The Loss of Land and Place in the World
James Barry, Jr.
Expropriation, or loss of place in the world, is one of the central themes of Arendt’s work from The Origins of Totalitarianism to the end of her life. In fact, an even earlier text, the 1943 essay “We Refugees,” represents a personal anthem to the transformation through which Arendt’s own life is forever altered by her loss of place in her mother nation. The question of expropriation that begins as a reflection on her own status as a refugee serves as a basic pivot for most, if not all, of her texts for the next three decades. Whether she is discussing the dislocation of the stateless, the problem of freedom in modern mass society, or the dangers of ideological thinking, the question of expropriation lurks as a fundamental concern. This is not to say that Arendt’s preoccupation with expropriation is always focused on the same issue. In some cases, she addresses it as an historical event, focusing on the rise of a certain socioeconomic body, while in others she takes up expropriation as a political problem. However, in all these different approaches, Arendt is concerned, in one way or another, with the problem of expropriation as the loss of place in the world.
Arendt’s most explicit account of expropriation is found in the second and sixth chapters of The Human Condition. In section eight, “The Private Realm: Property,” she describes the original modern expropriative event in terms of the displacement of the peasants or common people from what had been traditionally common land following the Reformation:
For the enormous and still proceeding accumulation of wealth in modern society, which was started by expropriation—the expropriation of the peasant classes which in turn was the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation—has never shown much consideration for private property but has sacrificed it whenever it came into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.1
A full consideration of this extraordinarily dense sentence tells us much about Arendt’s reading of the dramatic changes that define the modern age. Arendt grounds the rise of the wealth-centered society, a society dedicated to the conversion of land into more mobile forms of wealth, in this rich and challenging story of modern expropriation. Expropriation is the event that sets this new society in motion. All the terms and principles that we commonly associate with the modern age, for example, private property, capitalism, and the rise of the merchant class, derive much of their specific meaning from the triggering event of the Reformation and the corresponding dislocation of large numbers of people from the lands on which they had traditionally resided. Arendt connects the liberation of land as a new form of wealth to the liberation of these people from their long-term locality.
Arendt returns to the question of expropriation in even greater detail at the beginning of the last chapter of The Human Condition. Here again she refers to the Reformation, now defining it as one of the three events that open up the modern age. The characterization of expropriation is essentially the same, but Arendt unpacks the far-reaching significance of this event in much greater detail:
Expropriation, the deprivation for certain groups of their place in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life, created both the original accumulation of wealth and the possibility of transforming this wealth into capital through labor. These together constituted the conditions for the rise of a capitalist economy. That this development, started by expropriation and fed upon it, would result in an enormous increase in human productivity was manifest from the beginning, centuries before the industrial revolution.2
Again, Arendt links expropriation to the modern project of wealth accumulation, but now she explicitly connects it to the rise of modern capitalist economy as well. The fact that she prefaces this linkage with her most elaborate definition of expropriation, namely, the loss of place in the world and exposure to the winds of mere life, makes this passage all the more compelling. It is no accident that this extensive account of expropriation occurs in a section entitled “World Alienation,” for Arendt explicitly identifies the modern expropriation of the landless poor as the event that initiates world alienation. She draws a line of heritage between nineteenth-century industrialization and the expropriative events triggered by the Reformation. Arendt sums up the connection in comments she makes some fifteen years after the publication of The Human Condition: “The whole modern production process is actually a process of gradual expropriation.”3 The rise of industrial labor represents a new chapter in the story of expropriation and world alienation.
It is, of course, no accident that Marx figures centrally in this discussion, for Arendt’s exploration of expropriation owes a significant debt to Marx’s critique of capitalist industrial society and the sort of individual that inhabits this society. Indeed, one had only to read the opening paragraphs of Chapter 27 of the first volume of Capital to see the depth of connection between Arendt and Marx on the subject of expropriation. However, Arendt will ultimately argue that Marx focused on the problem of self-alienation when the real problem is world alienation: “World alienation, and not self-alienation as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age.”4 In short, it is not the loss of self that defines the modern age but the loss of world that is sparked by expropriation. If anything, Arendt argues, the world alienation launched by the event of expropriation will produce a self that is stronger and more real than ever. The problem is, where exactly does this self reside, or more properly put, where does this self belong? Even more accurately, if we are to follow Arendt’s aforementioned definition as care fully as possible, where does the group to which this self belongs belong?
