![]() In conclusion, this striking affinity with Marxism in Arendt's early work is contrasted with the emergence of classical totalitarianism theory-a project with which Arendt was soon eager to associate herself and which makes a unified and consistent reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism so difficult. Third, it shows that Arendt wrote in these languages and contributed to the same debate. Second, it shows how these languages underpinned a central controversy in Marxist theories of totalitarianism during World War II, a debate conducted in the languages of imperialism and Bonapartism and turning on the relationship between the political and the economic. First, it reconstructs two core languages of interwar Marxism (imperialism and Bonapartism). Building on a novel genealogy of Marxist theories of totalitarianism, the article traces this inheritance into Arendt's early work on the subject, demonstrating that her “languages” (in the Pocockian sense) were basically continuous with those of interwar Marxism. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.This article offers a new reading of the place of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in the history of totalitarianism theory. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. ![]()
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