1. Hannah
Arendt is one of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth
century. It is hard to think of anybody else who wrote during the period of the
Cold War whose vision and insights remain as substantial, as interesting and as
free of ideological blinkers. Arendt was German Jewish political refugee who
arrived in New York in 1940 without English. At that time and for several decades
after, she declined to take up a full time position in the academy. However,
she was almost immediately recognised with the publication of her first major
book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and she was the first women
to be offered a professorship at Princeton and feted with many other awards and
offers. Yet, she largely went her own way without fixed institutional
affiliation for a long time, avoided the great ideological camps of the Cold
War, found it difficult to locate herself on the political spectrum and
established no school to consecrate her memory.
2. This, in
part, explains the fact that her work has not had anything like the influence
of say John Rawls within academic philosophy. For example, she would hardly
rate a mention in most courses on “contemporary” political philosophy. Up until
very recently I was the only philosopher to offer a course on her work in the
more than thirty years of my association as student and then lecturer with
Philosophy at Sydney. This neglect is indicative of several things. Arendt’s
work is hard to place Arendt within traditional disciplinary boundaries. Her
substantive ideas were also hard to reconcile with the dominant philosophical
tradition of the Anglo-American world. Against a political philosophy that has
largely reduced itself to normative issues like justice, retribution,
distribution and so on, Arendt still believed in the great tradition of
political philosophy that sought after the essence of politics and its
categories in the grand style and then throws in an account of historical
dynamics and a diagnosis of the times. She completely rejects the paradigm of
the social sciences and especially political science to focus on the
phenomenology analysis of everyday politics, of the meaning and significance of
key terms like action, promise, labour and power. As already mentioned, her
views do not fit easily within the prevailing political options available the
cultural climate of the Cold War. In a milieu pre-occupied with the
historical/ideological struggle between the great power blocks of Communism and
Capitalism, Arendt's political philosophy advanced a quite idiosyncratic view:
this was that both systems shared and advanced a common underlying logic, that
threatened that which was finest in human achievement--the capacity for world
creation, excellence and political action- in favour of heightened
functionality and consumption. This is not to say that Arendt ever equated
these two systems. For her, liberal democracy, especially in the United States
with its still surviving links to the historical republican tradition, and
despite all its shortcomings, was a serious defender of the political ideal of
freedom whereas the Communist systems sacrificed freedom to the creation of a
fully “socialized” man which for her, as you will see, had completely negative
connotations. Needless to say, this independence won her few friends amongst
the ideologically committed.
3. As recent
historical events have dissolved the political and ideological realities that
shaped much of the ideological and cultural options of my generation, it is
timely to take a backward glance at the work of Arendt who died in 1975. This
is not because I think she offers us clear solutions to our problems. This
could hardly be the case for a thinker who did not outlive the Cold War and who
thus could have had no inkling of the political and cultural physiognomy of the
contemporary world. Nor could it be said that Arendt offers a clear paradigm
for research in the empirical political science. As already mentioned, she
viewed the social sciences with scorn because their focus was the quantitative
and the regular. They therefore missed what for her was the vital ingredient of
all political action: novelty and the human capacity to initiate something
entirely new. She was equally critical of Hegelian metaphysics and Marxian
philosophy of history with its idea of a totalising dialectic. Arendt never
aspired to a system or pretended that she has solutions. Her invitation is not
to the discovery of definitive answers but to "thinking" in the sense
of critical, contemporary self-reflection. In Arendt's mind, the future is a
creative flux of political action for which there can be no guarantees or
certainties. As you will see, the role of philosophy in this constellation is
to shake up our prejudices, to look with fresh eyes on our everyday conventionalities.
I will say more about this next week.
4. It is fair
to say that no fully formed and obvious practical program emerged from her
critique of modernity. However, if we dismiss Arendt because she cannot provide
clear solutions or easily implemented practical programs we probably miss the
point. Arendt's own political message is also very much of our own time. I do
not say this because the question of refugees and human rights has become a
more and more contemporary issue or that a major contemporary political
philosopher like Giorgio Agamben has found her diagnosis of totalitarian
society so useful for the critique of a contemporary liberal democratic society
although both of these propositions are true. I would maintain that Arendt is
contemporary for the opposite reason. Today there appears no particular style
of political regime or socio-economic organisation that could be the single
clear solution to all our problems. One might even suggest that the very quest
for them is illusory. Whether such illusions are simply misguided, probably
dangerous or absolutely necessary, is a question I shall leave you to ponder!
