Revisiting the Arendt-Voegelin Debate: Totalitarianism and Moral Reality

Abstract The secondary literature on Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin’s 1953 debate on totalitarianism is in general agreement that these two thinkers offer fundamentally irreconcilable accounts of the phenomenon. This article adds to the literature on this debate by employing a broader temporal frame of analysis. I argue that, when viewed over the longer arc of their development, these thinkers converge in how they approach some of the moral questions associated with totalitarianism. This is especially evident in their reactions to resurgent questions of “German guilt” that arose in the early 1960s. Arendt’s “reality as such” and Voegelin’s “first reality” converge on what I call “moral reality.” Both ultimately treated totalitarianism as, in part, a moral catastrophe insofar as it entailed a loss of this sense of moral participation.