This lecture was delivered on October 7, 2010 as the 2010 Hannah Arendt Lecture in the
Soeterbeeck Progamme, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
ON COSMOPOLITAN THINKING
As the Second World War was ending, many people, looking upon the devastation the war and the Holocaust had brought about and thinking about the collapse of moral values and political institutions that had allowed this war to enwrap the earth, realized that new ways of thinking were needed. There was hope that the old Kantian aspiration to “cosmopolitan intent” could be revived for a new world, one in which people united negatively in their horror at the evils they had witnessed or learned of and at the threatening possibility that the human species could destroy itself and its habitat, might also unite in a positive ideal, in an idea of humanity.
The war itself had resulted in the deaths of more than seventy million soldiers and civilians (many more civilians than soldiers) and the uprooting of perhaps 40 million more who were living as refugees or stateless minorities in Europe. The atomic weapons used by the United States to force the end of the war had demonstrated that entire cities of people could be eliminated in an instant and their land rendered uninhabitable. War, everyone could see, was no longer even expected to be between armies. Calculated targeting of minority groups –to be named “genocide” in 1948—had become a justified objective of war among totalitarians, with concentration camps and labor camps as their defining means. Annihilating attacks upon civilian metropolitan populations had become a justified tactic among both the totalitarians who conducted the Blitz and the non-totalitarians who responded by demolishing Dresden and Berlin and then bombing Japan. In such a world, what could become of the old cosmopolitan ideal of world peace?
From the United States of the New Deal era had come two visions for the world and all peoples as citizens responsible for the world as the common site of the common destiny of humankind. President Roosevelt had articulated Four Freedoms– freedom of speech and belief, freedom from want and fear– that he hoped might represent a universal rallying call. The Four Freedoms did, in fact, become the inspiration for the document that, when it was voted at the United Nations in 1948, was called A Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And the United Nations itself, chartered in 1946, was the institutionalization of President Roosevelt’s wartime hope for a world organization that could secure world peace, as the League of Nations had not.
But Roosevelt’s effort to think as a citizen responsible for the world was undercut in his own country, before and after his death in 1945, by nationalist isolationists of many sorts and by his successor, Harry Truman, who was willing to use the new American bombs, of unprecedented destructiveness, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Roosevelt’s hope, which he urged upon Churchill and Stalin, was also undermined as the implications of their ideas about the world after the war came clear. The British persisted in being primarily concerned with the preservation of their Empire against the “self-determination of peoples,” and the Soviets with the preservation of their absolute state sovereignty, which they felt was necessary to protect their socialist system and the rights of the working classes. Eventually, the compromise Charter of the United Nations reflected the ideal of state sovereignty in the Security Council’s composition and veto provision, a constitutional arrangements which few Americans opposed, for state sovereignty proved to be just as important in the United Sates –although for different reasons—as it was in the Soviet Union.
While efforts were being made after the War toward a world politics, a politics in which states could put their resources to the world concerns they shared, working for world peace, intellectuals of various backgrounds were considering the meaning of cosmopolitanism in that historical moment –a window of opportunity before the so-called Cold War gripped the world. In 2002, looking back on this post-war moment and comparing it to two earlier Western cosmopolitan moments –the one in ancient Greece when Stoic and Cynic philosophers coined the word kosmopolites and the one in the Enlightenment when Kant wrote with “cosmopolitian intent” –two British political theorists, Fine and Cohen, contributing to an essay collection called Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, named the moment “Arendt’s moment.” Hannah Arendt had offered an analysis of “crimes against humanity” that was, they argued, defining of the moment.
By concentrating their attention on Arendt’s thoughts about international law and the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, Fine and Cohen overlooked, I think, the centerpiece of Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitanism, which was her critique of the late 19th and 20th century sovereign nation-states, which, she emphasized, were states that had turned on groups of their own people, eliminating some and creating wave upon wave of stateless others. In her view, a new world order was necessary, first and foremost, to address the plight of people denied political life by the very sovereign nation-states that were not in any way checked by the Charter of the United Nations.
