CONCLUSION

IN VOLUME 2 of Democracy in America, published five years after the first one had established the author’s reputation as an admirer of American society and its political system, Tocqueville noted that “in their relations with strangers the Americans are impatient of the slightest criticism and insatiable for praise.”¹ He was a genuine admirer but complained nevertheless about the narcissism of many Americans:

I tell an American that he lives in a beautiful country; he answers: “That is true. There is none like it in the world.” I praise the freedom enjoyed by the inhabitants, and he answers: “Freedom is a precious gift, but very few peoples are worthy to enjoy it.” I note the chastity of morals prevailing in the United States, and he replies: “I suppose that a stranger, struck by the immorality apparent in all other nations, must be astonished at this sight.” Finally I leave him to his self-contemplation, but he returns to the charge and will not stop till he has made me repeat everything I have said. One cannot imagine a more obnoxious or boastful form of patriotism. Even admirers are bored.²

Patriotism in this form is not only annoying but also dangerous as it continues to endorse familiar visions that might be socially and politically flawed or even pernicious. The stranger persona is, most of all, a gateway to alternative representations that become visible once we renounce enamored perpetuations of what we already have. The stranger persona, as discussed in this book, is also the result of a tension between political subjectivities, the native and the foreigner. The persistent disagreement over visions of America between American intellectuals and the protagonists of this book is striking. Yet it is hardly surprising, as it reflects deep-seated differences in worldviews and commitments. These four intellectuals all arrived in America after experiencing traumatic events in their native country. Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo and was later interned as an enemy alien at Gurs, France. She could have shared the fate of historian Marc Bloch—among so many other Jewish intellectuals in Europe—who died in an extermination camp. Solzhenitsyn was in the Soviet Gulag and could have been interned again or executed if his growing international fame had not determined Soviet authorities to resort to deportation. Marcuse and Said did not experience directly such trauma, but they watched from up-close a politics of destruction affecting their people. All four came to the United States politically disenchanted. As the saying goes, they were not prophets in their own land. How then did they become prophets in America?

Disenchantment increases awareness of the wrongs of the world, both actual and possible. It breeds skepticism and pessimism and stimulates hypercritical evaluation. Such a mindset conflicted with the postwar optimism and enthusiasm of many Americans. For a lot of European intellectuals, the tragedy of World War II was to have called into question the very meaning of life and the fundamental goodness of human beings. If after Auschwitz poetry did not make sense any more, as Adorno put it, life itself, and with it politics, seemed to have come to an apocalyptic end.3 By contrast, American intellectuals coming out of the war, and even more so those coming of age in the postwar era, had a keen sense of a new beginning. European pessimism clashed with American optimism as in each other’s eyes one side looked grim and morose and the other naïve and gullible. In the case of the Frankfurt Institute leaders Adorno and Horkheimer, or writers like Mann and Brecht, this clash was never fully resolved and led to their decision to return to Europe. Arendt and Marcuse, on the other hand, were able to engage with American intellectuals in a way that allowed some cross-pollination rather than a constant locking of horns. Both displayed a certain amount of faith in American politics while also damping the national enthusiasm at times with their lucid analyses. For Solzhenitsyn and Said, adopting a critical stance toward American politics was part of maintaining a distinctively nationalized stranger persona, one as a Russian and the other as a Palestinian. Yet insofar as they continued to press their political goals, both were more optimistic than many Americans who feared that the Soviet Union was unstoppable or that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a case of irresolvable civilizational strife. The exchanges between these four foreigners and American intellectuals produced a political discourse that is itself a major gain, productive beyond immediate polling results and beyond an impact measurable in policy or regime change.

If these foreign intellectuals—white, Western educated, sophisticated, and highly articulate in English—encountered hostility when they expressed critical opinions of America, what does this say about Americans’ willingness to grant the nonnative the right to participate in public discourse, and thus, the right to political membership? The objections against these foreign intellectuals’ political ideas and their right to formulate them are indicative of a broader xenophobic politics and thus at least as troubling as the more blatant, institutionalized rejection of the foreigner in the person of an illegal alien, guest worker, or asylum seeker. To me, this illustrates the insidiousness of the national bond even in a country defined by civic patriotism rather than ethnic bonds, a country whose citizens commonly identify with a symbolic immigrant heritage. The challenge is to articulate a way in which this bond can maintain its strength while also allowing more receptiveness to the perspective of those who fall outside of it and thus creating a more complex and nuanced perspective on civic affairs. One possible way, which I sketch briefly by way of concluding, is through recognition of a mutual commitment to a shared world as part of a political friendship unconstrained by an ethics of nationality.