What we find in this question of the price and effect of expropriation, namely, the loss of the very possibility of belonging to a place as a group or community, is that it serves as a basic link between the end of The Human Condition and the beginning of Arendt’s first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The first paragraph of the 1950 “Preface” ends with these lines: “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”5 With this double theme of loss of home and loss of a specific place in the world in which this home is grounded Arendt explicitly marks her first major project as a study of the perplexity of expropriation as a fundamental political question. One can trace this theme of loss of place in the world throughout the text, but her account of the loss of rights in the last chapter of the Imperialism section, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” offers a sustained reflection on the consequences of expropriation.6
The problem of rightlessness dominates the last section of this chapter, “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” and yet the language Arendt uses there shows the direct link to her account of expropriation in the last chapter of The Human Condition. The first loss she associates with rightlessness is the loss of home, “the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world.”7 As Arendt points out, the danger the refugee faces is that this loss of place will become permanent, “that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.”8 Clearly, Arendt is focused on the relationship between the problems of the loss of place as home and political loss of place as loss of community. Without this double right to place all other rights are compromised, because the capacity of the individual, the family, and the group to act in the world is for Arendt grounded in belonging to a place by having a concrete place in the world of one’s own.
However, the connection with her explicit definition of expropriation in the last chapter of The Human Condition goes further than this. The second half of the definition of expropriation she offers there refers to the “naked exposure to the exigencies of life.” In her account of rightlessness in “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man,” Arendt refers repeatedly to the problem of the “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human.”9 The use of the term “naked” refers to the stripping away of the protections afforded by belonging to a place and to a community, both of which are related to Arendt’s understanding of identity. The difference between her account in the Totalitarianism book and The Human Condition is that in the earlier text, she is concerned with refugees (and camp inmates) of the early- to mid-twentieth century, while in the latter text she offers a much wider historical account (i.e., from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution and beyond). Thus, it is her meditation on the plight of refugees and camp inmates who experience the dangers posed by the “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human” that sets the stage for her more full- scale account of the dangers of expropriation in The Human Condition and subsequent projects.10
The third term of loss that Arendt refers to on the first page of the 1950 “Preface” to the Totalitarianism book, powerlessness, reveals what is at stake in this double problem of a loss of place and naked exposure to the necessities of life. Stripped of the protections inherent in having a home and belonging to a political community, the refugee finds herself bereft of all but the most basic capacities to respond to the demands of life. The protection of herself and her family is no longer a joint project, but depends solely on her innate capacities. Power, Arendt tells us, is always a collective endeavor, and the refugee is by definition without a viable community. Thus, the dislocation inherent in the refugee’s condition cuts her off from all capacities beyond her own strength. The fact that such a condition is replicated thousands of times in the provisional space of a refugee camp does not change the underlying experience of powerlessness; in fact, the replication only further confirms and aggravates this condition.
However, it is not in the name of the plight of the refugee or the camp inmate that Arendt summons the specters of homelessness, rootlessness, and powerlessness in the 1950 preface to her Totalitarianism book. Her comments operate on a more contemporary plane. She is concerned with the new political reality in which we are all caught, one which seeks to organize the masses who must live in the world born out of the events of the first two World Wars, as well as the imperialist and industrial events that preceded them. Her concerns are directly bound to her efforts not to understand the totalitarian event but rather to understand how the world that existed prior to totalitarianism continues to shape the world after totalitarianism has come and perhaps gone. Thus, it is not life under totalitarianism but life after totalitarianism that concerns her most. In th is way, the totalitarian event can be read as a terrible revelation, one that shows us that in many ways and many forms the loss of place in the world is a legacy much older than totalitarianism itself. The direct bridge to her recurrent discussion of expropriation in The Human Condition is built on this concern with how we can live in a world that no longer seems to make a place for all those who dwell on the earth. Modern mass society represents a global phenomenon of expropriation, one that was already underway in the early industrial period but has reached its fuller implications only in the wake of the totalitarian event. It is as if the basic problems of the refugee have become the problem, albeit in a much less drastic form, of billions of people.11
In a text written just after the publication of The Human Condition, Arendt still seems to have the fruits of expropriation clearly in mind: “The fact that contemporary politics is concerned with the naked existence of us all is itself the clearest sign of the disastrous state in which the world finds itself—a disaster that, along with all the rest, threatens to rid the world of politics.”12 To borrow from the last lines of Arendt’s “We Refugees,” and thinking in terms of all the problems Arendt connects with the expropriative events and forces that define the modern world (e.g., loss of community, political impotence, social loneliness, industrialization, etc.), one might argue that those groups who have most violently lost their own place in the world have become the vanguard of all people. In the age of expanding expropriation, would such a loss of place make the refugee’s plight a warning to us all?
