Rick Elmore
There has been in recent years a growing attempt to rethink the long-standing opposition between Arendt and Adorno, or phenomenology and critical theory. For example, Rensmann and Gandesha, authors of the only English collection on these two thinkers, contend that “the stand-off between Arendt and Adorno . . . represents a false either/or” that today “appears well and truly obsolete.”1 For them, the stark oppositions between Marxism and progressivism, critical theory and phenomenology, and dialectics and anti-dialectical method that has structured the supposed incompatibility of Arendt’s and Adorno’s projects no longer makes sense; in the post–Cold War era, the development of and resistance to neoliberalism, disaster capitalism, and the “War on Terror” do not fall cleanly along traditional political and theoretical divisions—a fact that opens up common ground between these two supposed foes. Their worry is that the continued insistence on the incompatibility between Arendt and Adorno, phenomenology and critical theory, leads to an increasingly narrow and canonical understanding of these figures and trends, one that ignores productive tensions. Hence, they argue that it is past time to explore the common ground between these two ardent critics of Nazism and proponents of political freedom and social change. Yet while it is difficult to disagree with the spirit of this attempt, and I am deeply sympathetic to rethinking the relationship between critical theory and phenomenology, I do not think we should be so quick to cede the incompatibility between Arendt and Adorno. More specifically, I think this hope of reconciliation drastically underestimates the degree to which Arendt’s and Adorno’s different methodological commitments shape every aspect of their thought. Additionally, I wonder if it is not the differences between Arendt’s and Adorno’s projects, and perhaps also between phenomenology and critical theory, that speak most directly to our political moment, as the question of whether political change comes through reform or revolution remains perhaps the most pressing political concern of our times. Furthermore, one would be hard pressed to find two thinkers more philosophically and personally opposed than Arendt and Adorno.
It is well known that Hannah Arendt despised T. W. Adorno, once calling him, in a letter to Karl Jaspers, “one of the most disgusting people that I know.”2 This personal animosity seems to have been driven by three factors. First, Adorno was the director of Günther Anders’ (then Stein’s), her onetime husband, failed Habilitation in philosophy of music at the University of Frankfurt, and Arendt blamed Adorno for effectively ending Anders’ teaching career in Germany.3 Second, she held Adorno and the Institute for Social Research accountable for the tragic suicide of Walter Benjamin. Arendt was convinced that the Institute failed to offer Benjamin financial support at the precise moment that could have made a difference for his survival.4 Lastly, she saw Adorno as the driving force behind the postwar campaign to expose the Nazi sympathies of her teacher and former lover, Martin Heidegger, whom she would increasingly defend against the claim of ideological Nazism.5 Most of these perceived injustices are little corroborated by the facts. For example, it is simply a matter of record that the Institute for Social Research and Adorno in particular did provide material support for Benjamin and that Adorno was hardly the only intellectual of the era calling for Heidegger to explain his relationship to Nazism. Moreover, Arendt and Adorno did not know each other well, with three letters appearing to be the extent of their direct correspondence.6 Hence, as Rensmann and Gandesha succinctly put it, the relationship between these two thinkers was characterized by “lack of interest and indifference on Adorno’s side” and “by an abiding and cultivated animosity . . . on Arendt’s.”7 Yet while neither read the other’s work in any serious way, one might wonder whether such an engagement would have fared any better than their personal relationship.
Philosophically, Arendt and Adorno had little in common: one, a devoted civic republican who openly rejected dialectical method as a “dangerous” and “treacherous hope used to dispel legitimate fear,”8 and the other, an avowed Marxist who developed a full-blown dialectical account of contemporary society and for whom dialectics expresses nothing less than “the world’s agony raised to a concept.”9 It is on the basis of this radical methodological difference that each develops their account of the relationship between the public and the private spheres, economics and politics, and the nature of political power and revolution. Thus, while it is certainly too simplistic to stage their opposition as merely a disagreement over dialectics, it is the central issue in the theoretical chasm between them. This disagreement led them to develop profoundly opposed accounts of political power and social transformation: Arendt led toward a more pragmatic, reformist strategy of social change and Adorno led toward a more utopian, revolutionary strategy. Hence, in what follows, I trace the consequences of this disagreement over dialectics in order to show how it leads Arendt and Adorno to quite different accounts of social transformation, accounts that mark the difficulty of bringing together phenomenology and critical theory more generally. I begin by recalling that it is the rejection of dialectics that shapes Arendt’s central concern, namely, the character and possibility of legitimate political power.
