Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt

• 1906-1975

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Achievements

• Understand experience of totalitarianism
• Confront complicity of political thought
• Develop new normative vision of political life
• Uncover real social existence of political ideas
• Construct social theory of modern political life

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analysis of totalitarianism

• reference to Nazi and Stalinist movements and
  states they established
• differences between Germany and Russia, e.g.
  private versus state property, superiority of
  Aryan race versus dictatorship of the
  proletariat
• similarities e.g. terror and ideology, mass
  mobilisation, anti-state, anti-national,
  anti-rights, anti-bourgeois, anti-civil society.

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Meaning of origins

• origins more like elements than causes
• Antisemitism
• Imperialism
• Anti-imperialism
• Disillusion
• Nihilism

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decline of the nation-state and the end of the
rights of man

• collapse of the great multi-national empires
  after the First World War
• rise of nationalism
• dissolution of solidarity between the formerly
  oppressed nations
• looked like petty nationalist quarrels

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Transformation of nation state after WW1

• enlightened idea of state nation defined by
  virtue of common citizenship in a shared
  political community
• nationalist idea of state no longer state that
  defines the nation but nation that defines state
• decline of the nation-state transformation of
  state from instrument of law to instrument of
  nation
• division of state into four national elements
• state peoples
• unequal partners
• minorities
• stateless peoples

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Elements of the decline of the nation state

• imperialism,
• nationalism (anti-imperialist movements)
• intervention of western and communist powers
• minorities themselves

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End of the Rights of Man

• displaced persons
• treaties guaranteeing rights of minorities (only
  nationals could be full citizens)
• subordination of rights of individual to rights
  of national self-determination
• distrust of idea of human rights
• Everyone became convinced that true freedom,
  true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty
  could be attained only with full national
  emancipation, that people without their own
  national government were deprived of human
  rights. (Arendt)

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perplexities of the rights of man

• In origin indicated the inalienable dignity of
  each individual that no power could deny.
• In practice dependent on political infrastructure
  of nation-states
• Creation of new class of stateless persons who
  lacked the right to have rights

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Arendts normative conclusion

• antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism
  have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new
  guarantee which can be found only in a new
  political principle, a new law on earth, whose
  validity this time must comprehend the whole of
  humanity, while its power must remain strictly
  limited, rooted in and controlled by newly
  defined territorial entities. (OT, ix)

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Aphorisms from Arendt

• Let us not be tempted by
• A) liberalism that wheedles us with the voice
  of common sense and nostalgia for a still intact
  past'
• B) nostalgia to take that which was good in the
  past and simply call it our heritage, to discard
  the bad and simply think of it as a dead load
  which by itself time will bury in oblivion (OT
  pp. viii -ix)
• C) radicalism born out of justified
  disillusionment with all existing values
• D) wishful thinking Progress and Doom are two
  sides of the same medal ... both are articles of
  superstition, not of faith (OT vii)

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Nihilism

• The front generation' ... were completely
  absorbed by their desire to see the ruin of this
  whole world of fake security, fake culture and
  fake life. This desire was so great that it
  outweighed in impact and articulateness all
  earlier attempts at a transformation of values'
  such as Nietzsche had attempted... Destruction
  without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such
  assumed the dignity of supreme values (OT p.328).

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Nihilism

• Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this
  violent dissatisfaction with the prewar age ...
  is to overlook how justified disgust can be in a
  society wholly permeated with the ideological
  outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie
  (OT p. )

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Nihilism

• Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian
  of Western traditions and confounded all moral
  issues by parading publicly virtues which it not
  only did not possess in private and business
  life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed
  revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of
  human values, and general amorality, because this
  at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the
  existing society seemed to rest (OT p.334)

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Imperialism and Violence

• Expansion for expansion's sake' became the
  political credo of the bourgeoisie, a concept
  which was not really political at all, but had
  its origin in the realm of business speculation
  (OT p. 125)
• Imperialism was the first stage in the political
  rule of the bourgeoisie (OT p.138)
• What was new was not the use of violence as
  such, but that violence now became the aim of the
  body politic and would not stop until there was
  nothing left to violate (OT?)

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Mass society and totalitarianism

• 'the term masses applies only where we deal with
  people who either because of sheer numbers or
  indifference or a combination of both, cannot be
  integrated into any organisation based on common
  interest, into political parties or municipal
  governments or professional associations or trade
  unions' (p.311)
• breakdown of the old party system transformed
  the slumbering majorities behind all parties into
  on great unorganised, structureless mass of
  furious individuals' (p.315).