In her reflections on the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education for America’s continuing struggle with racial inequality, Danielle Allen sees a possible solution in an increase in political friendship. She defines political friendship as a deliberate cultivation of, and engagement with, the ideas of people we do not know and do not resemble by way of measuring our own perspective against an unfamiliar one. As Allen stresses, “the final test of whether we have managed to cultivate political friendship in our own communities is . . . whether a stranger to our neighborhood, including strangers from beyond the nation’s borders, could land here and flourish in conjunction with us.” This would not simply require that “strangers from beyond the nation’s border” receive more tolerance in American society but rather that they would feel they have a political membership in America and thus the right to reimagine their new country in a way that would reflect their own ideals, no matter how different from those held by their native-born fellow citizens. Allen urges us, as democratic citizens, “to develop [our] capacities for political imagination, particularly with reference to the strangers in [our] lives.”4

This book has shown how difficult it is to engage in such an effort when the strangers are foreigners, people who were born and raised in different traditions. To imagine an alternative America, as envisioned in turn by Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said, required a willingness to listen to them more carefully and to admit that their visions might be morally and politically justified, rather than assume them to be misguided or irrelevant to American life. Deeming the foreigner wrong by default is not only a mark of intolerance beyond social policies and rhetorical conceits; it is also a way of limiting political membership to those with whom we already share a bond. Seyla Benhabib has argued convincingly that allowing immigrants political membership in their new country is a fundamental right.⁵ As she points out, “the human right to membership is an aspect of the principle of right, i.e., of the recognition of the individual as a being who is entitled to moral respect, a being whose communicative freedom we must recognize.”⁶ I regard discursive acts of the kind put forth in these intellectuals’ criticism of America as their attempted expressions of political membership. Political membership allows us to express particular views toward the polity we have entered and to expect such views to be heard and recognized as potentially valid and legitimate.

The criticism (occasionally quite harsh) that these intellectuals received in America suggests that they lacked such political membership even though they had the freedom of speech to articulate their views publicly and no matter how authoritative they might have been otherwise, intellectually or morally. The cause is not their rhetorical incompetence, far from it. It is not the case that foreign intellectuals simply needed to come up with a different set of rhetorical strategies. Such a demand would trivialize a rhetorical phenomenon that grew out of a complex political and ontological predicament. The stranger persona emerges from a historically and culturally situated form of political subjectivity. One could argue that these cases are exceptional and that there are counterexamples of foreign-born politicians and public intellectuals who have risen to the highest levels of power. Hans Morgenthau and Arendt were friends educated in similar intellectual traditions. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish native with direct knowledge of the communist bloc, successfully promoted as a member of the Jimmy Carter administration a political agenda similar to Solzhenitsyn’s. At the same time, professional politicians like Morgenthau and Brzezinski spoke from within a discourse that was not uniquely theirs but created and shared by Americans. Morgenthau’s conception of political realism found its practical grounding in George Kennan’s Cold War containment doctrine. Brzezinski’s conception of a non-antagonistic politics toward Eastern Europe matched President Jimmy Carter’s vision (after having clashed earlier with the American official policy under President Dwight Eisenhower). Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said were never professional politicians or government officials. If included in and subordinated to a native political vision, perhaps their political visions could have become part of an official agenda and even been incorporated in specific policies. Leo Strauss, while not a direct commentator of civic affairs himself, directly influenced the political thinking behind official decisions, which were nevertheless squared off on their own terms. The four intellectuals studied here were not members of the political establishment, and none an eminence gris mentoring powerful officials.

