matter of that which we come to agree
upon within a communicative process – rather, truth and communication stand
in a essential relation to one another such that it is only in and through
communicative acts that truth emerges, and yet it is also on the basis of the
accessibility of truth that communication is itself possible. The conception of
political engagement that Arendt advances – the conception that emphasizes the
idea of truth as tied to communication – is essentially one that sees politics as
always given over to the recognition of others and to dialogic engagement with
others. The political is the realm of common action and speech, but as such, it is
also the realm of plurality, a realm in which we speak and act together with
others, and in which we must always negotiate between our own opinions and
judgments and those of our fellows. Arendt’s conception of the political is, in this
respect, one that can also be found in the work of Albert Camus for whom the
recognition of plurality, in the form of a commitment to dialogue, is similarly
5
A distinction drawn by Arendt in ‘Truth and Politics’, Between Past and Future
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p.231.The difference between such truths, if there is a real
difference, is not that ‘rational;’ truths refer to a different realm from the ‘factual’ such that
one refers to the world and the other does not, but that they refer to the world conceived
under two different aspects – in terms, for instance, of that which is, in some sense,
‘necessary’, and in terms of that which is contingent.
4
essential. For Camus, the humane form of politics that is essentially dialogic is
counter-posed to the ‘monologic’ politics of violence and of murder,6 and it is the
politics of dialogue that Camus identifies with the politics of democracy: ‘The
democrat, after all, is he who admits that his adversary might be right, who,
therefore, lets him express himself, and who is prepared to reflect upon his
arguments.’7 Dialogue itself is possible, however, only on the basis of a common
realm of meaning, which is to say, on the basis of our common engagement in
the world. The commitment to such dialogue can be understood, in the terms
Arendt uses, as a commitment to the communicative character of truth – truth as
that ‘which binds us together’, as a ‘practice between men’ – in Camus it is also
explicitly understood in terms of a commitment to and recognition of our own
human fragility, and of the limits of our knowledge and capacities. 8 Here truth
appears, not as that which stands over against the human, as that which may
even be alien to the human, but rather as that from which the human cannot be
disentangled. To be human is to recognize the way in which we are already
given over to truth through being given over to our engagement with others, and
so also to our engagement with the world, that is, with the ordinary, mundane
world of our everyday practice. The commitment to truth, which in Arendt is a
commitment to the practical and the engaged, is also a commitment to the
properly human.
The idea that truth may have a key role in the possibility of
democratic politics might appear at first glance, however, to run somewhat
counter to Arendt’s account of the relation between truth and the political in
essays such as ‘Truth and Politics’ and ‘Lying in Politics’. Although she
emphasises the connection between truth and communication, Arendt also
claims, as I noted above, that truth and politics stand in an antagonistic relation
to one another – as she observes at the start of ‘Truth and Politics’: ‘No one has
ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and
no one, so far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political
virtues’.9 Politics, according to Arendt, concerns itself, not with truth, but with
opinion; it is not about ascertaining how the world is, but about making the
world in a certain way; not about statement, but about negotiation and decision.
It is thus that politics and truth can so often appear to stand in conflict with one
another. This does not mean, however, that truth is, indeed, irrelevant to politics.
Politics must still attend to truth, and truth still provides the frame within which
negotiation, decision and action may occur. Thus Arendt writes, also in ‘Truth
and Politics’, that although she may be thought to have championed truth
against politics, in fact:
See, for instance, Camus famous essay ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’.
Camus, Actuelles: écrits politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), I, p.125.
8 See especially ‘Helen’s Exile’, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New
York: Vintage, n.d), pp.148-53.
9 ‘Truth and Politics’, p.227.
6
7
5
What I meant to show here is that this whole sphere [of the political], its greatness
notwithstanding, is limited – that it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s
existence. It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will. And it is only by
respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain
intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually cannot change;
metaphorically it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.10
Truth cannot be ignored by politics any more than we can ignore our own
situatedness, our own location in the world.
The way in which truth acts to limit the domain of the political is
particularly important for Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism
attempts to deny the limits that truth imposes, but it must inevitably fail in this
attempt, simply because of the way in which, no matter what force is exerted,
that force is inevitably constrained by the world. As Arendt comments:
Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no
matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large
enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. This is one
of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers’
frightening confidence in the power of lying – in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history
again and again to adapt the past to the political line’ of the present moment or to eliminate data
that did not fit their ideology…The results of such experiments when undertaken by those in
possession of the means of violence are terrible enough, but lasting deception is not among
them.11
Indeed, Arendt argues that one of the effects of attempts to deceive on a large
scale is not the establishment of a counter-reality in accord with the wishes of the
deceiver, but rather the undermining of the willingness to believe in the first
place:
It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brain-washing is a peculiar kind
of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth
may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for
factual truth is not that the lies will be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that
the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs.
falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.12
Not only might one argue that this is a feature of those totalitarian systems of
government that depend upon deception, but it is also a commonly noted feature
of the contemporary political situation here in Australia as well as in the United
States and Britain. Political cynicism is widespread, and the rise of such cynicism
‘Truth and Politics’, p.263-4.
