1
The great object in our time is to raise the faculties
of men, not to complete their prostration.[1]
The ablest Greek philosophers agreed that the origin of philosophy is in wonder. Socrates, in the Theaetetus, praised wonder (thauma) as the source of philosophical reflection; Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, clearly identified it as the historical beginning of the theoretical life. “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.”[2] Aristotle maintained that the primordial object of wonder was the physical universe. His claim is supported by the history of pre-Socratic thought that initially focused human inquiry on the origin and order of the natural world. In the beginning philosophy and cosmology were one.
What struck the first philosophers was the beauty and harmony of nature, in particular the lawful motions of the heavenly bodies. For them, nature was a kosmos, a well-ordered whole in which cosmic justice, the temporal equilibrium of the elemental opposites, was scrupulously observed. This perpetual cosmic order served as a model against which the human quest for order and justice was eventually measured. Yet if cosmic justice was assured in the realm of nature, it was at all times a telos, an end to be aimed for, in human affairs. In their constantly changing relations with one another, human beings did not naturally enjoy the ordered harmony so visibly present in the evening sky. However intently citizens might aim at justice in the life of the city, they invariably fell short of the mark. The earthly polis never became a kosmos; its imperfect and partial order never secured the silent admiration of the philosophical few. When the city finally gained the close attention of the Greek philosophers, it was discord rather than harmony, disorder rather than justice that dominated their field of vision.
Western political philosophy has its origin in the crisis of the ancient city, in the disintegration of the civic whole rather than in its achievement of fullness and power. It was only after Athens, the greatest of the Greek cities, had suffered defeat in the war with Sparta, that Plato gave the polis a central place in philosophical thought. He made Athens, Socrates’ native city, the dramatic center of his dialogues, and he made the polis itself a fundamental theme of Socratic discourse.[3] In both cases, however, it was not wonder at the city’s ordered beauty, but distress and unease at its tragic decline that required philosophers to think about it. If Socrates redirected the attention of philosophy from the kosmos to the polis, he did so because stressful perplexity (aporia) had become as important as silent wonder in initiating philosophic activity.
The Socratic Platonic origin of political philosophy leaves its mark on the ensuing tradition. Although the pathos of decline is less striking in Aristotle’s Politics than in Plato’s Republic, still, Aristotle, in his portrait of the ancient city, is describing a pattern of political life that has already lost its historic vitality. His influential descriptions of the independent Greek polis commemorate an ideal that no longer exists rather than an observable pattern flourishing before his eyes. In St. Augustine’s The City of God, the sombre Platonic inheritance is even more pronounced. Augustine is moved to sustained political reflection by the Vandals’ sacking of Rome and by his deepening awareness that the days of the Empire are numbered. Like Plato, he responds to the ruin of the temporal city by evoking the image of an eternal republic. True citizenship is to be found neither in Athens nor in Rome but in the ideal republic or the city of God. Both Augustine and Plato refuse to abandon the language of citizenship and the metaphor of political community, but they transfer their application from decaying historical cities to an ahistorical or transhistorical commonwealth. They seem jointly to believe that only a just and eternal city is actually worthy of the name.
When we turn from the classical tradition to the modern, we find the importance of political crisis remaining constant. Angered by the repeated invasions that beset the Italian city-states and bitter at the Church’s disruptive role in political affairs, Machiavelli appeals for a united Italy cleansed of both clerical and foreign influence. Once again it is the fact of political decline that occasions intense theoretical reflection. But Machiavelli is a modern as well as a traditional thinker. He looks neither to heaven nor to an ideal republic for political salvation, but to an as yet unrealized commonwealth. It is love for an actual country, a state, yearned for but not yet realized, rather than love of God or love of truth, that shall restore meaning to devalued citizenship.[4] The emergence of the secular nation-state, which Machiavelli dreamed of but never directly experienced, marks the transition between medieval and modern political history. As Athens had exemplified the polis of classical antiquity, and Rome had provided the historic model for world-empire, so in modern Europe, France represented the nation-state par excellence. Yet in the French nation of the eighteenth century, modern political forms were combined with a legal and social order rooted in medieval feudalism. The French revolution was precipitated not by a crisis of the nation-state but by the eroded legitimacy of the aristocratic social order to which it was historically joined. As de Tocqueville’s investigations convincingly demonstrated, the centralized political institutions developed by the French monarchy survived the collapse of the Ancien Regime.[5] In fact, the Napoleonic phase of the revolution carried to its limit the process of political centralization deliberately undertaken by the Bourbon kings. According to de Tocqueville, the central question raised by the tumultuous French experience was whether the modern nation-state could combine a democratic social revolution with the institutions, practices and customs of political liberty. Like Tocqueville, nearly all of the great nineteenth century political theorists found their point of departure in the history of the French revolution. The political philosophies of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx are as closely tied to that cataclysmic event as Plato’s and Augustine’s were to the earlier crises of Athens and Rome. A deep and comprehensive knowledge of European history provides the best guide to western political philosophy, because each great theoretical initiative was a sustained attempt to understand the meaning and importance of some central political event. Through all of the nineteenth and for the early twentieth century, the critical event around which political reflection turned was the unfinished revolution in France.
Is there a parallel benchmark for political reflection in our time? Is there a central event of the twentieth century that commands the attention and study of our ablest political thinkers? Hannah Arendt, one of the most original political philosophers of the postwar era, claimed that there was. She identified this event with the totalitarian terror that dominated eastern and central Europe during the nineteen-thirties and forties. In a century scarred by political horror she chose to take her bearings from, perhaps, the darkest horror in recorded time, the totalitarian reality as it reached its developed form in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.[6] She believed that this political reference point was fundamentally different from its historical antecedents. Totalitarianism represented more than a crisis in existing political order. It constituted an ultimate or limit situation, without historical precedent or analogue, a transformative event that posed an unparalleled threat to human dignity. Because the reality of this overwhelming event was so extreme, she suspected that the human mind would recoil from the task of confronting it. Against this understandable reaction of collective avoidance and denial, she insisted that we, her worldly peers, acknowledge the depth of what happened, that we try to comprehend the factual reality and meaning of totalitarianism, without lessening the burden of comprehension by appeals to precedent or resort to analogy. Behind this passionate insistence rooted in her intellectual courage and personal history, lay a general belief in the revelatory power of limit situations. According to Arendt, exceptional events, whether glorious or terrible, are more deeply revealing of human possibility than the ordinary patterns of behavior that serve as their background and contrast. She took the classic Aristotelean principle that telos reveals eidos, that the essence of a thing is fully disclosed in its perfected state, and gave it an extended and unusual application. For her, historical events serve a complex educational function. As the Athenian polis in its Periclean splendor disclosed the potential greatness of the political realm, so the death factories of totalitarian terror reveal the depth of indignity to which human beings may be reduced through systematic planning and effort. A comprehensive political philosophy must take full account of both types of event. We need both the monitory and exemplary lessons of history to understand the full dependence of secure human dignity on the soundness and legitimacy of the political realm.
Arendt emerged from her postwar study of totalitarianism with three enduring convictions: that totalitarianism was a radically new phenomenon, entirely without precedent in world history; that our inherited political and moral categories were inadequate to describe or appraise it; and that it revealed, by their complete abolition, the fundamental conditions on which the existence of human dignity depends.[7] The political phenomenon of tyranny or despotism was deeply familiar to both ancient and modern theorists. They knew from experience the reality of arbitrary rule and the exclusive usurpation of political power by the tyrant. They were familiar with coercion in public affairs and the restriction of freedom to the circumscribed space of the private household. Almost without exception, they dreaded despotism and assigned it a place of dishonor in their elaborate political taxonomies.[8] But neither ancient nor modern political communities had any experience of the totalitarian attempt at total domination over the human person. The total domination attempted by the Nazis and Stalinist Russia is radically different from arbitrary despotic rule. In its most revealing institutional form, the extermination camp, it deliberately creates conditions under which people no longer wish to live. Totalitarianism recognizes no boundary between public and private freedom, and deprives its victims of liberty in every humanly recognizable form. While conditions in the camps could not destroy the native capacities of men and women, they did effectively destroy the possibility of their meaningful use. The assault on the requirements of freedom was twofold. Totalitarian ideology, with its pretense to limitless temporal knowledge, actively destroys the truth of the past and the unpredictability of the future, and seeks to eliminate from historical memory the lives of those it has condemned to death. Totalitarian terror, the animating principle of the death camps, destroys the public and private spaces human beings need for their free movement and interaction.[9] It drives its victims together like herds of animals until they become indistinguishable from one another in their mute suffering. The extermination camp effectively isolates its victims from every aspect of reality except pain, death and unrelieved humiliation. It confines them to life within a humanly constructed world whose only intelligible purpose is the mass production of corpses.[10]
Both the Hebraic Torah and the Christian Decalogue clearly command “thou shalt not kill.” But the totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia introduced modes of systemic evil of which our moral traditions had taken no account. Here, human thought is confronted with a radical evil so improbable that the criminals who commit it are more credible in their denials of wrongdoing than are their victims in their pleas for redress.[11] Totalitarian evil is radical in two respects: the motives of those who plan and execute it are utterly disproportionate to the reality of what they actually do. Hard headed common sense, which demands a reasonable balance between ends and means in its assessment of action, is tempted to deny the full reality of the death camps because the canons of utility it implicitly assumes are not observed there. Human beings commit crimes against one another, far worse than murder, but there are no discoverable motives or practical aims to render their deeds intelligible. There is the undeniable fact of terror, but no plausible explanation adequate to its occurrence and magnitude.
What is the fate worse than murder to which the victims of totalitarianism were subjected? It is the systematic deprivation of their juridical, moral and existential identity. The process of total domination progressively strips its victims of every dimension of their personal dignity until they are left naked, like animals, with nothing more than their sheer numerical individuality to distinguish them from one another.[12] The initial assault was on the legal or juridical standing of the human person. Insofar as human beings are citizens, members of an established political body, they enjoy certain legal rights and protections. Through the device of denationalization, however, human beings may be stripped of their citizenship and placed beyond the pale of enforceable law. By placing the concentration camps outside the normal penal system that connects punishment directly to crime, the totalitarian rulers expose their victims to an arbitrary and relentless violence against which they have no recourse or appeal. Since the residents of the camps have committed no statutory offense, there is no longer a discernible connection between imprisonment and crime, between punishment and legally established guilt. Yet, deprived of citizenship and the enforceable legal rights it guarantees, to whom can they appeal to secure the natural rights that ostensibly belong to them as human? The first lesson driven home to Europe’s stateless persons during the nineteen-thirties and forties was that the deprivation of citizenship effectively deprived them of enforceable rights of every kind. To be stateless essentially meant to be rightless; to lose one’s political and legal identity meant complete vulnerability to arbitrary violence and torture.[13]
The loss of political identity and security immediately placed the moral dignity of the human being in jeopardy. Part of that dignity clearly resides in the freedom of the individual conscience to choose between good and evil. In the limit case, it means the capacity voluntarily to sacrifice one’s life rather than to participate in wrongdoing. The efficacy of conscience implicitly presupposes that the moral agent has a meaningful choice between right and wrong, between noble and base, between just and unjust, however difficult it may be in particular cases to distinguish between them. This basic moral presupposition was undermined by the actual conditions in the extermination camps. When those in authority require a mother to choose between the death of her son or her daughter, when inmates are ordered to play the role of executioner with their fellow prisoners, then the decisions of conscience have become entirely equivocal. The moral agent is reduced to despair before such grotesque alternatives.
