Arendt and the Modern State: Variations On Hegel in The Origins of Totalitarianism Roy T. Tsao Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), unlike her later books, is centrally concerned with the nature and fate of the modern state. The book presents a series of political pathologies – antisemitism, imperialism, tribalism, and totalitarianism – that Arendt regards as the result of failures in the state’s dual mission to integrate diverse social groups into a single body politic, and to uphold the uniform rule of law for all. Her underlying conception of the state bears a striking, though unacknowledged affinity to that of Hegel. Like Hegel, moreover, she argues that citizens’ mutual recognition of one another’s human rights, as mediated through state institutions, is an indispensable condition for full human self-consciousness and agency. Her version of this argument is developed first through an excursus on the origins and effects of racism among Europeans living in Africa, and then through an analysis of the unique plight of stateless refugees. The book that established Hannah Arendt’s reputation as a political thinker was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).1 Its account of totalitarianism was highly influential in its time, and the book is still widely read today. And yet the full measure of Arendt’s ambitious project in political theory in this first major book of hers has rarely been taken. One reason for this is simply that the book encompasses so much disparate historical material— ranging from the role of Jewish bankers in seventeenth-century state finances, to European imperialism in Africa, to the police methods of Stalin—that its larger philosophical claims about the nature and function of political institutions tend to get lost amid its episodic narratives. Many of the most important of those theoretical claims are fairly tangential to what Arendt has to say about totalitarianism and its historical origins; the book’s rather misleading title (which Arendt herself came to regret) lulls the I would like to thank Peg Birmingham, Margaret Canovan, George Kateb, Jerome Kohn, Patchen Markell, Larry May, Gaelen Murphy, and Walter Nicgorski, along with this journal’s manuscript reviewers, for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951], rev. and expanded edition (New York: Harcourt, 1973). Henceforth abbreviated OT. All parenthetical page references in the body of this essay refer to this text; all of the passages cited also appear in the differently paginated first edition. 1 06 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS reader into discounting the significance of such claims, and thus missing the full scope of her theoretical project.2 Moreover, students of Arendt’s thought have generally approached the book from the retrospective vantage of her later works like The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963).3 In fact, however, Arendt’s theoretical priorities underwent a substantial shift between the time she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and those later books.4 As a result of this shift, The Human Condition and Arendt’s other later writings are an inadequate guide to the concerns of the prior book.5 The central arguments of that earlier theory deal with a matter to which she devotes virtually no attention in her later writings: the modern constitutional state. In The Human Condition, Arendt mentions the modern state only to dismiss its significance to her theoretical concerns.6 While she shows greater interest in modern constitutionalism in On Revolution, she devotes far more attention to problems associated with the founding of states and the framing of their constitutions than with their regular functions. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, by contrast, she attaches para- mount importance to the modern state’s dual function of integrating its diverse populations into a single body politic and upholding the rule of law for all. To be sure, Arendt never sets out a detailed 2. Arendt expressed her regret over the misleading nature of the title of The Origins of Totalitarianism in her published reply to a Eric Voegelin’s review of the book for The Review of Politics. Arendt, “A Reply,” Review of Politics 15/1 (1953): 76- 84, reprinted in Arendt, Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 401-408. Unfortunately, Arendt’s remarks there about the book’s intended structure were in some respects no less misleading; on this matter, see Roy T. Tsao, “The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 589-90. 3. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Arendt, On Revolution [1963] rev. ed (New York: Viking, 1965). 4. The magnitude of that shift is partially masked by the fact that all editions of the book since 1955 have included a new concluding chapter (“Ideology and Terror”) that more closely reflects Arendt’s theoretical concerns in The Human Condition. On the evolution of the text, see Ursula Ludz, “Hannah Arendt und ihr Totalitarismusbuch: Ein kurzer Bericht über eine schwierige Autor-Werk- Geschichte,” Hannah Arendt-Studien 1: Totalitäre Herrschaft und republikanische Demokratie, ed. Antonia Grunenberg (Frankfurt: 2003), pp. 81-92. 5. That is not, however, to deny that some (though not all) of the underlying concerns of The Origins of Totalitarianism would remain important to Arendt in her later writings as well. For these continuities, see Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 7 and passim. 