“It seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.”

– F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

In realizing the capacities of control via a reiteration of the archetypal modern subject, Nazism rises as the last catalyst of Enlightenment liberal capitalism’s ideological self-deconstruction. In 1961, Hannah Arendt reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi high official, and controversially labeled him as an unthinking, utterly normal individual, focused only on career advancement and devoid of any sadistic murderous impulse; he exhibited, as Arendt coined it, the “banality of evil.” Seventeen years earlier, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment provocatively described totalitarianism as fundamentally coextensive with Enlightenment rationality: the focus on control in the Enlightenment project extended to Nature and ultimately to man himself. Put simply, though, what remained in question was the dialogue between the structural and the individual, between Adorno and Arendt. In combining their insights, Eichmann in totalitarianism emerges as the ultimate subject of the Enlightenment, produced by its processes, participating in its activities, and contributing to its destinations, all in the service of — if possible — establishing order in chaos, control over uncontrol, and human domination over inhuman madness. 

Constructing Eichmann

Implicit in Arendt’s portrayal of the unthinking, banal Eichmann is a representation of him as, essentially, a non-being, a vacuum. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes that totalitarianism itself rose out of the power vacuum left by the destruction of the nation-state, the will of the “legal and ‘abstract institutions,’” and the loneliness epidemic of modernity, an analysis extended by Nietzsche in the analogous reemergence of slave morality (1) following the death (thus a moral power vacuum) of the Christian God of slave morality (1968, 275; 1967, 528). While devaluing all dominant values, “the moment Nihilism outlines the world for us, its counterpart, science, creates the tools to dominate it. The era of universal mastery is opened” (Blanchot 1977, 122). As Adorno & Horkheimer add, the Enlightenment, though professing liberation from uncontrollable forces, through its principles of reason and control leads to control over Nature and then man himself ([1944] 1979, xiv). In this way, then, the rise of totalitarianism, as Adorno & Horkheimer declare, is not only the creation of newness as a result of the vacuum, but rather the reinstantiation of the most totalitarian (or most actualized) aspects of the previous manifestation of the Arendtian nation-state — “the overthrown god returns in the form of a tougher idol” ([1944] 1979, 117). As Arendt says, “It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past” — the unthinking, amoral figure of Eichmann, though perhaps a relic of pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment eras, rises again (1963, 273). For the trial prosecutors, it “would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster” instead of, in fact, the ideal and the common: his focus on order and control above all else, chiefly above his own impulses, is the archetypal vacuous Enlightened subject (1963, 276).

Vacuousness extends further into individuals’ construction as mediated by their historical and social situation, just as reason’s categorization in Dialectic extends to the interpellated subjects. The alienation produced by contemporary capitalism leaves the modern subject with, as Frankl put it, an “existential vacuum” of meaning and purpose that has analogous fascistic potential as the power vacuum of the nation-state breakdown and the death of God (Frankl 1964, 106). Man’s commodification via capitalism’s productive forces alienates him from Nature, his species-being, the product of labor, fellow man (thus the Arendtian loneliness epidemic), and society itself; control over Nature via production, then, leads to the inner disorder of the individual (Marx and Engels 1984, 76-78). In Foucault, control functions as control over madness (the uncontrollable; in Freud, the unconscious) insofar as madness is recognized as endemic to the individual human: “Delirium is the dream of the waking person” – “it is no longer the dream which borrows its disturbing powers from alienation …  it is madness which takes its original nature from the dream” (1965, 103; Freud 1961). In controlling madness, then, as the extension of the human unconscious, humanity (read: Eichmann and the Nazis) attempts to control itself via the disorder its own rationality created. As Adorno & Horkheimer say, the culture industry has made possible the “illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen” ([1944] 1979, 126). The hallmark of Foucault’s analysis of madness was the madman erroneously supposing that the dream and reality were kindred, but in Adorno & Horkheimer the line between madness and dream itself is almost entirely obscured; control is madness, Enlightenment is mythology (2) ([1944] 1979, xvi). In a similarly vacuousness and coextensive fashion, Eichmann himself recognized the barrenness of his own moral agency which thus blurred the line between himself and the systems living through him: “he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect” (Arendt 1963, 22). The judges in Jerusalem refused to believe the normality of his psychological profile, believing instead that “an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong,” but in so doing ascribe a certain non-structural agency to individuals which remains nonexistent amidst the continuation of the vacuousness produced by the Enlightenment (Arendt 1963, 26). 