There remains, one might think, the possibility of heroic resistance against systematic terror. As long as one lived outside the iron grip of the camps, meaningful resistance remained conceivable.[14] But within the institutional structure of the camps themselves, this otherwise plausible assumption lost its validity. From Hannah Arendt’s perspective, human resistance continues to be meaningful, even when it cannot succeed in preventing injustice, as long as there are witnesses who can testify to its occurrence.[15] But the deliberate purpose of the death factories was to render death anonymous, to deprive its victims of all hope for remembrance and to condemn the only living witnesses of their suffering to an identical fate. When it seems no longer to make a difference whether one lives or dies, human beings often go to their doom like sheep. After all forms of practical reflection, choice, and action have been rendered futile, little remains of the vaunted moral dignity of the person.[16]
The foundation of our existential dignity is the fact of human plurality. By plurality, Arendt means that each human being is unique, unexchangeable with any other, a singular person, a particular subject with a life story peculiarly his own. “Man’s dignity demands that he is seen, every single one in his particularity, reflecting as such, but without any comparison and independent of time, mankind in general.”[17] As animals, human beings are individual members of a finite biological species, but as distinctively human they are existential subjects capable of independent thought and spontaneous and unpredictable action. The confirmation of a person’s unique identity occurs in his appearance before other persons, in the discourse they exchange and in the deeds they perform together. Since the solitary subject cannot actualize his singular identity alone, he requires the enabling presence of peers. He requires a common space of appearance where he can reveal himself to his equals and receive their recognition, acknowledgment and response. But Arendt concluded that the ultimate purpose of totalitarian rule was to destroy the uniqueness of the individual personality, to eliminate the conditions of human spontaneity and to reduce all human conduct to the level of conditioned behavior. “Total domination strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual.”[18] By depriving the individual person of political and legal rights, by creating extreme conditions that subvert the autonomy of conscience, by confining human existence to the company of the dead and the dying, and by robbing human beings of every meaningful opportunity to exercise their freedom and uniqueness, it is possible to diminish the reality of the person until the most striking difference still apparent among the victims of terror was the fact of their distinct bodily forms. By the time they were finally murdered, the victims of the death camps had often come to resemble the naked and impotent animals their executioners had asserted they were.[19]
Totalitarian rule carries to its limit a systematic process of human deprivation. By depriving human beings of the goods and rights essential to their humanity, it indirectly reveals what the full actualization of human dignity requires. Radical evil is deeply instructive because it forces us to acknowledge realities that we normally take for granted. It is a profound reminder of how much human beings lose when they are denied a private place of their own in the world and a public realm where their political, moral and existential identity is confirmed. Totalitarianism deprived its victims of two essential conditions human beings need in order to be at home on the earth. First, it took away their private homes, their personal places of refuge and shelter; then, it withdrew their citizenship, their legal standing, their right to governmental protection and due process, their exercise of civic and political liberty. The fundamental importance of having a secure legal and political identity was never more evident than at the very moment it was deliberately destroyed. “We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights, to live under a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions, and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights.”[20]
What is the responsibility of a reflective human being faced with an historical reality of this magnitude? Hannah Arendt believed that human thought and speech would lose their integrity if they refused to come to terms with what had happened. She could not return to the familiar life of the mind until she understood how totalitarianism in Europe had been possible. The only way survivors of the holocaust could bear these limitless sorrows was to put them into an intelligible story that disclosed their deeper meaning and significance.[21] Such was the existential intention of The Origins of Totalitarianism. This extraordinary text, published six years after the war’s conclusion, was not intended as a work of historical scholarship. It is, rather, a deeply reflective personal account of the century of European decline that climaxed in the occurrence of totalitarianism. It is a story constructed with the aid of a single controlling image, that of radical dissolution and subsequent crystallization. This heuristic image provides the framework for the central question to which the book provides a partial answer. What were the hidden dynamics that dissolved the institutional and moral structures of European civilization, thereby releasing the fragmentary elements later to crystallize in Nazism and Stalinism? The Origins of Totalitarianism is a many-leveled story, drawing on history, literature, philosophy and political theory, but refusing to stay within the limits of any scholarly discipline. It is the work of a thoughtful and compassionate humanist, profoundly sensitive to an unprecedented assault on human dignity and driven to political reflection by events so grave that they shattered the moral horizon within which we normally think and act. “The worst had lost all of their fear and the best had lost hope of ultimate judgment and grace.”[22]
Hannah Arendt was born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1906. She spent her youth in Weimar Germany, a land scarred by the Great War and its aftermath of revolution and persistent economic and political instability. She was a brilliant student, blessed with the gift of an exceptional education, and marked from the very beginning of her life by the sense of being an outsider.[24] Over time she acquired familiarity with and command of the greatest texts of Western thought, but she remained fiercely independent of their authors. Her deepest intellectual roots lay in the German poetic and philosophical tradition, the tradition of Goethe, Heine, Lessing, Rilke, Kant and Nietzsche. During her extended university career, she studied with some of the most important German thinkers of this century, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. She received from them a rare sensitivity to the revelatory power of language and a philosophical style based on the description and conceptualization of the structures of appearance.[25] Her earliest theoretical interests, that were theological rather than political, are reflected in her doctoral dissertation completed under Jaspers on St. Augustine’s understanding of love.[26]
A secular Jew, sensitive since childhood to the cruelty of anti-Semitism, she emigrated from Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s ascent to political power. This disruptive emigration began an eighteen-year period of continuous statelessness; she knew from immediate experience the plight of the displaced person seeking refuge and protection in an alien land. After leaving Germany, she lived and worked in Paris until 1940. These were the depression years and Jewish refugees were often unwelcome in France. Native French unemployment had already become a sensitive domestic issue, and the large numbers of Jews fleeing to France from the East complicated an already difficult economic and political situation. During her years of exile in France, Hannah Arendt deliberately refrained from traditional philosophical activity. Apparently, the academic practice of philosophy seemed indecent to her while darkness descended steadily over Europe. When Paris capitulated to Hitler’s armies in the spring of 1940, she was sent with other Jewish refugees to a detention camp in southern France. In the interval of uncertainty between the collapse of the French army and the consolidation of the Vichy government, she left the detention camp and was able to reunite with her husband Heinrich Blücher. Together with Hannah Arendt’s mother, Martha, the Blüchers fled from Europe in 1941 to seek exile in the United States.[27]
During the remaining years of the war she worked in New York for various Jewish relief organizations. When the war ended, she attempted to understand how the civilized Europe into which she was born had been effectively destroyed. She came to believe that the collapse of European civilization had its origins in the nineteenth century, that the process of disintegration was accelerated by the slaughter of the World War I, and that the final dissolution occurred during the dark decades between the two wars. On her account, the moral, political, and social order of Europe had already crumbled before the death camps began their terrible work. Those who had survived that historic collapse now lived in a city in ruins. No inherited form of human security could still be relied upon uncritically. The structure of the political universe, the integrity of the moral order, the shared spiritual and cultural convictions that allow human beings to live together in peace, each of these human foundations had to be reconstructed anew.
There could be no return to the past, nor advance into the future, until the people of the West confronted the abyss that had opened in their midst. Hannah Arendt never abandoned these unsettling convictions, rooted in the experience of profound sorrow and loss. They explain the constant foundational character of her political thought. She deeply believed that western civilization had been uprooted in the twentieth century and that the institutional structures left standing by the cataclysm had been secretly damaged when the whole world had shaken to its depths.
Aristotle’s maxim that the beginning is more than half of the whole is profoundly true in the case of Hannah Arendt. For her, the life of the mind resumed in earnest after the war, but her thought remained focused on the dark times that had preceded it. Although she did her most important intellectual work in America, she was at heart a European permanently marked by her experience in Europe between the wars. When she wrote of Men in Dark Times it was to the darkness of twentieth century Europe that she chiefly referred.[28] It was in Europe that her intelligence and sensibility were formed and her memory stocked with lasting literary and historical allusions. She believed, with Augustine, that the seat of the mind is in memory, and though her most important thoughts and judgments were framed on the western shore of the Atlantic, they were essentially directed to European events. It is important for an American reader of her work to remember this fact, because many insights and convictions that seemed evident to her on the strength of personal experience are only accessible through argument or inference by those whom history has treated less harshly.
Arendt once wrote of Machiavelli that he “represented the culture that is born of humanism, becoming aware of political problems because they are at a crisis.”[29] There is ample evidence that she understood her eventual absorption with politics in similar terms. She was by nature and education a humanist, not a political philosopher. But personal experience and sustained historical reflection convinced her that the most urgent crisis of the modern world is political.[30] Since no one can flee from a crisis and retain self-respect, she taught herself to look at human affairs from a distinctively political perspective. In adopting this standpoint, she considered herself an outsider, for she was primarily a thinker and teacher rather than a political agent. Perhaps she benefitted from the intellectual distance the outsider enjoys, for she discovered a dignity and importance in political life that nearly all her contemporaries failed to discern.
Although she never absolutized the political perspective, never forgot that it is but one legitimate standpoint among many, she chose to think and write from it exclusively until almost the end of her life.[31] This fact helps to account for both the originality and the consistency of her thought. As a critical humanist, she focused her attention on human existence and the human condition, but as a political humanist she approached her subject from an unfamiliar direction. Hers was not the theological perspective that viewed the human being as a child of God; nor the naturalistic perspective that conceived of humans as a higher species of biological animal; nor the traditional philosophic perspective that emphasized their intellectual and cognitive capacities. She never denied the partial validity of these alternative standpoints, but she seemed to believe that they could not provide the transforming insight and guidance that our century most required. The City, the classical symbol of political existence, was in ruins; it was the dignity of the human being as citizen of the city that must first be retrieved and reclaimed.