In many ways, Arendt’s work is oriented by the insistence o n distinguishing political power from violence. As Keith Breen states, “It is no overstatement to argue that the different currents of [Arendt’s] thought are united by a sustained attempt to distinguish violence from power and to resurrect an alternative concept of the ‘political.’”10 This attempt emerges from Arendt’s belief that the problem of modern politics rests on the “misunderstanding” that “politics is essentially a matter of ruling and being ruled, of domination.”11 For her, modernity is defined by this misunderstanding, grounding itself on the assumption that power and violence are two forms of the same thing. This misunderstanding reduces politics to a play of competing violences or political realism, a thinly veiled justification for rule by the strongest that is already on the road to fascism. Hence, central to Arendt’s work is the attempt to articulate a notion of legitimate political power that would not derive its force from a logic of domination—a notion of political power that would have nothing to do with violence. This positive response to political realism has found significant support among thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, who embraces, to varying degrees, Arendt’s attempt to redefine power in opposition to violence.12 On the other hand, this project has garnered a good deal of criticism from those who contest Arendt’s rigid and seemingly ontological distinction between power and violence.13 The disagreement between these two camps, although quite diverse, comes down to a basic questioning of the ability to maintain the strict separation between a series of seemingly co-conditioning terms, such as power and violence, public and private, and politics and economics; or, put more succinctly, this disagreement comes down to the question of whether the relation between power and violence can be understood non-dialectically.
As suggested earlier, Arendt’s project rests on a strict separation of what she argues are legitimate political concepts—for example, the public sphere, freedom, action, and power—and what she argues are their nonpolitical or “social” opposites—the private sphere, domination, means-ends reasoning, violence, etc.14 She argues that these separations admit of no dialectical relation, since dialectics harbors the dangerous and false idea “that good can come out of evil; that . . . evil [and this would hold for violence and injustice as well] is but a temporary manifestation of a still hidden good.”15 For Arendt, a transition from evil to good, violence to power, and the private to the public is problematic not just in the logical sense that something cannot arise from its opposite but also in the material sense that power, freedom, and politics emerge at ontologically distinct sites from violence, domination, and the social. One sees this clearly in On Violence, where Arendt contends that power and violence emerge from utterly incommensurate sites: power being collective, inherently justified by its inclusive scope, never governed by means-ends logic, and never in need of technology to achieve its goals, while violence, being always individual, necessarily excludes deliberation, governed by means-ends logic, and always in need of technological prosthesis.16 Hence, in the name of avoiding the modern confusion between power and violence, Arendt places a strict, ontological dualism at the heart of her system. There is of course significant debate about the status of these categories for Arendt. However, what should be immediately clear is that Arendt’s insistence on these non-dialectical separations would be intolerable for Adorno since her granting of conceptual and ontological primacy to power, the political, and the public constitute nothing less than a form of ideology.
The question of ideology plays key roles in both Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. 17 They share a deep concern for the pivotal role ideology played in the rise and functioning of fascism and Nazism. Yet as in nearly all other aspects of their thought, they develop quite different accounts of ideology. For Arendt, ideology operates by positing an account of reality that is divorced from the empirical world of facts, allowing its adherents to freely deduce a vision of the world that is totally impervious to contestation by appeal to experience or social realities.18 It is this rejection of a common world that marks the totalitarian horror of ideology, since “we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men [and any common accounts of the world] have become equally superfluous.”19 In a world in which no facts o r competing experiences can change our understanding of reality, we enter a realm in which no one’s experience can matter at all. It is this radical fungibility of the common world that lies at the heart of ideology, for Arendt. Similarly, Adorno also worries about the potential for ideological domination, and the foreclosing of competing conceptions of reality. Yet for him, this risk arises from the assertion of moral primacy, rather than the denial of a shared world of facts.
