Background: This article was commissioned by the Zurich-based magazine DU: Die Zeitschrift der Kujltur, and published there in October 2000 as part of a special issue called Hannah Arendt: Mut Zum Politischen!
HANNAH ARENDT IN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE (2000)
During Hannah Arendt’s life in America and since her death twenty five years ago, three generations of American commentators and critics have focused attention on her life and work. The first made her acquaintance with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The second is of an age to have been her students and studied her On Revolution (1963) in the late Sixties; they now chair departments, edit magazines, fight cultural wars, and still mull over their old questions about the way things should be in a democracy. The third generation, now thirtysomethings, know Hannah Arendt only through her writings. They, the much discussed and worried over inheritors of the Sixties generation’s hopes and, especially, disillusionments, focus their attention on what Arendt had to say about personal and political identity.
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In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt first articulated her most fundamental thought –as an alarm, a dire warning. She claimed that politics — the speaking and acting of citizens in a public space, variously secured by different forms of government and law– only appears under certain historical conditions, and can disappear . Further, a form of government can come about that has the unprecedented and hideously contradictory consequence of making politics disappear completely. Totalitarianism, a novelty, neither a tyranny nor a one-party dictatorship, is the radical elimination of politics brought about by methodically eliminating the very humanity of, first, selected groups and eventually any group, by making humans superfluous as human beings.
This profound chord of Arendt’s thought provoked American commentators of her generation, but only in a very partial and, ultimately, deleterious form.. Her argument that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin were instances, despite their very great differences in evolution and ideological origins, of fundamentally the same form of government, totalitarianism, precipitated a quarrel from the political left and a great abuse from the political right. Her analysis of totalitarianism got caught up in Cold War polemics, and it has never really been reassessed, even as the Berlin Wall has come down.
Arendt’s analysis of Stalin’s Soviet Union was exploited on the political right to justify anti-communism as anti-totalitarianism. The end of victory over totalitarianism justified any means for promoting democracy –including totalitarian means. And it is no exaggeration to say that this intellectual stance helped make moralistic, “patriotic” crusading for democracy into such a norm in America that it can hardly even be recognized any more as the aberration in relation to constitutional traditions that it is.
Among American leftists, objections arose both to Arendt’s disregard of the idea that a fascist regime is the very opposite of a Marxist revolution, and to her disregard of the argument that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a betrayal of Marxism. She was read as the Cold Warriors’ theoretician of anti-communism. But there were a few New York leftists who were independent enough to appreciate Arendt’s analysis, and they became her friends and allies. Dwight MacDonald made a little magazine, politics, into a big voice of independent thought. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy and the poet Randall Jarrell, who was a associated with The Nation, became close friends. Allies appeared at the Partisan Review and among the American academics who had organized the New School for Social Research’s “University in Exile,” as they did among the founders of the Jewish magazine Commentary, followers of Judah Magnes, in advocating Israeli-Palestinian binationalism. David Riesman, author of the very influential The Lonely Crowd, adapted Arendt’s analysis for a look at American mass society.
Except for such crucial friends, Arendt was separated in the 1950’s from her American commentators to the left and the right by her concern with totalitarianism as anti- politics. The majority of American intellectuals wrote from within their experience of America as a secure nation-state, defining politics in terms of good and bad states and right or wrong distributions of power and property, while Arendt, a refugee from Nazism, a stateless person, thought about the death of politics.
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The theoretical writings Arendt produced in the decade after The Origins of Totalitarianism were the ones that commanded the attention of the Sixties generation. These readers returned and keep returning again and again to The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution. Later, they connected these writings to “Civil Disobedience” and On Violence, and later still to the unfinished “Judging” third of The Life of the Mind. In these works, they found Arendt’s attention turned not to totalitarianism per se but to the catalog of deeper trends and ideas that constituted, in her understanding, the preconditions for totalitarianism. She looked at the elements of politics that totalitarianism had eliminated.
Arendt’s experience in America in the early 1950′s, during the Korean War and as Joseph McCarthy rose to prominence in Washington, pointed up for her the specificity of the European totalitarianisms and the fact that totalitarian elements do not necessarily crystallize into totalitarianism. In her adoptive country, she saw some of the elements of totalitarianism appear, but with two of the key ones missing and without a full crystallization process. There was no “movement” in McCarthyism, no swell of support coming from adherents in group after group, class after class, uniting in a vast abandonment of self, an ecstatic conformity, an anti-state fervor. And anti-Communism was not an effective group-targeting ideology like anti-Semitism, which had provided the Nazis a unifying vision, a common enemy in the form of the international Jewish conspiracy controlling the government.
