hannah arendt 1906-1975. achievements understand experience of totalitarianism confront complicity...
TRANSCRIPT
Hannah Arendt 1906-1975
Achievements
• Understand experience of totalitarianism
• Confront complicity of political thought
• Develop new normative vision of political life
• Uncover real social existence of political ideas
• Construct social theory of modern political life
analysis of totalitarianism
• reference to Nazi and Stalinist movements and ‘states’ they established
• differences between Germany and Russia, e.g. private versus state property, superiority of Aryan race versus dictatorship of the proletariat;
• similarities e.g. terror and ideology, mass mobilisation, anti-state, anti-national, anti-rights, anti-bourgeois, anti-civil society.
Meaning of ‘origins’
• ‘origins’ more like ‘elements’ than causes – Antisemitism – Imperialism– Anti-imperialism– Disillusion– Nihilism
decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man
• collapse of the great multi-national empires after the First World War
• rise of nationalism
• dissolution of solidarity between the formerly oppressed nations
• looked like petty nationalist quarrels
Transformation of nation state after WW1
• enlightened idea of state: nation defined by virtue of common citizenship in a shared political community
• nationalist idea of state: no longer state that defines the nation but nation that defines state
• ‘decline of the nation-state’: transformation of state from instrument of law to instrument of nation
• division of state into four national elements: – state peoples– unequal partners– minorities– stateless peoples
Elements of the decline of the nation state
• imperialism,
• nationalism (anti-imperialist movements)
• intervention of western and communist powers
• minorities themselves
End of the Rights of Man
• displaced persons• treaties guaranteeing rights of minorities (only
nationals could be full citizens)• subordination of rights of individual to rights of national
self-determination • distrust of idea of human rights• “Everyone became convinced that true freedom, true
emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights.” (Arendt)
perplexities of the rights of man
• In origin indicated the inalienable dignity of each individual that no power could deny.
• In practice dependent on political infrastructure of nation-states
• Creation of new class of stateless persons who lacked the right to have rights
Arendt’s normative conclusion
• “antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism …have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity, while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.” (OT, ix)
Aphorisms from Arendt
• Let us not be tempted by • A) liberalism that ‘wheedles us with the voice of
common sense and nostalgia for a still intact past' • B) nostalgia to ‘take that which was good in the past and
simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion’ (OT pp. viii -ix)
• C) radicalism born out of ‘justified disillusionment with all existing values’
• D) wishful thinking: ‘Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal ... both are articles of superstition, not of faith’ (OT vii)
Nihilism
• “The `front generation' ... were completely absorbed by their desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture and fake life. This desire was so great that it outweighed in impact and articulateness all earlier attempts at a `transformation of values' such as Nietzsche had attempted... Destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values” (OT p.328).
Nihilism
• “Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with the prewar age ... is to overlook how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie” (OT p. )
Nihilism
• “Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest” (OT p.334)
Imperialism and Violence
• “Expansion for expansion's sake' became the political credo of the bourgeoisie, a concept which was not really political at all, but had its origin in the realm of business speculation” (OT p. 125)
• “Imperialism was the first stage in the political rule of the bourgeoisie” (OT p.138)
• “What was new was not the use of violence as such, but that violence now became the aim of the body politic and would not stop until there was nothing left to violate” (OT?)
Mass society and totalitarianism
• 'the term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers or indifference or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional associations or trade unions' (p.311)
• ‘breakdown of the old party system transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into on great unorganised, structureless mass of furious individuals' (p.315).
