Arendt Lect 8 (cont)& Lect 9:

5. In her discussion of the determinants of world alienation Arendt gives pride of place to the theoretical alienation immanent to the project of modern science. For her, world closure and the reformation may have determined the course and development of modern society but this is of "minor significance" compared to the "earth alienation" presupposed in modern science. Arendt writes in the wake of the atomic age, entry into the space age and anticipated developments in the biological sciences. She clearly believes that theoretical alienation is ultimately likely to have even more far-reaching consequences for the human condition than the staggering changes already produced by the world alienation of modernity. But these recent developments have their antecedents in much earlier times. Arendt traces this theoretical alienation as reflected in the history of philosophical ideas. The early breakthroughs of modern science were almost immediately registered in the changed mood of contemporary early modern philosophical consciousness. For Arendt this epochal change of consciousness is marked by a pervasive pessimism (HC273). Arendt sees here an important affinity between this new mood and the other dimensions of alienation shaping the physiognomy and spirit of modernity.

6. At first sight, it might appear that the difference between the world alienation arising from global exploration and theoretical alienation related to the de-anthropomorphised perspective of modern science is merely quantitative. The first presupposes the distantiation from immediate surroundings while the second announces the attainment of an Archimedean point, an external perspective first codified in the adoption of the heliocentric world view and later by the centerless one of relativity theory. However, what is decisive for Arendt is the qualitative aspect. The unification of the classical dichotomy of earth and sky under the perspective of truly universal laws of nature facilitates not just mastery of nature but the future imitation of the formerly exclusively divine creative power. This is the capacity to initiate and import cosmic processes into nature (HC268-69). For Arendt, what lies behind these gains to human knowledge and power are the beginnings of nihilism. Galileo's discoveries with the aid of the telescope lead directly to Cartesian doubt. The inadequacy of human senses leads to a blow to human confidence in the world. Truth does not necessarily reveal itself nor are the objective qualities of nature "given". The result is the nightmare of universal doubt. This signifies not just the loss of our capacity for truth, faith and the testimony of the senses or reason but the certainty that formerly went with all of these (HC277). This loss of certainty leads to a pronounced subjectivist turn. There is a new zeal for truthfulness rather than truth, reliability rather than reality (HC279). Yet the new introspective turn harbored it’s own immanent problems. While the reality of our thinking is confirmed, it does not bridge the gap between consciousness and the reality of the world (HC280). Instead of confirming the objective qualities of nature, now all that is confirmed is the reality of the processes of consciousness, all that we find is ourselves (HC261). Thus the great paradox of the discovery of the Archimedean point and of modern science is that the external perspective turns out to be the most internal. Theoretical alienation has entrapped us entirely in a world that is of our own making.

7. For Descartes, mathematics becomes the ideal knowledge for modern science. It frees us from the shackles of our earthbound sense experience; its symbolism allows us to grasp those dimensions and concepts that had formerly been thought of as negations or limits of the human mind; it opened the way to experiment by allowing nature to be placed under conditions of the human mind expressing a universal standpoint. However, this type of knowledge is produced by the human mind itself. Arendt reinforces this point by demonstrated the changed meaning of common sense. It now becomes an inner faculty with no relation to reality. Thinking is conceived not as internal dialogue but as a mode of computation, the mind playing with itself (HC283). In other words, both common sense and thinking have lost their essential multi-perspectival aspect that required reason be anchored in plurality and public confirmation. As Arendt views it, this is the culmination of world alienation. Descartes nightmare of an illusory world persists in the suspicion that the symmetry between the man-made mathematical worlds of astro-physics and the physical universe may turn out to be a symmetry produced only by the human mind (HC286). Arendt understands this as a deep cultural predicament expressing the worldlessness of modern man. We have certainly increased our power of acting and making. However, this has been bought at the great cost of an inability to escape ourselves and actually experience what we are not (HC288). We increasing rely on experimental and technical instruments that present us with a nature that is inconceivable, unthinkable and cannot be represented (HC288).

9. For Arendt, the progress of world alienation in the form of theoretical alienation comes under the heading of the modern reversal of contemplation and doing. The ancient theoretical ideal of a passive reception and wonder (Thaumazein) before the revealed truth of being was overturned in favor of the realisation that truth must be won through active interference in the forms of experimentation and introspection. This reversal was instigated by the lost of faith in our senses which motivates Cartesian universal doubt and the subjective turn inwards. The consciousness of the early modern age is dominated by the typical attitudes of Homo Faber (HC305). That "man is the measure of all things" is the slogan of the age and this was expressed in a constellation of typical attitudes and preoccupations. The old cosmic notions of harmony and simplicity give way to an instrumentalised view of the world. Nature becomes an immense material at the service of our ingenuity and for our use. With it an emphasis on tools and productivity, the rationalist conviction that all problems can be solved by reason and human motivations can be reduced to questions of utility (HC305). The vita activa conquers the vita contemplativa. Yet this hegemony of Homo Faber was only short lived. The defeat of contemplation liberated the potentials of another earlier cultural reversal whose potential consequences had been held in check by the dominance of contemplation. This reversal is the Christian prioritisation of life over world in place of the classical subordination of the individual life to the preservation of the polis (HC320). The co-incidence of these two reversals, the combination of the hegemony of the vita activa with the Christian orientation not to the world but to life itself that opened up the historically novel path of a society primarily devoted to labour and no higher end than life-itself. But how do we get from the Christian concern for eternal life to consumer society? Christian culture replaced the classical citizen’s devotion to the collective public life of the polis with the concern for their eternal individual life while reinforcing the classical priority of the contemplative life. When scientific skepticism undermined contemplative knowledge in favor of instrumental rationality, the ambient Christian context funneled the fully emancipated vita activa toward the goal of life. However, an increasingly secular society interpreted this not as the life of the soul but as collective life, the life process, laboring and materialism.

10. Arendt is even disinclined to attribute the last phase of this constellation of complex historical shifts --from the hegemony of Homo Faber to the victory of animal laborans --primarily to economic forces (HC307). Again Arendt strives to distinguish her analysis from Marx. She argues that Homo Faber succumbs to the priority accorded to processuality in the modern age. However, this priority is not just a product of commercial society and the dominance of exchange value but of the scientific and philosophical revolution of the epoch. These cultural revolutions incorporated man into the two all-encompassing processes of nature and history. Having retreated from the aspiration to know the essence of nature, human reason could now only console itself with a power derived from an understanding of the "how" of these processes, a knowledge of the operative laws regulating natural processes. The paradigm of process seemed especially fruitful for history and human affairs. The processes of inner life discovered in the passions through the new method of introspection could serve as standards and rules in the domain of politics and morality (HC299).

11. For Arendt, a striking index of this change was Bentham's interpretation of the principle of utility. The idea of use presupposes a world of use objects by which man is surrounded and in which he moves. This was the very quintessence of the worldview of Homo Faber. The Benthamite reinterpretation of principle of utility as the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" redirected attention towards hidden processes without visible profile nor need for public confirmation. The world of shared use objects is abandoned in favor of an alleged shared identity of calculable sensations. Arendt sees two great contemporary advantages of this shift. Firstly, was the introduction of mathematical calculation into the moral sciences. Secondly, the certainty of the introspective method that allowed no doubt as to the veracity of experience (HC309). Consequently utility lost its relation to use object and products. It became immured in the processes that could have no other measure than the silent calculus of egoism. The ultimate standard of utility was no longer objects but a calculable sensate individual happiness. Usefulness now referred only to what lessened pain and enhanced pleasure. Yet even a theory of utility that finds its end in individual happiness is, according to Arendt, only a way station, a superficial appearance obscuring the deeper reality. All early modern affirmations of the power of egoism and self-interest were crude fronts for the more potent principle of life itself. The mark of the in-authenticity of modern hedonism was its failure to offer a radical defense of suicide (HC311). Surely, if modernity had been really serious about hedonism, suicide would have been defended in all situations where pain overwhelmed pleasure without prospect of respite. However, in the last resort, the interest of the individual and the interests of the community were always referred back to and equated with the life in its particular or species form as the highest good (HC311-312).

12. Here Arendt sees real irony. Despite the demise of Christian faith under the impact of modern secularization, there has been no challenge to the Christian priority of life as a self-evident truth (at least, until recently). While the immortal soul has not survived secularization and today what matters is life as the highest good, nor could it be said, strictly speaking, that modern man has attained worldliness. This is really the climax of her theory of world alienation. Marx believed that the self-alienated working class only had to take back the material powers of the modern productive forces into its own hands in order to take possession of a world of freedom and abundance. Here modern science as the leading productive force would be crucial. Arendt, on the other hand, argues that no matter which attitude modern man adopts to his world he has not found security and contented worldliness. Assuming the uncritical optimism of modern science requires earth alienation to the external standpoint that almost annihilates human significance. Ascribing to pessimistic skepticism led to uncertainty regarding the reality of the world and man's retreat into himself. With the rise of society only life process in the form of consumption, labour, classes and interests has triumphed. Not even the realisation of Marx's utopian society would improve this outcome. Arendt believes that "socialised man" signifies only more of the same. Alienation signifies the impoverishment of man. For Arendt, a society devoted to the perpetuation of labour and life in the modern form of jobholding and consumption is a species existence: it is a world with diminished, homogenised human experience, lacking individuality, plurality and meaning. This is a world that no longer values contemplation, which understands thinking as reckoning, where action is largely reduced to behavior and, making, because it does not produce worldliness, is deformed into another species of labour ring. Arendt is not asserting that modernity has actually succeeded in expunging all trace of higher human attributes, activities and the spaces in which they flourish. However, she is undoubtedly serious in indicating what she views to be the threatening trends of modernity and asking us for a thoughtful reassessment of where they might lead.

