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Abstract
Philosophy of History and the Modern Problem of Freedom
in Hannah Arendt’s Thought

The first part of the twentieth century brought about a series of unprecedented
events. The two world wars not only economically and socially devastated Europe, but
also altered its political landscape irrevocably. Millions of people perished in Nazi
concentration and extermination camps and in the Soviet Gulag, millions more were
displaced or rendered stateless. The world, for the first time, witnessed a regime of total
domination and totalitarian terror.
In her very widely acknowledged and controversial book “The Origins of
Totalitarianism,” Arendt investigated the social and political elements that crystallized
into the totalitarian regimes of Germany and Soviet Russia. Her insightful observations
reveal that totalitarian systems relied on an ideology of historical necessity, which
deprived all men of their individuality and spontaneity, and prepared them for their role
as either executioner or victim. Where did this idea of historical necessity come from and
why did individuals submit to it? How did ideologies become “the keys to history” which
presumed to be able to explain everything, yet in the process became completely divorced
from reality?
Starting from the experience of totalitarianism, this dissertation analyzes the
threat posed to freedom by long-established understandings of history and historical
necessity in the tradition of Western political philosophy. The aim of my project is to
challenge the Hegelian notion of history, a dialectical movement towards the realization
of human freedom, which entrusts human affairs to a flowing process, the meaning of
which will only be revealed at the end of history. In its stead, I develop a notion of
politics and political action grounded in Arendt’s political philosophy, which promotes
the individual as an acting being and political actions as self-contained events, the value
of which can only be redeemed in the public realm.
Philosophy of History and the Modern Problem of Freedom
in Hannah Arendt’s Thought
A Dissertation

All rights reserved.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments iv
INTRODUCTION
ONE TOTALITARIANISM AND HISTORICAL
NECESSITY
1. Introduction
2. Totalitarianism: A Novel Form of
Government
3. Characteristics of Totalitarian Lawlessness
a. The Source of Authority
b. The Subject of Totalitarian Law
c. The Legal Framework of Totalitarian
Law
d. Terror
e. Ideology
4. Characteristics of Totalitarian Ideology
5. The Critique of Ideology
6. Nazism and Bolshevism in Perspective
7. Conclusion
TWO HEGEL AND THE PROBLEM OF
HISTORICAL NECESSITY
1. Introduction
2. The Concept of History
3. Vico
4. The Modern Concept of History
5. Hegel’s Philosophy of History
6. The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of History
7. From Politics to History
8. Hegel and the French Revolution
9. The role of the Philosopher in Hegel’s
Philosophy
10. Conclusion
1
22
22
26
30
31
32
32
36
42
49
54
58
66
67
67
68
72
76
82
88
98
102
108
118
THREE MARX AND THE PROBLEM OF
KNOWING AND MAKING
1. Introduction
2. Arendt’s Interest in Marx
3. Marx and the Tradition of Political
Philosophy
4. Totalitarian Elements in Marxism
a. Perspectival Thinking
b. Process-Thinking
5. Three Fundamental Claims of Marx
a. Labor
b. Violence
c. The Role of Philosophy
6. Theory and Praxis
7. Marx and the Concept of History
8. Arendt’s Critique of the Marxist
Conception of History
9. Conclusion
FOUR WALTER BENJAMIN AND HISTORY AS
PROGRESS
1. Introduction
2. Some Common Themes
3. History as Progress: Theses on the
Philosophy of History
4. Arendt and the Notion of Progress as
Catastrophe
5. Now-time and Blasting Open the
Continuum of History
6. Traditionsbruch
7. Between Past and Future
8. Kafka’s Parable
9. Exercises in Political Thought
10. Conclusion
FIVE KANT AND SPECTATORSHIP
1. Introduction
2. The Role of History in Kant’s Writings
according to Arendt
3. Reason in History
4. Kant as the Quintessential Philosopher?
120
120
124
127
132
132
138
143
143
145
151
154
157
160
170
172
172
178
183
193
198
206
212
215
223
225
228
228
229
235
244
5. The Relationship between Thinking and
Judging
6. Human Species, Man and Men
7. Kant’s Rejection of the Traditional
Hierarchy between Philosophy and Politics
8. The Political Nature of Critical Thought
9. Kant and the French Revolution
10. Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment as a Means of
Addressing Plurality and Particularity
11. Conclusion
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
256
258
262
266
268
274
278
279
1
Introduction
I
Hannah Arendt has inspired many scholars from various disciplines. Political
theorists in particular have been drawn to Arendt’s work, since her political thought
offers one of the most passionate, original and inspiring justifications of the political
realm in contemporary political theory. Arendt’s at times contradictory, controversial and
frustrating writings—despite their accessibility and transparency—provide the
foundations of a political theory that centers on meaning, identity and human plurality.
