Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.

Arendt develops this formulation in her postwar analysis of Nazism and Stalinism, written after her flight from Nazi Germany and her work with Jewish refugee organizations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (first published 1951), she argues that totalitarian regimes are not merely extreme dictatorships but novel political forms that aim to remake human reality itself. The line appears in her discussion of how terror and ideology function together: terror is not only a tool to silence opponents but a means to organize society so that spontaneous human action, plurality, and individual initiative disappear. The “superfluousness” of persons is linked to mass atomization, the destruction of civil and legal status, and the production of populations that can be treated as expendable.

Arendt’s point is that totalitarianism’s ultimate ambition is deeper than domination. Despotism still presupposes subjects to command; totalitarianism seeks a self-running system in which human beings no longer matter as distinct agents. By making people interchangeable and disposable—through terror, bureaucratic procedures, and ideological “laws” of history or nature—the regime aims to eliminate unpredictability, conscience, and political freedom, all of which arise from human plurality. “Superfluous” signals not only physical extermination but also the political and moral nullification of persons: individuals become mere functions of the movement. The quote crystallizes Arendt’s warning that the gravest threat is a world where human agency is engineered out of existence.