With her emphasis on human beings as citizens, Hannah Arendt took deliberate exception to both bourgeois and romantic individualism, the dominant nineteenth-century images of the human person. Considered historically, Romanticism was a revolt against bourgeois society, opposing the integrity of the heart and the interior life to the personal corruption engendered by economic and social ambition.[32] Because the romantic individualist saw the public realm under the aspect of competitive social struggle, he believed that public life inherently threatened the integrity of human existence. This controlling belief drove him to seek authenticity in the region of the heart apart from the corrupting presence and influence of others. Romanticism identified the authentic self with this inward realm of personality shielded from public light and attention and segregated from the turmoil of political action. To be truly human, a person must refrain from competition with his peers, either enjoying immediate communion with nature or absorbed in heroic interior struggle. The romantics saw correctly the threat bourgeois society posed to genuine intimacy, but they were unable to conceive of a credible politics founded on active and responsible citizenship. The Romantic conception of human existence opposed the spirit of compassion and wonder to the spirit of acquisitiveness. It rejected the naturalistic reduction of humans to selfish calculating animals driven by material desires and the urge for conspicuous display. Its portrait of the authentic life emphasized generosity against selfishness, the riches of hidden feeling versus the emblems of visible wealth, and deliberately chosen solitude against the quest for social recognition. Despite its relentless critique of bourgeois existence, romanticism shared the bourgeois prejudice that political life is an acquisitive struggle for scarce resources and that genuine human fulfillment is properly a private affair.
Some form of Marxism or socialism has been the expected rejoinder to these opposing strains of nineteenth century individualism. Marxism celebrates socialized humanity and the solidarity of the human species against the acquisitive bourgeois and the ineffectual romantic. It accepts the bourgeois emphasis on productive labor, while envisaging a socialized economy based on cooperation rather than competition. It endorses the romantic commitment to human compassion, but insists that it be institutionalized in a utopian economic and political order to be practically effective. Ostensibly, Marxism is committed to the dignity of political life. It conceives of history as a group or class struggle that will eventually culminate in the elimination of classes and the attainment of universal solidarity. But the Marxists are closer to the bourgeois vision of public life than they often acknowledge. Both Marxists and classical liberals agree that the public realm is dominated by the struggle for economic power; they disagree in their account of the primary agents in the struggle and in their views of its eventual resolution. Marxists oppose social classes to private individuals, the anarchy of the market to the benign effects of the invisible hand, and the radical end of history to unlimited progress through unregulated economic competition. When the focus of attention is restricted to economic contrasts, these familiar differences appear fundamental. But from the perspective of a genuinely autonomous politics not subordinated to economic imperatives, the similarity between these fierce modern rivals is far more striking. They share a common vision of the human being as an economic animal, preoccupied with life and the goods that sustain it, and concerned with public affairs only as they serve the economic interests of the individual, the class, or the species. Even under the most desirable conditions, they believe that politics exists to serve economic ends; that the city and the citizen have no independent dignity or purpose of their own. To use the idiom of Hannah Arendt, in both classical liberalism and Marxism, the human laborer, the animal laborans, has assumed complete priority over the human citizen, the zoon politikon.[33]
According to Hannah Arendt, none of the dominant modern theories of human existence provide an adequate conception of politics and citizenship. Their systemic failure forces the serious theorist to revisit the pre-modern traditions in which praxis and lexis, distinctively political capacities, are recognized as the specifically human ergon or function.[34] Hannah Arendt’s absorption with Greek and Roman political thinking was not based on nostalgia for the remote past.[35] She turned to the Greeks because they had founded the original cities in which the recognition of human dignity and liberty was inseparable from one’s actual political standing. We can learn therefore from ancient practice what modern theory can no longer teach us, namely, what it once meant to call human beings political animals. Arendt’s selective appropriation of ancient political culture should be seen for what it was, the conscious effort by a political humanist to recover the original meaning of political language whose revelatory power had been lost in the modern age.
For the ancient Greeks, what did it mean to say that politics is the specifically human activity? It presupposed an ontological placement of humanity between the gods and the brutes. When human beings engage in productive labor, in the activities required for the maintenance of life, they are comparable to animals in their biological needs and concerns; when they withdraw from the exigencies of public affairs in order to contemplate the truth in solitude, they become similar to gods. It is only when they participate with their fellow citizens in political life, in the reciprocal exchange of words and deeds that they exist and act purely as men. Political existence is the properly human form of life to which neither the beasts nor the gods have access.[36] To say that man is a political animal is to claim that only in the life of the polis, in the company of his civic peers, in the revelation of his personal uniqueness and excellence before others, does a man attain to properly human stature. Our biological or species identity is given to us at birth, but only in the active life of the polis, the bios politikos, do we become distinctively human. Three interdependent strands of thought are united in this classical matrix which modern anthropology seems unable to combine: an emphasis on the unique individual person, the singular citizen, the irreplaceable who; the dependence of a significant and actualized personal identity on the constitutive presence of a plurality of peers; the acknowledgement of a properly public activity, action or speech, in which each person may aspire to excellence through cooperative interaction with political equals. In authentic political experience, the dignity of the individual person is sensibly manifest, publicly recognized and legally protected. With the loss of an independent political realm, human beings lose the clearest visible evidence and the most secure collective guarantee of their singular worth and potential.
This brief schematic contrast of Greek political culture with modern anthropology is not intended as a solution to the contemporary political crisis. Its purpose is rather to show how obscure and opaque traditional political language has become for our contemporaries.[37] Our operative notions of politics have lost contact with their linguistic and experiential roots to such a degree that the essential connection between human dignity and meaningful political participation is no longer evident.[38] Thus, we are inevitably sceptical or perplexed when told that the primary threat to human existence in our time is political.
The concept of a political crisis raises problems of a different kind. The danger here is one of overreliance on an important evaluative category. A useful word intended to mark a significant division in historical time or the turning point in a threatening illness, a time in which institutional or individual life is at stake, is now regularly used whenever human beings find themselves in a jam, no matter how temporary. Overuse of the word ‘crisis’ has cost the term its intended gravity. This semantic change is unfortunate because we still need a common expression to designate those periods in history when inherited forms of order have lost their authority, when “the past has ceased to cast its light on the future and the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”[39] Tocqueville’s image of historical discontinuity is helpful because it recognizes how sharply time is divided when a source of light on which human beings have depended suddenly goes out. It seems that we only discover our reliance on the light shed by the past when it no longer shines. Since it is not light that we perceive but the world light makes visible, we become most aware of light’s presence by its unexpected withdrawal.
Hannah Arendt uses a discursive rather than a visual metaphor to express this condition of deep, unanticipated perplexity. In a crisis we lose confidence in the answers on which we ordinarily rely without ever having realized they were originally answers to questions.[40] The occurrence of crisis should drive thought back to the questions themselves and to the experiences that first elicited them. The initial perception of loss may be converted to gain, for crises have the power to obliterate complacency and bias. By depriving us of unexamined certainties, they can pry us open to whatever fresh experience has disclosed of the matter at hand. For Hannah Arendt, the political crisis of the twentieth century calls us to rethink, without the prejudices or assumptions of tradition, the basic problems of human living together.[41]
More than the fact of political crisis, Arendt’s greatest fear was our unreadiness to face it with courage and honesty. As though the horrors of global war, systematic terror, and cultural and institutional collapse were not sufficient cause for sorrow, they had occurred in a culture unwilling or unable to think about them. After the war, what human beings required was the healing reconciliation with existence that only authentic understanding can bring.[42] What they received, instead, were counterfeit substitutes for thought: ideologies, claiming to unravel the tangle of history, although they had lost touch with real events and the nature of historical time, common sense explanations for what clearly outraged common sense, and appeals to tradition when the authority of tradition itself had been cast into question. Perhaps there was no deeper sign of our theoretical and practical burden than our shared incapacity to bear it like adults.
Arendt often drew a sharp distinction between theoretical and political crises. In the seventeenth century, the new science of nature created profound difficulties for philosophy because it challenged the traditional concepts of knowledge and truth. Yet in its immediate impact modern physics directly affected only those who had made the practice of inquiry the effective center of their lives. A political crisis, by contrast, affects us all, because it results from a breakdown in our established forms of living and acting together. Although the continuing crisis of our time has an important connection with the advent of modern science, it is primarily political, rather than scientific, in character. What disintegrated after World War I was not our traditional cosmology, but the cultural, political and social fabric of Europe.[43] Given Europe’s central place in the history of the West, this fact by itself was sufficiently grave.
But Arendt believed that something still more fundamental was at stake. Even those countries spared the totalitarian experience were threatened by the moral and intellectual decay that had preceded it. Intellectually and culturally, though not institutionally, America and England were in a similar situation to that of eastern and central Europe. If this controversial claim is true, it is because the crisis to which Arendt referred existed at many different levels. At the most immediate level, the political and social orders deriving from the French revolution had lost their incorporative power. Politically speaking, this meant a decline in the legitimacy of the nation-state; socially, it meant the transformation of an industrial class system into mass-society.[44] According to Arendt, it was the conjunction of these two related events that made totalitarian mass movements possible. A second level of disorder, its moral and spiritual dimension, corresponds to the modern rejection of what Arendt calls the Roman Trinity: religion, tradition and authority.[45] These interdependent foundations of a stable political realm go back to the origins of the Roman republic. As long as they were culturally and institutionally secure, western political and moral life was assured of essential continuity. However, Hannah Arendt believed that all western countries, no matter how stable their political institutions may appear, have lost the security that the Roman Trinity had historically provided. In this respect, both shores of the Atlantic now share a common fate and a common state of danger.
Increasing economic instability revealed the fragility of the class structure supporting the modern nation-state. The quest for new reliable foundations disclosed the inadequacy of our inherited political categories and principles. The combination of these two events points to a third and distinct source of political crisis. We are unprepared theoretically to address and resolve the fundamental questions of politics. When we turn for help to “our tradition of political thought,” we find it lacking in the foundational resources we need.[46] Neither the conservative desire to restore our political tradition, nor the modern eagerness to abandon it, strikes Arendt as the correct response to our plight. We must learn instead, to think our way forward against the tradition, to question its categories, assumptions and paradigms, if we are to recover a genuine sense of political experience and language and a critical appreciation of the merits and limitations of political life.
There is an historical progression linking these different sources of political crisis. The theoretical failure can be traced back to the origin of political philosophy in the Socratic Platonic dialogues. The weakening of the Roman Trinity began at the onset of modernity with the historic convergence of the Protestant Reformation and the Copernican revolution. The decisive events that made Europe politically and socially vulnerable to totalitarianism were preceded by a century of institutional decline. There is no single causal chain linking these different levels of crisis to specific historical events. It is simply not true that the nation-state declined because the Roman Trinity lost its stabilizing power, or because philosophers have traditionally held the practice of politics in low esteem. Arendt did not believe there were strict causal chains in human history as there are in the natural order. Significant historical events become intelligible when we place them in the proper narrative context, but the memorable incidents in that story are not the causes of those events in any nomological sense.[47] The metaphor of critical sources of decline does not imply a sequential pattern of causal dependence; rather it points to distinct strata of intelligibility that must be understood in conjunction before we can comprehend where we are and have been politically speaking.
