The Origins of Totalitarianism: C.L.R. James and the Dilemma of American Democracy

Abstract:

C.L.R. James was one of the true polymaths and original thinkers of the 20th century. His fiction and creative writing laid the foundation for some of that century's great writers including Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Bernadine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith. He wrote widely on a range of subjects: The Haitian Revolution, international socialism and the Russian Revolution, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana Hegelian dialectics, and cricket and the art of sports. James's work has received significant attention since his death in 1989, including the publication of multiple biographies and anthologies, but what is perhaps less appreciated about the corpus of James's work is his elaborate writing on the United States of America. In the 1950s James penned two books on America: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In and American Civilization. Neither received significant attention at the time that they were written, but in light of recent political developments in the US and their significance for the world at large, both books speak to contemporary politics and the problems and possibilities that confront America's tenuous experiment with democracy. By reading James's American books alongside Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, this discussion probes C.L.R. James’s analysis of American society in the 1950s in relation to our times.