62. Onion (Arendt)

Philopsher Hannah Arendt used the onion as a metaphor in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Despite the fact that the onion metaphor became quite famous, she only mentions the onion two times.

"Multiplication of offices, duplication of functions, and adaptation of the party-sympathizer relationship to the new conditionsmean simply that the peculiar onion-like structure of the movement, in which every layer was the front of the next more militant formation, is retained."

\ cutive branch of the government through which all orders aretransmitted. Through the net of secret agents, the totalitarian ruler has createdfor himself a directly executive transmission belt which, in distinction tothe onion-like structure of the ostensible hierarchy, is completely severedand isolated from all other institutions.

Read the whole book here.

More information here.

"Each layer of the onion absorbs a bit of the shockwave, ultimately rendering the contact with external reality harmless."

In her text What is Authority, she uses the metaphor again.

"The onion structure makes the system organizationally shock-proof against the factuality of the real world?" Read more about Arendt's use of metaphorshere.

"By contrast, the totalitarian onion, in whose center the Führer is located, is specifi c in that all the political movement’s extraordinarily manifold parts are related in such a way that each represents the façade in one direction and the center in the other; each plays the role of a normal outside world for the more extreme layer below and the role of radical extremism for the next layer toward the outside. As a result, the movement provides for each layer the fi ction of a normal world."