The Origins of Totalitarianism and Men in Dark Times contain Hannah Arendt’s most detailed account of our present political disorder. Taken together these books present a dramatic and powerful story of institutional decline: the weakening of the nation-state, the collapse of the nineteenth-century class system, and the destruction of the European international order. Her story is told with the help of three contrasting intellectual constructs. Each of these constructs represents a dominant political mentality, a representative way of thinking and acting characteristic of a particular historical period and culture.[48] These representative characters are modeled on Plato’s famous political typology from books eight and nine of the Republic.[49] Following Plato’s example, Arendt introduces them within a narrative of precipitous political decline. Following Hegel’s controversial practice in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Arendt identifies each of these representative characters with the governing mentality of a particular epoch in European history.
Hannah Arendt’s explanatory narrative begins with the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century. In its civic republican form, this was the spirit of the patriotic citizen, the independent individual drawn from the ranks of the people as a whole who accepted personal responsibility for the conduct of public affairs. The animating motive of the republican citizen was his strong love of country; he enjoyed genuine solidarity with the people of his nation and a broader solidarity with those contemporaries who shared his concern for the world.[50] In Arendt’s judgment, the French Revolution, originally inspired by civic republican ideals, ended in disaster because it failed to found its new political order on the principles of authentic citizenship. The clash of competing class interests shattered the solidarity of the French people and fractured the community of citizens into antagonistic social groups. The French nation-state emerged intact from the wreck of the revolution, though it was no longer based on the ideal of a united political community. The competitive struggle between the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the urban proletariat prevented the mutual cooperation among citizens that the republican ideal required.[51]
Divided by severe class conflict, the nineteenth-century nation-state faced a continual problem of political unity. It attempted to solve this problem by basing political and legal rights on the possession of a homogenous national identity that transcended differences in social class. The nation state was unified insofar as its citizens shared a common language, territory and ethnic history. This unity became apparent in moments of inter-national conflict, when the struggle between rival nations overrode their internal divisions. But the union sacré created by foreign threats to territory or security was always precarious. Powerful class divisions simultaneously separated the citizen-soldiers united in combat against a common national enemy. In periods of national emergency, one spoke and acted as a patriotic citizen, but at all other times as a member of one’s limited class or party.[52]
The political institutions of the nation-state reflected this pervasive polarity. In those European countries that enjoyed representative government, politics was organized around the party system. The different parties were not formed to represent the comprehensive national good but the class interests of their particular constituents. In their parliamentary activities and policies, they conducted themselves in an openly partisan manner; thus the deeply entwined class and party system prevented the formation of an active citizenry prepared to act responsibility for the people as a whole. It was an axiom of European class politics that neither individual citizens nor the party to which they belonged was responsible for the national interest. National responsibility was assigned exclusively to the executive organs of the state that were expected to transcend the partisanship of classes and parties and to represent the nation as a whole.[53] The state was the only symbol of collective unity in a political context where partial and limited interests were dominant. In the nineteenth century, the state’s greatest achievement, the equal extension of national law to all of its citizens, reflected this narrowly universal intent.
Hannah Arendt contended that the fate of the European nation-state and of the international comity of nations was directly connected with the history of the Jews. In the midst of a divided class society, the Jews represented a trans-national body of persons whose primary loyalties were European rather than national. The Jews did not constitute a distinct social class, nor did they have an organized political party to represent them. Their political power and influence depended entirely on the financial support they provided to the different national governments and from their ability to guarantee direct lines of communication across national boundaries. The Jews were the quintessential good Europeans, who symbolized a common European interest that neither national rivalry nor partisan struggle had completely destroyed. As long as national governments remained strong and independent of particular class interests, and as long as nationalist loyalties did not preclude an active sense of European identity, the political position of the Jews was relatively secure. However, both of these important conditions ceased to obtain during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In Arendt’s judgment, the primary factor accounting for their removal was the rise of European imperialism.[54]
Because Arendt’s analysis of the dynamics of imperialism is exceptionally complicated, we will limit ourselves here to a brief outline of her argument. During much of the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie had been indifferent to the financial projects of the various European state governments. They had been content to leave the Jews in the influential position of inter-European bankers. But a surplus of capital resources and a lack of attractive European investment opportunities increasingly tempted European capital into the remote continents of Asia and Africa. From a purely economic standpoint, the expansion of private business interests into foreign lands was attractive. It promised unparalleled rates of profit and new opportunities for the employment of European nationals without work; as Arendt ironically remarks, the enterprise of imperialism provided an ostensible refuge for superfluous men and superfluous money.[55] But bourgeois indifference to state governments and their financial activities abruptly halted with these major new commitments of capital abroad. Those who had invested heavily in foreign enterprises had a clear interest in protecting their financial investments. They therefore demanded that the nation-state provide financial and military security for their speculative holdings. They claimed that their own economic interests and the larger interests of the nation as a whole had become identical. On Arendt’s critical analysis, the capitalist bourgeoisie succeeded in convincing the state administration that the economic interests of a particular class now coincided with the national good. As the bourgeoisie became increasingly engaged in imperial politics, they preempted the traditional banking functions of the Jews. This realignment was critical because it meant that an inter-European source of state finance had been replaced by a narrowly class-bound and nationalist source. By this route, the competitive spirit of nineteenth century capitalism was directly injected into the European state system.[56]
If the public spirit of the independent citizen represents the political ideal of eighteenth century republicanism, then the political stance of the capitalist bourgeoisie represents the outlook of nineteenth century liberalism. In her compelling account of European political decline, Hannah Arendt regularly opposes these two contrasting character types: the republican citizen whose love of country and concern for the world transcend self-interest; and the bourgeois capitalist prepared to sacrifice both country and world in the pursuit of private advantage. The opposition between these two political mentalities is fundamental. The citizen steadfastly refuses to allow private interest to interfere with public duty, the bourgeois capitalist demands that public institutions serve private interests and needs. Hannah Arendt portrays the emergence of European imperialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as an unqualified victory for the spirit of bourgeois capitalism.
Arendt’s sustained critique of economic liberalism is partly based on its alliance with imperialism and on her conviction that imperialism severely damaged the foundations of the nation-state. The political legitimacy of the nation had rested on two basic principles: the right of a people with a common culture and language to their own political institutions, the equal application of law within a national state to all its citizens. The imperialist adventure required the nation-state to violate both of its legitimating principles, for it denied political autonomy and the impartiality of law to the territories it conquered and subjugated. The spirit of European nationalism as it penetrated the continents of Africa and Asia was quickly transformed into racism. Only the appeal to European racial superiority could explain why principles that were valid for Europeans were invalid for the people they dominated. From the beginning of the imperialist project, the colonial practices of the European states were inconsistent with their own sources of political legitimacy.[57]
New methods of administration had to be devised for governing colonized peoples since they were not to be governed like the citizens of the home country. As the indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa did not want the Europeans on their land, their resistance had to be suppressed by military force. The dominant role of the army in the colonial territories helps to explain the emergence of an imperial bureaucracy as an explicit substitute for national government. According to Arendt, the modern reliance on bureaucracy as a method of political administration has its origin in military practice. In place of a political relationship between equal citizens, who are expected to observe the rule of law in their common transactions and to give each another a respectful account of their conduct, it substitutes rule by decree and secret administration. The colonial governors are no longer accountable to the colonized people they govern, nor are they constrained in their actions by a stable framework of law. A political chasm opens up between the unaccountable few who are licensed to command and the subjugated many who are required by force to obey their dictates and decrees. During the imperial era, a constant tension existed between the national governments in Europe and the bureaucratic administrators appointed to rule in the conquered territories. The former were accustomed to the constraints of constitutional government and the rule of law, the latter to the secretive habits of despotism and tyranny. There was, however, this important asymmetry between the two cases. The extension to the colonies of constitutional law and conduct would have meant the effective end of imperialism, while applying the methods of colonial bureaucracy to the home country would have abolished its political liberty.
Imperialism inserted the capitalist economic principles of relentless expansion and competition into an international political system already weakened by national rivalries and partisan conflict. The imperial ideal of unlimited empire violated the important territorial boundaries of the nation and it threatened the stability of national law. Imperial governance, as we have remarked, was inconsistent with the nationalist principle of a limited homogenous population sharing legal and political equality. The competitive spirit of capitalism was equally damaging to the international relations among European states. They now became engaged in an unlimited struggle for wealth and territory outside of Europe. During the nineteenth century this imperial rivalry did not destroy their willingness to compromise national differences, however intense. The inter-European spirit, although clearly weakened by imperial competition had not yet been extinguished. The terrible slaughter of the First World War shattered the remaining bonds of European unity. In fact, the Great War seemed to set in motion a chain reaction of catastrophes from which Europe has not fully recovered.[58] At the war’s end, the victors largely redrew the political map of Europe to satisfy the principle of national independence, but the immediate instability of the ensuing peace pointed to the inherent limits in the nationalist principle. In the early nineteen twenties, uncontrolled inflation devastated a whole class of small property owners in Germany; in the thirties, the disaster of global depression struck and the European states appeared unable to control the resulting economic and social disarray. During both decades, revolutionary unrest and civil war caused the constant migration of unwelcome refugees across national boundaries. The cumulative result of these disruptive events was politically and spiritually devastating. “Homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.”[59]
During the nineteenth century the stability of the nation-state had coincided with that of the European class system. Social classes were still able to unite private individuals on the basis of their common economic interests. This bond of mutual interest and activity could survive because the individual members of the class still shared a limited concern for the common world.[60] But partisan and competitive national politics organized around narrow class interests was singularly unsuited to the requirements of Europe after the war. During the nineteen twenties and thirties, the European class system broke down under the weight of growing masses of people who had become declassed and uprooted by economic and political events outside their control. As the traditional classes and parties declined and as the state proved increasingly ineffective in dealing with the mounting problems, hatred and cynicism began to play a central role in public affairs. In Europe during the depression, there emerged a common anxiety that a major catastrophe was coming, but the existing political powers seemed unable to prevent it. The mounting unease was heightened by a failure of political will in both economic and foreign policy. The shared perception of governmental impotence heightened contempt for representative institutions; the party system, parliamentary democracy, the national state itself lost the trust and support of the people. The severe decline in public authority coincided with the rise of mass movements that openly claimed to stand above the party, the state and the law. The mass appeal of extra-legal solutions was based on the widespread conviction that they could master the political and economic crises, as Europe’s democratic institutions could not. This proved, of course, to be a counsel of despair for it permitted an unprecedented criminality to invade the political realm almost without popular challenge. The earliest victims of political criminality were the European Jews who had symbolized the authority of the state and the spirit of international cooperation that were now in full retreat. It was this functional and symbolic connection between the Jews and the declining European state system that partly explains why they became the chosen political targets of the new mass movements. In attacking the Jews, popular demagogues were activating a more complex and deep-rooted pattern of hatred and contempt. According to Arendt, it was neither eternal Anti-Semitism nor mere historical contingency that explains why European Jewry and the structure of the European nation-state rose and fell together.[61]