With her admiration of American traditions reinforced when McCarthyism receded in the late 1950’s, and with her despair over the Soviet Union mitigated by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Arendt worked through some of the fear and rage that had propelled The Origins of Totalitarianism. She came to the attitude she called amor mundi and started writing enthusiastically about American history and political theory and about “the council system,” the political form she considered the antidote to totalitarianism, the form most conducive to genuine political life, for action and for reasoning speech. She studied American town meetings, wards, and voluntary associations, comparing them to the 1871 Paris Commune and popular societies, the Russian extra-Party workers councils or soviets appearing in 1905 and again in 1917, the Ratesystem of the German revolutionary period of 1918 and 1919, and the councils that sprang up in Hungary during the 1956 revolution. As she wrote in On Revoltuion, these were all “spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and by their leaders.”
The gravest danger in American political life in the Cold War years, Arendt concluded, was a kind of thoughtlessness and lack of historical memory for America’s revolutionary origins and constitutional tradition, which protected its council formations “Fear of revolution has been the hidden leitmotif of postwar American foreign policy in its desperate attempts at stabilization of the status quo, with the result that American power and prestige were used and misused to support obsolete and corrupt political regimes that long since had become objects of hatred and contempt among their own citizens.”
Arendt went on to argue that domestic policy-makers of both American parties were focusing on socioeconomic goals, not political processes, valuing free enterprise over freedom. The progressive Democrats, she felt, were engaged in promoting centralization in ways that crushed local initiatives, while the Republicans were busy sponsoring capitalism regardless of its consequences. Americans generally, she thought, failed to understand that free enterprise, capitalism, except in a situation of natural abundance and relative lack of class structuration, only leads to unhappiness: “Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute proof for its existence.”
Very few of Arendt’s Sixties readers noticed this critique of capitalism in Arendt’s work. They concentrated, instead, on Arendt’s distinction between “the social question” and politics, some accepting the distinction, some rejecting it. The acceptors fastened enthusiastically on her hopefulness about the council system and applied it to their own enthusiasm about grassroots or participatory democracy. The rejecters, from a Marxist angle, raised questions about the way in which she found obsession with economics and “the social question” to be the doom of revolutions, first of the French Revolution and then of all its legatees.
In effect, the Sixties Marxist critics repeated the critique of Arendt launched by their leftist elders, but their emphasis was different. They were not fighting over whether and how the Soviet Union was totalitarian or about whether a Marxist revolution had ingredients of totalitarianism built in. The central debate was about how to take up “the social question,” which Arendt’s critics posed as a moral question, even a question about whether violence was morally justified to bring about social justice, to help the downtrodden. Her sharp distinction between “the social question” and political action seemed to them to condemn the victims of social injustice to waiting upon politics for their next meal, much less for their triumph over the bourgeoisie. This criticism, then, came to have great weight even among Arendt’s supporters, who urgently wanted grassroots organizations to address “the social question.”
These debates haunted the nearby problem of the relation of morality and politics, which Arendt took up in her reflections on the controversy that irrupted over her Eichmann in Jerusalem and in her reflections on the American tradition of civil disobedience during the Vietnam War. She assumed that morality has to do with conscience and that conscience is an individual matter. In the European tradition, the exemplary man of conscience is Socrates, who was concerned with whether or not he could live with himself if he did this deed or that. Morality only becomes political when people of conscience act together, at which point, Arendt argued, it is transformed. Arendt had been very impressed that Eichmann had shown at his trial that he was capable of telling right from wrong –he had a conscience–but the problem was that his conscience told him to obey his Fuhrer, and in the society in which he lived obedience to the Fuhrer’s will was right. His conscience, in public, functioned lethally.
Arendt argued that the civil disobedience of significant numbers of Americans in the late 1960′s was a continuation of the nation’s tradition of voluntary associations, councils. She praised it as such, and even hoped that a constitutional amendment might one day be proposed to cover the right of association. But she was very well aware that voluntary associations at that time were also –as lobbies, pressure groups, and special interest organizations– working against political action and thus for eliminating politics. So her criterion for judging the worth of voluntary organizations was political, not moral. They become dangerous “if the original contractual model of the associations –mutual promises with the moral imperative pacta sunt servanda–should be lost. Under today’s circumstances, this could happen if these groups, and their counterparts in other countries, were to substitute ideological commitments, political or other, for actual goals….What threatens the student movement, the chief civil disobedience group of the moment… is the growing infection of the movement with ideologies (Maoism, Castroism, Stalinism, Marxism-Leninism, and the like), which in fact split and dissolve the association.” To those for whom an association was a vehicle for a moral cause, Arendt seemed to be saying flatly that there are no right and wrong causes, but only right and wrong ways of associating or being political. That is, in this distortion of her meaning, she seemed amoral.