Her work allows us to gain a richer understanding of politics and political action in our
contemporary societies, where the meaning of politics is being transformed and the
boundaries of the public realm is constantly being negotiated thanks to feminist, gay and
lesbian civil right movements, and eco-activism. Her rightly placed confidence in speech
and action as the media through which human beings insert themselves into the world and
the realm of the political as the forum for acting together, made her work the center of
contemporary and ever-growing attention. Thanks to Arendt’s work, we have developed
a sense of the political that transcends ―simple oppositions between liberalism and
communitarianism, modernism and postmodernism, rational choice and cultural identity
that have dominated much political thought.‖1
While Arendt was a well-known and widely read political theorist during her life
time—particularly thanks to her very influential writings on totalitarianism, which will
1 Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, introduction to Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig
Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 2.
2
also be the starting point of this project—popular interest in Arendt’s writings waned
beginning in the 1970s. The main reason for the shift away from Arendt was the
increasing popularity of Marxism, of which Arendt was highly critical. The most
important of her criticisms were the centrality of labor, the rise of the ―social‖ which
distracts from politics and the political life, and the idea of a progressive history.2 Though
Arendt was highly critical of the Western tradition of political thought, her political
theory was still firmly embedded in it. It made scholars of feminism, multiculturalism,
and postmodernism, who were already skeptical of the traditional canon of thought for
its lack of attention to subversive identities and non-traditional questions, unappreciative
of Arendt’s contribution to political theory.3
Throughout the 1990s, there was a surge of interest in Arendt’s work. Several
orientations emerged in the study of politics from an Arendtian point of view: (1) Legal
and political questions posed by the problem of stateless persons that translate into the
modern examinations of citizenship, asylum, and ―the right to have rights,‖4 (2) The
2 I will examine Arendt’s critique of Marx, particularly of his concept of history in Chapter 3.
3 I owe my understanding of this historical interest work in Arendt’s work to Calhoun and Gowan, 1997.
4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), 177-178.
For a detailed analysis of the concept of ―the right to have rights,‖ see Seyla Benhabib ―Kantian Questions,
Arendtian Answers: Statelessness, Cosmopolitanism, and the Right to Have Rights‖ in Pragmatism,
Critique, Judgment. Essays for Richard Bernstein, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 179-188. See also Margaret Canovan, "Is There an Arendtian Case for the
Nation-State?" Contemporary Politics 5, no. 2 (1999): 103-19; Phillip Birger Hansen, Hannah Arendt:
Politics, History and Citizenship (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993); Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt
and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006).
3
problem of evil in politics and the moral underpinnings of political life, (3) The aesthetic
self-representation in politics, the nature of political realm, conceptualization of political
action and actor, (4) The problem of judgment rooted in Arendt’s controversial reading of
Kant, and (5) The empirical questions such as the nature of power and domination. I
would like to elaborate a few of these central debates.
The first concerns the nature of political realm, political action and actor. The
discussion of Arendt’s work from this point of view revolved around the Nietzschean-
Habermasian axis. While both of these positions denounced a reading of Arendt as a
―nostalgic communitarian pining for the lost world of Greek polis,‖ they differed from
one another in a significant respect.5 Arendt scholars who concentrated on the individual
and performative aspects of her theory of political action, emphasized her definition of
the public realm as a space of appearances.6 At the center of this reading was political
actor as a singular individual and political action as a novel, agonistic, spontaneous, and
incalculable act. According to these scholars, Arendt’s political thought had more
affinities with the postmodern political theories such as Foucault’s, in which ―any dream
of a renewed realm of positive communal meaning‖ was rejected ―in the name of
5 Martin Jay, ―Reflective Judgments by a Spectator on a Conference that is Now History‖ in Hannah
Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 340.
6 See for example Lisa Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1994); Kimberly Curtis, Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics,
Contestations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); John McGowan, Hannah Arendt: An
Introduction (Minneapolis, MN ; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
4
aesthetic self-fashioning.‖7 In contrast, the scholars who emphasized Arendt’s concept of
―action in concert,‖ interpreted her writings to support a robust and comprehensive public
sphere.8 They found in her political theory a conception of the political that valued
publicity, communication, and plurality. The aforementioned controversial and
contradictory character of Arendt’s writings provided room for both interpretations.