Of primary importance in totalitarian production, for Arendt, and concurrent with vacuousness, is the “curious duplication of offices” at “all levels of the administrative machine” (Arendt 1968, 399). Bureaucratic multiplicity dispersed the nucleus of control, yet in so doing centralized it through the desubjectified individual: “The point is that none of the organs of power was ever deprived of its right to pretend that it embodied the will of the Leader” (Arendt 1968, 400). It is as Hans Frank distorted Kant’s categorical imperative, then used by Eichmann: “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve’” (Arendt 1963, 136). Eichmann’s presence as merely Pontius Pilate in his perverted Kantian precepts is emblematic, then, of the function of the systematizing “role” in reducing one’s morality to simply order-obedience (Arendt 1963, 114). Similarly, in totalitarian capitalist society, the ever-expanding relations of production and division of labor (Adorno’s formulation of the Arendtian duplication) inculcate bourgeois principle on the masses, constraining individuality insofar as “competition … has passed from the objectivity of the social process into the composition of its colliding and jostling atoms” ([1951] 2020, 30). Crucially, “the entire private domain is being engulfed [by transaction]” to create a people who “ingratiate themselves with the executive they imagine omnipresent” (25). The Arendtian embodied will manifests through the ingratiated individual via the vacuousness of inner agency, thus extending reason’s instrumentalization into the instrumentalization of the individual. Taylorism is fascism in embryonic form: Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses of the bourgeois-as-Nazis coalesce into the workers (the fascist subjects) who “follow a man who looks through them,” thus themselves becoming the Eichmanns of capitalism as fascism, enlightenment as myth, and individual as bureaucracy (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1979, 228, 191, 155; Althusser [1971] 2014, 75). The Arendtian notion of administrative multiplication, then, amplifies Adorno’s critique of instantiation of competitive productive-relation ideology, and thus the elucidation of the individual path toward becoming Eichmann under the totalitarian order: a mere cog in the machine of actualizing a larger normative picture, especially while the individual acts as the host for the parasitic undertakings of totalitarianism. 

Eichmann’s recapitulation of the categorical imperative in his trial testimony is emblematic of the manifestation of the Other’s will (of Hitler) in the extricated subject under Enlightenment control – the subject, which exists both in Sadeian and Kantian “categorical imperatives,” is replaced in the modern man by the totalizing force. The individual subject does not conquer the desiring passions, as Kant would hope, nor act them out fully, as Sade might insist on, but rather displaces them; the difference lies in the figurehead of morality’s pinnacle, which Eichmann had as a man (Hitler) as opposed to Sade and Kant’s principles. Nietzsche recognized the Eichmann-like castration of the individual post-vacuum — as he said, “conformity with the law itself counts as the end, as the highest end” — here implying the interchangeability of God and Hitler via their similar representation of the “will to deify” just as Eichmann betrayed his subjectivity in favor of the subjectivity of the Führer living through him (Nietzsche 1967, 91, 30). If the bourgeois is “already virtually a Nazi”, as Adorno & Horkheimer posit, then the subjects enslaved by their systems must be themselves subservient to it; the extrication of mind from body implicates a fascist recognition of the spontaneity arising from the body as such, and thus mind/body dualism extends to the Platonic Form/reason dualism recognized in the Kant-Sade imperative ([1944] 1979, 155; Plato 2007). In the instrumentalization of reason while subsuming the body for the mind, fascism must imperialistically extend and instrumentalize reason to thus use it in the quest for the Form. In the incapability of moral agency, Eichmann as the production of totalitarian’s conformism is the vessel and “proficient apparatus” of its power; he is, as Adorno & Horkheimer claim, the perfect ingratiated individual ([1944] 1979, 167). 