Lecture 7: Arendt's Account of the Human Condition (cont) & Lecture 8: World Aliention

17. This provisional account of some of the major elements in Arendt's causal explanation of the rise of the social helps explain her hostility to its consequences. She views the social as the bearer of leveling demands (HC39). Thus Rousseau's explorations of intimacy is no reaction against public life but a rebellion against the intrusion of leveling social demands into the formerly private realm of the household where citizens had formerly been protected from the glare of publicity. The leveling demands of the social are a displacement of the domestic command of the patriarchal head of the house that individuals act as members of one big family into the new realm in the shape of a social conformism of one interest and one opinion (HC39). This displacement is explained by the domination of the social by the rhythms of life processes formerly confined to the household. Public existence has not changed the fundamental character of these processes. The realm of necessity does not somehow undergo a sudden metamorphoris and become a source of freedom. To the contrary, necessity possesses a driving force unmatched by the so-called higher desires and aspirations of man (HC70). As Tocqueville already well understood the urgency of life-processes give them a decisive advantage in the struggle for hegemony over man. However, when this urgency is coupled with the homogeneity of life as mere species existence, we can understand the monolithic character of the social. To reduce individuals to their species life as totalitarianism did is to annihilate individuality and threaten the diversity, unpredictability and spontaneity that is the core of humanity. For Arendt, the rise of the social and its contemporary hegemony threatens to realise such a barbaric outcome without explicit violence or terror. When every individual is driven by similar economic motives, when we all define ourselves as jobholders, consider this activity primarily as a way of sustaining our own life, where the modern division of labour continuously extinguishes skill in favour of undifferentiated labour power, where our aspirations are dominated by homogenous consumption and our life-world convulsively mobilised by dynamic social processes which appear irresistible and beyond human control, there is such a threat. These are just a few of Arendt's examples of a rising tide of homogeneity. The modern celebration of labour as the motor of our own human self-creation simply fails to recognise the silent victory not of humanity but of life, not of freedom but of the necessity of life-process, of our subtle reconquest by nature in the form of a highly technicised and fabricated monolithic species-life. For Arendt, the extent of this despotism of the social can be measured by the degree to which the political realm itself has been reduced to merely a function of the social. The fact that modern politics is largely pre-occupied with economic issues demonstrates that the classical realm of freedom is now under the sway of a necessity where men do not appear as actors with opinions but as interest groups whose behaviour can be predicted with statistical accuracy on the basis of function, social status and the ideologies to which these subscribe.

18. While Arendt acknowledges that the modern private realm has been enriched by modern individualism and no longer bears the stigma of "privation", she does not count this as sufficient gain to offset these costs of the rise of the social. Arendt is also highly suspicious of modern individualism. Its Christian and bourgeois roots infuse it with a self-regarding and inward looking orientation that renders it radically subjectivist, moody, neither at home in society nor able to live outside it and rent with internal conflicts and disquiet that distinguishes it from classical individuality. The latter may have lacked this intricate depth, but it was saved the accompanying perpetual self-doubt and driven by the simple aspiration to public performance and communal recognition in great deeds and fine words. Thus it is not surprising that she interprets the inwardness of modern individualism itself as a retreat from the pressures of the social. Not only has the modern social imperialised and functionalised the public, reducing public space and distorting public performances, but it has also scaled the walls of the private, which made it the domain of respite and seclusion. Arendt views the modern development of intimacy as a defensive reaction on the part of modern individuals to the invasion of the social. Lacking a tangible objective space of its own, the social also invaded the private. Bourgeois modernity is characterised by the manifest increase of social pressure anticipated in the work of Rousseau. Arendt views the pressure of "rank" in the late feudal society of the 18th century, "class" in the middle of the 19th, or "function" in the middle of the 20th, as a continuum. Only the marginalised can escape the progressive absorption into society (HC41). As Arendt sees it, what intimacy provides by way of cherished interludes, is but a momentary release from the loneliness of the masses.

Lecture 8: World Alienation

 

1. I have already intimated that Arendt views a loss of worldliness as one of the chief characteristics of modernity. She takes over this concept from Heidegger for whom it has a very precise philosophical meaning. For him, the world is not a thing, nor does it consist of things. The coherence of the world is not explained by the real connection of real beings and things. Rather, the world’s coherence issues from the significance, which Dasein (Heidegger’s term for the finite, culturally located, conditioned and dependent individual) derives from the relations and their possibilities in which he is a priori embedded. These possibilities belong to this finite and dependent being and are the product of their anticipated relations with the possible things and other beings with whom they are co-located. This articulated web of reference relations in which and from which Dasein refers himself constitutes an ontological structure that Heidegger designates worldliness. The horizon of this world is a transcendental in the sense that it constitutes a framework of meaning that it so familiar we don’t even notice it. The world is comfortable for Dasein because it expresses a typical manner of being in the presence of others that takes it’s bearing from the everyday standards of the public. This concept of worldliness is important for Heidegger because it stands at the crux of his critique of the western philosophical tradition. This tradition, as far as he is concerned, has stripped the world of its worldly character in order to objectivise it into a sum of mere material substances located in indifferent space. In this way, from the beginning of philosophy theory has passed over the world in favour of an abstract nature but this presupposes Dasein to be worldless and ignores the fact that this significant reference whole is the presupposition of all investigation in relation to which all other inquiries are secondary and derivative. Arendt takes over the general conceptual contours of this analysis and makes it the basis of a critique of Marx. She wants to expand the orbit of alienation and find its sources deeper in the cultural dynamics that produced modernity. We live a society of labourers and jobholders. A society preoccupied with the consumerist values of the life-process that has ignored the importance of the creation of a lifeworld that is durable and objective, that provides for spaces and activity which reinforce human plurality and the higher capacities that encourage human meaning and individual distinctiveness. Unlike Marx, she is reluctant to fix the source of all the fundamental problems of modernity in economic relations. On the basis of her analysis of totalitarianism, it is already clear that she attributes a great deal of responsibility for the crisis of modernity to the bourgeoisie and it championing of the values of labouring and the social. However, in the final chapter of The Human Condition Arendt attempts to construct a new theory of alienation that locates the source of the crisis of modernity more broadly in she calls "world alienation".

 

2. Arendt's fundamental charge against Marx is that he was too closely aligned to the spirit of the modern age. He shares the modern age's "extreme subjectivism"(HC254). His concern for the economic is fixated in the domain of life and the rhythms of labour and consumption that increasingly threaten the world and human plurality. This shared spirit is manifest in the Marxian reading of alienation as "self-alienation". On this reading, the modern pursuit of accumulated capital leads to the creation of an alien world of commodities that dominates and controls its creators. The worker loses him/herself in the very act of labour as the self loses control over the process, does not own the product and is compelled to conform to externally imposed rhythms and goals. Marx suffers from the subjectivist illusion of mastery that the problem is to bring this entire process under the control of the worker. You will remember that the idea that “everything is possible” is one of the fantasies of the totalitarian imagination. Her point will be that while the worker is an actor, he/she is a conditioned being and can never hope to master this process as if they could be the measure of all things. Reflecting on the origins of capitalism, Arendt argues that Weber was much closer to the truth: the enormous everyday activity of capitalism was not generated by material aspirations and a being-at home-in-the-world but by otherworldly considerations stemming from "worry and care about the self" (HC254). The hallmark of the modern age is not man's new confident self-assertion within the world but rather the suspicion, outrage and despair that throws him back entirely on himself. On this Arendtian reading, the problem is not the loss or distortion of self but the radical turning in on the self which has multiple causes but which generally reflects a loss in confidence in, and place within, the world. This latter mood also issued in a programme of individualist self-assertion and attempt at world mastery culminating in the thought that "everything is possible". It is Arendt's contention that this is a compensatory reaction to human insecurity and the sense that man no longer has a home, a secure place in the world. The inner core of the crisis of modernity is a retreat into the self in the face of a pervasive cultural experience of alienation from the world.

3. The historical determinants of this experience of world alienation are the events of global exploration, the ex-appropriation of church lands and peasantry in the Reformation and the new science. For Arendt, these are "events" in the sense of great historical turning points that could neither be foreseen nor predicted: she is not interested in historical causality. These events ruptured the chains of everyday causality and set in train consequences which nobody could have foreseen or foretold. The furthermost thing from the mind of the great explorers would have been the shrinkage and closing in of the world. Nevertheless, the consequence of their discoveries was the conquest of space. We are now inhabitants, not of countries but of the earth (HC250). However, to be an "inhabitant" does not mean to be at home. On the contrary, the great discoveries of this period of exploration were prefigured by the modern aspiration to survey the world. As she remarks, ‘nothing can remain immense if it can be measured’ (HC250). Yet already this surveying capacity presupposes an alienation effect whereby humans disentangle themselves from all involvements and from things close at hand. It requires that they distantiate themselves (HC251). The achievements of Renaissance exploration were bought at the cost of a theoretical alienation from immediate earthly surroundings. This was brim full of consequences.

