THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HANNAH ARENDT EDITED BY DANA VILLA University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40West 20th Street, New York, ny10011–4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions ofrelevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction ofany part may take place without the written permission ofCambridge University Press. First published 2000 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface Sabon MT 10/13pt SystemQuarkXPress™ [se] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge companion to Hannah Arendt / edited by Dana Villa. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0521641985(hardback) – isbn 0521645719(paperback) 1. Arendt, Hannah – Contributions in political science. I. Villa, Dana Richard. jc251.a74c222000 320.5¢092– dc21 00-021835 isbn0521641985hardback isbn0521645719paperback CONTENTS List of contributors page ix List of abbreviations xii Chronology xiii Introduction: the development of Arendt’s political thought 1 dana villa PART I · TOTALITARIANISM AND NATIONALISM 1 Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism: a reassessment 25 margaret canovan 2 Arendt and nationalism 44 ronald beiner PART II · POLITICAL EVIL AND THE HOLOCAUST 3 Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem 65 seyla benhabib 4 Arendt and the Holocaust 86 mary g. dietz PART III · FREEDOM AND POLITICAL ACTION 5 Freedom: the priority of the political 113 jerome kohn 6 Political action: its nature and advantages 130 george kateb vii Contents PART IV · ARENDT AND THE ANCIENTS 7 Arendt’s Hellenism 151 j. peter euben 8 Athens and Rome 165 jacques taminiaux 9 Equality and elitism in Arendt 178 hauke brunkhorst PART V · REVOLUTION AND CONSTITUTION 10 Arendt’s constitutional politics 201 jeremy waldron 11 Arendt on revolution 220 albrecht wellmer PART VI · JUDGMENT, PHILOSOPHY, AND THINKING 12 Arendt’s theory of judgment 245 maurizio passerin d’entrèves 13 Arendt on philosophy and politics 261 frederick m. dolan 14 Arendt on thinking 277 richard j. bernstein Select bibliography 293 Index 300 viii 1 MARGARET CANOVAN Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism: a reassessment Introduction The Origins of Totalitarianism,first published in 1951, established Hannah Arendt’s reputation as a political thinker and has a good claim to be regarded as the key to her work, for trains of thought reflecting on the catastrophic experiences it seeks to understand can be traced to the heart of her later and more overtly theoretical writings. Halfa century after the book’s appearance there has been a revival of interest in the idea of totalitarianism, but the concept itself1remains controversial. Far more than a technical term for use by political scientists and historians, it has always incorporated a diagnosis and explanation of modern political dangers, carrying with it warnings and prescriptions. This chapter will argue that “totalitarianism” as understood by Arendt meant something very different from the dominant sense of the term. The final section will attempt a reassessment of her theory. Two concepts of totalitarianism There are almost as many senses of “totalitarianism” as there are writers on the subject,2but a few broad similarities have tended to hide a fundamental difference between Arendt and most other theorists. Like the rest, she is con- cerned with a novel political phenomenon combining unprecedented coer- cion with an all-embracing secular ideology; like the rest she finds examples on both the left and the right of the mid-twentieth-century political spec- trum. But these apparent similarities conceal more than they reveal, and much confusion has arisen from failure to realise that there is not just one “totalitarian model,” but at least two which describe different phenomena, pose different problems of understanding, and carry different theoretical and political implications. The better-known model (on which there are many variations) depicts a totally coherent socio-political system: a state built in the image of an 25 the cambridge companion to hannah arendt ideology, presided over by a single party legitimized by the ideology, employ- ing unlimited powers of coercion and indoctrination to prevent any devia- tion from orthodoxy. The construction ofsuch a polity is associated by some theorists with the attempt to build Utopia; others interpret its perpetuation in a state of frozen immobility as a quasi-religious retreat from the anxieties of modernity. Despite the regular inclusion of Nazism under the “totalitar- ian” heading, the clearest examples have been found among communist regimes, and appropriate diagnoses and prescriptions have followed. Diagnostically, totalitarianism has been seen as an affliction caused by over- ambitious political ideas and radical actions. The remedy for this political fever is to avoid excitement: to lower our expectations from politics and ideas alike, falling back upon the invaluable if unglamorous blessings of liberal politics, skeptical philosophy and free market economics.3 Reassessment of Arendt’s theory is impossible unless we first realize that hers is quite different from this dominant model. True, the equation of left and right is still there (though including only the regimes ofHitler and Stalin, not Fascist Italy, nor the Soviet Union before or after Stalin); the stress on coercion and ideology is still there (though we shall see that Arendt under- stands these vital ingredients in distinctive ways), but the differences are crucial, and have a great deal to do with Arendt’s focus on Nazism and par- ticularly on the Holocaust.4In fact the picture oftotalitarianism that she pre- sents forms a stark contrast to the more familiar model. Metaphorically, one might say that ifthe dominant picture suggests the rigidity, uniformity, trans- parency, and immobility ofa frozen lake, Arendt’s theory evokes a mountain torrent sweeping away everything in its path, or a hurricane leveling every- thing recognizably human. Instead of referring to a political system of a deliberately structured kind, “totalitarianism” in Arendt’s sense means a chaotic, nonutilitarian, manically dynamic movement