5. Arendt is
very much in tune with a position I shall for want of a better term call
“critical humanism”. While she applauds human excellence and its many modern
achievements, she is very aware of our interconnectedness with others and our
fallibility. She therefore stresses human finitude and transience and our
embeddedness in a web of relations. Against the modern Promethean spirit that would
usurp the mantle of the divine, she reminds us that we cannot pretend to have
any privileged position in regard to our age and knowledge. For her, life
remains the most worthy topic of philosophical scrutiny: not the vitalist
“life” that pre-occupied Nietzsche, but just the common everyday life and its
remarkable potentials for creation, memory, promise and renewal. My main point
is that Arendt’s spirit that once was “untimely” has certain strong affinities
with the postmodern spirit of the present— she preserves the candle of liberty
and hopes for democratic renewal while being only too conscious of
fragmentation, contingency, of the failings of ideological straitjackets with
an awareness of constant shifts and discrepancies. If there is one key point that
separates her from the standpoint of “critical humanism’ as it has come to be
understood recently by thinkers like Tzvetan Todorov, it is that Arendt held on
to the value of the utopian moment in politics that she associated with the
revolutionary tradition. Somebody like Todorov rejects total revolution on the
grounds of the need for political responsibility in the light of crimes of this
tradition in the 20th century. As Arendt herself was not interested in
legitimating such political crimes, it should also be clear that for her the
utopian moment in politics was not just about political adventurism or
criminality but also about the ideals of politics and their meaning.
6. In any
case, what we do gain from Arendt's writings is a powerful and consistent vision
that fundamentally critiques the underlying dynamics of modern society and
questions its leading tendencies and ultimate prospects. Her narrative and
analysis of modernity presents a remarkably suggestive and vast historical
panorama of modernity's crisis in terms of a prodigiously labyrinthine
intersection of processes, events, action and ideas. Whether we ultimately
accept or reject it is less important that the fact that it is studded with
compelling ideas, interesting insights and commentary both on historical
development, contemporary social trends and the history of philosophy. The
great fertility, vitality and contemporaneity of Arendt’s vision are
demonstrated not just by the influence some of her ideas have exercised on key
contemporary political thinkers like Agamben. Her work has also produced a
veritable explosion of secondary works and articles in the last couple of
decades. In the geo-political and ideological crisis that has followed the
collapse of the Soviet Block and the end of the Cold War, Arendt has appeared
attractive to many as an alternative critical perspective on modernity. I have
already mentioned the renewed interest in human rights discourse and discussion
of refugees and asylum seekers. Not surprisingly with the enormous expansion of
feminist scholarship over the last twenty years there has also been an
increasing stream of interest from this quarter in Arendt. While she personally
declared herself no feminist, her deep sympathy for Nietzsche and Heidegger and
her marginal position as a critic of the entire philosophical tradition for its
scientisation of politics makes her very attractive to the mainstream of
post-structuralist feminism. In other words, today Arendt is the centre of
quite a bit of academic attention and several parties are vying to claim her
philosophical soul and inheritance.
7. I know
roughly the terrain I want to cover--this is Arendt's diagnosis of modernity
and the implications that flow from it. This involves a reading of Arendt's two
major works: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human
Condition (1958) with some ideas from On Revolution (1963). I will
use this background to rehearse Agamben’s recent reading of Arendt in Homo
Sacer (1998) and critique it. Although Arendt's oeuvre is considerable--and
all of it is brilliantly written and worth reading-- I will focus on these main
works because they present most systematically the key elements of her
diagnosis of modernity and her distinctive critique of the mainstream tradition
of political philosophy. I encourage you to read as much as you can of these
works as we go along. That way you are more likely to ask questions and contest
my idiosyncratic opinions.