As Adorno argues in Negative Dialectics, “Ideology lies in the substruction of something primary.”20 It lies in “the very category of the root” and the assertion of “the origin.” Ideology emerges the moment one insists that “a man ranks first because he was there first,” the moment one gives primacy to some originary element at the expense of its supposed opposite.21 What Adorno resists in the origin is not that some things come before others but that this fact entails a moral or evaluative priority. This is, he contends, the great conceit that connects dualism to the ideological logic of prima philosophia: “Wherever a doctrine of some absolute ‘first’ is taught there will be talk of something inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its logical correlate. Prima philosophia and dualism go together.”22 All forms of dualism and all claims to first philosophy are, for Adorno, fundamentally ideological insofar as they justify the domination of what is posited as secondary by what is taken to be primary. It is this justification of domination that most concerns Adorno about ideology, “the category of the root” always being a category of “domination” and violence.23 Hence from an Adornian perspective, Arendt’s most essential distinctions between power and violence, the public and the private, and the political and the social would be fundamentally ideological, a positing of power, the public, and the political as primary in relation to an always secondary, violent, and private social sphere. Hence, for Adorno, Arendt’s attempt to avoid categorically the confusion of power and violence amounts to an assertion of direct and unmediated access to the truth of the world, an assertion that is the very mark of ideology. Of course, Arendt is hardly naive about the dangers and likelihood of confusing power and violence, given that the vast majority of On Violence is spent detailing the numerous ways in which this confusion can arise. However, her insistence that the way in which one best avoids this danger is through a strict, non-dialectical separation of power and violence marks, nonetheless, a fundamental roadblock to the attempt to bring her and Adorno’s work together. Moreover, this disagreement over power and violence affects the compatibility of their projects as a whole, her rejection of dialectics positioning her account of the relationship between economics and politics, and the processes of social change in opposition to Adorno’s.
Whether one is inclined toward Arendt’s civic republicanism or Adorno’s Marxism, it is difficult to square their understandings of the relationship between economics and politics. For Adorno, the economic gives rise to the political, insofar as he follows Marx in seeing the modes of production and the commodity form as essential to the production and reproduction of social and political life. In opposition to this account, Arendt insists on separating the economic and political, her worry being that to see the economic as determinative of political life effectively reduces politics to economics, evacuating the space for free, collective (political) action.24 This distinction helps explain for her the success of the American Revolution over the French Revolution, for example.25 It is outside the scope of this chapter to give a complete account of the role of economics in Arendt’s and Adorno’s thought. Yet generally, their different understandings of the importance of economics to politics fundamentally shift their accounts of political resistance and social transformation.
To assert that economics and the forces of production are significant factors in determining social and political realities is to assert their importance, not just for political power but also for political resistance. This is perhaps the essential difference between Adorno and Arendt. For Adorno, politics cannot be theorized apart from the economic, insofar as the “identity principle” (the logic by which nonidentical objects are made identical through the processes of conceptualization) is socially expressed in the “exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours.”26 Exchange, and more specifically the wage labor system, is the “social model” of “the identity principle,” a basic identitarian reduction underlying all forms of sociality, insofar as forming a group of unique individuals into a single collective requires that “non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical.”27 Wage labor is the concrete expression, at least in our current capitalist epoch, of the very possibility of politics and social organization, wage labor embodying the essential reduction around which each of us is given a recognizable identity and around which the very “we” of our social world is expressed. Hence, for Adorno, the contestation of the current social arrangement requires a fundamental overturning of the wage labor system. As he puts it directly, “If no man had part of his labor withheld from him anymore, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking.”28 For Adorno, social revolution must occur at the level of economic and social production, which is to say, primarily outside the sphere of deliberative debate and policy, since revolution requires the radical transformation of the means of production.