No leaders in the states signatory to the United Nations Charter and no representatives of the states signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from which the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites abstained in the 1948 voting) had, in Hannah Arendt’s estimation, grasped fully the key stumbling block to any harmonious world organization of nation-states and any Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the problem of statelessness. Since the period of the First World War and the Peace Treaties following it, this problem had been festering, and it had been vastly exacerbated in Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. But it had really been launched two centuries earlier by the paradigmatic 18th century efforts to secure human rights, that is, the American one concerned with the rights of citizens in a state, and the French one concerned with the Rights of Man. That the revolutionary origin of the problem was still reverberating was clear as the United Nations tried to be a new beginning.
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted and debated in 1947 and 1948, the Soviet Union’s delegate never tired of taunting the United States of America’s drafter, Eleanor Roosevelt, with the fact that her country’s Founding Fathers, while proclaiming inalienable human rights, had not enfranchised women or slaves (Native Americans were not considered), and had recently interned its Japanese-born citizens (on Franklin Roosevelt’s order) in 1944. By the end of the Second World War, no federal action had abrogated the Jim Crow state laws, so the Negroes had only advanced from the slavery unmentioned by the Founding Fathers to the second class citizenship ordained by laws that had made a mockery of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
The French drafter of the Universal Declaration, the former Resistance fighter and aide to De Gaulle, Rene Cassin, a lawyer, also quite consistently reminded himself without need of Soviet prodding that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man had not counted women, slaves, or the Jews in France among the humans with inalienable rights; and the rights of citizenship granted the Jews under Napoleon had not protected them later from being rounded up and delivered into Nazi hands by the Vichy government. Rene Cassin knew, too, that the Republic brought into existence with the French Revolution had started out with remarkable policies for offering French citizenship to foreigners and asylum to revolutionaries from other countries –to “benefactors of mankind” and “citizens of the world” like the American Tom Paine—but had under the Jacobins quickly turned to blaming those recipients of hospitality for any defeat or crisis the Republic suffered, aiming the initial state terror right at them.
The Soviet Union’s delegate, while applauding his own country for its Constitution’s inclusion of women and minorities, represented, of course, a nation-state with a horrific recent history of displacing and slaughtering peoples not of the working class. But he did not mention this history as he argued, in the name of state sovereignty, against each and every United Nations article and resolution designed either to protect “displaced persons” from forced repatriation (and certain death) or to encourage asylum for political refugees.
After the United Nations Charter was signed, there were no instances in which the problem of statelessness was addressed with sanctions against Charter signatories or newly created states. When Israel, which had been created as a Jewish nation-state, was refusing repatriation –or “return”–to the Arab peoples of Palestine who had been made stateless refugees during the 1948 War of Independence, the United Nations passed its first resolution on the problem of the Palestinians, calling for their return to their homes. But this was ignored in Israel, in the name of state sovereignty. When the Soviet Union soon afterwards started persecuting its Jewish citizens and refusing them permission to emigrate to the newly established state of Israel, there were no sanctions against their policy, which they defended in the name of state sovereignty.
Hannah Arendt, in her essays in the late 1940’s on the problem of statelessness, in her commentaries on the specific problem of the Palestinian refugees from a sovereign Jewish nation-state, as in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, again and again focused on the problem of statelessness as the key roadblock to world politics and to world peace. Stateless people, by virtue of their existence, pointed to the fact that any individual and any people existing without a state’s protection had no rights. This made the stateless, as Arendt put it in Origins, “the most symptomatic people in the contemporary world” (p. 267). In a world where only sovereign states were acknowledged as guarantors of rights, no universal declaration of human rights could promise, nor any world organization enforce, “the right to have rights.”
A horrible paradox defined modern world politics: the revolutions that had demolished the authority of absolutist monarchies and destroyed the concept of the divine right of kings, giving birth to republics and constitutional monarchies, had not thereby created states in which all the inhabitants could be citizens and have a political life, or states which could be checked by other states if they did not grant citizenship and a political life to all, invoking their sovereignty to justify the exclusion. The revolutions had created instead, nation-states that could deprive whomever they wished of their civil rights –the freedoms of speech and beliefs, for examples– and their fundamental right to have rights, to be members of a polity.