Through style and ideas, Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said fell outside the bond of nationality shared by the audiences they addressed in America. At times, they may even have strengthened this exclusionary mechanism as Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech did, just by mobilizing them against a common front, the foreigner’s criticism of their country. The rhetorical fragility of the stranger persona is a consequence of its political and ontological framework. Irked by their style, Americans who rejected the views of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said rejected the voice of the stranger. I use the term “voice” in the same sense as Fred Evans, as both “conveyor of discourse” and material condition of existence, reflecting worldviews and subjectivities that interact in our forms of life. Evans describes society as a multivoiced body granting “equal audibility” to each voice in a creative interplay that values and maintains democratic diversity.7 The value of unfamiliar voices lies in their capacity to stir up the imagination, but they risk being silenced forcefully by the oracular voice of the native. An oracle is a voice that tries to dominate and exclude others in the name of homogeneity and as an attempt at asserting hegemony. The native, here, is understood not in any biologically essentialist way but as a political construct made possible by the idea of the nation. Jürgen Habermas has stressed the role played historically by national identity in transcending regional particularistic ties and creating broader solidarities.⁸ Yet nationality also limits solidarity, acting as an “ethical community,” according to David Miller, that separates one national group from others and from humanity at large.⁹ In Miller’s view, such an ethical connection takes precedence over the more general bond we might feel with other human beings. It represents a commitment to people we do not know yet with whom we assume to have a certain familiarity. It is such a commitment that can justify in times of war the sacrifice of an individual’s life for the good of not just family and close friends but also people one does not actually know. The “imagined community” that constitutes a nation, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, creates an assumption of closeness where such a thing does not actually exist. An ethics of nationality involves a distribution of trust based on assumed familiarity. I trust fellow nationals because I assume that I know them, and even more important, that their judgment and actions and mine are likely to be at least based on a shared set of beliefs and values.

“Does the ethics of nationality not entail moral indifference to outsiders?” asks Miller, and the answer is surely positive, judging by what responses to international crises have repeatedly shown.¹⁰ This book suggests that the ethics of nationality can shun outsiders at the level of discourse as much as at the level of policy even when those outsiders have become its newest members. American intellectuals repeatedly displayed a fundamental mistrust in the political ideas of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said, acting on behalf of an ethics of nationality troubled by, and alert to, the breach of familiarity. To be sure, there were ethnic, ideological, and philosophical bonds that these four intellectuals shared with American colleagues. These were strong connections but overall not as deep as those created by nationality.

Nationality can provide a bond that keeps out the foreigner on the assumption that foreignness will challenge the consensus or at least conventional wisdom of those sharing the national bond. The rejection of arguments proposed by Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said reinforced the mechanism of statecraft by which the foreigner is the measuring rod against which states maintain control over the attribution of citizenship. As Nevgat Sozuk has argued, “the invention of the nation-state and the national citizen, outlining new forms of eligibility, could not have been achieved without defining those forms of ineligibility against which the forms of eligibility were presumed.”11 Insofar as foreign is a “political epithet,” to use Rogers Brubaker’s formulation, “condensing around itself pure outsiderhood,”¹² the politics of a nation would seem incompatible with foreign ideas.

Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said faced an audience that, no matter how sophisticated intellectually, shared this strong national bond above other connections and commitments, which in turn presented these four foreign intellectuals with a daunting rhetorical task. Would they have faced it more effectively if they had avoided the stranger persona and tried instead to come across as naturalized Americans (or at least be less emphatic about their non-American identity, in Solzhenitsyn’s case?) As I argued in chapter 1, the only rhetorical stance available to these foreigners was that of a stranger, which they employed with wisdom and dignity. Occasionally, one might wish they had displayed more diplomacy or sensitivity. Would it have been beneficial to American political discourse if the stranger persona I have examined had had an overall more favorable reception? My answer is yes, but not merely because I would rank the political beliefs of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said superior to those of American-born intellectuals. The loss suffered by American political discourse in rejecting the arguments of these four is not reducible to a particular policy intervention or even broader reform—though it is interesting to speculate what would have happened, for example, if Arendt’s plea for the abrogation of anti-miscegenation laws would have been heard and put into practice then, in 1959 rather than 1967, when the last anti-miscegenation legislation in America was abrogated. Beyond possibly missing the opportunity for enlightened sociopolitical reform, the American polis failed to look at itself through the eyes of another.

