Use the Passage Below and Your Knowledge of World History

question 105

Essay

Use the passage below and your knowledge of world history to answer all parts of the question that follows.
"The question we raised at the start of these considerations and to which we now return is what kind of basic experience in the living-together of men permeates a form of government whose essense is terror and whose principle of action is the logicality of ideological thinking. That such a combination was never used before in the varied forms of political domination is obvious. Still, the basic experience on which it rests must be human and known to men, insofar as even this most "original" of all political bodies has been devised by, and is somehow answering the needs of men.
It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. The isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, "acting in concert" ([Edmund] Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition.
Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability to act at all, have always been characteristic of tyrannies. Political contacts between men are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities for action and power are frustrated. But not all contacts between men are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication, and thought are left intact. We know that the iron band of total terror leaves no space for such private life and that the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man's capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action."
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
(A) Identify and explain ONE similarity between a pretotalitarian, tyrannical government and a totalitarian government, according to Arendt.
(B) Identify and explain ONE difference between a pretotalitarian, tyrannical government and a totalitarian government, according to Arendt.
(C) Choose a totalitarian state in the period from 1920 to 1940 and identify and explain ONE example of the way the leaders created isolation and terror.

---

Definitions:

Science And Math

Academic disciplines focused on understanding natural phenomena through observation, experimentation, and calculation.

Achievement

The accomplishment of a goal or the meeting of a set of standards through effort and skill.

TIMSS

An acronym for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which assesses the knowledge and skills of students around the world in these subjects.

International Test

An assessment administered across multiple countries to evaluate and compare educational performance or abilities.