Ever since The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt had been adamantly opposed to moralistic ideologies of any sort, holding that anyone predetermined by an ideology into the role of moral judge becomes unable to experience directly or concretely as well as unable to reflect back freely on experiences. Independent thought is mobile –free in the most elementary sense. Among the Sixties moralistes who criticized Arendt and whom Arendt criticized, the most common prefabricated script featured violence justified. She felt their scripts completely closed off the young people to the novel realities of the world historical moment that these very same young people had created with their moral fervor.
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Currently in America, many younger intellectuals without particular defining political allegiances of the left or the right, mostly academics (as there are few intellectuals without academic positions), have turned to Hannah Arendt as a sounding board for their forms of identity politics. Most of these theorists, it seems to me, come up partial or distorted because they do not compass the way in which Arendt herself posed the question of identity; they do not consider her philosophically, socially and politically –three dimensions that did not always fit together logically or comfortably in her life or work.
Philosophically, Arendt valued the internal dialogue of thinking that she referred to as “a conversation between me and myself,” and she held that having an identity implied be having a monologue in your mind or not keeping up the endless back and forth, questioning, searching, project of thinking. In this sense, she rejected having an identity as a state of being or a way of life. Socially, she valued the creative tension of being at once a private and a public person and assumed that this tension would not exist if a person had an identity and was reliant on having that identity confirmed in public. She could have said of herself what she said of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen in an essay full of autobiographical themes: “…she had discovered…that the chief trap in life is one’s own identity –”I will not be one person again…” In Dinesen’s case, the trap “was not so much writing or professional writing as taking oneself seriously and identifying the woman with the author who has his [sic] identity confirmed, inescapably, in pubic…” Socially, Arendt felt that taking oneself too seriously and identifying the private person with the public person –in whatever terms, professional, cultural, ethnic, gender–signaled a private lack of what she called “the supreme confirmation of one’s existence which only love, mutual love, can give.” This was her highest tribute to her husband Heinrich Bluecher and also to her mentoring father-figure, Karl Jaspers.
Politically, Arendt’s reflections on identity were much more tied to analyses of particular historical-political situations. as her many essays on Jewish identity make clear. Basically, she felt that if you are attacked for your identity –as she had been attacked as a Jew—you must defend yourself as such and defend the history and reality of the identity, Jewishness. She understood the victimization of other groups, like the African-Americans in America, on analogy with
Antisemitism, which often produced misunderstandings of those groups’ experiences. And, as far as the identity “ a woman” is concerned, she had very little sympathy for feminism as a defense because she saw no analogy between discrimination against women and anti-Semitism. Those in the current generation of her readers who want to use Arendt’s work for thinking about the politics of identity have to contend with the fact that she –such an illuminating theorist of anti-Semitism—really did not turn her attention so thoroughly or thoughtfully to other prejudices. Totalitarianism and fighting totalitarian trends always continued to frame her thought.
The currently emergent American intellectual generation has grown up in political conditions that look in many ways like the turn of the last century — nation states are everywhere consolidating, contesting their borders, oppressing their minorities, rediscovering or dreaming up national traditions, while supranational movements with world domination ideologies, often fundamentalist religious ones, offer even wilder dreams. The dream of economic “globalization” is being dreamt by all sorts of people, including many who are newly anti-political. So, because of her critique of ideology, Arendt’s thought is of great interest to those in America now trying to be progressive without ideology, as well as to think politically without being primarily focused on questions of identity.
There is no clear publishing site in America for these independent readers of Arendt, as politics was in the 1950’s. But, as the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism approaches, one can hope that allliances among such readers will form, and that all of the multitude of questions that she launched into the world with that book will continue to inspire discussion and debate. Her basic question is still basic: under what conditions can politics be eliminated? The answer for the present historical moment will not be “by totalitarianism,” which was a historically specific governmental form. But Hannah Arendt’s more general reflection on the rise of “the social,” and the way in which economic questions can overwhelm political questions has lost none of its relevance.