4. The Reformation is another decisive determinant of world alienation. As already mentioned, Arendt attributes the spirit of Capitalism not to worldly but to other worldly motives. The spirit of asceticism crucial to primitive accumulation came from Calvin and Luther's efforts to construct a Christianity uncompromising in its otherworldliness: enjoyment in the things of this world was denied for the sake of the world to come. This new religious ethos provided the spirit of perpetual accumulation while the acts of ex-appropriation provided an immediate reservoir of untapped wealth to be fed into it and a new ready source of labour power to exploit. This ex-appropriation was ‘the greatest single factor in the breakdown of the feudal system’ (HC252). The Reformation is responsible for a two-dimensional alienation. Firstly, the Christian concern for the eternal soul alienates the individual from immediate this-worldly satisfaction. This spirit both fuelled and compounded the physical uprooting of large strata of the population now deprived of their sense of secure worldliness in the shape of ancient feudal rights to tenancy and commons. This loss of worldliness is the forerunner of the homelessness and mass statelessness that traumatised the 20th century.

Lecture 7: Arendt's Account of The Human Condition (cont)

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9. Thus far, with her nomination of a hierarchy of human activities and their corresponding conditions, of life, worldliness and plurality, Arendt has supplied an incomplete interpretative framework for an analysis of modern experience. Nevertheless, she has at least pointed out that the activities of labour, work and action constitute a human world. Each activity has an indispensable role to play in human life. Labour sustains life and its reproduction, work forms a human artifice that becomes a home for man and action makes life meaningful and constitutes a sense of personal identity and distinction. Arendt also demonstrates the interdependence of these activities: each presupposes the other and makes the others possible. Thus without labour and its reproduction of life neither work nor action would be possible, while work and action provides a world and the meaning that makes human life both secure and something distinguishable from the mere circularity of biological processes. Arendt even allows that it is possible for the higher activities to assume the characteristics of lower ones if they become routine as when they are annexed to the domain of jobholding. Despite this interdependence, Arendt still wants to affirm the autonomy of each distinctive activity. To confuse these specific activities or to think that the standards and aims of one can simply be applied to the other in the way that modern political philosophy has done is to invite disaster. Modernity threatens to take this road by translating the criteria of labour into the domain of work and the criteria of work as a sort of making into the domain of action and politics. Finally, Arendt claims that while all these activities are vital, they are not equally human in a value sense. For her, the respective activities are hierarchically ordered in terms of human value by the degree of freedom involved and the sense of a human reality confirmed by them. Politics is the most free because it transcends both the necessity and violence that characterises the household and the domain of fabrication.

10. Arendt’s phenomenology of the fundamental activities of the human condition is not just a hierarchy of practices but also of spaces. Human activities are not usually undertaken indiscriminately without due regard to their appropriate settings. To fill out this dimension of her phenomenology she returns to the classical world. The ancient life-world was divided between the oikos (household) and the polis (public sphere). Despite their desire to escape from the burdens of political life, neither Plato nor Aristotle doubted the distinction between the private and the public and the subordination of the former to the latter (HC37). For the Greeks the realm of the household, the sphere of the privacy, was one of privation. A life confined to the household is not a fully human life: it does not allow for the full realisation of human capacities. The household is not a domain of equality, nor therefore do its permanent inhabitants have the opportunity to demonstrate their excellence either in speech or action. This explains why the private was held in contempt. The household is a natural community born of the necessity to reproduce life. Men overseer the reproduction of the material means of life while women are preoccupied with the reproduction of the species (HC30). Yet, the very necessity of this reproduction reinforces the futile circularity of the process that ends only in human mortality. This sense of futility is a burden that gives rise to an institutional sphere in which men can excel in a fully human manner by striving for immortality. However, release from the cares of necessity presupposes that women and slaves will attend to the necessities of life. Necessity can only be mastered by violence. The use of violence in the mastery of necessity explains why the household is a pre-political sphere of inequality, why its relations were not based on equality or justice. The private sphere has no law or justice because here the head of the house exercises an absolute total authority. Arendt argues that it was only long after the collapse of the ancient polis and the feudal expansion of the household to encompass the entire state that justice entered the realm of the private (HC34). This, however, is an important concession because it demonstrates that Arendt acknowledges the essential historicity of these distinctions and their content.

11. While the domain of the household has a subordinate position in relation to public life, it still fulfils an absolutely vital societal function. The household was a sacred place where natural events like birth and death, impenetrable to human knowledge, were appropriately hidden (HC62). The fact that without a household the individual could neither be a citizen nor participate in the affairs of the world reinforced this sanctity (HC29). In the classical world the oikos and polis exist in a relation of complementarity: the former was the indispensible precondition for latter, not just in terms of functional dependence, but even in terms of meaningfulness. The very idea of freedom is meaningless without a realm of necessity. The exposure of the public also requires a sphere of retreat, of renewal and nurture. However, the obvious complementarity of the private and the public in the classical world does not exclude the already mentioned reality of their tension and opposition. The rise of the polis was at the expense of the family and the private sphere; all organised units based on kinship had to be dissolved to make way for the polis (HC24). This opposition leads to the value hierarchy already noted. The Greek notion of man as zoon politikon implies much more than the idea that humanity is a social animal. More than a natural association imposed by biological need (HC 24), this idea presupposed the capacity for political organisation as a second artificial realm of human affairs, excluding the useful and necessary, devoted purely to excellence and immortality.

12. Arendt views the household as an indispensible foundation, of both inescapable necessity and futility. Its opposite is the glorious classical polis. In her beautiful, if one-sided phrase, the polis was "organised remembrance". Here the futility of the biological life process was challenged by a collective quest for freedom and transcendence. Great deeds and words were immortalised in collective memory. Note Arendt’s emphasis on transcendence: it reinforces her view that humanity cannot be exhaustively defined, that humanity by definition signifies a new beginning and cannot abide unfreedom. The quest for immortality, overcoming the futility and necessity of mortal life, is the deepest societal motive of the institution of the polis (HC 56). To leave the household also demands courage (HC36). The polis required a devotion of one's life to public affairs, the courage to leave behind comfort and pleasure, the potential sacrifice of life itself to a collective enterprise and fellowship. The "good life" was not only "better" and more "noble" than ordinary life: it was qualitatively different. It signified the mastery of the necessities of biological life expressed in the innate urge to survive (HC37). This motive of triumph over necessity gives shape to the defining qualities of public life. Arendt understands these as publicity and commonality (HC50-52). In the polis, citizens appear amongst others. Far from this appearance being the mark of an inferior reality bound up with transience, she views it as the only way of securing reality. We have already seen in her analysis of the atomisation of the mass individual that the loss of normal social relations leads to the diminution of common sense and disorientation. Our feeling for reality, she argues, depends upon appearance for others. This generates common sense by processes of recognition, discussion and confirmation (HC51). A world apparent to all is also a common world. Unlike our privately owned place, we share the public realm with other citizens. This provides the public realm with a pronounced "objectivity" that consists in the fact that this single shared domain is exposed to a multitude of perspectives (HC57). The common world presents itself simultaneously from innumerable perspectives. Far from imposing its own uniform vision, Arendt views the public realm as a guarantor of human plurality. Ideally in this realm all dimensions and aspects of common concerns get a full airing. The bourgeois retreat from the public into the private world deprives individuals of multiple perspectives and entraps them in the singular vision of their own subjectivity (HC58). To reinforce this perspective Arendt mentions that while the modern notion of intimacy signifies its discovery of the intensity of private feelings, we have bought this at the expense of the assurance of reality (HC50).

13. Multiple perspectives are not simply a consequence of natural difference but a product of the artificial world that is public space. Natural diversity in the space of the family does not give rise to pluralism. Only a structure of human artifice can create a space that both relates and separates. The polis as institution had a power to bring together, to relate and separate. The polis knew only equals (HC32); citizens knew neither ruler nor ruled. The Greeks spoke of “isonomy”. Common concerns allowed them to relate to one another, while their equal status separated them sufficiently to give full scope to different perspectives. Arendt highlights the gulf separating this vision of equality from our own. The modern concept of equality is bound to the notion of justice, as for example "equality of opportunity". The classical notion of equality was an expression of the aspiration to freedom. The polis rested on inequality. The great majority of the population were confined to the necessities of the household and excluded from the public realm (HC32). In the ancient world, equality was no threat to freedom as it was to become for Tocqueville. The equality of the polis presupposed an agonal competitive spirit amongst citizens. They struggled amongst themselves to demonstrate excellence and earn immortal glory (HC41). Diversity of opinions produces not only multiple perspectives but also rigorous competition for public recognition and ascendency. As Arendt puts it ‘it was for the sake of this chance to become individuals that citizens were prepared to bear the burdens of public affairs’ (HC41). However, commonality is not reducible to multiple gazes trained on the same object. The condition of this convergence is the existence of a public space and, one might add, public identity. You will recall that the activity of work is tied to the human condition of worldliness. However, this worldliness is not only a matter of the creation of an artificial world that survives its creators-- public space and buildings--but also involves a political-cultural worldliness in the sense of  collective commitments, promises and a spiritual world transcending the individual. Arendt finds the political expression of this worldliness in the citizen's subordination of their own life to that of the community and public affairs. The Greek citizen entered a world that existed before he was born and would survive long after him. The very meaning of a project whose highest aspiration was immortality presupposed permanence in shape of institutionalised commitments and memory. Here permanence means more than monuments, buildings and spaces: it means the cross-generational transmission of memory and the preservation of a fragile domain of action. This sense of involvement in a collective communal enterprise based on continuity and durability reinforced that sense of commonality that, for Arendt, is a striking feature of the public realm.