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In Arendt’s view, the only answer to this paradox was more political life, including protest in all kinds of political forums against the paradox until it was resolved by statelessness becoming illegal and state actions making people stateless becoming punishable under enforceable national and international laws. In Arendt’s view, federated republics like the United States of America were the form of government most encouraging of political life, provided that they had two types of checks: checks among levels of government –municipal, state and national—and among federated states; and the external check on the republic itself of treaties and alliances with other republican governments (see Article 6 of the Constitution). Her ideal was maximal direct individual participation and maximally representative representation of the people –potestas in populo—from the local to the national levels in various kinds of associations and councils and in all the branches of governments and internationally via treaty commitments.
Only states approximating to this “checks and balances” ideal, plus accepting restrictions on their national sovereignty through treaties, could prepare the way for a true “comity of nations”. Such a comity of states would need to be itself a regional federation of states or a group of federations. Arendt was not an exponent of any kind of world-state, because she saw the potentiality for such a state to have no checks on its ability to render its citizens stateless and without any possibility of asylum elsewhere. But I think that she would have advocated a checks and balances republican order for any international organization, too (although she did not comment on this directly). That would mean that the United Nations would need a representative elected executive, a representative legislature (a criterion the United Nations Security Council did not meet), and a judiciary (a branch the original Charter did not create, although there is now an International Court, operating with international law, ratified by some of the current signatories, not including the United States).
The promise of the 18th century revolutions was, in Arendt’s view, more political life: the extension of political life to all, with citizenship for all being most conducive to world citizenship, not in the sense of citizenship in a world-state, but in the sense of all people having political formations through which they could have the possibility of expressing opinions about and acting on world political matters, matters common to all people, to humankind. Much of her work, then, was focused on asking why this promise was not kept. The Origins of Totalitarianism was her most comprehensive statement, for there she had, in sweeping strokes, told the story of statelessness –or more broadly, the story of exclusion from citizenship–after the late 18th century revolutions failed to address it; while On Revolution was her most thorough analysis of the problem in the 18th century revolutions themselves, particularly in America.
In Origins, Arendt had tracked the ramification of the problem in the overseas imperialisms of the 19th century European nation-states, contrasting Great Britain, which did not become fascist or totalitarian in the 20th century, with Germany, which did. These imperialist ventures of the rising capitalist bourgeoisie, financed with state investments and buttressed by state legal structures, had removed unwanted “superfluous” déclassé peoples –Arendt called them “the mob”–from European soil to make them the ruthless servants of capitalism abroad, which was dedicated to endless, limitless growth and infused with ideological visions of superior people controlling inferior people. The peoples in lands colonized became peoples with no right to their own homes or resources, ruled over without any political role, and, further, charged with racial inferiority.
The creation of two types of deracinated peoples –those employed by colonializing bureaucracies and those colonized and stateless—within this alliance of capitalism and nation-states was, in Arendt’s view, a template for what happened later on the continent of Europe. Groups of people were left stateless or made stateless by governments allied with capitalists (or, in the case of the Soviet Union, socialists) supporting and supported by pan movements –chiefly Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism. Bureaucratically managed land-grabs and wars advanced what she called “continental imperialism”; and these were the imperialisms that turned so lethal as totalitarianism in 20th century Germany and the Soviet Union. Great Britain could keep its persecutions largely overseas, out of its own state territory, so it was not inhabited by a huge number of stateless people who could be ruthlessly dehumanized. Also, its bureaucratic and military specialists in dehumanizing were living abroad, not acting out their brutalizing way of life within Britain itself.
In Arendt’s view, the defining characteristic of the 19th century imperialism of the European nation-states was that it denied all those whom it had deprived of their legal and political existences any possibility of such an existence, which meant any recognition of their humanity. This characteristic marked it off clearly from previous types of imperialism, and particularly from that of the Romans, which was an absorptive imperialism. The Romans gave conquered peoples a legal and political role in the Imperium. But the 19th century capitalist imperialists depended upon slave labor and colonial labor and the labor of the disenfranchised working classes—that is, the labor of people who were not citizens, not able to exercise their citizenship.