Arendt, too, argues that political revolution requires collective action, which, she contends, requires a public, communal space in which equals can come together in “word and deed.”29 Key to t his possibility of politically free action is that “man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life” and from concern for self-preservation, since otherwise it will be these concerns of “the home” or economics that will determine their actions.30 Arendt reasserts here the need to separate economics and politics, arguing that politically free action and deliberation ought to have nothing to do with questions of individual, economic survival; rather, for her, politics takes place through active, collective deliberation and the enactment of what is deemed best for us as a political community. Putting aside an elaboration of Arendt’s detailed description of the processes and forms of political action and speech, it is clear that her account of social transformation stands in marked opposition to Adorno’s. While, for Adorno, a change in the modes of production, and specifically an overturning of the wage labor system, is required for true social transformation, Arendt sees economic questions as at best secondary to the deliberative discourses of politics, suggesting a model of social change through collective political reform. Hence, we find in Arendt and Adorno two entirely opposed accounts of historical change, and it is perhaps this opposition that is the lesson of reading their work together.
The relationship between Arendt and Adorno was a tense affair both personally and philosophically. Yet, the relationship between their projects forms around the question of how to theorize political power, resistance, and freedom without simply reasserting the dominant ideology of realpolitik that, for both of them, underlies liberal democratic theory as much as fascism and Nazism. In the broadest terms, if Arendt is right that power and violence, the public and the private, and the economic and the political can and ought to be verifiably separated, then a politics that builds on this division, developing formal and institutional policies that maintain and expand freedom of choice and civic life, seems ideal. However, if Adorno is right that power and violence, the public and the private, and economics and politics can never be reliably divided, then one will never be able to create formal and institutional policies that can guarantee the supposed freedom of choice and civic life so treasured by Arendt. Rather, these possibilities could only be realized through a radical transformation of society, one in which private and public interests were no longer structurally opposed, a system that, for Adorno, would no longer be predicated on private property and individual rights. Thus, no matter which interpretation one is drawn to, we see in the essential differences between Arendt and Adorno not simply competing accounts, but a reminder of the fact that, in political concerns, one cannot always have it both ways. The opposition between Arendt and Adorno, and also often between phenomenology and critical theory, reminds us that all tactics cannot be aligned, that each of us will have to decide in our own political lives whether political power and violence can be reliably distinguished, whether economics is essential to politics, and whether or not social transformation can be best achieved through reform or revolution. From this perspective, the difference between Arendt and Adorno, far from being a problem to solve, actually helps us think through our most essential political commitments, commitments that may be, no less than Arendt’s and Adorno’s relationship, irreconcilable, but which are sharpened because of this.
Notes
1 Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, “Introduction,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6.
2 Ibid., 5.
3 Ibid., 4–5.
4 Ibid., 5.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970), 56.
9 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 6.
10 Keith Breen, “Violence and Power: A Critique of Hannah Arendt on the ‘Political.’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33, no. 3 (2007): 343–72, 344.
11 Arendt, On Violence, 43.
12 See Jürgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (1977): 3–24; George Kateb, “Political Action: Its Nature and Advantages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130–48; John McGowan, “Must Politics be Violent? Arendt’s Utopian Vision,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 263–96.
13 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Richard Bernstein, “Rethinking the Social and the Political,” in Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 238–59; Breen, “Violence and Power,” 343–72; and Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hitchman and Sandra K. Hitchman (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 289–306.
14 For a concise overview of Arendt’s conception of politics, see her essay “What Is Freedom?,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 143–72.
15 Arendt, On Violence, 56.
16 Ibid., 44, 46.
17 See, in particular, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 460–83, and Negative Dialectics, 37–40.
18 Arendt, Origins, 471.
19 Ibid., 459.
20 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 40.
21 Ibid., 155.
22 Ibid., 138.
23 Ibid., 155.
24 For Arendt’s most detailed account of economics and productive processes, see her analysis of labor, work, and action in The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958).
25 Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1963).
26 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 147.
29 Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 148.
30 Ibid.