The Dialectics of Order

Despite vast ideological differences, Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism utilize the concept of order and its myriad manifestations in ways that render parts of each work virtually indistinguishable. Arendt writes in Origins that “[totalitarian] terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of Nature or of History to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action” (1968, 465). For such forces to be enacted, “terror seeks to ‘stabilize’ men,” while Adorno adds that “the countless people who know nothing but their naked, prowling interest are those who capitulate the moment organization and terror overtake them” (Arendt 1968, 465; Adorno [1951] 2020, 160). Obvious similarities aside, Arendt’s conception of the foundational forces of fascism and communism marks a more substantive explanatory overlap; here we add the Enlightenment’s version, the force of Order. The destruction of mythology, the rationalization and subsumption of all phenomena — specifically of pleasure — to reason, and the categorization and interpellation of individuals and societies into controllable atoms all derive directly from the Enlightenment’s driving force of Order. Just like in totalitarianism, to Arendt, spontaneity (what characterized Eichmann’s lack) is fundamentally antithetical to the force of Order, and as such is the final object of control in Arendtian total dominion; Adorno & Horkheimer likewise write that “any trace of spontaneity … is controlled” in the totalitarian culture industry (1968, 438; [1944] 1979, 122). The movement of Enlightenment reason thus requires its full manifestation in the force of Order. The duplication of offices Orders individuals into atomized units, thus creating cogs in an ever larger and more effective machine while power vacuums and vacuousness (as a manifestation of chaos) create the optimal conditions for the rise of Order in its place; the figure of Eichmann in modern society is created through the force of Order of the Enlightenment’s structures. 

The force of Order in the Enlightenment, though trending towards total dominion, must nonetheless cognize the impossibility of complete subjugation. Eichmann is the manufactured ideal, but the tension between the complete embodiment of the superego and the impossibility of complete repression of the unconscious means he is an ideal nonetheless. Dialectically, though, that impossibility affirms the control as such. In Foucault, the ocean upon which exiled prisoners (the mad and uncontrollable) sailed was defined as “that great uncertainty external to all things,” resisting reason’s totalizing forces while embedding the “rigorous division” between reason and madness, land and water, just as in Adorno movie-goers “all recognize chance … as the other side of planning,” even as the two “become one and the same thing” in repressive equality (Foucault 1965, 11;146). The imperialistic attitude of the European states (a hallmark of totalitarianism, in Arendt), though repeating the ideation of order through conquering chaos (sailing the seas for the sake of conquest, like Odysseus), nonetheless affirms the prevalence of disorder insofar as it continues affirming that “water and madness have been linked in the dreams of European men” (Arendt 1968; Adorno & Horkheimer [1944] 1979; Foucault 1965, 12). The unconscious excesses of madness, as implicit in the analogous dreams post-Freud, further instantiate the force of Order’s impotence at constituting ubiquity, yet that lack of ubiquity dialectically affirms the order of the land: one recognizes one’s control via the chaos of the other, or even the chaos of one’s own unconscious. The ocean as the “underside of the world” in Foucault reiterates the irrepressibility of the unconscious, but that may not necessitate the intractability of the id into certain pathways as preordained by superegoic forces; Eichmann may not be necessitated (1965, 12). After all, Adorno & Horkheimer write that the fascist paranoia of “the perfect madman or absolutely rational individual” manifests in “a castration wish as a generalized urge to destroy” which consciously recognizes itself as envy, but the dialectic of destruction as both order and madness urges a rewriting of Adorno as the fascist being “the perfect madman and the absolutely rational individual” ([1944] 1979, 191-192). The forces of Order, then, though recognizing their antithesis, mold it into a dialectical and juxtapositional reaffirmation of their strength. (3) 