Under the intensifying pressure of war, inflation, mass unemployment and forced emigration, the social and political stratification of the nation-state collapsed. This meant the end of a social and economic structure based on stable and clearly defined classes.[62] Since the effectiveness of the traditional party system depended on class stability, the rapid erosion of that stability left the political realm in chaos. The process of social atomization, which first began when belonging to a class replaced independent republican citizenship in the nation, dramatically intensified. From Arendt’s civic republican perspective, independent citizens are properly united to one another by their shared love of country and by their mutual concern for the world. The members of a particular social class, by contrast, are joined by the much weaker bond of overlapping economic interests. To the degree that these interests are still grounded in objective reality, they continue to preserve a limited portion of the world as a tenuous connection among individual citizens. Though a politics based on competing class interests is no substitute for the free interaction of republican citizens, it does take account of the limited worldly realities to which the different classes remain sensitive. Though the world of class politics is a severely truncated world, it still retains a foundation in empirically confirmable fact. But this can no longer be said of the mass society that emerges from the breakdown of the class system or of the mass movements that supplanted the traditional political parties. “The masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness had been held in check only through membership in a class.”[63]
When the economic and political structures in Europe lost their integrity between the wars, the classes cracked open releasing their members into a threatening social void. It was out of these declassed human beings that the new social mass was created. According to Arendt, human beings constitute a mass society when they no longer have their membership in the common world to draw them together and keep them apart. If the active independent citizen is the political ideal of civic republicanism and the self-interested bourgeois capitalist the prototype of nineteenth century liberalism, then the socially and politically atomized individual is the breeding ground of the twentieth century’s mass movements. The chief characteristic of mass man, Arendt’s third political character type, is his political isolation and social loneliness, his lack of the normal interpersonal relations that are mediated through participation in a public world.[64] Republican citizens are reciprocally connected through their cooperative membership in the same body politic; the members of a social class are united through their mutual economic interests and concerns; the isolated individuals who coexist in a mass society are the victims of radical worldlessness. In their worldless condition, they symbolize the frailty of human interconnection that economic disaster, political impotence and spiritual decline can effectively destroy.[65]
The mentality of mass society reflects the historical conditions that brought it into being. It emerges from the collapse of the European class system and the increasing impotence of partisan politics based on class rivalry. Its individual members are united not by their love of world or country but by their hatred of the status quo.[66] Dislocated and frightened by historical forces beyond their control, they see themselves as superfluous beings whose lives are deprived of personal meaning and importance. While their counterparts in a traditional social class are still moved by appeals to self-interest and personal gain, they no longer experience the public world as open to their individual desires and intentions. Excluded from a meaningful relation to the world and their fellow citizens, they become strangely selfless, believing that history has made them individually expendable. This growing loss of interest in their own wellbeing is not an expression of civic or moral generosity, but a psychological escape from the intolerable burden of personal and public responsibility.[67]
It is very important to distinguish the sociological concept of an aggregative mass from the republican notion of a politically unified people. The mass is that portion of the people who “because of sheer numbers and indifference or a combination of both cannot be integrated into any political organization based on common interest.”[68] For Arendt, a unified people prepared for action in history is a free association of independent citizens with their own perceptions and judgments of the world to connect them together. Lonely individuals who feel abandoned by everything and everybody constitute the mass. Their loneliness should not be confused with physical isolation from other persons, because unlike voluntary solitude, it cannot be put to meaningful human use. The artist in the isolation of his studio, or the thinker in a room of her own, is not really lonely. They have withdrawn from the world voluntarily to do in private what they cannot do well in the presence of others. But they remain bound to the reality of the world through the works of art they create or through the memories and experiences that initiate their personal reflection. Loneliness, in contrast to solitude, is the experience of being abandoned or cut off when one stands in the presence of others; it is the limit position in the modern process of social alienation and atomization, a desperate way of being and feeling that is exceedingly hard to endure. “The deprivation of objective worldly relations to others and of the reality guaranteed through them has become the mass phenomenon of loneliness.”[69]
Radical loneliness, the painful sense of exclusion from the work of the world and from the intercourse of human fellowship, helps to explain the broad appeal of twentieth-century mass movements. According to Arendt, these dangerous movements are the social and political substitutes for nineteenth-century classes and the political parties that were organized to represent them. They provide an artificial sense of belonging together to human beings made homeless and worldless by history.[70] Desperately oversimplified ideologies play the integrative role in these mass movements that the public and objective world plays in genuine politics. Ideologies substitute a logically consistent fantasy world for the intractable historical facts that the dispossessed find increasingly intolerable. On Arendt’s distinctive use of the term, an ideology is the logical elaboration of a single explanatory idea, such as race or class.[71] An ideology systematically develops the implications of that idea through a process of strict logical inference, and then claims for these conceptually generated implications the central role in the explanation of history. Ideologies are desperate attempts to make history intelligible by means of a fixed idea, an idée fixe, alleged to possess universal explanatory import. They direct their seductive appeal to that growing number of lonely people who cannot accept the complex intelligibility of human existence. Since ideologies are logically constructed fictions, how can they be sustained against the challenge of verifiable fact? Hannah Arendt accounts for their unusual tenacity in two ways: the dislocated masses bear such resentment against the actual world that they refuse to accept its reality. Moreover, the fantasy world created by ideology has a linear logic and unyielding consistency that historical reality never possesses. When human beings are no longer capable of thinking authentically about reality, the logical rigor of a shared ideology serves as an appealing replacement.
Human beings have a permanent need to think, to make sense of their existence in one way or another.[72] If genuinely open, exploratory thinking proves too difficult or too painful, demagogic ideologies are now readily available as alternative sources of meaning and coherence. The second reason for their plausibility is an intellectual consequence of loneliness. In the world of the lonely, no one is reliable and nothing familiar can be safely relied upon. Deprived of communal relationships with other persons and things, relationships that confirm our shared sense of reality, the lonely individual is cut off from common sense and thrown back on himself and his fears. But the isolated self he encounters in private reflection no longer has confidence in reality as it appears to the senses. The lonely man is therefore confined within the circle of his growing suspicion; he does not trust himself as a reliable partner in the internal dialogue of thought, nor does he trust his perceptual experience as a way of understanding the world.[73] Without the collaborative agreements of common sense or the internal concurrence with oneself that reflective thinking provisionally achieves, logical reasoning remains his only secure intellectual resource. The competing ideologies of our time offer different explanatory premises for logical deduction to work with; thus, we have the idea of a master race, or a messianic class, or a redemptive technology, or a global Jewish or capitalist conspiracy. It is the desperation of loneliness that makes the ideological pattern compelling. A lonely man “always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything for the worst.”[74]
It was political and social homelessness that prepared disoriented human beings to join the mass movements of the twentieth century. It was their alienated loneliness, which had become an intolerable experience for the homeless masses that prepared them to submit to totalitarian domination. Organized loneliness, bound together by ideology and made possible by radical world alienation, is the greatest political danger of our time. The ancient Biblical warning from Genesis has retained its cautionary force. “It is not good that man should be alone.”[75]
It may be objected that this radical breakdown in social and political order was confined to the European continent and that Hannah Arendt exaggerates when she insists on a general political crisis in the West. She readily acknowledged that England and North America had emerged from the war with their basic political institutions intact. But she held that the cultural and theoretical dimensions of the crisis applied to them with equal validity. These subtler aspects of the modern crisis, although more difficult to discern and articulate, have left all western nations politically vulnerable. They concern the deepest intellectual and moral foundations on which western political institutions and communities rest.
The republican citizens whose free association constitutes the life of the well-ordered city are mortal beings with a limited life span. Through their natality they enter a world that anteceded their birth and which is intended to survive their death. These human beings are partly children of nature, residents of the earth, biological creatures like the other terrestrial animals. But they also belong to human history, to the common world of the city, to a political vocation that summons them to transcend their animality and to become fully human. This second dimension of their existence depends, of course, upon the vitality and strength of the first. Human beings must satisfy the requirements of life before they can begin to live well. The ancient Greeks originally founded the polis so that human mortals might do something great and memorable before they died. As Pericles described its purpose in his celebrated funeral oration, the polis was the site for enacting historical deeds and the commemorative center of their lasting remembrance. To mortal men haunted by the fear of futility, of leaving no trace of their brief stay on the earth, the polis was treasured as a protection against oblivion.[76] But to serve this commemorative function it must endure through historical time, providing a narrative bridge between the generations keeping the memory of the dead alive. In the critical eyes of their Roman conquerors, the splendor of Greek civic culture was sadly of short duration. Torn by incessant internal strife and weakened by protracted and devastating wars, the Hellenic cities lost their political independence to the Macedonian hegemony in the fourth century. Despite the undisputed political greatness of the Greeks, they failed to achieve the “miracle of permanence” they actively longed for.[77]
Arendt believes we must look to the Romans, our other great classical political ancestors, to discover how historical splendor can be combined with temporal stability. Despite numerous challenges, the public realm created by the Romans survived for more than seven hundred years. Even when the Empire eventually decayed, the Romans transmitted its founding principles to the Roman Catholic Church. Arendt calls these principles that have held together the great temporal and spiritual institutions of the West the “Roman Trinity.”[78] All three principles bear Latin names; in this respect they differ from the majority of classical political terms whose linguistic origins are Greek. The three elements in the Roman Trinity are: religion, from re-ligare, to bind back; tradition, from traducere, to lead across; authority, from auctor, founder or father and augere to augment or increase. These principles find their common origin in the Roman experience of the sacredness of foundation. The Romans believed that the founding of their city was a sacred and unique event to which the rest of human history was inseparably bound. This founding experience was narrated in Virgil’s great epic poem, the Aeneid. As the poem memorably reveals, Aeneas escaped from the ruins of Troy, bearing the gods of his household, in order to recreate his native city in the western Mediterranean. This poetic re-creation is meant to reverse the tragic fate of the Trojans at the conquering hands of the Greeks. Aeneas is the auctor or founder who establishes the new city to which all future Roman citizens will belong. His act of foundation provides the constant reference point for the Romans’ subsequent political life. Unlike the classical Greeks, who considered the creating of cities and the establishing of colonies an important but frequent occurrence, the Romans treated their founding as an event without sequel.[79] The stated purpose of their political life was to augment the act of foundation by preserving and extending the power of the original city. The heroic military and political deeds that maintained and extended Roman rule had an explicitly religious significance, for they were consciously bound back to their great antecedents and ultimately to the experience of foundation itself. Roman tradition preserved the public memory of these deeds and transmitted their compelling story across the generations. To become a Roman citizen, to belong to this noble and heroic tradition, was to bear the gravity of the past on one’s shoulders. Those who could carry its historical weight in their public lives enjoyed authority for they alone proved worthy of augmenting the original actions of the founder. The three elements in the Roman Trinity, therefore, constitute a unified political and cultural whole. All presently existing authority is bound back to the foundational act from which it springs and is carried forward by tradition that preserves the required continuity between the past and the future.[80]
The Roman Trinity could survive the demise of the Empire because its spiritual principles were ultimately embodied in the self- understanding of the Catholic Church.[81] Within the Roman Catholic conception of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth assumed the role of the community’s founder, the historical community of Christians took the place of the Roman Republic and the apostles and their successors became the Christian equivalents of leaders whose authority rested on unbroken connection with the founding events. The Christian tradition continues to carry forward all that is judged to be memorable in the community’s past: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the good news of the kingdom of God, the acts of the Apostles, the lives of the saints, and the doctrinal teaching and practice of the Church. The stabilizing power of these originally Roman principles and cultural practices should be evident, for the Catholic Church, founded by a Palestinian Jew and periodically persecuted by Rome and its imperial successors, has achieved an unparalleled institutional permanence across the earth.