14. With this initial outline of Arendt's phenomenology of human activities and a brief elaboration of the principal spaces in which they occur, we are now in a better position to explain how all this serves her contemporary critical purposes of "thinking what we are doing" and providing the foundations of a new political theory. This reconstruction is far from innocent. It is shaped by a contemporary diagnosis of modern problems. Already I have mentioned certain decisive historical shifts that have transformed our modern understanding of the relation between public and private. For Arendt, the most fundamental change is what she calls “the rise of the social”. This development is primarily responsible for the fact that in modernity the private and public are no longer distinct, that politics has become merely a function of society and that the household has exploded the limits which formerly constrained it (HC33). As a result, the two realms now constantly flow into each other (HC33) and, what, from her perspective, is much worse, the life-process has come to dominate the imagination and practice of the modern world.

15. In discussing the activity of labouring we have already seen that Arendt identifies it with life itself, with the necessary and circular processes of reproducing life. Initially housed in the oikos, labour was confined to this domestic realm. Arendt identifies the rise of the social with a complex set of historical changes that emancipated the life-processes from their containment within the household. As a result, they enter into the public realm and increasingly dominate public attention to the extent that the public realm itself began to atrophy: attention to life and its reproduction displaces plurality and its concerns. In The Human Condition Arendt does not attempt to provide an exhaustive historical account of this change and the multiple processes involved. She comes closest to doing these in the final long chapter of the book on ‘The Vita Activa and the Modern World’. For the moment, it is sufficient to understand that Arendt identifies the rise of the social with the commercialisation and mechanisation of productive activity. Whereas in classical times politics dominated the provision of needs and subsistence and there was very little strictly commercial activity, the gradually increasing role of the market finally allows production to be dominated by other aims like accumulation of wealth. The rise of the social "coincides" with a transformation whereby private wealth was no longer just a private care but became a public concern. Property owners demanded and received public protection for the accumulation of wealth. The historical watershed in this historical transformation is the metamorphosis of private possessions and wealth into capital. This marks a vital change in the very meaning of private property. In classical times property was primarily the “privately owned share of a common world” (HC253), a political qualification of entry into the polis signifying a place in the world. Only when the emphasis shifted from this political meaning to its commercial significance in processes of accumulation does it acquire its modern meaning of capital (HC 61). Private wealth was impermanent and vulnerable to the mortality of its owner. Capital, however, is immortal and assumes a life of its own. It has a permanence characteristic not of stability but of process (HC68). A society of property-owners is "a guise", according to Arendt, because the processes of capital accumulation ultimately undermine the very meaning of property as a durable and permanent home. Today we know that international capital resides in any nation state only as long as the existing investment climate provides the highest returns to shareholders. For Arendt, this last point is vital. The incessant processuality of wealth accumulation is merely the circularity of the life-process itself now unchained and emancipated in a new dynamic constantly expanding form. As we have seen, she views the constant accumulation of capital dominating bourgeois modernity as "the unnatural growth of the natural" (HC47).

16. The second decisive factor in the rise of the social is the productivity of labour power. While the market provided both a motive and mechanism of accumulation, it was the enormous productivity of labour power that provided the surplus making this dynamism possible. Arendt sees the most important factor in this increased productivity as the division of labour. Even the mechanisation of the labour process, which is associated with the industrial revolution and implicates science in a vital role in this transformation, is secondary to this initial division of labour (HC47). Arendt argues that the division of labour takes its organisational principle not from the household but from the public sphere. What is at stake here is an implicit debate with Marx over the issue of role of economic factors in historical causation. Arendt maintains that this fundamental organisational change is owed to the political sphere where co-operation reigns because men have to act together and in concert (HC123). Reinforcing this surprising argument, Arendt argues that the "excellence" achieved in the revolutionary transformation of labour is an attribute of public activities rather than household ones. Household labour was always associated with necessity and misery but never "excellence" (HC48). Lest we conclude that labour itself might be an independent source of excellence, Arendt argues for a distinction between professional specialisation and the modern division of labour. Specialisation is an organic production of human co-operation guided by the fact of the finished product itself requiring different skills. Arendt wants to sharply distinguish this specialisation involving skilled activity with a strong human element of initiative and purpose from the modern division of labour where labour power is a mere natural force with few differentiating characteristics. Labour power is not an end in itself but presupposes rather an equivalence of all labour. Most characteristic of labour power is that it requires no special skill. It presupposes the essential unity of the human species and has nothing to do with co-operation (HC123). By means of this distinction, Arendt endeavours to realign the modern division of labour not with the higher human capacities of work or action but as an organic outgrowth of the bloated life-process. While labour is a vital activity of the human condition of life, it contributes little to these authentic higher human capacities. On the contrary, in its modern expanded version it has typically has been an agent of their decay.

Lecture 6: Arendt’s Account of the Human Condition

        

1. At the conclusion of my analysis of the Origins of Totalitarianism I argued that Arendt viewed totalitarianism not as some historical accident but an event whose conditions of possibility had been promoted by the specific dynamics of bourgeois modernity. As I argued previously, this does not mean that totalitarianism can be identified with modernity nor, even stronger, that it is the essence of modernity. Rather, it is simply the darkest potential of this society. Arendt believed that in totalitarianism she had unveiled the political question of this historical moment and a phenomenon of general and continuing relevance for the future of modernity. In The Human Condition (1958) she explores the lifeworld and dominant activities of modern society in order to illuminate its underpinning categorical and value framework. Her analysis of the atomisation of the masses had hinted at a link between pervasive social loneliness and the activity of labouring: the dominant activity of modernity. Returning to this theme, she argued this isolation leads to the growing conformism of a society of labourers. This is because isolation suppresses the internal dialogue of thinking that is modeled on the public world and its inter-subjective interchange of opinions. This has made thoughtlessness one of the outstanding characteristics of the age. This was the most controversial proposition of her analysis of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann did not appear to Arendt as a monster despite the fact that he had performed a pivotal role in the annihilation of millions. He was rather a person who, according to Arendt, simply lacked the capacity to think. She thought all his motivations were thoroughly banal.  However, Arendt turned out to be quite wrong about Eichmann. Subsequent evidence has shown that the he was not simply the dour and faceless bureaucrat simply doing his duty that he attempted to portray during his trial in Jerusalem but a convinced racist who committed his crimes out of absolute conviction.   

The aim of The Human Condition is not to provide a philosophy of history as a process of decline or other “answers” but to "think what we are doing" in precisely the way that she believed Eichmann had failed (HC5). Arendt substantiates this link between the character of mass society and the activity of labour by examining the historical transformation of the most general human activities and their traditional hierarchy. For Arendt, this general phenomenology of human activities was to serve as a crucial prelude to a new science of politics. That Arendt was interested in a new science of politics must be rightly understood. Katznelson has located her in a tradition of post-war American thinkers interested in saving Enlightenment for liberal democracy that he calls the political studies Enlightenment group that included Polyani, Dahl, Lasswell and Lippman. As we have already seen, Arendt tries to combine macro-historical analysis of key dynamics with systematic propositions about political parties and, inside both, explanations of variations in the choices and actions of historical actors. Her idea was that only by being more aware of all dimensions of the human condition could political philosophy overcome the blinked vision that had blinded it to the crisis of its own categories in the face of the political disasters of the 20th century. Traditional political philosophy had tended to homogenise the full range of human experience into the categories of only type of human activity. Thus Marxism, for example, is a philosophy of "labour" and liberalism of "work" both leading to an impoverished understanding of the true nature of politics.

2. The Human Condition was initially part of a planned critique of Marx. In the ideological context of the Cold War with many intellectuals of the left still having strong sympathies for the Communist regime, Arendt was keen to challenge what she considered to be an uncritical reception of Marx. The substance of this critique was that Marx’s thought was the best expression of the deepest tendencies of modernity. He accepted the deepest presuppositions of the age and therefore is unable to provide a sufficiently critical distance and understanding of its most threatening potentials.