In Eichmann, the dialectic of control emerged in his dealings with Rumania as a zone of violent disorganization. Starting in 1941, writes Arendt, the Rumanian military began a genocidal campaign that threatened to dwarf the Nazis: “The horrors of the Rumanian concentration camps … were more elaborate and atrocious than anything we know of in Germany” (1963, 192). Unthinking of the overwhelming moral hypocrisy, “the Germans were horrified” with both the “unorganized and premature Rumanian efforts” which threatened to “deteriorate into bloody chaos,” and, more importantly, the lack of any centralized controlling ethos which catalyzed it (1963, 192). Eichmann’s ingratiated embodied will yearned for Order “so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way” — “if it had to be done at all, he argued, it was better that it be done in good order” (1963, 190). Adorno & Horkheimer’s focus on Juliette’s rationalization of the pursuit of sadistic pleasure, is, essentially, Eichmann’s focus on schematization and efficiency for the personal pleasure of advancement ([1944] 1979, 95). Sade’s truth of Kant is the fascist — he, as Adorno & Horkheimer note, is “not accessible to reason,” for his reason is undergirded by a more fundamental desire for control (Lacan and Swenson 1989; [1944] 1979, 210). However, his desiring id via the ingratiation of the “administered life” becomes superegoic id as repressive desublimation diverts the instincts into the desire of the Leader as embodied will (Adorno [1951] 2020, 95; Adorno & Horkheimer [1944] 1979, ix; Marcuse 1964, 72). Adorno & Horkheimer’s insight, though, was that the ingratiated and reified principles of the social productive processes function analogously to the embodied will in Arendt: as such, not only are Hitler and God interchangeable as deities (4), but, more importantly, Hitler and capitalism are as well. The systematization of violence via inculcation unfolds as the Enlightenment morphs and rearranges Nature’s productive capacities of power; just as productive capacities of ethical progress expand, though, so do the capacities of violence. As Adorno & Horkheimer claims, “[Reason] is neutral in regard to ends; its element is coordination,” as implied in the paradoxical unity of Kantian and Sadeian imperatives ([1944] 1979, 88). Planning-as-end thus implies totalitarianism’s control of the “ratio” and constitutively involves the anathematization of Nature’s power “on humanity as slavery,” as subsuming the uncontrollable necessitates analogously supplanting the power of domination ([1944] 1979, 89-90). Eichmann’s schematization of violence for the sake of violence thus follows directly from the Enlightenment’s force of Order. 

Arendt notes further in Eichmann several instances of the Nazis’ confrontations with resistance in carrying out their imperialistic deportations. In Denmark, for example, the Nazis “had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun,” a toughness which, as Arendt says, “was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price” (1963, 175). Enlightenment as mythology finds parallels in rationality as force in the Nazi toughness – paradoxically, “not a single one of them has the guts to defend the Nazi ideology,” and thus their rationality-induced obedience was destroyed via the same principle which ostensibly gave them strength (Arendt 1963, 175). This is the fragility of Enlightenment: the desubjectification of the vessels of embodied power finds that the embodiment exists only as embodiment, and not as principle. In the same way that Althusserian interpellation only names what exists externally, the turning of the interpellative act back onto the perpetrators of Nazi ideology in the face of resistance reveals the limits of ingratiated ideology in forming the principle of the Führer-as-morality because of the individuated locus of moral agency (Althusser [1971] 2014, 191). Hence, “they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of courage” (Arendt 1963, 175). Conformity is revealed as both constitutive and superficial in the force of Order, itself disguising, as Lacan added to Kant, the base under the superstructure of terror: as Adorno & Horkheimer said, the “Jew” as such mattered only insofar as it represented the “Other” to be destroyed in determinate negation (Lacan and Swenson 1989; [1944] 1979, 168). The interpellative act, as Butler declares of hate speech, contains within it the seeds of emancipatory resignification via the naming of a subject that slices through the ingratiated will of the Leader like butter (1997). Eichmann’s complete lack of self-reflection following the aforementioned incidents, though, displays the necessity of a degree of remaining agency in potentiating ideological change; the dialectic of spontaneity in Arendt (as destroyed completely in totalitarian total dominion) and Adorno & Horkheimer (in spontaneity as produced by repression) perhaps falls on the Arendtian side for Eichmann and the Dialectic’s for the other Nazis. 

The force of Order, though, must be understood dialectically as motivationally incorporated in the Enlightenment, contrary to Adorno & Horkheimer’s momentarily inadequate reading of Nietzsche’s “dualistic” understanding of the Enlightenment. Adorno & Horkheimer write that, though Nietzsche recognized essentially Freudian Eros via domination in the Overman, his “pre-Fascist followers” grasped solely the “‘nihilistic’ anti-life force in the enlightenment,” implying fascism to be purely a manifestation of the Freudian death drive (5) ([1944] 1979, 44). However, Freud was careful to underline the “concurrent or mutually opposing action” (italics added) of the life and death drive — “the instinct [to death] itself could be pressed into the service of Eros” via, as Adorno & Horkheimer described it, determinate negation (1961, 106; [1944] 1979, 24). The fundamental point about fascism as foreshadowed in the power vacuum exists in Freud’s recognition of the Eros and death drive dialectic. Fascism rises as a collusion of the dialectical forces of the Enlightenment (of both myth and the force of Order, though the former was subjugated to the much stronger latter) in the Sadeian perversion of the simultaneous lust for libido and control in Sade’s Juliette. Adorno & Horkheimer, however, maintains this dialectic in determinate negation: fascism defines itself in its creative production (Eros) via the (death drive, aggression-turned-outwards) destruction of others (Freud 1961, 106; Adorno & Horkheimer [1944] 1979, 13, 24). Eichmann realizes his own lust for recognition by his superiors through the use of order and thus death drive, thereby combining both drives to advance himself (though ultimately in the service of Eros). Jew-as-animal mimics unconscious-as-chaos, though the palliative fascistic action negates itself through destruction-as-projection and the reliance of the fascist on that which he seeks to control; fascist creativity is negation. The death drive turned outward in Enlightenment externalizes the destruction of the Other but, contra Freud, in doing so regresses into (and is constitutive of) inward death drive as Enlightenment regresses to myth ([1944] 1979, 106). 