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Idea of mass man

• a new form of selflessness, a new feeling of
  being infinitely expendable
• the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly
  atomised society whose competitive structure and
  concomitant loneliness of the individual had been
  held in check only through membership in a class'
  (p. 317)

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difficulties of understanding

• rupture with all ideas of progress or of Europe
  as a civilised community
• our existing political concepts insufficient for
  understanding (EU302)
• Inadequacy of social science assumption of
  rationality i.e. that terror can be understood
  through a means - ends calculus

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The camps

• It is not only the non-utilitarian character of
  the camps themselves the senselessness of
  punishing completely innocent people, the
  failure to keep them in a condition so that
  profitable work might be extorted from them, the
  superfluousness of frightening a completely
  subdued population which gives them their
  distinctive and disturbing qualities, but their
  anti-utilitarian function, the fact that not even
  the supreme emergencies of military activities
  were allowed to interfere with these demographic
  policies. It was as though the Nazis were
  convinced that it was of greater importance to
  run extermination factories than to win the war
  (EU233)

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The camps

• The gas chambers did not benefit anybody. The
  deportations themselves, during a period of acute
  shortage of rolling stock, the establishment of
  costly factories, the manpower employed and badly
  needed for the war effort, the general
  demoralising effect on the German military forces
  as well as on the population in the occupied
  territories all this interfered disastrously
  with the war in the East, as the military
  authorities as well as Nazi officials pointed
  out repeatedly And the office of Himmler issued
  one order after another, warning the military
  commanders that no economic or military
  considerations were to interfere with the
  extermination programme (EU 236)

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Limits of social science

• If we assume that most of our actions are of a
  utilitarian nature and that our evil deeds spring
  from some exaggeration of self-interest, then
  we are forced to conclude that this particular
  institution of totalitarianism is beyond human
  understanding. (EU233)

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Non-rational

• Why this micro-world in which punishment is
  meted out without connection with crime
  exploitation is practised without profit, and
  work is performed without product? (OT443)
• Why these spaces in which the whole of life was
  thoroughly and systematically organised with a
  view to the greatest possible torment? (OT445).
  
• The only category that seems to make sense of
  this world is senselessness

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concept of totalitarianism

• Arendt not the first to use concept of
  totalitarianism
• Gentile before the war in a positive mode
• Political philosophy after the war to indict
  Communism and Nazism and whole tradition of
  utopian social engineering whose origins traced
  back to Plato, Hegel and Marx.
• Political scientists to denote illiberal
  political systems which annihilate all boundaries
  between the state, civil society and individual
  personality.
• In Cold War used in an ideological way to indict
  twentieth century Marxism and to justify
  liberalism as if it had no relation to
  totalitarianism

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Arendts use of the concept of totalitarianism

• not top-down type of political system but rather
  imaginary identity of total domination and total
  freedom
• it is not the success of totalitarianism that led
  to escalating orgies of destruction, but rather
  its repeated failure
• until now the totalitarian belief that
  everything is possible seems to have proved only
  that everything can be destroyed (OT459).
• Not a structure of total domination but a
  movement which demands that any limit on its
  freedom must be destroyed.
• the way people present themselves should not be
  confused with who they are not only when people
  present themselves as all-good but also as
  all-powerful.
• The lebensraum theory of the Holocaust, that it
  can be explained in terms of the ambition of
  Nazis to Germanise the east, forgets it was the
  failure of the ambition that led to the
  extermination of Jews.

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Megalomania

• The state is the march of God on earth

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On Revolution

• Modern idea of revolution
• No longer cycle of planets
• But new beginning
• Freedom as its raison dêtre

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Three moments of the revolutionary tradition

• French Revolution
• American Revolution
• Lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition

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French Revolution

• Two revolutions political and social
• Political liberation from old regime
• Social liberation from material want
• Political natural solidarity and exchange of
  opinions
• Social artificial solidarisation and singular
  voice of the people identified with unanimous
  cry for bread

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French Revolution

• Conception of the people rooted in
  interpretation of Rousseaus general will
• A multi-headed monster, a mass that moves as one
  body and acts as though possessed by one will
• the value of individuals should be judged by the
  extent to which they act against their own
  interest and for the god of all

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French revolution

• every attempt to solve the social question with
  political means leads to terror (112)
• Nothing more obsolete futile dangerous than
  to attempt to liberate humankind from poverty by
  political means (114)
• liberation from necessity because of its urgency
  will always take precedence over the building of
  freedom (112)
• nothing deprives people more effectively of the
  light of public happiness than poverty

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French Revolution

• Tear the mask of hypocrisy off society and
  celebrate the unspoilt honest face of le peuple
• World of universal suspicion and denunciation
• General will as the enemy of all public life

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French revolution

• Transform the malheureux into the enragés

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American revolution

• Forgotten links between right and revolution
• Representative form of government
• Constitutional framework
• Restoration of natural liberties

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American revolution

• Defend private realm against public power
• But no guarantees for the rights of public life
• what we today call democracy is a form of
  government where the few rule, supposedly in the
  interest of the many and public happiness and
  public freedom become the privilege of the few

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American revolution

• Only the representatives, not the people, have
  the opportunity to engage in those activities of
  expressing, discussing and deciding which in a
  positive sense are the activities of freedom
  (235)