The stranger persona is central for an “intersubjective praxis of argumentation which enjoins those involved to an idealizing enlargement of their interpretive perspectives.”13 An enlarged perspective that included the criticism offered by these four intellectuals could have led to less reliance on American exceptionalism and an increased willingness and ability to situate and evaluate American politics in a broader international context without assuming America’s superior status or its messianic mission. Each of these four intellectuals pleaded for such attitudes, directly or indirectly. An enlarged perspective would have also meant an increased skepticism toward the political trope of mythical America, a true nationalist strategy of disabling critical reflection on actual America and inhibiting reform. Finally, such an enlarged perspective would have made (as it did at times) disenchantment and estrangement part of political analysis, leading to fewer self-congratulatory assessments, and possibly to more daring visions. Creativity is the response to the interruption of habitual activity.¹⁴ Such interruption requires “modes of argumentation that make use of innovative linguistic strategies and devices,” as critical theorists recommend we use.¹⁵ Estrangement led to original and sophisticated conceptions, rendering them at the same time unrecognizable to many American audiences.

Recognition implies a difficult task: to acknowledge another’s identity in a way that shows an accurate understanding and without submitting it to a biased evaluation. Many New York intellectuals misunderstood Arendt’s identity—in its complex relations to German culture, Jewish and Zionist politics, and abstract philosophical thought—and submitted her to a biased judgment. Similar misunderstandings and biased evaluations shaped the reception of Marcuse seen insistently as too German for a new American revolution, Solzhenitsyn as too Russian to appreciate true democracy, and Said, too Arab not to be anti-Semitic and anti-Western. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, the task of recognition involves a “politics of identity” but also actively seeks to avoid hierarchies of values and beliefs underlying different identities. In Taylor’s view, every individual has a unique way of experiencing the world and should be allowed to hold those beliefs and convictions that reflect such a unique position. What we recognize, then, is another person’s moral and epistemic scheme, the “background against which [her] tastes and desires and aspirations make sense.”16 On the same grounds, we can reject another person’s views if we disapprove of the cultural, social, and political background against which these views make sense. To avoid such rejection, Nancy Fraser’s conception of recognition focuses on the social divisions and the economic inequities that make recognition necessary in the first place by placing agents into privileged and oppressed positions—and thus assigning them a particular status. Recognition, when granted, is no longer measured by the extent to which a unique way of being in the world has been validated. Rather, recognition is possible when “institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem.”¹⁷

If we follow Taylor, the recognition of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said would have required an accurate understanding and acceptance of their worldviews. This can be exceedingly difficult under particular circumstances. How to convince some Americans caught in the panic of the Cold War that not all Russians are born either communists or religious nationalists? To make recognition predicated on accurate understanding also begs the question: what does it take to understand accurately the views of people who think so differently from us that we are bound to misunderstand them? Taylor can help us out of this dilemma, as I show shortly, but let us consider first Fraser’s recommendation that recognition come from institutions and state practices. Where foreigners are concerned, institutions might be even less willing to recognize their perspective as valid, at least so long as they serve a nation-state founded on the a priori distinction between citizens and foreigners. Ironically, in the case of these four foreigners, the task of recognition did not benefit from the existence of an institutionalized setting that could guarantee equal opportunities for social esteem. Marcuse, for instance, ended up being seen by New Leftists as too much of a German, no matter how much their political ideals coincided and no matter how committed he was to American politics.

To avoid these pitfalls, we can think about recognition, along with Paul Ricoeur, as a relationship based on reciprocity: in the act of recognition, different actors recognize each other as mutually committed to one another and to their common world.18 Rather than try to correct the understanding of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said or plead for institutional mechanisms more favorable to their acceptance, we can think about the relationship between these four foreign-born intellectuals and their American-born colleagues as part of a mutual commitment to America. Thus defined, recognition is not something granted by the native (or the state represented in institutions) to the foreigner—the New York intellectuals granting recognition to Arendt or the New Left to Marcuse—or indeed vice versa. It is mutually established. The foreign intellectuals would need to recognize the native’ concern about their nation’s welfare, just as the natives would recognize the right of the immigrants to be critical as an expression of their commitment to the country in which they have chosen to live. Arendt’s dismissal of the NAACP’s views was, by this logic, unacceptable, no matter whether wrong or right. Recognition based on mutuality offers one more important gain: it allows the expression of political membership through a common commitment to the American polis.