‘Lying in Politics’, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p.7.
12 ‘Truth and Politics’, p.257.
10
11
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has been accompanied by an enormous decline in confidence and trust in public
institutions and in the political system as such.
One might argue that Arendt’s assertion of the power of truth even in
the face of systematic deceit is misplaced and underestimates the power of
governments to control and manipulate information. Orwell, for instance,
appears to have taken a much more pessimistic view of the capacity of truth to
resist political domination. Thus in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party functionary,
O’Brien, dismisses the idea, to which the novel’s main protagonist, Winston, still
clings, of a truth or reality that exists in some way independent of the human,
and, therefore, of the Party:
I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere
else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in
the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is
truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.13
The possibility that Orwell envisages here is foreshadowed in an essay written in
1943 in which Orwell looked back on the events of the Spanish Civil War. Orwell
writes:
If you look up the history of the last war in the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a
respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German
historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be
that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is
just this basis of common agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as
‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’,
Jewish Science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which
the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of
such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two plus
two equals five– well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than
bombs…14
Part of Orwell’s pessimism here (and it is worth remembering that although
Orwell’s 1943 essay was written at a time when it was not obvious that fascism
would be defeated, Nineteen Eighty-Four was itself written after the Allied
victory) undoubtedly derives from a concern, which he himself makes explicit, at
the commonplace tendency to assume that democracy will, somehow, always
triumph.15 This is not an assumption Orwell believes we are entitled to make,
and to make it is already, he believes, to deliver ourselves over to exactly the
danger he fears. Thus he insists that:
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), p.200.
‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, in Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin
1966), pp.235-6.
15 See ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, p.237.
13
14
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Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may become white tomorrow and
yesterdays weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is
that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back,
and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so
long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered the liberal tradition can be kept alive… 16
What Orwell means by ‘the liberal tradition’ undoubtedly refers to the tradition
of open political engagement in which there can be a free exchange of opinion, in
which criticism can be openly expressed, in which a true dialogue can take place
– it just the form of common political life enjoined on us by Arendt, as well as by
Camus. What Arendt emphasises, in particular, however, is the way in which
such a possibility is not only at the heart of any form of political life that is not
based on violence, but also the way in which such a form of politics must always
situate itself within the constraints imposed by truth. If Orwell is more
pessimistic than Arendt, it is just inasmuch as he allows the possibility of a
regime of violent force that also establishes its own regime of truth, and this is
the possibility that Nineteen Eight-Four warns against. Yet one might argue that
the point of describing such a possibility is less to draw to the possibility of the
realisation of such a state of affairs than to make explicit the centrality of truth to
democratic politics as such. Thus one of the key ideas, perhaps the key idea, of
Nineteen Eight-Four is the construal of freedom, not as the freedom to enact
one’s desires or to exercise one’s will, but as the freedom to speak the truth.
Indeed, the former sense of freedom, a form of freedom that correlates essentially
with the exercise of power, is precisely the freedom that O’Brien presents as
belonging to the Party and to the State, and its assertion is itself a denial of
freedom in this second sense, as tied to truth.
Orwell, like Arendt and also Camus, sees the denial of truth and of
the dialogic engagement that it enables as possible only through violence and
through the denial of the human. This is made explicit within the argument of
Nineteen Eighty-Four both through the use of torture as an integral element in
the breakdown of Winston’s resistance and personal and political ‘reformation’,17
and through O’Brien’s description of the nature of the power exerted by the
Party itself, and so of the connection between the power over truth and the
power over the human, even the denial and destruction of the human:
16
17
‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, pp.246-7.
Torture may be justified by the supposed need to elicit information, to get at the truth (a
justification currently employed by the United States in respect of its use of torture in the ‘war
against terror’), but as Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking
of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), torture is not primarily about the
gaining of information, but about the enacting of power. Torture can be seen, in fact, as
exemplifying the contrast between the commitment to truth that is itself tied to a recognition
of the other and the commitment to power over truth that goes with a denial of the other.
