Richard H. King
It is surprising that Hannah Arendt’s relationship with America has received so little attention. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), does a remarkable job contextualizing Arendt’s thought, but covering Arendt’s links with the United States in any depth proves too much to expect. In addition, most analysts of Arendt’s thought come from disciplines—philosophy and political theory especially—where contextualization focuses on the influence of arguments and ideas over time without spending much time on their historical setting. Also, many of the same people have been trained in a Eurocentric history of political thought and have relatively little interest in, or knowledge of, the thought and culture of the United States. The two questions then become: How did Arendt respond to American thought and culture, and what was her impact on American intellectual and cultural life in her intellectual lifetime?1
Without doubt, what Arendt found most important about America’s political tradition was the framers’ formulation of a modern version of republicanism. Directly and indirectly, she questioned the post–Second World War consensus that interest group politics, representative democracy, and private property were central to the political vision of the American founders. Rather, she asserted that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others were committed to “public or political happiness,” not just private happiness. Remarkably, Arendt’s claims about the importance of republicanism appeared before academic historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood formulated what became known as the “republican turn.” Only J. G. A. Pocock mentioned Arendt in a couple of essays in the 1960s and then in his mammoth study The Machiavellian Moment in 1975.2 In On Revolution (1963), Arendt also suggested that the unsatisfactory state of American political institutions was due to the American failure to remember what their revolution had been about—not the pursuit of self-interest, but the creation of a public realm of speech and action among citizens. However, this emphasis upon the classical tradition of politics went with her neglect of the importance of America’s religious, that is, Puritan, origins. The “city set upon the hill” was largely invisible in her mapping of American political ideas and identity, while, historically, the Puritan jeremiad probably outweighed its republican counterpart in political importance.3
On the personal level, too, America meant the possibility of “beginning things anew” for Arendt. Her life hung in the balance when she escaped Vichy France by crossing Spain to Lisbon from where she and her husband sailed to New York in May 1941. Similarly, Arendt’s republicanism emphasized the need to break with the past, to begin things anew, and not attempt to return to it. This, she proposed, was symbolized and actualized by human natality as the basis for human freedom, and it was, in her mind, inextricably bound up with America: a re-orientation to the future, a crisis of authority and tradition, and the worldliness of the political realm. In other words, the American Revolution marked the onset of political modernity. It was while Arendt was studying for her citizenship exam in late 1951 that she first became aware of the power of the framers’ political thought. Of course, Arendt could hardly shed her European-based education and was always comparing her new home with her earlier life in Europe. As a Jew, she welcomed America’s abandonment of the European ideal of national religious, racial, and ethnic homogeneity. The United States was not a nation-state on the European model. She also found her fellow New York intellectuals welcoming and less rigid than their European counterparts. And in the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was on the loose, she took on the quasi-Tocquevillian role of mediating between American callowness and European snobbery.4 For all their differences, the United States and Europe belonged to the same intellectual and cultural tradition.
She left deep theorizing about the dangers of American mass culture to the Frankfurt School. In fact, she thought the critique of the culture industry and middle-brow culture harkened back to old-world snobbery. But her modernist literary tastes led her to respond quite enthusiastically to American fiction and poetry. In particular, she was taken with the work of Herman Melville on the politics of good and evil (she wrote about his novella “Billy Budd” in On Revolution) and cherished the way much of William Faulkner’s work focused on how memory preserved the past in the present by means of narratives and stories. Among her contemporaries, she was also known to irritate novelist Saul Bellow by giving him instruction in the nature of American literature. In response, Bellow devoted several pages of his novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), to an attack on Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” as applied to Adolf Eichmann, while Arendt’s good friend, the poet and critic, Randall Jarrell, populated his comic academic novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954), with a charmingly eccentric couple allegedly modeled on Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher.5 Few contemporary thinkers could match the number of mentions from writers and poets. Poet Theodore Weiss dedicated several poems to the couple, while poet Denise Levertov and fiction writer Flannery O’Connor commented on evil and the Eichmann controversy. She was good friends with both Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden, and received support in times of crisis from them.
