This is an interesting and what seems to me appropriately critical assessment of Hannah Arendt and the currently booming academic Arendt industry by political theorist Corey Robin from Brooklyn College and the City University of New York; an excerpt:

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the
centenary of Arendt’s birth should have devolved into a recitation of
the familiar. Once a week, it seems, some pundit will trot out her
theory of totalitarianism, dutifully extending it, as her followers did
during the Cold War, to America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran.
Arendt’s academic chorus continues to swell, sounding the most elusive
notes of her least political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks
about Zionism and imperialism….

The lodestone of the Arendt industry is The Origins of Totalitarianism,
published in 1951 and…[d]ivided into three parts – ‘Anti-Semitism’,
‘Imperialism’ and ‘Totalitarianism’….

This last section is the least representative – and,
as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least
instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most
attention….

Arendt saw
totalitarianism as the product of mass society, which arose from the
breakdown of classes and nation-states. Neither a political grouping
nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of
the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern
for their ‘wellbeing’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity.
What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience
of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to subsume themselves in
any organisation that would extinguish their ‘individual identity
permanently’. With their insistence on absolute loyalty and
unconditional obedience, totalitarian movements filled this need: they
fastened mass man with a ‘band of iron’, providing him and his fellows
with a sense of structure and belonging….

The
purpose of totalitarianism, in short, was not political: it did not
fulfil the requirements of rule; it served no constituency or belief;
it had no utility. Its sole function was to create a fictitious world
where anxious men could feel at home, even at the cost of their own
lives….

Arendt’s account dissolves conflicts of power, interest
and ideas in a bath of psychological analysis, allowing her readers to
evade difficult questions of politics and economics.do not exist)…..We
can ignore the distribution of power: in mass society, there is only a
desert of anomie. We can disregard statements of grievance: they only
conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we
needn’t worry about moral responsibility: terror makes everyone – from
Hitler to the Jews, Stalin to the kulaks – an automaton, incapable of
judgment or being judged.

During the Cold War, Arendt’s text
allowed intellectuals and officials to avoid any reckoning with the
politics of Communism and its appeal. Today, it offers a similar
detour. ‘If one could pierce the cloak of mystery that shrouds
al-Qaida, Hamas or Islamic Jihad,’ Power writes in her introduction,

one
might well find some of the qualities Arendt associated with
totalitarian movements: ‘supreme disregard for immediate consequences
rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national
interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives
rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; “idealism”, i.e.
their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than
lust for power’.

Power makes the occasional nod to
American policies in the Middle East and to terrorism’s local causes,
but she cannot resist the psychological thrust of Arendt’s analysis:
‘Arendt wrote of German and Soviet selfless devotion to the idealised
collective, but what greater testament to such selflessness can there
be than martyrdom of the kind that thousands of young Muslim men and
women are queuing up to undertake today?’….

[A]s virtually every
intelligence analysis has shown, Islamist radicals are driven by
hostility to the state of Israel and repressive Arab regimes, US
patronage of Israel and those regimes, and, in Europe, discrimination
against Muslims and support for US policies in the Middle East….The Islamists’ grievances
are local and specific. They are not the flotsam and jetsam of mass
society or a globalised world; they come from and return to mosques,
schools, parties and close-knit neighbourhoods. Suicide bombing is
primarily a response to foreign occupation, and terrorism is, as it
always has been, the weapon of choice for people with little power or
no mass base….

By the Cold War’s end, Arendt’s account of
totalitarianism had been so trashed by historians that Irving Howe was
forced to defend her as essentially a writer of fiction, whose gifts
for ‘metaphysical insight’ enabled her to see the truth that lay
beneath or beyond the verifiable facts. ‘To grasp the inner meaning of
totalitarianism,’ Howe wrote in 1991, ‘you must yield, yourself, a
little imaginatively.’ That fiction is again in vogue, but where once
it was passed back and forth between intellectuals and officials, today
it appeals primarily to the belligerati, who ignore the more informed
analyses of  [intelligence agencies].

If
Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism,
Zionism and careerism….

The rest of Professor Robin’s essay discusses these contributions.

I wonder what readers better-versed with Arend’t work than I think about Professor Robin’s assessment?