Difference between revisions of "Totalizing Ideologies"

Arendt defines ideologies as concepts of describing the world and people in it, as ‘isms which at least as far as their adherents are concerned, can explain virtually every event and norm in social life by deduction from a single premise. They are worldviews that collapse nuance and contradiction, and simultaneously promise a means of refining and perfecting the world in a fashion that is promised to significantly improve it for its adherents and their progeny. Ideological systems like this are obviously not rare, rather it is the elevating of one such school of thought into a totalitarian movement where the mischief occurs. Seized by such a movement as a templates of a future perfected, an ideological system of belief becomes transformed into a deductive principle of action.