Given the grave and essential dangers posed by expropriation, perhaps it is not surprising that Arendt actually offers a solution to this loss of place in the world. Arendt rarely made such suggestions to any of the problems that plague contemporary political life, but in the case of the problem of expropriation, she makes an exception. Her solution is offered in very general terms, but it is consistent with the essence of the problem: “To make a decent amount of property available to every human being—not to expropriate but to spread property—then you will have some possibilities for freedom even under the rather inhuman conditions of modern production.”13
The fact that Arendt ventures to offer a solution says much about the core issue that expropriation represents. Although her solution to the problem of expropriation may seem an obvious proposal (and offered in offhand comments at a conference), the fact remains that she offers a direct and concrete solution. “Propriation” is the appropriate response to expropriation; the loss of peoples’ places in the world can only be remedied by a recovery of their places in the world. With this recovery of place, political freedom is given new possibilities. Only in those places where people belong together can the power to act consistently appear.
Of course, the implications of this recovery of place are vast. It would require a radical overhaul of the political and social structures in which we live—structures that Arendt argues have been greatly compromised by various forms of expropriation.14 The nation-state that once served to guarantee the right of place for its citizens no longer proves viable in this regard. Arendt returns again and again to the problem of the decline of the nation-state as an instrument for the protection from the loss of place and other rights. She leaves us with a problem which only we can solve: the problem of creating a “new political principle . . . 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.”15 The forces of expropriation that are our complicated and long-term modern inheritance can only be held at bay by the creation of effective structures that ensure the right to place and right to belong in a conscious and ongoing manner. In all of its forms, the modern story of expropriation has never been a predestined fate but rather a series of events activated by worldly human intent. As Arendt might say, we must begin by acknowledging this long saga of expropriation as an undeniable fact, but a fact that can serve as a launching point from which we can create a new political community, a new place to belong together in the world.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 66–67.
2 Ibid., 254–55.
3 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 335.
4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 254.
5 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), xxv.
6 Of course, the boldest examples of expropriation in The Origins of Totalitarianism relate to the expulsions of the millions of people sent to the Nazi concentration and death camps. One could argue that the Nazi event is the purest expression of worldlessness. Perhaps it is the very purity of this expropriation, that is, the total loss of place in the world, which leads her to describe the totalitarian event as incomprehensible and unprecedented.
7 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 372.
8 Ibid., 375.
9 Ibid., 377. It is worth noting that Arendt credits this idea of the dangerous quality of being stripped of one’s protections to Edmund Burke. See Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution in which he describes the legal protections the state provides to clothe the “defects of our naked, shivering nature.”
10 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 380. Note that Arendt is working backward from more or less contemporary forms of expropriation to those somewhat more muted forms of expropriation she finds in earlier phases of the modern age. It is the extreme quality of loss of place in the world in the twentieth century that seems to have alerted her to expropriation as a longer term historical legacy.
11 See the last lines of Chapter 12 of the Totalitarianism book where Arendt warns of the temptation of using totalitarian techniques to deal with problems which are intimately bound up with expropriation, namely overpopulation and economic superfluity.
12 Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken, 2005), 145.
13 Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, 320.
14 Here again Arendt seems to draw on Marx. However, where Marx argues for the elimination of private property, Arendt argues that it is only by each individual having a private place in the world of their own that each person can belong to a common public world.
15 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xxvii.