Marxism and Nationalism

Abstract

One of Hannah Arendt's more surprising observations in Origins of Totalitarianism is her statement that 'modern anti-semitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined'.1 Rather than identify anti-semitism, and racism in general, as the most extreme and pernicious excrescence of nationalism, Arendt chose to see antisemitism as something extraneous to nationalism, a reaction to its failure. Elsewhere in her book she argues that each class in European society became infested with anti-semitism when it came into conflict with the state, 'because the only group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews'.2 This surely is an extraordinary view. This is not the place to discuss in detail the question how far Arendt's overall thesis about the role of Jews in European economic life and their power in the modern state is itself an internalization, by a Jewish thinker, of anti-semitic images and theories; nor can such an affinity of views be merely ascribed to her close relationship with Heidegger. On a much more fundamental level, Arendt would be the first to concede that sometimes victims of totalitarian ideologies adopt albeit unknown to themselves images, stereotypes and identities projected onto them by their persecutors. In Eichman in Jerusalem, Arendt argued forcefully along these lines, perhaps pushing the argument to its extreme; her analysis of modern Jewish life and the causes of anti-semitism may be another instance, sophisticated, scholarly and urbane as it is, of such a brutalization of the victim. Be this as it may, Arendt's apparently idiosyncratic view of the relationship between the rise of anti-semitism and the decline of nationalism is linked to her general understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism, and it is directly connected with our main topic, viz. the Marxian attitude to nationalism. For in the course of her