Within the framework of the Roman Trinity, the community’s preservation of the memorable past is of primary importance. The present and the future retain their authentic meaning only if they preserve their vital connection to the founding events. The rituals and narratives of tradition transmit to successive generations the greatness of those original events, providing a perpetual model for posterity. The young members of the community learn from these stories how to become worthy of their common ancestors. Traditional stories also provide the foundation of the community’s ethical practice; they teach what must be done and avoided if the authentic spirit of the beginning is to survive. Authority clearly rests with those who are older, closer to the ancestral origin, and united to that sacred beginning by rites of ordination and transmission. The spiritual and intellectual culture of the community has its deepest roots in memory, the faculty of depth, which insures the gravity of an otherwise weightless present. Were the community’s leaders to be divorced from the past by a failure of memory, or separated from the origin by a break in the ancestral connection, then their claim to authority would lose its legitimating ground. Without religion and tradition to support it, the Roman model of authority cannot survive. As a political relationship, authority depends on the voluntary acceptance by those who obey of the institutional legitimacy of those who command. Whenever the Roman Trinity has sustained an enduring political community, a common religion and tradition have been its primary sources of legitimacy.[82]
A second source of the modern political crisis has been the erosion of authority, not only in politics, but in western religion and morality as well. The decline of ancestral authority was neither sudden nor unexpected; the central events in modern history have all been at variance with the Roman cultural mentality. We shall mention only the most significant moments in a cumulative process that took several centuries to complete:[83] the emancipation of secular power from ecclesiastical authority during the Italian Renaissance; the rupture of Christian unity in the Reformation with the concomitant decline in the Church’s mediating role between human beings and God; the pathos of novelty that animated the scientific revolution whose leading interpreters revolted against tradition and what they saw as the dead weight of the inherited past; the radical critique of religious belief during the Enlightenment that deprived western culture of a common theological inheritance; the nineteenth-century break with classical humanism that carried the scientific revolt of the seventeenth century into the new human sciences; the industrial revolution that effaced the traditional distinction between the public and the private realms of human life; the political and economic upheavals of the twentieth century that left millions of homeless people displaced and uprooted. In the seventeenth century the West lost a securely anchored philosophical tradition as its guide to the past. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we lost our common belief in the unifying dogmas of Christianity and in the metaphysical and theological foundations of the moral order. Although ethical and political conduct did not immediately decline as a result of these cultural changes, moral imperatives and obligations gradually deteriorated into unreflective habits that nobody quite understood but which the majority continued to obey because they remained familiar.[84] Social conformity became an almost sacred requirement of stability because compliance with the beliefs and behavior of the dominant culture was the only guarantee of moral security. Western political communities, now held together by the bonds of unexamined custom and habit, were no longer able to give a persuasive account of their moral and spiritual foundations. As the unsettling dynamics of modernity accelerated, increasing numbers of people ceased to feel at home politically; they no longer believed in the laws under which they lived, nor respected the authority of those entrusted with command. Long before the tragic events of the twentieth century took their remorseless toll, Europe had become politically fragile and morally unstable.[85]
It is a defining mark of modernity that it looks to the future rather than the past as its inspiration for action; and it grants intellectual authority not to poets, statesmen and priests, the representatives of an enduring tradition, but to scientists and engineers, those who claim to predict and control what is yet to occur. The cultural spirit of modernity is basically antithetical to the Roman Trinity. It is, therefore, not surprising that traditional authority gradually lost its meaning for modern men and women and an acceptable place in their institutional lives. According to Arendt, the political implications of this cultural loss are extremely grave. It is not clear that political communities can achieve the permanence and stability they require without some reliance on a principle of authority. But the perceived need for authority in the political realm is not sufficient to restore a cultural legacy that was lost over several centuries of change. As Hannah Arendt emphasized, genuine authority rests on a common legitimating tradition that establishes clear relations of command and obedience among the members of a community. But this shared tradition, in either its secular or religious form, is precisely what the acids of modernity have destroyed. So far we have no credible idea of what to put in its place. “We are confronted anew without the religious trust in a sacred beginning and without the protection of traditional and therefore self-evident standards of behavior with the elementary problem of human living together.”[86]
With our economic and political institutions shaken by global depression and war and their moral foundations weakened by the modern spirit of suspicion and distrust, political thinking is driven back to its original ground. Historically, this has meant a return to the Greek thinkers and statesmen who formulated our basic categories of political discourse; theoretically, it has meant an attempt to recover through articulate reflection the underlying principles and norms of political activity. Arendt believed that political philosophy should seek to align our inherited categories and principles with the basic experiences and events they are intended to articulate. It should seek to reconstruct our shared understanding of political life from its origin in the concrete experiences of citizens and statesmen. The tacit presupposition of this reflective task is that political experience and theoretical understanding are in harmony, that the ideas conceived and expressed by the mind actually illumine the concrete patterns of experience to which they refer.
But what if this basic assumption is unwarranted and the concepts and principles we have inherited from Greek philosophy were in fact based on experiences drawn from outside the political realm? In that case, our common intellectual inheritance would handicap political reflection, and the genuinely political experiences would be left without adequate expression or recognition. If this critical conjecture were true, it would mean that “our tradition of political thought” is fundamentally flawed, and that, as a consequence, we now approach political reality ill prepared to understand and to judge it. Hannah Arendt’s revisionary critique of the western tradition is based on just this contentious assertion. She repeatedly insisted that Plato created Western political philosophy on a fundamentally discordant note, and that the distorted beginning he bequeathed us has proven to be more than half of the whole.[87] In Arendt’s counter narrative, Plato’s depiction of the polis was dominated by the Athenian execution of Socrates and by his own political failures in Sicily. Responding to these grave disappointments, Plato concluded that ordinary political life was incompatible with philosophy and with the constitutive virtues of the true philosopher. He articulated this basic opposition in a memorable parable, the Republican myth of the cave, deliberately intended to reverse the classical understanding and appraisal of politics. Ever since the Ionian milkmaid first laughed at Thales for having his feet on the earth but his mind on the heavens, ordinary humans had chided philosophers for their eccentric withdrawal from the world of reality. Plato chose to answer this recurrent criticism by standing it completely on its head.
His vivid philosophical poetry depicted the political realm as a shadowy cave, an insubstantial world based on deceptive illusion. The shadows that appear to the residents of the cave are only a fleeting semblance of what is truly real. The unreflective citizens who dwell in this darkness are obsessed with flickering images about which they offer ungrounded and contradictory opinions. They struggle intensely for political honors and offices but the whole affair is, in truth, much ado about nothing. The bright, substantial world of true being, the realm of the invisible Platonic forms, lies entirely above the space of sensible appearances, above the illusions and unstable opinions that dominate the discourse of the cave. In contrast to the unreflective cave dwellers, the very few authentic philosophers gradually discover that neither being nor truth exists in the polis. They voluntarily withdraw from the city’s shadowy darkness in order to ascend to the sunlit sky of ideas. There, beneath the light and warmth giving sun, the visible symbol of the Good, they are able to contemplate what is permanently and totally beautiful. Absorbed in their contemplative delight, they have no desire to return to the shadow land from which they escaped. But for the sake of the city and its desperate need for wisdom, they are compelled to abandon their philosophical home and to resume life among their confused fellow citizens. Their return to the cave is marked by severe disorientation, for the genuine philosopher, now filled with true knowledge of being, is again surrounded by opinionated cave dwellers for whom shadowy becoming is the only reality. These men are hostile to the truth with which the philosopher returns; they band together to kill him rather than accepting his insight and counsel. Even if the philosopher’s reluctant sojourn in the cave does not end in death, he still perceives public life as an unwelcome burden, a necessary duty that keeps him from the true life of thought and contemplation.[88]
Four powerful objections to politics can be extracted from Plato’s mythical criticism. The first is theological or transcendent. Even at its best, politics is entirely human, all too human. It circumscribes human consciousness within an ontological horizon whose dominant figure is the human being. But this horizon effectively conceals all that transcends human beings in dignity and beauty. To attain eternal rather than perishable beauty, humans must intellectually abandon the polis in which ordinary men but not gods are at home. Only in the company of authentic divinity can the spirit of the philosopher find rest. The second criticism is metaphysical. Human events and political affairs are constantly in flux. Individual citizens come into being and pass away; cities rise and fall; reputations are made and broken; nothing that is permanent and unchanging ever appears or endures. It is only outside the temporal flux of the political realm that true invariant being can be discovered. On one reading of Platonic metaphysics, all that is genuinely real is eternal and immutable, unaltered by time and mortality. If human beings are to share in this experience of eternity, they must detach themselves from the cares of the polis to pursue the theoretical life in solitude. The epistemological criticism of politics is the natural complement of these metaphysical objections. Political discourse, since it always refers to a world in disorderly flux, can never rise above the level of opinion (doxa), can never achieve or express genuine knowledge (episteme). Partisan rhetoric is regularly exchanged to defend and rebut inconstant opinions, but it is confined to the appearances or semblances of things rather than their true being. There is an unbridgeable epistemic divide between knowledge and opinion that parallels the ontological separation of being and becoming. Plato appeals to these hierarchical divisions to separate the theoretical life of the philosopher from the active life of the dedicated citizen. When the true philosopher returns to the world of the cave, he is forced to use rhetoric, to convey by means of opinion and uncertain persuasion what he inwardly possesses as knowledge. While citizens in the polis live together through the medium of language, their celebrated speeches and arguments are typically empty of truth. The supreme form of knowledge, the knowledge of the Good, cannot be put into words and its solitary bearer keeps silent about what is closest to his heart.