Totalitarianism, as it appeared in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s Soviet Union, in Arendt’s view, was the culmination of a process –not an inevitable one, but one that unfolded by ignoring, co-opting, or crushing, all opposition. As a process, it could only have been stopped, and could only be prevented in the future, by people dedicated to a single principle: that no one should be excluded from political life, which meant, in her cosmopolitan terms, from humanity. It is in the context of her critique of the sovereign nation-state devouring colonials and then its own people on its own soil that Arendt considered the Nuremberg category “crimes against humanity,” which the Nuremberg Charter had distinguished from “war crimes” and “crimes against peace” by indicating that they were crimes against civilian populations committed during wars as part of a systematic state policy against groups defined by their political, racial or religious identities. Agents of a state, the Nuremberg Charter had insisted, can be held responsible as individuals for the state’s criminal policy and execution of it. As state agents, the Nuremberg defendants had, Arendt agreed with the Charter, committed more than the crimes of deportation and murder, the crimes of uprooting and taking a life –or six millions lives, or twenty million lives. They had committed crimes against people having a political life as well as against people.
But a crime against humanity is also committed by a state –and the Nuremburg Charter had not called for trying states. A crime against humanity, Arendt argued, by going further than the stipulations and legal definitions offered by the Charter, “oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems” (Arendt/Jaspers, 1992, 54). The state breaks the legal system that constituted it as a state, rendering those it has attacked as well as (eventually) its own citizens without a political life –without a human community. If we understand as Arendt did that being human means exercising capacities and being engaged in activities that produce and sustain political life, then not only those who are made stateless but ultimately those who, caught in their own traps, make others stateless as well are cut off from their humanity, their being human.
This is what Arendt had meant by identifying totalitarianism as a novel form of government which has the consequence of eliminating politics. But she also argued that using atomic weapons is a novel form of war that can eliminate political life right along with life. Crimes against humanity are crimes against the possibility and promise of politics, against the fundamental human condition of plurality. As Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers, “individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but […] an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being” (Arendt/Jaspers 1992; 69).
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In speaking of a crime against humanity as an attempt to eradicate “the concept of the human being,” I think that Hannah Arendt was also saying something about human mental life and a way of thinking cosmopolitanly. And I would like now to explore that suggestion.
Particularly in Eichmann in Jerusalem and in her later reflections on that book in her last and unfinished book The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt argued that Eichmann was a thoughtless man, a man who did not –eventually even could not—think what he was doing as he organized the deportations and deliveries of Jewish communities to their deaths. He had no concept of human being –no thought connecting himself to other human beings, no sense of human community, and, in emotional terms, no shame at being a human being who could do what he did. The Nazi race doctrine, its “ideology of nature” (as Arendt termed it), set whole peoples outside of the human community, and what followed –by an ultralogicality–was the physical elimination of them. They obstructed what this ideology called an inexorable law of nature, therefore they should not exist. An ideology is a blockage of thinking, which turns thinking into not-thinking; it is itself a kind of crime against thinking, making thinking impossible for all but those who intentionally refuse the ideology. Feeling shame at the crime against thinking is almost impossible for all but those who intentionally hold fast to their idea of humanity, thinking it consistently.
But Hannah Arendt had never considered that a concept of the human being, or a concept of humanity, would in itself provide any protection to any human being. She felt it was crucial to have a category of “crimes against humanity,” but she did not think that humanity as a concept had any deterrent or sanctioning power, nor did she think that invoking humanity or trying to represent it in a world organization would guarantee human rights or prevent thoughtless state actors from committing crimes against humanity. Only more thoughtfulness, more people thinking and intentionally living this concept –and understanding what thinking is and how it is by its nature cosmopolitan or interconnecting of all people—could meet the paradox of thought that she described.
Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitanism did not take off from the usual theoretical formula that contrasts cosmopolitanism with state allegiance or patriotism or some kind of communitarian vision; she did not begin with an abstract , theoretical question about whether local allegiance and allegiance to humankind are incompatible. Rather, she took off from the concrete experience that each person’s humanity is dependent upon every person’s (and thus every state’s) refusal to commit a crime against humanity, a crime expelling persons or peoples from states and from the human circle, from humanity. Each person’s humanity is, in this sense, a microcosm of humanity. Or, as Arendt put this idea in one of her strongest statements of it, made in 1945 before the War had even ended :
For many years now we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human. This elemental shame, which many people of the most various nationalities share with one another today, is what is finally left of our sense of international solidarity; and it has not yet found an adequate political expression…[T]he idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others…” (See “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” Essays in Understanding).