The main hang-up evidenced by some American readers in response to the stranger personae used in the texts I have analyzed here was that they could not imagine that those ideas could be worked into their own perspective as Americans. Although it was a source of insight for these four authors, estrangement sometimes also erected a barrier between them and the audience. It was this barrier that made recognition difficult, and with it, the enlargement of discursive perspectives. The obstacle was not insurmountable though. When these four thinkers achieved recognition by American peers, the result was not just intellectually superior but also politically expedient, as illustrated by the New Left mobilized alongside (if not behind) Marcuse or the emergence of postcolonialism, its own kind of revolution in cultural politics, inspired by the work of Said. Recognition of this kind, conceived as a reciprocal relation, can forge political friendship in the sense envisioned by Aristotle: a friendship among equals, born out of necessity and based on accepting difference. We are not friends only with those who resemble us but also with those different from us.

The stranger persona is the embodiment of mutuality as a product of recognition. An expanded political imagination can use a stranger persona as rhetorical artifice if not always the product of one’s life circumstances. The stranger persona would facilitate a kind of intellectual activity promoting the “corporatism of the universal,” actively encouraging a comparative analysis that acknowledges the uniqueness of historical situations and national polities while also regarding them from a “context-transcending” perspective.19 Such an analysis can be described in Maeve Cooke’s terms as “social criticism that challenges the validity of prevailing social institutions and arrangements through reference to some alternative idea of the good society.”²⁰ Providing such an alternative idea is the political gain of a stranger persona.

To think of strangers as political friends and to accept their strange visions as our own requires us to rethink the “enemy-friend” distinction, which has a long tradition in political theory and is often viewed as a realistic take on political relations, one that involves, in the writings of Carl Schmitt, a permanent possibility of war, designed to defend and preserve a group’s form of existence. The Cold War renewed this opposition and strengthened it in association with a rhetorical Manichaeism that is well suited for the age of a war on terror. Although many scholars have challenged this way of thinking and the discourse it creates, this book calls for a conscious and deliberate reversal of this distinction. How would our world be if we changed it on the basis of the criticism of enemies as readily as we do it in response to the advice of friends? To achieve such a world, we would need to suspend the assumption that foreigners are wrong by default and instead try out their ideas. This is a tall order not only because political mechanisms like the nation-state and ethical bonds like nationality sabotage such effort but also because our very capacity for understanding is, in Taylor’s terms, an ethnocentric epistemic enterprise. Those responding to these foreign intellectuals’ arguments by assessing them in their own familiar framework were bound to misunderstand those aspects that were most important and intriguing precisely because they were least familiar, such as Arendt’s conception of segregation, Said’s take on Zionism, Marcuse’s notion of an aesthetic-political revolution, or Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of American media and the legal system. The critics used their own language—in the broadest sense of the term, as a set of shared premises and argument techniques—and dismissed the language of the foreigners, and with it, their ideas. Taylor argues that “the adequate language in which we can understand another society is not our language of understanding, or theirs, but rather what one could call a language of perspicuous contrast.”21 An acceptance of the stranger persona does not require us to accept particular arguments as valid but to frame our response in such a language of perspicuous contrast. To this end, we could also use a strategy of estrangement, in order to develop a perspective that is radically different from our own. We can then compare the benefits of a world seen from that perspective and the ones of the world as we know it, before we make our final decision about the world we want.

The linguistic foreignness of these intellectuals—the fact that they came to English from another language—is, of course, a key dimension of their stranger persona. If poetic language is a foreign language, as Aristotle put it, then the language associated with the stranger persona is a poetic language, not because they relied so much on a tropological discourse, but because their was a language that “deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects,” by bypassing or questioning shared meanings, and proposing new ones instead.²² Our political order, to which Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said contributed important ideas, is one in which tolerance needs to be supplemented with recognition, in order to not merely allow those who speak another language and have come from somewhere else the right to hospitability but also to give all of us a chance to embrace the changes foreigners can inspire.