Responsibility is a theme, in its many variations, that runs throughout the life and work of Hannah Arendt. In her personal life, we have seen how, when she escaped from Germany in 1933, she made the decision to take on the responsibility of engaging in practical work to oppose the Nazis. In the early 1940s, she argued that the Jewish people should assume responsibility for forming an international army to join with others in the fight against Hitler. When she believed that extreme ideology was taking over the Zionist movement and ignoring the complexities of the Arab–Jewish problem in Palestine, she felt it was her responsibility to dissent. After the end of the Second World War, she discussed other aspects of responsibility. She was highly critical of the Adenauer administration in Germany for its reluctance to single out and put on trial former Nazis who had been murderers. She strongly objected to the idea of collective guilt. It obscured the distinction between those who were really responsible and guilty of murder and others who supported the regime tacitly. “Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged” (Arendt 1994: 126). The Eichmann trial raised further questions about responsibility. Arendt criticized the excuses that were made in Eichmann’s defense – that he was simply following orders, that he was carrying out his duties as an SS officer, that he was a cog in a vast bureaucratic machine. She also objected to the inflated (and mistaken idea) that Eichmann alone was responsible for the Final Solution. She believed that in a legal trial an individual is on trial – not a bureaucratic system – and the task of the judges was to judge whether Eichmann was guilty and responsible for his criminal deeds. The judges recognized the distinctiveness of Eichmann’s crimes when they asserted that the extent to which a criminal was “close to or remote from the actual killer means nothing, as far as responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw farther away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands” (Arendt 1965a: 247, italics original).
The deepest theme concerning responsibility that runs through all her thinking – and is so relevant today – is the need to take responsibility for our political lives. Arendt was ruthlessly critical of all explicit or implicit appeals to historical necessity. Because of our natality, our action, our capacity to initiate, we can always begin something new. Arendt rejected both reckless optimism and reckless despair. She was equally critical of the belief that there is a hidden logic of history that will inevitably result in the triumph of freedom and the belief that there is a hidden logic to history whereby everything is going downhill. Progress and Doom are two sides of the same coin; they are both articles of superstition. She resisted both false hope and false despair. She was bold in describing the darkness of our times – lying, deception, self-deception, image-making, and the attempt to obliterate the very distinction between truth and falsehood. She constantly warned about all those dangerous tendencies in contemporary life that still exist and haunt us. She also warned about giving in to despair and cynicism. Her exploration of the meaning and dignity of politics was intended to be an act of retrieval and recovery – a reminder of a real possibility rooted in our natality. She wanted to keep alive the revolutionary spirit – the spontaneous creation of spaces of tangible, worldly, public freedom. She was keenly aware of the disparity between her conception of politics and the ways in which we normally think of politics today. She certainly did not intend her description of politics to be a blueprint for action. But her defense of the dignity of politics does become a critical standard for judging what is so lacking in our contemporary politics, where there is so little opportunity genuinely to participate, to act in concert, and to debate with our peers. We must resist the temptation to opt out of politics, to assume that nothing can be done in the face of all its current ugliness and corruption. To do so is to allow ourselves to become complicit with the worst. Arendt’s life-long project was to understand, to comprehend, and to do this in a way that honestly confronts both the darkness of our times and the sources of illumination. What she says about comprehension at the beginning of The Origins is what she sought to do throughout her life.
Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalizations that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of reality – whatever it may be. (Arendt 1976: viii)
The task she set herself is now our task – to bear the burden of our century and neither to deny its existence nor submit meekly to its weight. Arendt should be read today because she so was so perceptive in comprehending the dangers that still confront us and warned us about becoming indifferent or cynical. She urged us to take responsibility for our political destinies. She taught us that we have the capacity to act in concert, to initiate, to begin, to strive to make freedom a worldly reality. “Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man: politically it is identical with man’s freedom” (Arendt 1976: 479).