There is an understanding of universal responsibility here that is quite different than Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which was framed legally, on the model, so to speak, of a legislating individual fabricating a legal system single-handedly: act so that the maxim of your action could be a law for all mankind. Arendt’s cosmopolitan way of thinking implies a responsible refusal to destroy the political life and the legal systems (local right on up to international) that genuine political life can produce. It is much closer to the so-called Golden Rule –do not do to others what you would not have them do to you—a Rule which has, in fact, appeared in some version in each and every culture in the world with a written tradition. This cosmopolitan Rule is a restraint, a “do not do,” particularly in the Confucian variant just cited, which is different than the active Judaeo-Christian form Kant knew, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Her thought might be expressed like this: do not act without taking responsibility for the right of all persons to act. This means that people should think and act to protect responsibly the conditions that allow them to think and act and be, thereby, a microcosm of what is hoped for all people. What way of thinking yields such a restraint, which is only imperative in the sense that it forbids legislating imperatives and concentrates on providing the conditions that allow people to think and act?
Late in her life, as she was writing the essays that she gathered into the first volume (“Thinking”) of her uncompleted trilogy The Life of the Mind, Arendt considered the implications for action implicit in Socrates’ description of thinking as a dialogue between me and myself. When we are thinking, we human beings are a “two in one” of internal dialogue and, as such, must refrain from acting in a way that would make it impossible for us to live with our internal other. Do not do what you could not live with yourself if you did. She calls this morality according to the “standard of the self,” not according to any preformulated rules offered by any moral systems– a Ten Commandments, for example, or a Categorical Imperative.
The “standard of the self” is, so to speak, a standard by which to judge any rules or imperatives: When you judge whether you could live with yourself if you did not refrain from killing this person (or refrain from advocating a murderous policy against that people), you are judging that the imperative “Thou shalt not kill” is too specifically an imperative. The standard of the self is, in the microcosm of the self, the standard that leads to the cosmopolitan refusal, which we can frame here as including a refusal to deny anyone the conditions in which it is possible to conduct a questioning interior dialogue and to act upon its answer –or conduct such a dialogue with another person with whom you are a “you and I together,” or, ultimately, with any other person in the “we” of humankind. Can we all live together –share the earth–if we do this deed, or if we do not refrain from this deed. “Thou shalt not kill” does not get you to this level of questioning.
Arendt’s “standard of the self” was formulated in distinction form Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and as part of her effort in The Life of the Mind to both build upon Kant’s work and go beyond it, noting what she thought were its inadequacies philosophically but also –and for her, just as importantly—politically. She viewed Kant as the great political philosopher of the period of the 18th century republican revolutions not just because of his political writings, but because he had analyzed the mind politically. He had analyzed the mind as a republic with three faculties (the very three that Montesquieu had discovered to be elementary to republics and monarchies): an executive (Reason), a legislature (Practical Reason), and a judiciary (Judgment). Each of the three faculties had been the subject of one of Kant’s Critiques, in which he had explored the faculties’ operations, purposes and limits (the checks they put upon themselves intrinsically), and he had systematically refused to give them as a whole or individually any divine source or guidance. This was a revolutionary philosophy, as Arendt fully appreciated, and also one that opened the possibility for philosophy to truly appreciate the political domain and not look upon it as a domain of mere opinion.
But Arendt thought that Kant had not really explored the faculties in their individual interior tensions, in their inter-faculty checks and balances and operating unities, or in their dealings with other people’s minds –as it were, their inter-republican affairs and treaties—although Kant had gestured at this last area when he explored how human beings as spectators together at political events share their judgments. Her own portrait in The Life of the Mind is of the mind as a Thinking, Willing, and Judging republic shows that no faculty rules over another or can function alone, and it shows that there is constant activity and interactivity and interactivity with other minds.
Kant had provided the revolutionary step of saying that the relationship of the three mental faculties is not hierarchical in the sense that one part is closest to the divine and derived from it. His revolution was against the entire Platonic tradition in which the mind was portrayed as a three-part hierarchy with divinely-derived reason ruling over spirit and appetites. This hierarchy, in turn, provided Plato a model for imagining an ideal polis, which would be hierarchical as well, with philosophers ruling as kings over an aristocracy of spirited guardians and lower class of appetitive artisans and laborers. Kant specifically, and radically, wanted to demonstrate that the reason Plato had attributed to his philosophers—and all philosophers since Plato had, in turn, claimed for themselves in terms indebted to Plato—could not do what Plato said it could do: unite itself and its objects in statements of absolute truth which could, in turn, be used to rule over others, to declaim the Truth. There is no divine right of the kingly reason to truth and to the use of claimed truths to rule. What human reason can do, Kant argued, is explore itself and trace its limits (having discovered what he technically called its antinomies), formulating regulative Ideas, but not truths.
