[1][8] Further, Arendt states that, owing to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in its apparatus of coercion, "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within" [9] She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy.

[10][8] A key concept arising from this book was the application of Kant's phrase "Radical Evil",[11] which she applied to the men who created and carried out such tyranny and their depiction of their victims as "Superfluous People".

[10] In particular, Arendt traces the social movement of the Jewry in Europe since their emancipation by the French edict of 1792, their special role in supporting and maintaining the nation-state and their failure to assimilate into the European class society.

As Arendt observed, "modern anti-semitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of power crashed.

In so doing, Nazism sought, among other reasons, to organize the masses to bring about the disintegration of the nation-state system and to advance the totalitarian project, which was global in its orientation.

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

[18]Hannah Arendt considers the Soviet and Nazi regimes alongside European colonies in Africa and Asia, as their later and gruesome transformation due to the effect of imperial boomerang.

[19] Arendt discusses the use of front organizations, fake governmental agencies, and esoteric doctrines as a means of concealing the radical nature of totalitarian aims from the non-totalitarian world.

Saada contests that there is little evidence to support that ideas like those of Arthur de Gobineau, whom Arendt explicitly mentions, hold an important place in the scientific justification of European colonialism.

That commentary on Marxism has indicated concerns with the limits of totalitarian perspectives often associated with Marx's apparent over-estimation of the emancipatory potential of the forces of production.

[30] Historian John Lukacs was highly critical calling it a "flawed and dishonest book" with "unhistorical and shrilly verbose" and that Arendt coverage of the Soviet Union was superficial.