3.The Human Condition is the most explicitly philosophical and abstract of Arendt's major works. In it she examines the most general elements of the "human condition"-- its constant experiences, activities and spaces. A genuine political philosophy must take into account the full range of fundamental human activities and spaces. Arendt's inspiration here undoubtedly comes from Heidegger. This influence is rather complicated but a few words will allow you to see the basic links. The phenomenological response to the crisis of metaphysics was to argue that philosophy had neglected the fundamental embeddedness of humans in a pre-existing everyday world. Phenomenology had confined investigation to appearances. Heidegger appropriated and revised this method in his famous 1927 work Sein und Zeit. One of his fundamental insights was that the true relationship between the self and the world was not that of detached subject and object but an indissoluble linkage between human awareness and the environing world. This emphasis promised a shift of attention away from the artificially constructed objects of natural science to the more fundamental and encompassing stratum of experience typical of everyday life. Thus Heidegger begins with a phenomenological study of everyday life. He wants to privilege the human world revealed to phenomenology over the "reconstructed world” of scientific observation. He dismisses epistemological problems as a product of the artificial separation of subject and object. In everyday life we already find ourselves amidst a world of pre-existing objects and relations. Just as Kant had tried to designate the categories according to which the world is seen scientifically (as caused, limited), Heidegger proposed to do the same thing for this more primal everyday world by formulating the categories of a fundamental ontology (care, anxiety, fallenness). This ontology would investigate not the nature of being, as the substructure of the cosmos but of the being of man in the world, the fundamental and complex ways in which Dasein already finds itself thrown into a contingent, historical and inter-subjective cultural world. It seems that Arendt's key categories like labor, work and action are existentials in a similar way. By articulating the human condition she hopes to illuminate what it means to be in the world. Of course, we have already confronted Arendt’s employment of such concepts, for example, in her analysis of loneliness. Such a concept would be rejected by standard social science as too vague, in need of operational definition and not necessarily affirmed by subjects themselves who may not feel themselves lonely. However, loneliness in Arendt’s sense does not require this sort of empirical verification. Her whole point is that many individuals within mass society possess neither the learning nor the personal reflexivity to compare their current state with that of previous historical times or alternative possibilities. They may not feel lonely or not have the language to describe this generalised sense of lack. Nevertheless, to the phenomenological observer they are lonely people. Clearly Arendt believed that such a phenomenological analysis of the full scope of the human condition provided her with a comprehensive backdrop against which to rethink our political vocabulary. Of course, the problem with this approach is that it heavily privileges the standpoint of the observer without independent verification.

4. Before recapitulating the main elements of Arendt' s analysis of the “human condition”, we need to understand what sort of status she attributes to this concept. Arendt makes it clear that the "human condition" is not "human nature". In the Prologue to the book she concedes that with the exploration of space the modern age has now given way to the modern world. This epochal shift presents the real possibility of humans choosing to abandon the conditions of earthboundedness that had previously been the natural habitus for humans. In fact, Arendt speculates that the space project is itself the expression of a strong desire on the part of secular man to escape the human condition, which had previously limited humans to life on earth (HC1). The conditions in which humans choose to live in the future may be drastically different from any that they have encountered before. Even so, we could hardly deny the “humanity" of the inhabitants of this new man created environment (HC10). Human beings have the capacity to radically reshape not only the conditions of their self-created human artifice but also their very own nature. This makes it virtually impossible to say what "human nature" is. We are not entitled to assume that humans have a nature or essence in the same way as other things. Arendt agrees with Marx in arguing that human nature is not instinctually fixed as is the nature of animals. Everything that is typically understood as essential to our humanity is not an innate attribute but a creation of our membership within a specific community and the decisions that it makes. For Arendt, the unique capacity of human beings to initiate and adapt is compounded by an epistemological difficulty suppressed in the concept of human nature. She maintains the question of "human nature" is a theological one. To know "human nature" requires a God's eye view, we would have to know the end of the human story. As such a privileged and finalist view is clearly inaccessible, the question of human nature remains insoluble (HC10).

5. However, the shift from the question of human nature which remains "insoluble" to the question of the "human condition" does not allow us resolve the question of human essence or nature, so to speak, indirectly by exhaustively specifying all the conditions which explain the essence of man. On this point Arendt is very clear. Elaboration of the "human condition" is not another way of describing what man is, nor is it, for her, an untranscendable "iron cage", circumscribing the ultimate limits of humanity. On the contrary, Arendt is at pains to underline that the conditions of human existence can neither explain what we are, nor can they condition us absolutely. The most essential thing about humans is their unpredictability and capacity for initiation. Arendt is attracted to the notion of the "human condition" because it challenges the mastery phantasies of totalitarian modernity. She underlines that we are all subject to conditions and that conditionedness is inescapable. Human affairs consist of a web of human relationships. While the history of humanity can be told as a story that results from the unpredictable complexity of this web, humanity is not the author of the story. We might call this the defining substance of Arendt's humanism. Although we act, we are not unequivocally the authors of the eventual outcome (HC185). Humanism is here understood as a belief that humans create their own human environment but that this creative activity is characterised by both its conditionedness and its essential unpredictability. Humans do not create like god ex nilo, they are neither omnipotent nor omniscient: her book is an attempt to delineate these conditions and their limits. While she wants to emphasize that human nature is radically open and cannot be identified with any definable human nature, this open-ended-ness does not mean that we cannot know anything about ourselves. Her vision of the human condition also implies normative judgments as to what human capacities and conditions are particularly significant and most fully human. What is the basis of Arendt's prescriptive account of the human condition? Her answer is cautious and pragmatic. The openness of her vision precludes an essentialist definition of human nature. By shifting to a discussion of the human condition she wants to treat the relatively constant experiences of life (life, death, mortality, plurality, worldliness) their activities and spaces, in a way that both makes sense of the everyday experience of her readers but to also make use of the whole panorama of historical experiences. There are possibilities that modern individuals may not be aware are open to them. Reasoned inference from history and experience allows us to reconstruct the conditions that frame our existence. They constitute what it is to be a human being without defining it exhaustively in an unalterable sense. Historically, we know of human nature only in so far as it has appeared. Recent history has demonstrated that projects to transform this nature are not beyond totalitarian arrogance. Although Arendt clearly doubts their long-term viability, it is not impossible that such a project might succeed. Arendt therefore cannot offer an incontrovertible foundation for her account of the human condition but only the accuracy of her historical reconstruction, the plausibility of her narrative and the appeal of her vision. In a real sense she believes that this is the only way to face the task that modernity has imposed upon us. If human autonomy and freedom is taken seriously, we cannot fall back on some pre-established conception of our limits and possibilities.

6. In reconstructing the human condition, Arendt confines her analysis to what she calls the vita activa and postpones consideration of the vita contemplativa to a later work (The Life of the Mind --of which only the first two volumes were completed before her death) on the grounds that the latter activity of thinking, at least in the way that Arendt understands it, is confined to an elite while the former activities which she will divide into labour, work and action are general human capacities which all humans participate in to varying degrees. Arendt takes over the basic categorical framework from later classical civilisation where contemplation was viewed as the highest activity. This value hierarchy had itself been superimposed on classical society after the decline of the polis and political life. Both Plato and Aristotle considered theoria the highest activity because theoretical contemplation was not only free but its objects--the physical order and lawfulness of the physical cosmos-- were considered eternal and therefore more beautiful and truthful than the transitory concerns of the subluna sphere. Surrounded by an immortal world of nature and their own Gods, the Greeks put a high value on eternality. The quest for immortality in word and action became for their public life the only way to combat the seeming futility of mortal human life. One of Arendt's most important contentions is that although modernity no longer understood the meaning of contemplation (this was because in the wake of modern skepticism and the insight that observation was not an unproblematic means of disclosing being, it no longer understood truth as a passive beholding beyond thought and speech the way in which the tradition had understood contemplation) and had completely inverted the classical hierarchy of activities in raising labour to the pre-eminent position, it shared with the tradition the assumption that the same central human preoccupation must govern all activities in the sense of establishing a principle which orders the others (HC17). As we have seen, it is one of Arendt main contentions that in doing so modernity and its political philosophers had imposed crippling limitations on its understanding of human existence and political life.