of destruction that assails all the features ofhuman nature and the human world that make pol- itics possible. A view from Auschwitz The Origins of Totalitarianism consists of three volumes in one, Antisemitism, Imperialism,and Totalitarianism, and the theory it contains is enormously complex and notoriously hard to get to grips with.5 This section will pick out for examination some of the distinctive features of Arendt’s model, while the next will look at the way she approached the problem oftrying to account for this new phenomenon. We can perhaps find a point of entry in a theme that she stressed over and over again: the novelty of the political phenomena with which she was concerned. “Everything we 26 Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality . . . its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions. ..”6In other words, total- itarianism illustrated the human capacity to begin, that power to think and to act in ways that are new, contingent, and unpredictable that looms so large in her mature political theory. But the paradox of totalitarian novelty was that it represented an assault on that very ability to act and think as a unique individual. This new phenomenon seemed to Arendt to demonstrate the self- destructive implications of what she called “modern man’s deep-rooted sus- picion of everything he did not make himself.”7Believing that “everything is possible”8 totalitarian movements demand unlimited power, but what this turns out to mean is not at all the building of utopia (which would itself set limits to power and possibility) but unparalleled destruction. “Experiments” in total domination in the concentration camps that are the “laboratories” of the new regimes gradually make clear that the price of total power is the eradication of human plurality.9The characteristics that make us more than members of an animal species – our unique individuality and our capacity for spontaneous thought and action – make us unpredictable and therefore get in the way of attempts to harness us for collective motion. Only onecan be omnipotent,10 and the path to this goal, discovered separately by Hitler and by Stalin, lies through terror on the one hand and ideology on the other. “Total terror” as practiced in the camps is, Arendt claims, “the essence of totalitarian government.”11It does not simply kill people but first eradicates their individuality and capacity for action. Any remnant of spontaneity would stand in the way of complete domination. “Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world ofconditioned reflexes, ofmarion- ettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity. Precisely because man’s resources are so great, he can be fully dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.”12 Unlike the violence and coercion used by ordinary tyrants it does not have a utilitarian purpose such as repressing opposition, and it reaches its climax only after genuine opposition has already been repressed; its only function is to further the project of total domination by crushing out all human individuality. “Common sense pro- tests desperately that the masses are submissive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore superfluous; if they were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply: The apparatus seems superflu- ous to you only because it serves to make men superfluous.”13 Ideology complements terror by eliminating the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves, binding them into the unified movement of destruction. Ideologies – pseudo-scientific the- ories purporting to give insight into history – give their believers “the total 27 the cambridge companion to hannah arendt explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future.”14By making reality as experienced seem insignifi- cant compared with what musthappen, they free ideological thought from the constraints of common sense and reality. But in Arendt’s view the most dangerous opportunity they offer (seized by both Hitler and Stalin) is their stress on logical consistency. Both leaders prided themselves on the merciless reasoning with which they pursued the implications of race- or class-strug- gle to the murder of the last “objective enemy.” In their hands the ideologies were emptied of all content except for the automatic process of deduction that one group or another should die. Ideological logicality replaced free thought, inducing people to strip themselves of individuality until they were part of a single impersonal movement of total domination.15 For totalitar- ian ideologies do not support the status quo: they chart an endless struggle that is inexorable in its destructiveness. Total power turns out, then, to mean inevitable destruction. The job ofthe totalitarian regime is simply to speed up the execution of death sentences pronounced by the law ofnature or ofhistory. Arendt points to the stress laid by both leaders on historical necessity: on acting out the economic laws of Marxist class-struggle or the biological laws ofstruggle for racial supremacy. Seeking to distinguish totalitarianism from the innumerable tyrannies that had preceded it, she laid particular emphasis upon this. The hallmark of tyranny had always been lawlessness: legitimate government was limited by laws, whereas tyranny meant the breach of those boundaries so that the tyrant could rage at his will across the country. But (as experienced by its adherents) totalitarianism was not lawless in that way, though its laws were not civil laws protecting rights, but the supposed “laws” of Nature or of History. According to those inexorable laws, human existence consists ofthe life or death struggle between collectivities – races or classes – whose motion is the real meaning of history. For totalitarianism, “all laws have become laws of movement.”16 Neither stable institutions nor individual initiative can be allowed to get in the way of this frantic dynamism. “Total terror . . . is designed to translate into reality the law of movement of history or nature,” and indeed to smooth its path, “to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.” Human beings (even the rulers themselves) must serve these