1. Note that my intended meaning of ‘elements’ in connection with totalitarianism differs from Arendt’s. Arendt locates elements in the pre-history of totalitarianism (in the age of imperialism, for example). Her elements then ‘crystallise’ at a later point in time to constitute totalitarianism itself (see Hannah Arendt, ‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’, in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–54, ed. Jerome Kohn [New York: Schocken, 2005], 401–8). I work the other way around. ‘Elements’ are observed within the actual experience of totalitarianism; and by working backwards, the strands of thought that shape a general combination of elements are identified and evaluated. Arendt also constructs elements more narrowly than I do because she is specifically concerned with the influence of ‘practices’, as opposed to the influence of ‘ideas’. See Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 23.
2. For criticisms of the uses of ‘modernity’ in the humanities and social sciences, see Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epoch Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997). As Yack argues, thinking within the limits of pre-specified categories can actually obscure the novelty and specificity of the problem at hand: distinctive developments are obscured by ahistorical generalisations. For a general indictment of ‘medicine’,
3. see Mario Biogoli, ‘Science, Modernity, and the “Final Solution”’, in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 185–206.
4. Perhaps the most pronounced example of this tendency for accounts of political religion to focus on violence is Michael Burleigh. See Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005), and Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (London: HarperPress, 2006).
5. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. by Daphne Hardy (London: Bantam Books, 1968 [orig. 1940]).