7. Within this all-encompassing classical hierarchy of human activities constructed by philosophy (in which contemplation stood at the pinnacle), the more ancient hierarchy of the vita activa based on the lifeworld of the polis was still preserved. Arendt proposes to take over the general order of this hierarchy in her own articulation of the activities of the human condition. To appreciate why Arendt returns to the ancients and wants to base her own hierarchy of human activities on those of Pre-Socratic Greek society, it is again worthwhile to mention Heidegger. He believed that historical changes had largely obscured the fundamental ontological categories of being. These, however, remained evident in the original European languages, especially early Greek. Arendt appears to adopt a similar strategy in exploring Greek and Latin authors for interpretative clues in discerning the original meaning of certain political concepts, which, for her, express a deeper, more authentic insight into the human condition. As with the ancients, labour is located at the bottom of the hierarchy because it is bound to the vital necessities of the life process. At the level of biological life and its survival the human species is an undifferentiated and uniform. The qualities of labour typically mirror this in its monotony, drudgery and repetition. Labour is that necessary moment of the metabolic exchange with nature. Life can only be sustained if that which has been used up in consumption is constantly renewed. Labour is the perpetual activity of renewal that maintains the circular processes of life. This means that labour and consumption are the two sides of the cyclical process that is life. As Arendt puts it, ‘The human condition of labor is life itself’ (HC7). If labour is bound to the necessities of life and a natural cycle, work, for Arendt, corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence. You will remember that Arendt views the totalitarian project as an attempt to reduce man to beast. It follows that she conceives humanity as especially concentrated in those capacities that elevate us above a mere natural condition. Work achieves this by creating an artificial world of things, which are both distinct from natural surroundings and provides a durable home (one that is meant to outlast its creators) and even objectivity. This includes not just functional buildings but also decorative things like art. She maintains that the inherent purpose of art is ‘to attain permanence throughout the ages’ (LWA178). For Arendt, as we have already seen with her discussion of human rights and mass homelessness in modernity, the human need to be at home in the world is very important. This is why Arendt calls the human condition of work: worldliness (HC7). Work is vital in the construction of a stable and homely human environment. As she says, “without a world between man and nature, there would be only eternal movement and no objectivity”. The world suspends those processes of constant flux that characterise both external nature and our internal biology. Work saves the animal laborans from immediacy and cyclicality. But as we will immediately see, it also preserves the products of action that without the durability of work would lose their reality and disappear as a result of their intangibility and fleetingness.  However, Arendt also makes it very clear that work is circumscribed by a utilitarian logic of means and end that makes it predictable and completely saturates the process of fabrication. The world of work is rendered dead to any meaningfulness beyond itself and does not fully realise human potential. However, this deficit is made good by the highest activity of the vita activa: action. Action is in the world but not of the world. This activity is the direct interaction of humans without the mediation of things and is construed by Arendt as corresponding to the human condition of plurality. Plurality signifies the fact that the world is inhabited not by man but men in their irreducible diversity. She holds the condition of plurality to be the essence of political life. However this is an aspect too often overlooked, ignored or dismissed by the tradition of political theory. Action as political participation was the pinnacle of the classical vita activa. The political life of the polis was considered to be the only adequate existence of a free man. Arendt endorses this view in asserting that only in this realm are humans able to full realise their inherent capacities for speech and reason and demonstrate their distinctiveness and have it recognised by a public audience of equals. This is also the realm in which equals strive to out do each other in a competition for recognition and glory. For this reason she appreciates the high value the ancients put on praxis. This category of action has no end outside of itself: the mutual interaction and struggle of citizens in the pursuit of immortal glory was an end in itself. But such action is also unpredictable insofar as its impact on the world cannot be contained or reversed. Action is always frustrating in a way that cannot be avoided by reducing its to making or techne. The only way to limit the consequences of this unpredictability is the human institutions of promising and forgiveness. Promising corresponds to the existence of human freedom in conditions of non-sovereignty. While they are unable to expunge the irreversible consequences of action, the actor contains it by pledging to specific projects and constraints and making subjective amends for wrongs done. Thus keeping promises and individual identity are interrelated insofar as the act of promising also forges the bounds of stability.

8. Arendt identifies the human creative capacity with the human condition of natality. Human beings come into the world as a new beginning, unique and unrepeatable. They possess an immanent spontaneity that means their future action is always unpredictable. One of her favourite lines was from Augustine that she employed as early as the concluding lines of the Origins of Totalitarianism. They signify the rebirth of historical hope in the very culmination of her story of the darkest historical night of the holocaust, "that a new beginning be made man was created". Natality is a pre-political potential for creation that can only be brought to fruition in action. While birth individuates biologically, it does not realise this existentially. To be fully realised, the potential uniqueness of birth must be actualised through a "second birth" where singularity assumes shape in action. Natality therefore invokes the essentially undetermined character of humanity. Natality is the gift of a natural freedom but it does not make humanity free. The fact that our gift is always exposed to conditions we do not control, means that it remains in Benjamin’s sense a “weak messianic force” for which there is neither certainty nor inevitability, but only hope. The fragility of this hope makes natality the very opposite of sovereignty. Only the conditions that allow human creativity to take flight can bolster hope.  Becoming free means acting with others and the fullest expression of freedom is action within a public context. For Arendt human political creativity is the messianic ingredient of democratic politics. This in turn can only flower with a restoration of the political understanding of the concept of freedom. For her, freedom is not one amongst the many problems of politics but the very reason why men live together at all.

Lecture 5: The Essence of Totalitarianism

1. The third section of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism is devoted to totalitarianism itself. “Totalitarianism” is a concept that was first coined in the 1920’s to describe the apparently unique character of the Italian Fascist regime. This concept was quickly embraced by the National Socialists as an authentic characterisation of a new form of politics that rejected the old liberal distinction between public and private in favour of “total politics”. As we have seen, in analysing this political novelty, Arendt turns her focus to the "radical evil" which prompted her whole inquiry. As we will see, she will argue that the novelty of totalitarianism is intimately connected to the radical character of the evil manifest in it. Her claim will be that while these regimes are not the first in history to pursue and commit evil, they are the first to do so in complete detachment from traditional motives of normative or material gain.

2. Her portrait of the masses are central to her account of totalitarianism on a number of levels but the most obvious one is that these regimes rested on mass support (OT306). The popularity of Hitler and Stalin cannot just be explained away by a masterful and lying propaganda, by ignorance and stupidity. The former came to power by popular election while even Stalin could not have survived the many intra-party struggles of his career unless he had the confidence of the masses. Totalitarian ideology expresses the symbiotic relation between the totalitarian leader and the masses:

In substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than a functionary of the masses he leads; he is not a power-hungry individual imposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will on his subjects. Being a mere functionary, he can be replaced at any time, and he depends as much on the "will" of the masses he embodies as the masses depend on him. Without him they would lack external representation and remain an amorphous horde; without the masses the leader is a nonentity (OT325).

This is one of Arendt's most disturbing and controversial claims: beneath this deluded ideological self-understanding of a Hitler there is a deep truth regarding the totalitarian overcoming of the dichotomy of ruler and ruled. Obviously without mass support the leader is a marginalised fanatic. But, in Arendt's view, the other side of this symbiotic relation is that the leader supplies the masses with representation. In the ever-changing homeless world where the masses are disoriented to the point of believing everything and nothing, being both gullible and cynical at the same time, the infallible leader is a powerful identificatory, prophetic figure. The prophecy cannot be falsified because its predictions are in future centuries. The masses are thereby integrated with the forces of fate. Remember that the ideal mass subject of totalitarianism is the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false no longer exists (OT474). The disinherited, the homeless and the passive majority find a leader who transmogrifies their ego weakness and disorientation with his own apparent strength and conviction, who confirms their suspicions and gives shape to their aspirations for victory(OT350). He assumes all responsibility and they can escape from freedom into the cocoon of the totalitarian movement and its ideological certainties.

3. Simultaneously, the masses are also functionally essential in front organisations of sympathizers and supporters. They serve both as a protective wall which separates the committed core minority from the glare of the outside world and as a bridge back to normalcy for members who would otherwise be too disturbed by the abyss between their own beliefs and those of the normal world (OT366). This wall blunts the extremism of the totalitarian ideological division of the world into two hostile camps while it also allows the new recruits to live in a fool's paradise of normalcy (OT367).

4. But these affinities are only the first level of the relation between the masses and totalitarianism. Arendt’s analysis from this point works to achieve a number of things. Firstly, she wants to demonstrate the deep affinity existing between the modern masses and totalitarianism. They are one of the most important conditions of its possibility and it is an expression of their deepest felt anxieties, concerns and aspirations. Further she wants to show that totalitarianism is an unprecedented historical experiment in the construction of a social world in which the implicit potential of mass society can be realised without limitation. What I mean by this, I hope, will become clear. Finally, she wants to show that the mass foundation of totalitarianism has the widest political implications for modernity. As she puts it in a very important essay 'On the Nature of Totalitarianism' from 1954:

...so the collapse of our institutions--the ever increasing political and physical homelessess and spiritual and social rootlessness--is the one gigantic mass destiny of our time in which we all participate, though to very differing degrees of intensity and misery.

5. You will remember that I began these lectures with Arendt's belief that totalitarianism constituted a historically novel form of "radical evil". Her later essay 'Ideology and Terror' asserts that not only is "totalitarianism" an unprecedented historical phenomenon but also particularly relevant to modern political problems in general (E in U 347): this assertion turns on the question of whether totalitarianism is a makeshift arrangement or does it have an essence?

6. Arendt rejects the modern social or political scientific approach to the understanding of totalitarianism. While these approaches increase scientific accuracy, they do not provide standards and criteria for true understanding (E in U 339). She returns to the traditional approach of Montesquieu and ask what is the nature of the totalitarian form of government and what is the principle that sets it in motion (E in U 331). (Thus Montesquieu distinguishes between monarchy, republic and tyranny and views their respective motivating principle as honor, virtue and fear). Arendt combats all attempts to reduce the political significance of totalitarianism by either assimilating it to traditional categories as an extreme form of tyranny or by reducing it to the specific historical circumstances from which it arose in Germany and Russia. This is obviously an answer to those critics who drew attention to her lack of attention to the Russian historical background. Against the first alternative, Arendt will argue that totalitarianism surpasses tyranny in as much as this new regime is not concerned with stability and assuring the power of its existing rulers. Because the regime is conceived as the instrument of higher historical laws, it sacrifices stability to a motion in conformity with the laws it embodies. This is one of the reasons Arendt does not believe totalitarianism is likely to establish a permanent world: it represents an anti-social situation and principle destructive of all living together (OT478). Because it accords with a supra-individual historical lawfulness, it dispenses with the traditional essential principle of tyranny: fear. It can do this because the very idea of an essential principle immanent to regimes presupposes the need for individual motivation. Yet, what is entirely unique in the case of totalitarianism is that the very aim of the regime is to expunge individual motivation and action. Ideology must fill the orienting function from outside to enable the realisation of higher historical laws. This is so because on the inside all that is left is the lonely spinning of pure logicality. Against the historical reductionist approach, Arendt claims that whatever its historical origins, totalitarianism displays an appeal transcending these conditions. These governments have many propaganda successes and find many supporters and fellow-travellers even in non-totalitarian societies.

