H AN NAH ARENDT 'S The origins of totalitarianism, is a brilliant and important book, a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century Europe that is a courageous attempt at generalization and synthesis. Any writer attempting his own reinterpretation in future will have to use this study as a point of departure. Miss Arendt has insight, great learning, and an effective style. For all that, The origins of totalitarianism is only a partial success. The failure to be more does not lie primarily in Miss Arendt's own limitations but rather in the general failure of the historical profession to work out a satisfactory framework of abstractions within which to organize historical materials. Historians, in contrast to social scientists, are supposed to be in no need of theory, their business being to describe the concrete as it develops in time. In fact, this supposition is not true and could not be. Historians, like everyone else, organize their data with the help of abstractions. The trouble has not been that historians have used these abstractions but that they have used them uncritically. The origins of totalitarianism indicates that the framework of analysis employed by modern historians has become rigidly schematized without gaining correspondingly in precision, that the attempt to simplify has led to confusion and possibly error. It is just because Miss Arendt has such extensive knowledge and real understanding that she must strain the framework she is using to the point at which its deficiencies become obvious. Miss Arendt's study is concerned with the growth and final collapse of the nation-state. The nation-state in Europe grew out of the decay of the feudal order. In it the bourgeoisie played a unique role as the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule, the sole exception being the partially successful attempt to use the state for imperialist purposes at the end of the nineteenth century. Bourgeois philosophy, re-