forces, “either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under its wheels,”17and individuality is an inconvenience to be eliminated by “the iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of man the One who unfailingly will act as though he himselfwere part ofthe course of history or nature.”18 28 Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism The picture of totalitarianism in power presented by Arendt is very far from the familiar image of an omnipotent state with unified and coherent institutions. On the contrary, it is a shapeless, hectic maelstrom of perma- nent revolution and endless expansion, quite unaffected by utilitarian con- cerns.19Its central institution is not the civil service or the army but the secret police, and even they have a function that defies comprehension in terms of ordinary common sense. Whereas in earlier tyrannies the job of the secret police was to ferret out covert opposition to the regime, their totalitarian suc- cessors are no longer concerned with anything that individuals may actually have done. “Suspects” are replaced by “objective enemies”20who need not be suspected of any subversive thought or action. In due course the killing machine may demand that the secret policeman himself should become a victim, and if the process of ideological indoctrination is working properly he will obligingly accuse himself of the required crimes. To sum up, Arendt presents the baffling paradox of a new phenomenon which at one and the same time illustrates human inventiveness and is dedi- cated to its destruction. Testimony to the contingency of human action, which can bring forth utterly unexpected new things, the phenomenon rep- resents a flight from contingency as individuals turn themselves and others into flotsam and jetsam on the supposedly inexorable current of history. Pursuit of total power leads to impotence: the faith that “everything is pos- sible” only to the demonstration that “everything can be destroyed.”21 Reflecting on the traditional assumption that “human nature” sets limits to human power, she observes with bitter irony, “we have learned that the power ofman is so great that he really can be what he wishes to be.”22Ifmen decide to reduce themselves and others to beasts, nature will not stop them. Tracing the elements of totalitarianism Starting from completely different backgrounds and circumstances, Nazism and Stalinism had arrived at this same terminus, demonstrating that what had happened under the two regimes could not be reduced to events within the particular histories of Germany and Russia.23The key factor making it possible was in Arendt’s view the widespread experience of “superfluous- ness,” which prepared the way for the concerted eradication of human indi- viduality. “Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superflu- ous.”24 Not only are uprooted people who have lost a stable human world easy victims for terror, but loss of the world also damages people’s hold on reality. Such people are receptive to ideologies that may be insane but are at least consistent, and to movements that provide an alternative reality, a 29 the cambridge companion to hannah arendt “fictitious world.”25 Furthermore, breakdown of the stable human world means loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that normally set limits to what is possible. But what were the sources of these general condi- tions and of the specific organizational methods used by totalitarian move- ments and regimes? To what extent could the advent of this hurricane of nihilism be explained? Two thirds of Arendt’s long book is devoted to these questions. Not that she was looking for “origins” in the sense of“causes” that made totalitarian- ism happen or that could in principle have allowed it to be predicted. She insisted that any such determinism was out of place in the realm of human affairs, which is the arena of novel actions and unpredictable events.26What she offered instead was “a historical account of the elements which crystal- lized into totalitarianism,”27 and her choice of “elements” has often sur- prised her readers. Her first section is concerned with the question why the Jews in particular should have been singled out for destruction, a choice of priorities that underlines her stress on Nazism in general and the death camps in particular. But the heart ofher argument lies in the second section, on “Imperialism,” for (without ever suggesting that Nazism amounted to a German copy ofBritish imperialism) she argued that imperialism had set the stage for totalitarianism and provided its perpetrators with useful precondi- tions and precedents. Before we consider these it is worth noting a few places where she does not look for explanations. We have already seen her justification for leaving aside the particular histories of Germany and Russia, in which others have tried to find explanations for Nazism and Stalinism. More surprising is her neglect of the personal role played by Hitler and Stalin and their responsibility or other- wise for the catastrophic course ofevents. This is particularly striking in view of the stress she places on the key position of the leader in totalitarian move- ments and regimes,28and even more so in the light of her own admission that the Soviet Union was totalitarian only during Stalin’s rule.29Unlike most theo- rists of totalitarianism, finally, she does not seek for its origins in intellectual sources. Even when, after publishing Totalitarianism, she set out to write a companion volume tracing the roots of Stalinism, and conceded that features of Marxist theory (and even of the whole Western tradition of political phi- losophy) had helped to make it possible, she still denied any direct causation.30 Where the antecedents ofNazi racism were concerned she chronicled the the- ories of Gobineau and others, but observed that “there is an abyss between the men ofbrilliant and facile conceptions and men ofbrutal deeds and active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge.”31Elsewhere she wrote that “what is unprecedented in totalitarianism is not primarily its ideo- logical content, but the eventof totalitarian domination itself.”32 30