Not long after the war, she wrote to her mentor Karl Jaspers about Germany’s excellence in philosophy combined with political ineptitude, while she praised America’s highly developed political culture, but bemoaned its lack of philosophical achievement. She composed one short piece on Emerson upon receiving an award named after him, and one of her most important late essays took Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” as a point of departure. But she paid hardly any attention to American Pragmatism and blamed it for progressive education’s anti-intellectual impact on American education in the postwar world. Aside from a critical review of a minor John Dewey text, there are no other mentions of Dewey or any of William James in her work. She did use Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to help formulate a critique of consumer capitalism in The Human Condition (1958). Political theorist George Kateb has also suggested that Arendt was averse to what he called American “wildness,” the extremity of thought, feeling, and action that preferred lawlessness to the rule of law and assertion over argumentation. She remained very much the European.6
Like many Europeans in the United States, Arendt was also disturbed by the alleged strength of American social and cultural conformity. Following Tocqueville, whom Arendt was reading as early as the mid-1940s, she emphasized the tension between equality and freedom, and between the social and the political spheres. Indeed, what Tocqueville named the “tyranny of the majority” applied in both realms of existence. It was also through her reading of Tocqueville, her grounding in contemporary European social theorists, and epistolary exchanges with sociologist David Riesman that she formulated her particular version of the idea of mass society (not mass culture) as a crucial ingredient in the emergence of totalitarianism. Published at the height of the Cold War, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) exerted considerable impact on the debate about the nature of the Soviet threat in the postwar world, though the book was originally intended as a critique of the Nazi regime and ideology alone. Her emphasis upon the camp system in both countries, her observation about the illogic of totalitarianism whereby the operation of the camp system detracted from more conventional economic and military goals, and the way she developed a kind of historically oriented philosophical anthropology made Origins too eccentric for extensive use by political scientists and international relations experts. Arendt also adopted the term “ideology” to capture the spiritual and intellectual deep structure of totalitarian regimes. Her conception of ideology preceded Daniel Bell’s much discussed The End of Ideology (1960). For her, ideology made the claim to provide a total explanation for phenomena. It was impervious to experiential contradiction and marked by hyperlogicality. The frightening modernity of totalitarianism was sealed by the ideas “everything is possible” and the rule of historical necessity. Still, despite Riesman’s urgings to add American examples and anecdotes, Arendt hardly mentioned the United States in Origins, though she appeared on the cover of the magazine Saturday Review after the book appeared.7
The idea of mass society, so important in Origins, largely disappeared from Arendt’s work, replaced by the idea of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958). The social sphere was an omnibus conception encompassing the increased role of the state in overseeing the maintenance of biological and family life; the economics of production, distribution and consumption; and the claims of class, race, religion, and ethnicity. In America, she saw the historical obsession with upward social mobility and conspicuous consumption (à la Veblen) as symptoms of the triumph of the social over the political. In the 1970s, her essays on the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate crisis noted the decline of public commitment on the part of a disengaged citizenry. Historically, she claimed that what differentiated the American and French Revolutions was the Jacobins’ attempt in 1793–94 to abolish poverty and want. The embryonic state involvement in creating policies grounded in pity and compassion for the wretched of the earth, she thought, led eventually to a state-controlled command economy and moral and political absolutism. The telos of history was the triumph of the working class, and the eradication of the “social question” was initiated by the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet Arendt avoided any close examination of the causes of the American Civil War bound up with the expansion of slavery, a social institution par excellence. In fact, the United States had its own “social question,” and solved it by politicizing it and then fighting a four-year war to destroy it.8
Another version of the conflict between the social and the political spheres was found in Arendt’s short essay “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959) in Dissent magazine.9 In this essay, Arendt took on the question of school desegregation at the Central High School in Little Rock, Ark ansas, and thereby offended liberal and left-wing opinion in northern intellectual circles and beyond. Arendt’s argument was that public (state) schools were social institutions and thus (white) parents had the right to choose what children attended them, just as members of a club voted on membership for outsiders. Of course, if public schools were public/political institutions, then the principle of equality of access obtained. She also wondered why black students wanted to force their way into places where they were clearly not wanted, a principle she had learned as a Jew in a predominantly gentile Königsberg where she grew up. All this led African American novelist Ralph Ellison to claim that Arendt had not understood that black southerners were not just acting like “parvenus” in forcing their way into previously all-white institutions. Rather they were pursuing their rights as citizens and undergoing the trials of survival.10 In the next decade, Arendt was supportive of the goals of the civil rights movement, especially its resort to civil disobedience, which she distinguished from conscientious objection and which she considered a peculiarly American contribution to political thought and action. But she was very much opposed to the black nationalist and racially oriented politics of black university students. She was all too ready to identify black radicals, not white student radicals, with violence in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.11