Plato’s final criticism of politics is ethical and existential in nature. It reflects his ambivalent attitude, one perhaps endemic to philosophers, towards human life as it is actually given to us on this earth.[89] The deepest loyalty of the true philosopher belongs to the ideal republic, the city in speech, rather than to his native city. As a seeker of truth, he cannot assent to the deceptive opinions and conventional laws on which all existing cities are founded. He is, inevitably, a stranger among his fellow citizens, since he does not share their deepest convictions and attachments. When he joins his peers in political activity, he must compromise his standards of excellence to theirs. On returning to the cave, the true philosopher is confined to unhappy choices: to withhold from the city the liberating truth that might save and transform it, or to obscure and corrupt that truth by making it political, thus converting genuine knowledge into another unstable opinion.[90]
Despite profoundly different interpretations of its meaning and purpose, Plato’s Republic is unquestionably the most influential text in the history of political theory.[91] The Myth of the Cave occupies a central position in the Republic and in the tradition of political thought that it initiated. Even those successors of Plato who rejected the ontological chorismos (separation) between cave and sky, accepted his critical contrast between politics and philosophy. Hannah Arendt believed that the philosophers who began “our tradition of political thought” chose to defend and protect their new way of life (bios) by explicitly opposing it to the bios politikos. The first theoretical accounts of political life were offered by men suspicious of politics and openly opposed to its claims of importance. Although Aristotle directly criticized Plato’s Republic and generally treated the bios politikos with honor, in the concluding book of the Nicomachean Ethics he portrays the contemplative and political lives as historical rivals. In defending the supremacy of theoretical activity, he emphasizes the numerous ways in which praxis is inferior to theoria.[92] While Aristotle’s intention is not to denigrate politics but to elevate philosophy, the rhetorical contrast leads him to depict political activity in an unfavorable light. Since Aristotle knew the classical Greeks’ supreme regard for politics, he deliberately emphasized its limitations in order to make the strongest case for the ethical supremacy of the bios theoretikos.
The Republic of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle lay the groundwork for the classical tradition of political thought. But, if Arendt is correct, they leave the pre-Socratic political heritage of the Greeks without adequate articulation and expression. The analytical categories that have dominated the western understanding of politics are essentially Greek, but, on Arendt’s revisionary account, they fail to articulate specifically Greek political experiences.[93] They are based instead on elaborate metaphors drawn from the non-political realm. Let us briefly examine two important examples on which her revisionary criticism rests. The essential condition of politics is plurality, the fact that human beings in the plural, not man in the singular, inhabit the earth. Politics presupposes the interaction of unique and equal persons capable of mutual communication and criticism and sustained engagement in cooperative action. Yet Plato’s images of political activity are modeled on the experiences of man in the singular. The philosopher-ruler is compared to an architectural craftsman who builds the republican city with the help of compliant apprentices. It is the philosophical architect alone who knows how the city should be built; his fellow citizens who voluntarily execute his directives and commands are comparable to construction workers following the finished designs of a master architect. In this deliberately authoritative image, a place is reserved for human plurality only in the giving and receiving of orders between rulers and ruled, between masters and subordinates. But the political ruler determines the correct course of action in isolation from the ruled, as the builder conceives his plans in the solitude of the studio. The isolated ruler’s solitary vision of the forms (eide) beyond the cave and his authoritative use of eidetic knowledge to govern the polis become the guiding image of traditional political theory. When the political role of other citizens is recognized, they appear in the image of obedient subordinates who benefit from the ruler’s singular wisdom but take no active part in shaping it. Since the philosophical ruler consents to rule only reluctantly, under the constraint of necessity and coercion, we end with a theoretical and symbolic account of politics deprived of its splendor and dignity.[94]
Arendt’s second example is drawn from Aristotle’s Politics. Unlike Plato, Aristotle explicitly refuses to reduce praxis, political action, to poiesis or fabrication.[95] From her critical perspective, Aristotle remains more faithful to Greek practice and culture than his teacher, but he still remains under the powerful spell of the Republic. In particular, he follows Plato by making the assignment of rule the central concern of political theory. The taxonomy of political institutions is based on the distribution of governing authority. Each city has a distinctive politeia, or constitution, a way of determining the appropriate power relations between the governors and the governed. The basic political regimes Aristotle recognizes are differentiated by criteria pertaining to the allocation of rule. There is the rule of one, few or many; rule founded on virtue, wealth, or numbers; rule with or without adherence to law; rule for the sake of the rulers or the ruled. Aristotle modifies the Republic’s typology of regimes, but reinforces its emphasis on rule as the primary political relationship.[96] Plurality is restored to a central place in political life, but the relations among citizens, since they are founded on governance, presuppose an underlying inequality among them. According to Arendt, Aristotle is torn between two conflicting conceptions of the polis, which he never effectively reconciles. Under one description, the polis is a community of equals joined in voluntary association for the sake of living well;[97] under the other, it is a community of inequality organized around the practices and requirements of effective political authority.
Arendt insisted that both Plato and Aristotle based their political theories on essentially pre-political experiences. The ruler-ruled relation between human beings did occupy a central position in Greek life, but it belonged to the domestic rather than the political realm of activity.[98] Within the household, masters ruled over their slaves and parents jointly governed their children; within the sphere of education, teachers exercised authority over their pupils and master craftsmen over their apprentices. In all of these relations of rule or authority, structural inequality is clearly presupposed. Whether the purpose of rule is to serve the stronger or the weaker party, the former in the case of slavery, the latter in education and parenting, it is the evident inequality between rulers and ruled that makes rule either possible or necessary. Aristotle uses the contrast between slavery and education to distinguish between despotic and royal rule, and he supports the claim of the virtuous to political authority by citing the relevant inequalities of intellect and character. The category of rule, therefore, is never a wooden or a rigid instrument in his hands. Nevertheless, the combined theoretical influence of Plato and Aristotle was so formidable that the framework of rule and authority came to dominate the subsequent history of political theory. As a result, the political realm was conceived as a domain of structural inequality, even though this contradicted the origin of the polis as a voluntary association of equals committed to the quest for immortalizing excellence.[99] The philosophical portrait of the city thus concealed and obscured those fundamental experiences that depend on the political equality of citizens. “It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion that the original data of human affairs will reappear in their authentic diversity.”[100]
This is not the moment to explore that authentic and important diversity. Our present intention is to acknowledge a theoretical dimension of politics that needs to be carefully examined. Although thought and action are significantly different activities, they are, Arendt argued, mutually complementary. Action needs thought to guide, assess and complete it, while thought needs action to preserve its relevance, integrity and gravity. Arendt deeply believed that “our tradition of political thought” had failed in both its narrative and conceptual functions. It failed to provide the West with a compelling story of political events that made the greatness of politics a part of our common memory and education; it also failed to articulate a set of categories and principles adequate to the nature and dignity of political experience. It endowed us instead with a complex of concepts, metaphors and images that have historically biased our perception of politics and disposed us to think about political reality in alien terms. Despite her clear admiration for Plato’s philosophical brilliance, Hannah Arendt vigorously criticized his theoretical legacy because it deprived the bios politikos of its genuine splendor and dignity.
But the radical evil of the concentration camps, the unprecedented nature of totalitarian terror, the advent of an atomized mass society, and the declining legitimacy of the nation state have combined to weaken the authority of our inherited tradition. These momentous events have also revealed our common unreadiness to comprehend and judge the most pressing modern realities. By disclosing the limits of tradition as a guide to understanding the present, they have forced us to reexamine the most fundamental political questions and issues. This is the task Hannah Arendt chose for herself as a political humanist. Although she no longer bowed to the tradition’s authority, she was profoundly unwilling to abandon its study. She believed that the obligation of responsible thinkers in our time was to discover a new way of understanding the past and the present, a way no longer confined within the parameters of our inherited political theories. She called this critical revisionary activity learning “to think without bannisters,” and she made it the central enterprise of the last half of her life.[101] Our goal in the following chapters will be to think along with her as she beats a track across this largely uncharted sea.[102]
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840; New York: Vintage Books, 1960), vol. II, p. 93.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 1,982b12. Aristotle’s language clearly reflects the Platonic passage in the Theaetetus, though the two accounts of wonder are importantly different.
3. The Republic, the Statesman and the Laws are generally considered Plato’s “political dialogues” for each of them focuses on right order in the polis. But the political significance of philosophy and the political context of Socrates’ life are dramatically evident throughout Plato’s work. To appreciate Plato’s understanding of politics all the dialogues should be taken into account.
4. See especially chapter 26 of The Prince, An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians, where Machiavelli employs biblical imagery in support of his revolutionary project.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution (1856; Franklin Square: Harper and Brothers), pp. 50-60.
6. The degree of similarity between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is intensely disputed. See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) pp. 17-23. Also Bernard Crick, “On Rereading The Origins of Totalitarianism” in M. A. Hill (ed), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979) p. 29.
7. I agree with Canovan that the best way to approach Arendt’s thinking is to begin with her study of Europe’s institutional, cultural and moral collapse.
8. See Plato’s Republic, Books 8 and 9; Aristotle’s Politics, Books 4 and 5; Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Books 3 and 8. In her essay, “What is Authority,” Hannah Arendt argues for a clear distinction between legitimate authority and tyranny and between despotism and totalitarianism. Her analysis of totalitarianism is partly indebted to Montesquieu’s analysis of the forms and principles of government. She treats totalitarianism as an unprecedented form of rule whose animating principle is ideologically justified terror rather than fear.
9. For the critical role of ideology and terror in totalitarian government see chapter 13 in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958; New York: Meridian Books).
10. See the sub-section on Total Domination in Origins, pp. 437-459.
11. Ibid. p. 439. Arendt’s reflections on human evil undergo a partial change after reporting on the Eichmann Trial. See “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture.” Social Research (Fall 1971) and Thinking, pp. 3-6
12. Ibid. pp. 447-457.
13. See Origins, “The Nation of Minorities and the Stateless People,” pp. 269-302. The phenomenon of statelessness, as Seyla Benhabib argues, adds an important dimension to the theory of justice: the dimension of just membership as well as just distribution and punishment. See The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. (2004; New York: Cambridge University Press).
14. Arendt draws a clear distinction between the impossibility of effective resistance within the death camps and the lost opportunity for significant resistance within the cities and ghettoes of Europe. In her highly controversial report on the Eichmann trial, she criticizes the leaders of the Jewish councils for uncritically complying with Nazi directives. Her argument is partly based on the belief that non-compliance and resistance prior to mass deportation would have severely disrupted the plans for the final solution. See Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963; New York: Viking Press).
15. The concept of witnessing is central to Arendt’s understanding of the moral life. She bases her analysis of Socratic morality on the thinking person’s recurrent self-encounter in solitude; because the thinker is regularly meeting with himself on the occasions of thought, he is made aware of the moral character of his partner in dialogue. The regular practice of thinking has moral importance for it forces a man into a position of repeated self-scrutiny. By contrast, political morality is based not on self-reflection but on the witness of others to a man’s public conduct. Action in the space of appearance loses its meaning when there is no one to observe and appraise it and recount its story. What is clearly lacking in her approach is the concept of a divine witness who sees and recalls all things. See “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research (Fall 1971) and “Civil Disobedience,” Crises of the Republic.
16. For the murder of the moral capacity of the person, see Origins, pp. 451-453.
17. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. II, Willing (1978; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), p. 272.
18. Origins, p. 438.
19. Deception and lying in politics are not new. But totalitarian propaganda was not content with the linguistic distortion of reality. Total domination uses terror to transform reality so that the ideological lies are eventually confirmed by experience. The political ideology asserts that the regime’s intended victims are less than human; terror is then used to transform the inhabitants of the death camps into an ostensibly sub-human condition.