6. See Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 43. ARENDT AND THE MODERN STATE 107 normative model of a successful state along those lines. Instead, she addresses the matter obliquely, by focusing on the disastrous effects that she traces to the historical failure of the states of conti- nental Europe to carry out those two functions. Much of her argument in the book takes the form of a narrative about the inher- ent weaknesses of the continental European state from its emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its near-universal demise in the middle of the twentieth at the hands of Hitler, Stalin, and their various minions. (For Arendt, a totalitarian regime is not the aggrandizement of the modern state, but its ultimate antith- esis.) Her long detours from that narrative supplement her argument by illustrating a set of “perversions of human self-con- sciousness” that she associates with the failure of law-governed political community. Arendt’s argument about the state, its essential functions, and its fatal vulnerabilities appears primarily in The Origins of Totalitarianism’s first two parts, “Antisemitism” and “Imperialism.” As it happens, she had written nearly all of those first two parts of the text before she even arrived at her views on totalitarianism; despite what the title may seem to suggest, her decision to add a third part on totalitarian movements and regimes was something of an afterthought.7 This essay will undertake an examination of that argument about the state as it appears in those first two parts of the book.8 (I will conclude with a brief look at the theory of to- talitarianism in the third part.) By highlighting how particular sections of the sprawling text contribute toward that argument, I hope also to show how the seemingly disparate contents of the book fit within the frame of a comprehensive project in political theory— Arendt’s first. To help bring out the structure of that project, I will be considering it in relation to the theory of the state of an earlier thinker who shares many of the same concerns: Hegel. The suggestion that Arendt’s project in this work has important affinities with Hegel’s political thought may sound rather unlikely. She nowhere acknowledges any intellectual debt to him (whether in this book or elsewhere), and her published 7. See Tsao, “The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism,” 582-91; Canovan, Hannah Arendt: pp. 18-19. 8. Prior to their incorporation in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s treatment of several of the themes discussed in this essay made their first appearance in the pages of The Review of Politics. See Arendt, “Race-Thinking Before Racism,” Review of Politics 6/1 (1944): 36-73; “Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism” Review of Politics 7/4 (1945): 441-63; “The Nation,” Review of Politics 8/1 (1946): 138-41. 1 08 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS comments about his philosophy (occurring in her later works) are almost invariably negative.9 (Much the same, however, is true of what Arendt said in print about her former teacher Heidegger, whose impact on her thought can hardly be doubted.)10 Not surprisingly, then, Hegel has almost never been counted among Arendt’s influences.11 Yet the unacknowledged affinities between Arendt’s project in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Hegel’s political philosophy are striking nevertheless. Arendt’s understanding of each of the two essential functions she attributes to the modern state in this book corresponds to a comparable tenet in Hegel’s own theory of the state. Like Hegel, Arendt believes that the basic challenge confronted by the modern state in sustaining its people’s allegiance to a single political community lies in the conflicting, particularistic interests that arise with the emergence of a market-oriented, “bourgeois” society. With more than a century’s hindsight, Arendt takes a different, and darker, view of the forms those conflicting interests had taken. Even so, her account of the syndromes of political alienation that resulted 9. These unfavorable comments usually concern Hegel’s philosophy of history, which she (erroneously) interpreted as a conception of history as a quasi-natural process. See Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern” [1958] in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 85-86; Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 51-54. 10. Curiously, Arendt’s debt to Heidegger seems much less pronounced in The Origins of Totalitarianism (at least its first edition) than in her later works. (The book’s only overtly Heideggerian motif, its account of what Arendt calls “loneliness” in mass society, occurs in “Ideology and Terror,” a chapter added only in the book’s later editions.) This may have something to do with the fact that Arendt had been personally estranged from Heidegger at the time she wrote the book; she renewed contact with him in 1950, after the manuscript was already completed. 