Idea of mass man
• “a new form of selflessness, a new feeling of being infinitely expendable”
• `the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomised society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class' (p. 317)
difficulties of understanding
• rupture with all ideas of progress or of Europe as a civilised community
• our existing political concepts insufficient for understanding (EU:302)
• Inadequacy of social science: assumption of rationality – i.e. that terror can be understood through a means - ends calculus
The camps
• “It is not only the non-utilitarian character of the camps themselves – the senselessness of “punishing” completely innocent people, the failure to keep them in a condition so that profitable work might be extorted from them, the superfluousness of frightening a completely subdued population – which gives them their distinctive and disturbing qualities, but their anti-utilitarian function, the fact that not even the supreme emergencies of military activities were allowed to interfere with these “demographic policies”. It was as though the Nazis were convinced that it was of greater importance to run extermination factories than to win the war” (EU:233)
The camps
• “The gas chambers did not benefit anybody. The deportations themselves, during a period of acute shortage of rolling stock, the establishment of costly factories, the manpower employed and badly needed for the war effort, the general demoralising effect on the German military forces as well as on the population in the occupied territories – all this interfered disastrously with the war in the East, as the military authorities as well as Nazi officials… pointed out repeatedly… And the office of Himmler issued one order after another, warning the military commanders… that no economic or military considerations were to interfere with the extermination programme” (EU: 236)
Limits of social science
• If we assume that most of our actions are of a utilitarian nature and that our evil deeds spring from some “exaggeration” of self-interest, then we are forced to conclude that this particular institution of totalitarianism is beyond human understanding. (EU:233)
Non-rational
• Why this micro-world in which ‘punishment is meted out without connection with crime… exploitation is practised without profit, and … work is performed without product’? (OT:443)
• Why these spaces in which ‘the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organised with a view to the greatest possible torment’? (OT:445).
• The only category that seems to make sense of this world is senselessness
concept of ‘totalitarianism’
• Arendt not the first to use concept of totalitarianism • Gentile before the war in a positive mode• Political philosophy after the war to indict Communism
and Nazism and whole tradition of utopian social engineering whose origins traced back to Plato, Hegel and Marx.
• Political scientists to denote illiberal political systems which annihilate all boundaries between the state, civil society and individual personality.
• In Cold War used in an ideological way to indict twentieth century Marxism and to justify liberalism as if it had no relation to totalitarianism
Arendt’s use of the concept of totalitarianism
• not top-down type of political system but rather imaginary identity of total domination and total freedom
• it is not the success of totalitarianism that led to ‘escalating orgies of destruction’, but rather its repeated failure
• “until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed” (OT:459).
• Not a structure of total domination but a movement which demands that any limit on its freedom must be destroyed.
• the way people present themselves should not be confused with who they are: not only when people present themselves as all-good but also as all-powerful.
• The lebensraum theory of the Holocaust, that it can be explained in terms of the ambition of Nazis to ‘Germanise’ the east, forgets it was the failure of the ambition that led to the extermination of Jews.
Megalomania
• “The state is the march of God on earth”
On Revolution
• Modern idea of revolution – No longer cycle of planets– But new beginning – Freedom as its raison d’être
Three moments of the revolutionary tradition
• French Revolution
• American Revolution
• Lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition
French Revolution
• Two revolutions: political and social • Political – liberation from old regime• Social liberation from material want
• Political – natural solidarity and exchange of opinions
• Social – artificial solidarisation and singular ‘voice of the people’ identified with unanimous cry for bread
French Revolution
• Conception of ‘the people’ rooted in interpretation of Rousseau’s ‘general will’
• ‘A multi-headed monster, a mass that moves as one body and acts as though possessed by one will’
• ‘the value of individuals should be judged by the extent to which they act against their own interest and for the god of all’
French revolution
• ‘every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads to terror’ (112)
• Nothing more ‘obsolete… futile… dangerous’ than to ‘attempt to liberate humankind from poverty by political means’ (114)
• ‘liberation from necessity because of its urgency will always take precedence over the building of freedom’ (112)
• ‘nothing deprives people more effectively of the ‘light of public happiness’ than poverty
French Revolution
• Tear the mask of hypocrisy off society and celebrate ‘the unspoilt honest face of le peuple’
• World of universal suspicion and denunciation
• General will as the enemy of all public life
French revolution
• Transform the malheureux into the enragés
American revolution
• Forgotten links between right and revolution
• Representative form of government
• Constitutional framework
• Restoration of natural liberties
American revolution
• Defend private realm against public power
• But no guarantees for the rights of public life
• ‘what we today call democracy is a form of government where the few rule, supposedly in the interest of the many… and public happiness and public freedom … become the privilege of the few’
American revolution
• Only the representatives, not the people, have the opportunity to engage in those activities of ‘expressing, discussing and deciding which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom’ (235)