8
Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and
putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing…If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, for ever. 18
For all three of these writers, for Arendt, as well as for Camus and Orwell, truth
is not something that stands opposed to the human condition, but is indeed
integral to it. We cannot understand or properly respond to who and what we
are in our humanity without also taking account of the way in which stand in
relation to truth – not, of course to the Platonic Truth that remains forever
inaccessible to any but a few, but the truth that constitutes the very space in
which action and decision takes place. There is thus an essential relation between
the recognition of truth and the recognition of the human. To recognise another
as another is to allow the space of truth to stand between us. Allowing this is also
to recognise our own limits. It is the denial of these limits that Camus argues is
characteristic of modernity, and so modernity can be seen as itself given over to a
form of violence that is not only a violence against the world, and so against
truth, but also against our own human being, which Camus understands in
terms of beauty.19
Without the space opened up by truth, without the limits the truth sets,
there can be no opportunity for politics in the sense of a true engagement of
human beings with one another. The space that is opened up her is of course the
space of what Arendt refers to as the realm of the public. And what we can see
now is that this realm is a realm essentially defined in relation to the possibility
of truth. Arendt writes:
The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous perspectives and aspects in which the
common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever
be devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are
present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the
location of another than the location of two objects, being seen and heard by others derive their
significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different perspective…Only
where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that
those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly
reality truly and reliably appear. Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not
guaranteed primarily by the ‘common nature’ of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact
that, differences of position and the resulting varieties of perspectives notwithstanding,
everybody is always concerned with the same object. 20
The vision of politics that is to be found in Arendt, as well as in Orwell and
Camus, is one that is grounded in the partiality of the political realm, and its
essential limitation by a truth that is contingent and indeterminate, and yet also
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp.214-5.
See ‘Helen’s Exile’, and also, of course, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony
Bower (New York: Knopf, 1956).
20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), p.57-8.
18
19
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objective. It is also one that can, arguably, be considered as identical with the
politics of democracy. Democracy on this account is not primarily about who
governs, or about the structure of governmental organisation, but about a mode
of government that recognises its own limitation, its own contestation, its own
uncertainty. It is such a conception of democratic politics that can be seen as
standing against the politics of totalitarianism, itself understood, in analogous
fashion, as precisely that mode of politics that is based on the assertion of force
against truth, and so on the denial of the political as the realm of common
engagement and mutual recognition, and on the assertion of violence as the
inevitable means by which such force can be exercised.21
In a world in which there is a general cynicism about politics and
public institutions; in which public figures are not only assumed to lie, but
appear to do so as a matter of course; in which what is thought to matter in the
media is not truth, but rather political balance; in which the threat to security is
used, even in a time of peace, to counter public criticism or open discussion; in
which views that are in opposition to the government of the day are dismissed as
un-Australian or un-American, and those who express them are derided and
disregarded; in which lies and deception are regularly used to legitimate
governmentally enacted violence, injustice and illegality; and in which the Prime
Minister himself can blatantly deny what appears as well-grounded fact – and
not even appear embarrassed; in such a world, it is precisely the recognition of
limitation, contestation, and uncertainty that appears to have been lost. To that
extent, what is also in danger of being lost is the reality of a truly democratic
politics – and what is in danger of being enacted in its place is the politics of the
lie and of deceit, the politics that sees power as the only value, the politics of the
violent and the inhuman, which is to say, the politics of totalitarianism.
One might say, of course, that such claims are too extreme, too
exaggerated, too ‘philosophical’. Yet at what point does politics cease to be
democratic? At what point does it become ‘totalitarian’? At what point do we rise
to the defence of the sort of dialogic engagement that Arendt takes to be at the
heart of human political life? If democratic politics does indeed reside in the
ongoing possibility of and commitment to dialogue, criticism and debate, then
the point at which a defence of democratic politics becomes necessary is perhaps
already too late.
21
In this respect, one may treat totalitarianism as instantiating the tyranny of which Arendt says,
in The Human Condition, p.202, that it was ‘not one form of government among others but
contradicted the essential human condition of plurality, the acting and speaking together,
which is the condition of all forms of political organization’. Arendt’s analysis of
totalitarianism, like the analyses advanced by Camus and Orwell, has often been criticized as
failing to do justice to the socio-political complexity of actual totalitarian states, this is perhaps
to misunderstand the nature of the that analysis. Arendt is not primarily concerned with the
delineation of the empirical features of a particular socio-political phenomenon; instead, her
concern, like that of Camus and Orwell, is with its ethical and philosophical underpinnings.
10