11. There are some exceptions. The pertinence of Hegel to Arendt’s later work, particularly The Human Condition, has been noted, in passing, in Judith Shklar, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah” [1983] in Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 370; J. M. Bernstein, “From Self-Consciousness to Community: Act and Recognition in the Master- Slave Relationship” in The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 34; and George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), p. 44n.2. This matter has been more recently explored by Allen Speight in “Arendt and Hegel on the Tragic Nature of Action,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 28/5 (2002): 523-36. Some commonalities and differences between Arendt’s views on modern society and Hegel’s (with brief remarks on The Origins of Totalitarianism) are discussed in Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 177-200. ARENDT AND THE MODERN STATE 109 from the European state’s historical failure to contain and surmount those conflicts may be regarded as an imaginative extension of the underlying concerns that had led Hegel to lay great stress on the socially integrative function of political institutions. The consonance between Arendt’s arguments and Hegel’s is no less striking with respect to her claims about the state’s still more fundamental function of sustaining a rights- based legal order. Like Hegel, Arendt holds that the reciprocal recognition of rights among the citizens of legally constituted political community is an indispensable condition for an individual’s attainment of full human agency, so much so that a life spent outside such a community is in a sense not fully human. To be sure, Arendt’s approach to these problems differs from Hegel’s in a number of important ways. She has no use for the notoriously obscure “speculative logic” upon which his political philosophy is supposed to be based, nor for his vision of reason’s fulfillment in history. For these reasons, and others, it would be difficult to label Arendt’s overall project in The Origins of Totalitarianism as “Hegelian” in any conventional sense. Even so, attention to the recurring affinities between particular arguments of hers and the comparable ones in Hegel serves to illuminate that project’s otherwise elusive structure. By the same token, attention to Arendt’s divergences from Hegel’s precedent helps to bring some of the more original aspects of that project into sharper focus. There is no direct evidence that Arendt self-consciously took Hegel’s theory of the state as a starting point for her project in this work. But then again very little is known about the sources of Arendt’s political thought during this phase of her career.12 The story of her transformation from an apolitical student of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers to the author of a landmark work on totalitarianism has generally been told as the direct result of the shock of the political events that forced her to flee Germany in 1933. But another set of circumstances about her life in the 1930s may be pertinent as well. Prior to her emigration to the United States in 1941, Arendt spent most of her exile years in Paris, at the very moment that Hegel had become a dominant presence in French intellectual life. She herself 12. Arendt’s recently published Denktagebuch, a collection of notebooks whose dated entries provide a detailed view to the sources and development of her later thought, begin only in 1950; the manuscript for The Origins of Totalitarianism was completed the previous year. See Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper, 2002). 1 10 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS personally knew many of the figures who were most directly responsible for Hegel’s ascendance in France at that time. Two of them, Alexandre Koyré and Jean Wahl, became her good friends. A third, Eric Weil, was married to Anne Weil (née Mendelssohn), Arendt’s lifelong best friend since their youth together in Königsberg.13 Arendt also knew Alexandre Kojève, and had apparently attended some of his famously influential seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.14 At a time when the English-speaking world was unreceptive to Hegel’s philosophy—and especially its political side—these figures were rediscovering and exploring many of the very themes in Hegel’s thought that seem to reverberate in Arendt’s book. Wahl was responsible for introducing Hegel’s ideas about alienation to French intellectual circles.15 Weil’s studies of Hegel’s theory of the state (published in book form only later) would help acquit Hegel’s politics of its anachronistically presumed guilt by association with Bismark’s (and Hitler’s) expansionist German state.16 Kojève’s imaginative (if notoriously one-sided) reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit’s dialectical encounter between master and slave provided the most famous exposition of Hegel’s conception of mutual recognition as a condition for human self-consciousness and freedom.17 Arendt’s contacts with these figures during her Paris years may well have been among the formative influences on her efforts to arrive at a political theory of her own in the next decade. At very least, it 13. For Arendt’s friendships with Alexandre Koyré and Jean Wahl, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 117, 245, 251. Anne Weil, the wife of Eric Weil, is mentioned throughout Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt and was apparently a major source for it. For the influence in France of Koyré, Wahl, and Eric Weil as interpreters of Hegel, see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 14. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 116-17. According to Young-Bruehl, both Arendt and her first husband Günther Stern attended some of Kojève’s Hegel seminars at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which ran from 1933 to 1939; Young-Bruehl mentions no specific dates. The partial list of participants in those seminars that Michael Roth has compiled from incomplete official records includes one “Stern” for the 1935-36 year. See Roth, Knowing and History, p. 226. 15. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929). 16. Eric Weil, Hegel et l’état (Paris: Vrin, 1950). 17. The notes Kojève prepared for these seminars were later assembled for publication by Raymond Queneau. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969). ARENDT AND THE MODERN STATE 111 is plausible to suppose that such ideas of Hegel’s could well have been somewhere in the back of her mind when she came to write The Origins of Totalitarianism, given the evident affinities of her arguments with some of his own. State, Society, and Antisemitism Writing in the early nineteenth century, Hegel had been the first major political thinker to see that the emerging market economy had created separate sphere of “civil” (or “bourgeois”) society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), standing between that of the pri- vate household and that of the state. Unlike in the ancient world, for which he had posited a sharp divide (or tragic conflict) be- tween the enclosed, particularistic perspective of the family and the collective perspective of the community, this modern sphere of society allowed individuals to satisfy their particular inter- ests while transacting business with a wider public.18 Hegel sees this as a salutary development; in seeking the satisfaction of his own needs, each participant in the market economy must suit his productive activity to the needs of others, and develop his abilities accordingly.19 Yet Hegel rails against the classical lib- eral notion that the body politic (the “state”) may be conceived as no more than a contractual arrangement among the members of such a society.20 In his view, the state requires a more sub- stantial basis of allegiance from its citizens than such an arrangement could generate. For this reason, he sees a need for a set of intermediate institutions that serve to anchor the state in society and orient the individual toward the larger political com- munity. These institutions include professional and trade organizations, which are meant to temper the venal propensi- ties of commercial life.21 They also include representative bodies that give people a voice in government, on the basis of their mem- bership in such civil associations. In Hegel’s view, the measure of the success for such mediating institutions is their capacity to prevent the members of society from confronting the state “ei- 18. Hegel, Philosophy of Right [1821] ed. A. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [hereafter abbreviated PR], §§ 182-83. 19. PR §187. 20. PR §258. 21. PR §253. 1 12 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS ther as a simple undifferentiated mass or as a crowd split up into atomic units.”22 This kind of organic integration of state and society is pre- cisely what Arendt believes the modern states of continental Europe failed to achieve. Much of The Origins of Totalitarianism’s first two parts is concerned with various aspects of the resultant conflict between the state and particularistic interests in society. As Arendt tells it, the conflict dates back to the first emergence of the modern state in the era of royal absolutism, and it remained unresolved throughout the later period of the constitutional na- tion-state’s consolidation and evolution. The modern state’s claim to legitimacy rested on the promise of a uniform, imper- sonal legal order, abolishing the traditionally sanctioned, pervasively hierarchical structures of feudalism (p. 11). Its “su- preme task” was “to protect and guarantee man’s rights as man” (p. 230). But the separate sphere of “society” that emerged at the same time as the state’s uniform political and juridical order lacked the same homogeneity. Where Hegel had seen (or looked forward to) a harmonious division of society into functional sec- tors (agriculture, commerce, and the like), Arendt looks back on a discordant division among social classes with conflicting eco- nomic interests. Individuals’ actual interests were dictated not by their equal citizenship in the body politic, but by their mem- bership in a particular social class (landowner or peasant, employer or worker) and the relations between those classes (pp. 12-13, 314). It was only the concomitant rise of the modern West- ern notion of the “nation”—which posited the existence of a community based on shared historical or linguistic heritage, ir- respective of class membership—that made it possible to sustain any broad-based allegiance to the body politic as a whole. Arendt notes that this development had the pernicious effect of partly transforming the state “from an instrument of law to an instru- ment of the nation,” thereby obscuring its fundamental mission as the guarantor of rights for all (p. 230). And yet, she argues, not even this troublesome fusion of state and nation could suf- fice to heal the breach between state and society. Except in rare moments of “national” crisis, the nation-state’s citizens dealt with the state only insofar as it advanced or hindered their particular class interests. Parliamentary politics was thus the business of class-based parties that promoted and brokered such interests but that (unlike in the two-party