8. Those
wanting to know more about Arendt's life should read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's marvellous
biography For Love of the World. She was student of Arendt and had the
benefit of not only being able to speak to Arendt but also to interview many of
her contemporaries who knew her well, and from a range of perspectives. However
I should mention a few facts about Arendt's biography at the outset just to get
us started. Her life has all the ingredients of a great movie and I said this
long before Margarethe Von Trotta’s recent effort which is worth seeing but
hardly does justice to the screenplay that’s in my head. Arendt was born in
1906 at Linden near Hanover but grew up in Konigsberg (the hometown of Kant who
remained an important influence. She was writing on him at the time of her
death in New York in 1975 --Judgement Volume 3 of The Life of the
Mind-- an attempt to recover a suppressed political philosophy encased in
the Kantian notion of judgment). She came from a middle class Social Democratic
Jewish family, her father died while she was young. Her mother studied music in
France and was an ardent social democrat. Arendt recalls how her mother taught
her to reject all anti-Semitic taunting. She showed early intellectual promise
and, unusually for a girl at this time, received a classical gymnasium
education and latter university studies at Berlin, Marburg and Heidelberg, the
latter to being the two great centres of Neo-Kantianism in the early twentieth
century. While only eighteen, Arendt spent a year at Marburg (1924) where she
came under the influence of Heidegger who she latter described at this time as
"the hidden King". He was at that time a relative unknown before the
publication of Sein und Zeit (1927). Arendt latter recalled that he
revealed to her the art of thinking. During her year at Marburg she and
Heidegger (seventeen years older and married) commenced an affair that
persisted for some time even after she moved on to habilitate with Karl Jaspers
in Heidelberg. (This was the work Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish
Woman). What is even more surprising and even tantalizingly open to
interpretation is that after the Second World War Arendt re-established contact
with Heidegger despite his Nazis past and played a significant role in his US
public rehabilitation by assisting him with translators and endorsments.
Arendt’s dissertation was interrupted by her first unsuccessful marriage to Günter
Stern (later Anders) in 1929 who came from a very prominent academic family. At
that time he was going to habilitate with the Frankfurt School but latter
became a journalist. They lived together at least for part of the early years
in immigration and his connections were vital in obtaining the papers that
allowed her to escape Europe in 194O. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 her
world turned upside down. Until that time Arendt was non-political but now
quickly became involved in anti-Nazis Zionist activities. She finally had to
flee Germany when the group with whom she was involved was discovered and she was
questioned by the Gestapo. It was this dramatic turn of existential
circumstances that turned Arendt's interests towards politics and political
theory. In Paris she became one of the millions of stateless persons she was
later to write about in The Origins of Totalitarianism. There she
worked for an organisation aiding the emigration Jewish children to Palestine.
It was there that she also became familiar with Walter Benjamin who was related
to Stern. In 1936 she met her second husband Heinrich Blücher who remained her
partner until his death in 1969. Blücher had been an active Sparticist and
Communist throughout the post-World War 1 revolutionary situation in Germany.
He finally rejected Communism in the face of the Bolshevisation of the
Comintern. However, he was deeply immersed in the politics of this period as an
actor, an autodidactic philosopher, and his perspective was an important
influence on Arendt's theoretical reconstruction of this epoch in the Origins. He never wrote but taught for
many years in New York both at the New School and at Bard College. The
Origins book is dedicated to him. Together they finally emigrated to the
United States in 1940 after spending several months in separate internment
camps in the south of France. When Paris fell Arendt had a brief opportunity to
escape from the camp at Gars in which she was interned with nothing but clothes
she was standing in, when the gates were momentarily opened. Only this
immediate decision allowed her to narrowly escape the fate of others in that
camp, who were latter shipped to Auschwitz. After her immigration to the US,
she quickly learnt English and found initial employment in the Jewish
publishing house Schocken. She was gradually able to support herself with
writings, fellowships and visiting lectureships. As mentioned, she never wanted
to become an academic professor. She had been shocked by the way in which the
German Academic community had fallen in behind Hitler and probably also because
she thought a marginalised position, the standpoint of the pariah gave her more
perspective and critical autonomy. Nevertheless, while what she called
the" flood" world history had sucked her into the maelstrom of events
and concentrated her intellectual attention on political issues, Arendt
remained adamantly a thinker rather than a person of action. In America from the
late forties to the early sixties she wrote the major works of concern to us.
After the Origins of Totalitarianism she was invited to lecture at
Princeton, University of Chicago and at University of California and became a
sort of public intellectual. In New York her and Blücher were at the centre of
a quite vital intellectual scene connected to left wing journals like Partisan. She was a very close friend of
the American novelist and later political activist Mary McCarthy. She frequently
returned to Europe to work, lecture and spend time with Jaspers and his wife from
the mid fifties. In the mid-sixties she found herself in a storm of controversy
when she decided to work as a journalist on the Eichmann trial. Her reports
were subsequently published as a book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil. Her view that the Jewish leadership in Europe could not
be completely absolved of some responsibility for the numbers killed in the
Holocaust created an enormous campaign against her by Jewish organizations and
political lobbies. In the late sixties she finally took an academic job at the
New School for Social Research in New York where she lived until her death in
1975. At the time, she was working on her The
Life of the Mind of which she only completed the first two volumes.