7. To reinforce her claim for both the novelty but also continuing political relevance of totalitarianism, she sets out to answer the Montesquieuian questions regarding the nature of this regime and its essential principle. The implied answer to her own rhetorical question provides the positive claim for the historical unprecedentedness of the regime which she will then attempt to defend: --there is an essence of totalitarianism which corresponds to a new experience of men living together that has never pervaded and directed a society before (OT460). Essence here does not mean an eternal truth but the inner nature of the regime in terms of its ultimate human meaning and practical consequence.

8. What is the essence of totalitarianism? The fact that when these movements came to power they developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all the old social, legal and political traditions of the country, that they created completely new forms of organisation, that they shifted the centre of power from the army to the police, carried on an openly aggressive foreign policy and created one-party states that operated according to values distant from all utilitarian considerations superficially captures some of the novelty and some of the instruments and mechanisms of totalitarianism but does not capture this essence. Concentration on the empirical features of these regimes like the special dominant role assumed by ideology, the fluidity of organisation and the complementary shapelessness and permanent mobilisation of the movements, the identity of leader and masses already mentioned, the totalising incursion even into the old liberal refuge of private life gets us closer but ultimately not to the heart of the matter. For Arendt, it is the pervasive use of terror that is the key to a regime whose uniqueness consists in the attempt to obliterate the human in man.

9. The essence of totalitarianism is permanent terror manipulated in a programme of total domination. Arendt underlines that even after these regimes were securely in power and all political opposition had been destroyed, terror replaced propaganda as the main agent of subduing the population. The fact that this terror only reached its perfection in the concentration camps does not disprove Arendt's claim. She asserts that the camps were not just a peripheral horror of these regimes, but the true central institution of the totalitarian organisation of power (OT438). Before the camps, totalitarian terror was moderated by practical exigencies. It had to be combined with propaganda in relation to the external world and with indoctrination in relation to domestic populations and party-members. But in the camps all restraint on terror was released and allowed a completely free reign. Thus, the camps were the guiding social ideal of totalitarian domination (OT438). More than an experimental world of monstrous crimes: these institutions were carefully designed to annihilate all traces of humanity from their inhabitants before disposing of the remaining emaciated bodies. Total domination requires a process whereby the individual is progressively stripped of his/her juridical and moral personhood before finally having even identity expunged (OT451-453).

10. Arendt supplies a graphic description of this process from its beginnings with the phenomenon of statelessness. This revealed that it was possible for certain categories of people to be deprived of citizenship and put outside the protection of the law. When totalitarian regimes were allowed to expel and de-nationalise minorities amongst their own populations with little effective opposition, Arendt contends that the non-totalitarian world had lost a crucial moral struggle in ultimately recognising lawlessness (447). The expulsion of these groups and their lost of citizen rights was the decisive first step--their juridical destruction-- the prelude to their eventual annihilation. This initial victory for lawlessness allowed the Jews and other designated groups to then be gathered up and consigned to the camps: the inmates were expelled beyond the normal penal system. Arendt shows how they were mixed with criminals to reinforce the idea they had arrived at the bottom (OT448) and organised into the most haphazard categories to undermine solidarity. These are not accidental features but a planned arbitrariness. They are designed to engender the conviction amongst inmates that they have been thrown into oblivion, cut off from the human world of the living by indefinite imprisonment and a process of arbitrary and continuous cruelty and humiliation.

11. Juridical exclusion quickly is transformed into, and compounded by, an assault on moral personhood. Arendt points out that in camps designed to kill virtually all inmates, ideas of martyrdom and solidarity have no meaning because there are no survivors to tell the story, death is totally anonymous and it is as if individuals had never lived (OT452). Inmates were also compelled to help administer and run the camps, the hated capos. Thus complicity in these horrific crimes was extended to the victims. They could not even escape with their consciences as everyday they faced choices between evils (OT452): survival often means self-preservation at the expense of others. Arendt sees the culmination of this planned dehumanisation in the attack on individuality itself, the unique identity that is the premise of all human relations. Because it is founded in nature, this is the hardest to destroy. However, Arendt makes the point that it rarely survived the demolition of the other aspects. Inmates were transported naked to the camps in cattle cars, with searing hunger, thirst and without sanitation. Shaven heads, grotesque camp clothing along with unimaginable beating, torture and personal humiliation, all expunge identity, destroy the psyche, character and individuality of the person while only the body remains to be disposed. For Arendt, only this explains the fact that millions could go to the gas chambers with scarcely any serious revolt or attempts to take executioners with them (OT455). Arendt concludes:

For to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man's power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environments and events. Nothing remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov's experiment, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their death, and which do nothing but react. This is the triumph of the system. (OT455).

The triumph of the totalitarian system is its total victory over human identity with the physical annihilation of the individual. Here a theme that permeates Arendt analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism is played in a new register. If the beginnings of the crisis of bourgeois society in the last quarter of the C 19th materialised in the problem of "surplus", especially of surplus population, then the totalitarian solution is not the physical elimination of this surplus. While the system did physically annihilate millions, this was not its real aim. The real meaning of this historically unprecedented form of domination is the creation of a system where men are superfluous (OT457). For Arendt, this attempt to make man superfluous reflects the 'experiences of the modern masses in their superfluity on the over-crowded earth' (OT457). What she means here is that the concentration camps succeeded in eradicating the humanity in the masses of individuals who silently and obediently went to their death. What is at stake here is human nature itself. The totalitarian project is to eliminate the spontaneity and unpredictability from humanity and bring it into accord with the laws of history as expressed in the ideologies of the totalitarian regimes. Thus in essence the camps were an experimental microcosm in the annihilation of the spontaneity, individuality and character that is the precious foundation of humanity. The camps demonstrated that men could be transformed into beasts. Humanity itself is no natural attribute but a fragile cultural construct of nurtured potential humanity. As Arendt puts it 'human nature is only human in so far as it opens up the possibility of man becoming something unnatural' (OT455). Rehearsing a classical image she believes that our humanity emerges only to the extent that we differentiate ourselves from nature in those "higher" activities and practices like making, acting and thinking which historically distinguish us. Totalitarian terror aimed at a radical homogenisation and de-culturalisation of humanity. (OT347) The goal of the movement is to refashion the infinite plurality of human beings as if all humanity was just one big individual (OT438). Arendt formulates this as follows:

Terror substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men an iron band which presses them all so tightly together that it is as though they were melded into each other, as though they were only one man. Terror, the obedient servant of Nature or History and the omnipresent executor of their predestined movement, fabricates the oneness of all men by abolishing the boundaries of law which provide the living space for the freedom of each individual (E in U342). or (OT466)

The conditions of this "achievement" are the obliteration of human capacities for spontaneity and freedom. Here Arendt links the essential logic of totalitarianism back to the threatening potential of modernity.

12. You will recall that earlier I pointed to the connection she made between the typical loneliness and atomisation of the masses and the dominance of functionality and the activity of laboring which is identified solely with the reproduction of life. It is as if the aim of totalitarianism merely foreshadows the type of human being required were modernity to realise the darkest potential inherent in bourgeois society. The aggressive foreign policy of the totalitarian regimes expressed in the idea of world conquest is thus just the other side of an intensified internal colonisation and reconstruction of human nature within the individual demolishing its capacity for spontaneous action and real thought. World conquest achieves a totalitarian spacial domination in the form of a global control over the world. By this means ideology can become reality and all refuting "facts" can simply be obliterated. The camps achieve their goal of internal domination intensively by annihilating every aspect of the inmates’ humanity. Arendt finds this aim to exorcise the contingent, the unpredictable and the spontaneous already expressed in totalitarian ideology. Totalitarian movements view themselves as an expression of historical laws, which operate with the necessity of nature and are independent of all human action or opposition (OT464). Arendt makes the point that the laws of nature or history proceed independently and over the top of individuals. It comes as no surprise that Arendt views ideology as the totalitarian substitute for an essential motivational principle. It substitutes because this regime no longer requires individual motivation: its very mission is to obliterate all free individual action and spontaneity (E in U348).