In general, something resembling her idea of “action” was at work in the grass roots, more or less spontaneous examples of self-organization in 1960s America. The voter registration campaigns, sit-ins, and marches of the civil rights movement pointed to the New Left’s notion of participatory democracy with which she was sympathetic. She was also sympathetic with the anti-war and student movements (not only in the United States). But the New Left notion of “the personal is the political” was less congenial to an Arendtian perspective, since it opened up the public realm to matters best kept out of politics, such as abortion and birth control. For this reason, feminist political theorists have had problems with Arendt’s strong distinction between the public and private. In general, she was very suspicious of any political entity that was organized by the claims of race, ethnicity, or religion, that is, anything that demanded absolute loyalty based on biologically or ideologically fixed principles. Finally, she insisted in On Violence (1970) that politics was built on power, as defined in terms of popular support from active citizens, not on the possession of the means of violence and domination.12
The two years after Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was published were marked by public debates about the book, mainly on college campuses and in front of Jewish audiences. The decade also saw the appearance of numerous books and films on what came to be called “the Holocaust.” The sociology of the book’s reception book exposed political, ethnic-national, religious, and gender fault lines among American intellectuals. By paying close attention to Eichmann’s use of language as a window into his psyche, she proposed the controversial notion of “the banality of evil” to describe his intentions as a Nazi SS functionary. He lacked, she contended, any moral imagination, failed to think what he was doing and saying, and in general exuded mediocrity. There was nothing of the “demonic” about him as there was about the perpetrator of “radical evil.” Arendt also divided opinion with her criticisms of the way the Israeli government conducted the trial as a show trial, since he was charged with genocide, not crimes against humanity, and the way the trial was used to build waning support for Israel. Her ruminations on the Eichmann case had their origins in her early post–Second World War exploration of individual and collective guilt, responsibility, complicity, and judgment. Indeed, Arendt spent her last years focusing on the nature of moral judgment and its relationship to thinking, as articulated in “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971) and The Life of the Mind (1978).13
When German director Margarethe von Trotta’s feature film Hannah Arendt was released in 2012,14 the half-century-old controversies about the banality of evil and the allegations that the Jewish Councils had done too little to hinder the workings of the Final Solution were rekindled among American intellectuals and academics. The film itself made clear various objections to Eichmann in Jerusalem, often in strong terms. But it also largely sympathized with Arendt and clearly enhanced Arendt’s stature, not only in America but also abroad. Besides the film, there has also been an upsurge in Arendt scholarship over the last quarter century. Thus, Arendt’s important place in modern American intellectual history is beyond doubt, with many of her concerns still central to contemporary moral and political debate in the United States and beyond.
Notes
1 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1982); Richard H. King, Arendt and America (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
2 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Compass, 1965); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Daniel T. Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38.
3 P. Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness,” in Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 1–15; S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
4 King, Arendt and America, 103–7.
5 Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Penguin Books, 1972); Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).
6 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 194–222; Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958); George Kateb, “Wildness and Conscience,” in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2006), 245–71.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960).
8 Arendt, Human Condition; Arendt, On Revolution.
9 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent VI (1959): 45–56.
10 King, Arendt and America, 179–80, 185–86.
11 Arendt, “Reflections”; Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest Books, 1972).
12 Arendt, “On Violence.”
13 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enlarged (New York: Viking Press, 1965); Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38 (1971): 8–20; Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harvest Books, 1978).
14 Hannah Arendt, dir. Margarethe von Trotta (Germany: Heimatfilm, 2012).