20. Origins, pp. 296-297.
21. Arendt borrows the redemptive understanding of storytelling from Isak Dinesen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
22. Origins, pp. 446-447. “Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of the previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment.”
23. This is the title that was used, over her protest, when Origins was first published in England. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, p. 200.
24. See “From the Pariah’s Point of View: Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Life and Work,” Elizabeth Young-Bruehl in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin Hill (1979; New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 3-26. For a full biographical account of Hannah Arendt’s life and work, see Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World (1982; New Haven: Yale University Press) by Young-Bruehl.
25. Although Hannah Arendt was reluctant to characterize her philosophical method, she can best be understood as a phenomenologist. She provided a thoughtful account, logos, of the human appearances, phenomena, in the public and the private realms of human existence. She practiced a linguistically based phenomenology in all of her work though she never thematized it.
26. See Arendt, Love and St. Augustine (1996; Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
27. See “Stateless Persons,” For Love of the World.
28. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1968; New York: Harcourt Brace and World). The threat of existential despair and the refusal to submit to it are recurrent themes in this text and in Origins.
29. The actual quote is by J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli, Oxford, 1947. Arendt’s support for this reading of Machiavelli can be found in On Revolution (1965; New York: The Viking Press), p. 290.
30. Arendt, Between Past and Future (1968; New York: The Viking Press), pp. 140-141.
31. Even in The Life of the Mind, political themes continue to recur though without pride of place.
32. For the romantic critique of bourgeois society, see The Second Discourse on Inequality and Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Arendt’s critique of Rousseau’s political romanticism, see especially On Revolution, pp. 70-76.
33. These categories and representative mentalities are developed and extensively compared in The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago).
34. In the Republic, Socrates defines the ergon of a thing as its specific function, that operation which the thing alone can perform or which it can perform better than anything else. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle adopts the Platonic language and asks whether man qua man has a specific ergon. He concludes that the ergon of man is to live in accordance with reason, man’s highest power. But since reason, nous, is shared by men and gods, is there an exercise of nous that is distinctively human? Here Aristotle appears to waver slightly. He grants that political activity, praxis, is unique to humans; the gods do not constitute a political community. But he encourages human beings to place the theoretical above the practical intellect. The highest human virtue is not practical but theoretical wisdom. The perfection of man, therefore, is not identified with the perfection of his specific ergon but with his most god-like activity.
35. The charge of political nostalgia is often directed at Arendt’s political thought. While this charge is often unfair, I agree with her critics that she failed to acknowledge the limitations as well as the merits of the classical republic.
36. Aristotle emphasizes that neither the brutes nor the divine need a polis as a condition of self-fulfillment. But human beings require the polis for the attainment of virtue (arete), both moral and intellectual. Life in a polis is natural to man since it is the proper site for the perfection of his nature. See The Human Condition, pp. 24 and 305; and Aristotle’s Politics, 1253a, pp. 25-40.
37. Arendt repeatedly claims that our political vocabulary has lost its revelatory character. We no longer know the experiential or historical origins of the basic political terms we employ. This ignorance prompts us to use as synonyms terms that are semantically divergent and to rely on ideological vocabularies that are no longer relevant.
38. Neither classical liberalism with its emphasis on freedom from politics nor Marxism with its call for the replacement of government by public administration really prize active citizenship and participation in public affairs.
39. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, p. 349.
40. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 174.
41. Ibid. p. 141. This is another way of asserting our need to rethink the full implications of human plurality.
42. “The ‘reconciliation with reality,’ the catharsis, which according to Aristotle was the essence of tragedy, and, according to Hegel was the ultimate purpose of history, came about through tears of remembrance.” Past and Future, p. 45.
43. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 228-229.
44. See chapters 9 and 10, Origins, for this pattern of political and social disintegration.
45. For Arendt’s fullest discussion of the Roman Trinity, see Between Past and Future chapters 1 and 3.
46. “Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.” Past and Future, p. 17.
47. According to Arendt, laws of history do not exist and that the belief that they do is ideological. See On Revolution, pp. 51-52, 113-114, 255-261.
48. For the use of representative characters as instruments of social and political analysis, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) pp. 23-30.
49. In Republic 8 and 9, Plato sketches the various types of disordered political leadership ranging from timocrats and oligarchs to undisciplined democrats and tyrants.
50. See Origins, pp. 79, 144, 255.
51. See Hans Kohn, Political Ideologies of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 1966) pp. 3-18. Kohn traces the rise of exclusive nationalism and radical socialism as well as the decline of republican universalism to the abortive revolutions of 1848.
52. Arendt, Origins, p. 314. French politics, in particular, were marked by this conflict between national loyalty and divisive class membership. The union sacré created by the First World War put a temporary end to partisan rivalries that had dominated post-revolutionary France.
53. See Origins, pp. 17; 38-39.
54. See Origins, Part Two: Imperialism for her rich and suggestive account of the imperialist project. Nowhere is Arendt’s intellectual debt to Rosa Luxemburg greater than in her analysis of the economic origins of nineteenth-century imperialism.
55. See Origins, pp. 149-151; 188-189; 197; 200; 457-459.
56. See chapter 5, Origins, “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie.”
57. See Origins, pp. 152-153. “Hobson was the first to recognize both the fundamental opposition of imperialism and nationalism and the tendency of nationalism to become imperialist.”
58. Origins, p. 267.
59. Ibid. vii, Preface to the first edition.
60. Origins, pp. 300-318. Also, On Revolution, pp. 162-164. Arendt sees the basic movement of western history since the political revolutions of the eighteenth century as one of growing world alienation. Human beings became increasingly atomized and isolated as they lost the sensible world as a common matrix of reference. Membership in social classes provided a limited brake on this process of political decline. When the classes lost their stabilizing and unifying power, the political dangers of loneliness and worldlessness struck Europe with fury.
61. See “Antisemitism as an Outrage Against Common Sense,” chapter 1 of Origins, pp. 3-10.
62. Origins, “A Classless Society.”
63. Origins, p. 317.
64. For the important contrast between isolation and loneliness, see Origins, pp. 474-479.
65. Although the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century is well known, Hannah Arendt brings it to life through her disciplined passion, her powerful rhetoric, and her interweaving of poetic and factual materials. She recreates the intellectual and spiritual context of the events she is recounting. Hers is not the detached objectivity of the historian, but the spellbinding power of the storyteller. The reader is required, periodically, to disengage from her narrative spell in order to realize that hers is one story among the many that can and need to be told. For the psychological differences distinguishing the people from the social classes, the mob and the masses, see Origins, Part III: Totalitarianism, chapter 10: A Classless Society.
66. Origins, p. 315.
67. Origins, pp. 315-318.
68. Ibid. p. 311.
69. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 58-59.
70. Origins, pp. 311-326, 350. In the third section of Origins, Hannah Arendt vividly depicted the nature and consequences of worldlessness. Later, in The Human Condition, she traced world alienation to its source in the revolutionary events of the modern age. The polar opposition between love of the world and world alienation always remained at the center of her political understanding.
71. See Origins, pp. 468-474. Her concept of ideology is rooted in its etymological origins: logically unfolding the implications of a single seminal idea.
72. For the Arendtian contrast between “the need to think” and the “desire to know,” see Thinking, pp. 11-15; Past and Future, pp. 6-15; and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, p. 20.
73. Origins, p. 477. “Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.”
74. Idem. The original quote is actually Martin Luther’s. Hannah Arendt cites it in her investigation of totalitarian ideologies.
75. Genesis 2,18. “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helpmate for him.” For the distinction between solitude and loneliness, see The Human Condition, pp. 65-69. It is important that the loneliness of the doer of good works be distinguished from the organized loneliness of a mass society. The sources of their world alienation are significantly different.
76. See The Human Condition, section 3, “Eternity versus Immortality” and chapter 2, “The Public and the Private Realm,” as well as Past and Future, pp. 71-73.
77. Hannah Arendt finds inspiration for her political philosophy in the historical experiences of both Greece and Rome. Periclean Athens is her model of the public quest for terrestrial immortality; Republican Rome is the source of fundamental insights into stability and permanence in public affairs. For her richest elaboration of the Roman political spirit, see “What is Authority” in Between Past and Future.
78. See Past and Future, pp. 129-141 “The famous ‘decline of the West’ consists primarily in the decline of the Roman trinity of religion, tradition and authority.” p. 140.
79. Past and Future, pp. 120-121.
80. Past and Future, p. 124.
81. Past and Future, pp. 125-128.
82. Past and Future, pp. 127-128,134-135,138-141.
83. In summarizing this process, I draw on the full range of Arendt’s published work. She especially highlights Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Marx as nineteenth century thinkers struggling with the spirit of suspicion released by the scientific revolution. See”Tradition and the Modern Age” in Between Past and Future.
84. Arendt was scandalized by the failure of governments and citizens in all countries to protect the Jews and to oppose the violence of extra-legal political movements. The vaunted moral traditions of Europe no longer provided reliable protection against evil in times of crisis. Neither institutional religion nor conventional morality effectively resisted mass deportation and murder “when the chips were down.” See Thinking and Moral Considerations and Men in Dark Times.
85. The moral decline of Europe is thoughtfully explored in Origins, Men in Dark Times, Between Past and Future, and Eichmann in Jerusalem among other texts.
86. Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 140-141.
87. See in particular chapter 1, “Tradition and the Modern Age” in Past and Future.
88. See Republic VII, 514a-521b.
89. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, pp. 21-24.
90. It is doubtful that these unwelcome alternatives exhaust the possibilities of philosophical citizenship. See chapters 3 and 5 for other ways that philosophers can contribute to the life of the city.
91. This preliminary introduction to the Republic will be more fully developed in chapter 3, sections B and C.
92. See Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10, chapters 4-8.
93. See Between Past and Future, pp. 124-125. There are striking parallels between Arendt’s critique of the Platonic tradition in political theory and Heidegger’s critique of western ontology in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Both of them seek to overcome a tradition of thought founded on Platonic concepts and metaphors and to return, at least partly, to a pre-Socratic mode of thinking and speaking. See Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: the Fate of the Political, (1996; Princeton: Princeton University Press).
94. See “The Traditional Substitution of Making for Acting,” The Human Condition, pp. 220-23.
95. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a, pp. 1-25. “Neither is acting making nor making acting.”
96. See Aristotle’s Politics, Book 1, chapter 1; and Book III, chapter 1; for the primacy of the concept of rule or governing, see Books III and IV of the Politics.
97. Politics, 138a ; cited by Arendt in Past and Future, p. 116.
98. See Past and Future, pp. 105-106; 116-118; Human Condition, pp. 28-37.
99. Human Condition, pp. 196-199.
100. Arendt, Crises of the Republic (1972; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), pp. 142-143.
101. See Arendt’s remarks in the Hill volume, The Recovery of the Public World, pp. 333-339. “I always thought that one has got to start thinking as though nobody had thought before, and then start learning from everybody else.”
102. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” for the memorable image of Bulkington as independent thinker and comrade.