(Similiarly the totalitarian ideologies locate the fundamental disagreements of society as originating in deep natural, social or psychological sources beyond the power of human reason (OT312). Early in her analysis, Arendt noted the affinity between scientificity and the rise of the masses. The fact that the totalitarian ideologues choose to clothe their visions in the 19th century scientific laws of history is perfectly in accord with the collectivism of the masses which would eliminate the unpredictability of individual action (OT346) reinstating a lost sense of security into the modern world. Having loss the fear that was formerly provided by the last judgements of the old Christian worldviews and the hopes inspired by bourgeois progressivism based on individual initiative, the masses are attracted by all attempts to fabricate a man-made paradise, which in its conformity to underlying historical laws, reinstates security and certainty. For Arendt, individuality represents the possibility of a new beginning and this can only hinder a movement whose ultimate goal is to realise the underlying laws of history.)

13. The culmination of Arendt's account of totalitarianism is a climax of paradox and perversity. On the one hand, Arendt views totalitarianism as an expression of the masses. They provide the mass basis of this rule and it is the appropriate signature and expression of the masses dislocation, disorientation, distrust, violent dissatisfaction, prejudice, loss of responsibility and deep desire for certainty, predictability and victory. Thus totalitarianism appears to be based on a social experience of impotence and loss, of an all-pervasive loneliness. The dimensions of this experiential devastation are quite staggering. This is not just a matter of loss of income, employment, status, home, country and place in the world but even of individual identity, hopes and fears. The result is the weakening of the powers of individuation and a lapse into a smoldering passivity. Yet, the other side of totalitarianism is the cynical belief in the possibility of absolute mastery. The totalitarian leadership was characterised by "a firm and sincere belief in human omnipotence" and the solid conviction not only that everything is possible but also that everything is permitted (OT387). If totalitarianism has its basis and support in the passive masses, it derives the direction of its perpetual movement from a belief in human activism and mastery. Arendt makes this very clear when she notes that while the historical conditions of mass atomisation where provided for the Nazis, Stalin had to create an atomised society by his own initiative (OT318). Certainly Stalin could not create out of nothing and relied upon the basic conditions of a vast structureless mass population but it was only he who imposed the radical atomization that was the most fertile ground for the totalitarian project.

14. Least we conclude that Arendt cannot make up her mind about the true source of totalitarianism, I should make it clear that this apparent dichotomy between mass passivity and extreme activism is no antinomy but a complementarity. The leadership's conviction that "everything is possible" is just the other side of the masses passivity. The collapse of the social world and the values that reduced the masses to passivity also gave birth to the forces of an overriding sense of human mastery in the shape productive and technological capacity that could think that "everything is possible". This assumption of mastery over the world finds its expression in totalitarian ideology and its contempt for reality (OT458). This contempt imposes itself in a supersensual interpretation of the world where conventional utilitarian values and motivations are dispensed with in favour of the paranoiac logical system of an ideology which although senseless, nevertheless, displaces commonsense in the construction of an alternative reality .( Thus you find a world where there is punishment without crime, exploitation without profit and work without product(OT457)). This might suggest that the real source of totalitarianism lies in the ideological abandonment of a utilitarian political logic so characteristic of totalitarianism. Arendt does make the point that the concentration camps only appear "useless" from the utilitarian standpoint of punishment, profit or work (OT456). However, seen through the totalitarian prism of total domination they make perfect sense as a demonstration of the idea that man can do whatever he wishes. Yet, it would be a mistake to think that Arendt lays the blame at the door of the 19th century ideologies that provided the substantive ideas of the totalitarian worldviews. These ideologies did make claims to total explanation, they were concerned with historical laws and finding a deeper and truer meaning behind reality and they did cloth the emancipation of their thought from reality in a quasi-scientific method, but even all this did not make them totalitarian. This only made them politically more dangerous than other ideas in the coming epoch of crisis (OT473). Arendt finds the real source of this totalitarian continuum between the passivity of the masses and the megalomanical belief in human mastery of the leadership not in anti-utilitarian ideologies but the pronounced utilitarianism which has governed the thinking of bourgeois modernity. In the final paragraph of the original book Arendt makes a clear connection between "absolute evil" and the thought that "everything is possible". She follows this link with the following:

There is one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say the radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murders are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are dead or alive, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous.

Although Arendt does not supply any elaboration of her thinking here there can be little doubt that she views the source of modern utilitarian thinking in the constellation of bourgeois self-assertion and modern science. It is the logic of this world, which has abolished absolute values, in favour of exchange value based on utility and replaced speculation into the essence or "what" of nature with an instrumental thinking that is focused on the "how" of its operative laws in the cause of human exploitation and manipulation.

15. Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism has hereby traversed a full circle. It has revealed how the 19th century bourgeois world displaced and exported its internal crisis by entering an imperialist phase where it set out to conquer and civilise the whole globe. To do so it liberated the mechanisms of market from former limitations, extended the powers and autonomy of the bureaucracy, police and secret service and adapted old ideas like race-thinking into the new doctrines of racism that could justify its own actions and policies. In a beautiful piece of almost theological irony Arendt views totalitarianism as a tragic retribution. The products and sins of bourgeois culture in the form of these modern ideologies, techniques and technologies now return from the distant world of the colonies to reestablish themselves at home in the heart of Western European civilisation as an orgy of horror and self-destruction. Those whom modern industrial/bourgeois society had uprooted and made homeless now prosecute a European-wide programme of homelessness and disinheritance. However, as I've tried to indicate, the real point of Arendt's historical narrative is not just a moral tale of biblical proportions. The contemporaneity of the tale lies in the fact that even after the defeat of Nazis totalitarianism there remains a threat within modernity that makes the question of whether an event advances or not the cause of totalitarian domination the politically most important yardstick of judging it (OT442). And this threat was not just associated with the continued presence of totalitarianism in its Soviet form. The crisis of modernity had brought forward a form of government that will stay with us as both threat and potentiality (OT478). Thus, for Arendt the urgency of the question lies in the life world of modernity and the conditions of mass society that reproduce the objective conditions and psychological dispositions which allow totalitarianism to flourish:

It is easy to realize the extent to which totalitarian propaganda and even some totalitarian institutions answer the needs of the new homeless masses, but it is almost impossible to know how many of them, if they are further exposed to a constant threat of unemployment, will gladly acquiesce to a "population policy" that consists of regular elimination of surplus people, and how many, once they have fully grasped their own growing incapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will gladly conform to a system that, together with spontaneity, eliminates responsibility(OT437).

16. Arendt's next work would be an attempt not so much to shift the focus away from the totalitarianism potential of modernity but to show how the seeds of this possibility lay in modernity in general and its distinctive revolutionising of the traditional hierarchy of fundamental human categories and activities.  At this stage, I do not propose to enter into a full-scale critique of Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism. However, there are several problems that we can locate in this very elaborate and speculative theory. Amongst these are 1/The level of abstraction at which Arendt works and the speculative caste of her mind. Concepts like the masses and phenomenological ideas like loneliness are hard to pin down or verify empirically. Is it meaningful to speak of an essence of totalitarianism? Can we talk about this independently of the different concrete historical regimes? Paradoxically, in the light of her own critique of ideology for its emphatic logicality, her own overall account seems excessively logical and hard to always reconcile with all the facts, with the complex reality of different regimes and their complex histories. 2/ Arendt minimises the importance of the individual dictators and their personalities. On the one hand, the leader is a mere function and therefore the individual filling the function can be "replaced at any time" whereas elsewhere in the analysis Arendt speaks about the organisational indispensability of the leader as the only person in the highly mobile and shapeless organisation that really knows what is going on. Even if one accepts the distinction Arendt wants to make between the leadership function which is indispensable to totalitarianism and the individual filling the function who can be "replaced at any time", the fact remains that in both real historical instances full blown totalitarianism was associated with specific individuals --Hitler and Stalin--and their regimes did not outlive them. Here we see perhaps the potential problem of Arendt wanting to draw the broadest implications of totalitarianism for modernity. The desire to bring out the general and continuing political implications of totalitarianism compels her to play down the significance of the leader in explaining the general phenomena. Yet, this is otherwise quite against the grain of her thinking which would argue that individuals and their actions do make the difference and that history cannot simply be reduced to supra-individual processes with only collective sociological actors like the masses. More empirically 3/ There does appear to be real problems with the incorporation of National Socialism and Stalinism under the same model. The experiences of imperialism and anti-Semitism do not play an important formative role in Stalinism. Whereas the complex of imperialism, post-world war 1 dislocation plays a crucial role in the formation of the homeless and worldless masses of her account of National Socialism, Arendt admits that Stalin was not a product of mass society (in any other sense than the millions of peasants formed a politically unarticulated mass class) but had to create it. Although Stalin used anti-Semitism politically later in his career it played no significant role in his worldview. While the Soviet Union did expand its sphere of influence after World War11 it did not employ an aggressive foreign policy. Arendt has virtually nothing to say about the specifically Russian features of Stalinism. 4/ In fact her link between imperialism and the phenomenon of totalitarianism is in some ways problematic. While British imperialism serves as paradigmatic for her discussion clearly it did not issue in totalitarianism (her argument being that the British political institutions were sufficiently strong to sustain this crisis. 5/ Finally, recent research has suggested that the Nazis movement drew much its support not from the homeless masses but from traditional rural communities and was able to integrate many local organisations and associations into their own power structure.