systems of Britain or the United 22. PR §303; see also §§301-302. ARENDT AND THE MODERN STATE 113 States) assumed little pretense of responsibility for the body politic as a whole (pp. 251-52). In Arendt’s view, the ultimate consequence of those class-based politics was to discredit the authority of the state and the legal order it was supposed to rep- resent. And the situation became only worse when the class system itself finally broke down, amid successive economic shocks following the First World War. The result was the rise of dangerously alienated “masses”—agglomerations of socially and politically “atomized” individuals who shared only an embit- tered, cynical anger toward the state’s discredited institutions (pp. 314-15). Arendt’s understanding of the clash between state and soci- ety is set forth most fully in The Origins of Totalitarianism’s first part, “Antisemitism.” On the usual view that modern antisemitism has its roots in a long history of religious intoler- ance, that would seem an incongruous place for it. But Arendt’s concern in this part of the book is actually not the history of anti-Jewish animus as such, but rather the relatively recent rise of secular antisemitism as the basis for efficacious political agita- tion of various kinds.23 In particular, what she seeks to explain is how, at various times and in various places since the late eigh- teenth century, such secular antisemitism could be used so effectively by disparate social groups to rally support for seem- ingly unrelated grievances against the institutions of the modern state (pp. 9-10). How is it, she asks, that the fate of one tiny, powerless minority could become such an incendiary political issue in countries all across the continent, not just in Germany but all over Europe? Her answer to that puzzle lies in the anoma- lous historical position of the Jews in relation to the long-simmering conflict between state and society. Although excluded from the class structure of society, a small number of prominent, politically privileged Jewish families had for gen- erations served as the bankers to both royal and republican governments, over a period when the leading social classes— whether the waning nobility or the rising bourgeoisie—were for their part loathe to contribute to the state’s expansion (p. 98). As 23. This more limited focus accounts for the otherwise inexplicable way in which Arendt can refer in passing to a “religiously determined, mutually hostile past” between Christians and Jew reaching back to the recesses of European history, or to the “ubiquitous hatred of Jews” in the “backward countries” of Eastern Europe, while dismissing the significance of such factors to her argument (OT, pp. xii, 29). 1 14 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS a result, Arendt argues, the Jews in general became closely iden- tified with the affairs of the state, and kept that reputation long after its factual basis had declined. This reputation as a shad- owy presence behind the state made the Jews a convenient proxy target for particular classes’ hostility toward the state, first among the declining nobility in the late eighteenth century and then again among the ruined “petite bourgeoisie” of tradesmen and shopkeepers in the last third of the nineteenth (pp. 31, 37). For Arendt, what is most revealing about these groups’ antisemitic agitation is not simply the vulnerability of the Jews to their at- tacks, but that of the state itself. Arendt’s analysis of antisemitism culminates with a chapter on the Dreyfus affair in France at the turn of the last century. That famous “affair” had begun in 1894, when a military tribu- nal wrongly convicted a Jewish army colonel, Alfred Dreyfus, for treason; it eventually ended, after a string of revelations about falsified evidence, with Dreyfus’s ambiguous acquittal on ap- peal a dozen years later. For much of the time in between, controversy over every aspect of the case had rendered the French nation into two profoundly hostile camps, the long-be- leaguered Dreyfusards and their intransigent opponents. What gives the episode its paradigmatic significance for Arendt is chiefly the anti-Dreyfusards’ nearly successful use of antisemitism as a tactical device to undermine the very founda- tions of France’s Third Republic. She accordingly notes that the two groups that did the most to make the alleged case against Dreyfus a matter of avowedly antisemitic principle—on the premise that a Jewish colonel must be a traitor, whatever the evi- dence, and that the officers who framed him must somehow be the true victims—were precisely those whose loyalties to the republic were weakest: the French Army’s officer corps, still an enclave of aristocratic caste privilege, and its members’ Jesuit confessors, whose order was then a bastion of opposition to the secular state (pp. 101-102).24 The hero of Arendt’s version of this drama is Georges Clemenceau, whose tireless championing of Dreyfus’ cause 24. In discussing the Jesuits’ role in fomenting antisemitism in the Dreyfus affair, Arendt does not attribute their motives to their religious beliefs as such, but rather to their frankly antirepublican ambition to recapture “a political share in the management of the state” (OT, p. 104). In this regard, it is worth noting that she makes a point of praising the later courage of Catholic bishops and parish clergy in standing up for French Jews against the German occupiers and the Vichy authorities (OT, p. 93).