Arendt took Kant’s renunciation of hierarchy as a starting point, but she then reconceptualized the three faculties, considering each more experientially or existentially, in terms of lived experience rather than formal operations. As a phenomenologist of the mind, she said we experience thinking as an interior dialogue; we experience willing as an “I will” and an “I will not” that must be reconciled before we can act (and the reconciliation is not a matter of practical reasoning); we experience various types of judging, including aesthetic judging and political and legal judging, as an “I sense it” or an “I like it” that we then approve or disapprove, reacting to ourselves and (crucially) anticipating the judgments of others, “wooing” their consent. We connect ourselves to other judging minds as citizens do in a public space where opinions are exchanged (or, in a court where arguments, intepretations, precedents, and opinions are exchanged and judgments made).
In Arendt’s analysis of mental experience or mental life, judging is the preeminently political faculty, not willing. Willing is always tempted to domination and must be restrained. Willing is restrained by thinking, which forbids the will to do a deed that thinking cannot live with, and by judging, which approves or disapproves on grounds of whether an imagined action will make connection with others impossible, whether it will preserve the world, preserve the relations among people, ultimately, preserve the human solidarity, in which judges can go on conferring and discussing. Judging is in-between thinking and willing and has responsibility for them. Judging is like a supreme court in a republic which can have responsibility for judging whether legislative actions are constitutional, that is, preservative of the republic as constituted. This definition of a Supreme Court was an innovation of the American republic. But it had taken nearly one hundred years after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified in America for the Supreme Court to be accepted as the branch having the responsibility of judging the constitutionality of laws passed by the legislature. Thus is it as difficult to see the ultimate significance of judging in the political domain as it is to grasp it in the life of the mind.
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Let me say in conclusion that I anticipate that you may think it odd that I have interpreted the macrocosm-microcosm analogy in Kant’s thought and in Arendt’s as no mere analogy, but as more like a homology. I have spoken very literally about a republican mind. But I have done so because I think that each way of thinking about the life of the mind, or analyzing one’s mental experience, suits one for being a citizen in a corresponding polity. Those who think of their reason as divinely derived and fitted for authoritarian rule in their minds want to live in a polity where divinely inspired reasoning beings rule—Plato’s ideal polis, which he actually hoped to institute by reforming the polis of Syracuse, where Dionysius was tyrant. Kant’s analysis of the mind led him to a contradictory pass: he applauded the overthrow of the French ancien regime –an overthrow as revolutionary as his Critique of Pure Reason. But as the formulator of the Categorical Imperative he could not, of course, want such a maxim of revolution to be the law for all mankind, as a law must, by definition, provide stability.
Hannah Arendt’s picture of the mind as three branches, each internally active, all three interactive and engaged with other minds, especially through judging, is a picture of a maximally participatory republic of harmoniously interacting, checking and balancing parts. She could only imagine the mind in this way, I believe, because she had experienced and focused her attention on statelessness – on loss of being at home in the world in the most human and humanizing way, that is, politically. This led her on to the question of what kind of thinking is most human and humanizing –and most protective against loss of human qualities and capacities, including capacities to think, will, and judge. In my opinion, she had learned that cosmopolitanism is not only a matter of the content of one’s thoughts about the unity of mankind, but of the way you think those
thoughts, the way you entertain them in your mind . Thiking in a republican fashion, as it were, is the very opposite of thinking in an authoritarian fashion or in a completely unthinking fashion in which the content of thoughts is just recited but not really thought.
Hannah Arendt was most deeply moved by the phenomenon of homelessness, of people without a place with other people –what she called in political terms statelessness, and in more general existential terms loneliness, being cut off from human community. She felt ashamed as a human being that human beings could inflict this condition on their fellows. I believe that it is also this deep feeling of shame that led her to an idea about cosmopolitan thinking –so interactive and engaged with others–that is ideally suited for imagining the cosmopoliltan political life, the life no human being should be denied.