Through Arendt, Adorno & Horkheimer, Freud, and Nietzsche, the culmination of this rumination on dialectics is found in Foucault’s famous phrase: “Madness is the déjà-là of death,” the precursor, symbol, the already-there (1965, 16). The dialectic of the force of Order exists in the dialectic of the application of this maxim. To Eichmann in Enlightenment (as the phrase meant in Foucault’s use), disorder exists as the antithesis of the professed ideal and thus must be subjugated to avert the successor of the precursor. On a metacritical view, though, order via determinate negate is predictive of violence and, most importantly, self-immolation emerging from the productive death drive against madness-as-uncontrol — madness in the Enlightenment is the precursor of the death which will come in attempting to control madness itself. Enlightenment is the déjà-là of myth and vice versa, just as the attempt to control/tame/destroy unreason and chaos is the déjà-là of destruction, violence, and, most importantly, spontaneity in its dialectic. In fascism, the forces of Order of Enlightenment and capitalism discover their final, but not everlasting, destination. 

(1) Marx explains this phenomenon more clearly than Arendt does in The Eighteenth Brumaire on the rise of opportunistic Bonapartism in the wake of the breakdown of existing political hegemony ([1869] 1963).

(2) Plato notes that the tyrannical character “becomes in his waking life what he was once only occasionally in his dreams,” thus living out the “terribly bestial and immoral type of desire” which reason ostensibly and ideally subjugates. Here, then, the unconscious is liberated and supplanted for external domination (2007, 309, 312).

(3) Agamben’s use of Schimttian “state of exception” relates to this point as the “inclusive exclusion” of that which exists outside of the force of Order, though further elaboration of this relationship will not be taken up here (1995, 21).

(4) Foucault in Madness & Civilization explained religion’s role in the cure of madness as intrinsic to “the double role of nature and of rule” that religion has, thus allowing it to recognize the “old secret of reason in the presence of madness” as a means of curing the mad (1965, 244). The subsumption of nature into the coercion of reason parallels the Enlightenment’s recognition of myth and nature in itself in order to conquer it; Hitler and God as symbols for their respective methodologies remain interchangeable for the unique pathway toward control that they offer.

(5) Nietzsche himself recognized the dialectic of the Enlightenment via determinate negation as Adorno & Horkheimer would come to understand it: as Maurice Blonchot explains of Nietzsche’s thought, “Destruction and creation, when they bear on the essential, are hardly distinguishable” (1977, 123).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Translated by John Cumming. Verso, 1979.

Adorno, Theodor. “Education after Auschwitz.” In Education to Maturity. 1971.

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951). Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. Verso, 2020. 

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism (1971). Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2014.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Reprint. Penguin Classics, 2006.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, 1968.

Blanchot, Maurice.  “The Limits of Experience: Nihilism.” In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David B. Allison, 121-127. Delta, 1977. 

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997.

Foucault, Michel. Madness & Civilization. Translated by Richard Howard. Random House, 1965.

Frankl, Victor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press, 1959.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.

Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom (1944). Edited by Bruce Caldwell. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Lacan, Jacques and James B. Swenson, Jr. “Kant with Sade.” The MIT Press, no. 51 (1989): 55-75. doi: 10.2307/778891. 

Lingis, Alphonso. “The Will to Power.” In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David B. Allison, 37-63. Delta, 1977. 

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1869). International Publishers, 1963.

Marx, Karl and Frederich Engels. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. Prometheus, 1988.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Beacon Press, 1964. 

Nietzsche, Frederich. The Will to Power. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. Random House, 1967. 

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin, 2007.