The second issue is the role of judgment, which was largely inspired by Arendtian
reading of Kant’s aesthetic judgment and supplemented recently with the publication of
Arendt’s writings on the subject of responsibility and judgment under totalitarianism.9
The tension between the judgment of the actor and the judgment of the spectator was first
identified by Beiner in his brilliant interpretive essay on Arendt’s lectures.10 This
controversy revolved around the following question: in her final work, The Life of the
Mind, particularly the last, incomplete portion of it, ―Judgment,‖ Arendt introduced a
principled distinction between the actor and the spectator, between direct participation in
politics and passing judgment over political events from outside. Arendt observed that
while the actors may be the makers of history, ―the spectator, not the actor, holds the clue
7 Martin Jay, 1997, 340.
8 Jürgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communication Concept of Power," Social Research 44 (1977): 3-
24; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, Md.; Oxford : Rowan &
Littlefield, 2003); Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London;
New York: Routledge, 2001).
9 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003);
Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn, (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1994); Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
10 Ronald Beiner, "Hannah Arendt on Judging," in Hannah Arendt Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy,
ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992),
5
to the meaning of human affairs.‖11 The problem was reconciling the two periods of
Arendt’s work. How can we account for the fact that Arendt, who favored vita activa
over vita contemplativa in all her previous work, abandoned her focus on action for a
theory of judgment that privileged the spectator?12
Finally, the most recent wave of interest in Arendt’s work emerged from her
historical writings on imperialism, slavery, race, and genocide.13 This new wave of
interest was characterized by a shift of attention from Arendt the political thinker to
Arendt the historical thinker. These scholars were not necessarily interested in historical
or political accuracy (for example, whether Arendt was right to call Nazi Germany and
Soviet Russia totalitarian regimes), rather in the implications of Arendt’s writings for
some of the perennial political questions, such as the philosophical and anthropological
implications of violence and power, domination, race, nationalism, and international
relations.
Each of these approaches brought to the foreground an important aspect of
Arendt’s political thought. Thanks to Nietzschean-Habermasian debate, we gained a new
11 Hannah Arendt, ―Thinking‖ in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978a), 96.
12 See Patrick Riley, "Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics," Political Studies XXXV (1987): 379-
392; Linda Zerilli, ""We Feel Our Freedom" Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,"
Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 158-88; Seyla Benhabib, "Judgment and the Moral Foundations of
Politics in Arendt's Thought," Political Theory 16, no. 1 (1988): 29-51.
13 Richard H. King and Dan Stone, ed., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race,
and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Anthony Lang and John Williams, ed. Hannah Arendt
and International Relations: Readings across the Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Wolfgang Heuer,
"Europe and Its Refugees: Arendt on the Politicization of Minorities." Social Research: An International
Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2007): 1159-1172.
6
appreciation of the public sphere and the role of the political actor. The debate on
Arendt’s appropriation of Kant highlighted her theory of judgment as a way of dealing
with the particulars. Finally, the study of Arendt’s historical writings posed important
questions about violence and power, the role of imperialism, and finally the modern
iterations of these themes in current international politics.
The common point of all these approaches is the neglect or lack of attention to
Arendt’s writings on the philosophy of history. While Arendt’s historical writings have
garnered considerable attention, her writings on history have remained sparsely
attended.14 I would like to emphasize that when I refer to Arendt’s writings on history, I
mean to include her writings that deal with the concept of history (both traditional and
modern), historical necessity, and the philosophy of history.
One reason for the lack of attention can be traced to the nature of Arendt’s
writings on history. Unlike her theory of political action or totalitarianism, Arendt’s
writings on history are not contained in a single text. Arendt scholars who want to study
her theory of the public can turn to The Human Condition. The Origins of Totalitarianism
sums up neatly her observations on totalitarian movements. Even Arendt’s theory of
judgment can be understood to a large extent by consulting the Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy. In contrast, her writings on the philosophy of history are scattered
and fragmented. Nonetheless, this is not a reason to give up on Arendt’s writings on
history.
14 A welcome exception is Samir Gandesha, "Writing and Judging. Adorno, Arendt and the Chiasmus of
Natural History," Philosophy & Social Criticism 30, no. 4 (2004): 445-475.
7
Jerome Kohn relates the following anecdote from the early 1970s, when Arendt
taught two seminars on ancient and modern political thought.15 In the second seminar,
Arendt paid particular attention to Montesquieu and what she considered his unique and
crucial contribution to modern political thought.16 Arendt’s students were confused:
―where exactly, they asked her, is this contribution laid out in his work?‖17 Arendt
―replied that it is not laid out in one place, but has to be put together from all his writings
and by getting to know the man.‖18 I think Arendt’s answer is quite telling. Like
Montesquieu’s contribution to modern political thought, Arendt’s thoughts on history are
not laid out in one place, rather spread throughout her philosophy. Her critique of the
philosophy of history needs to be pieced together from writings that span of long
period—from her early writings in 1940s and 50s on judgment and responsibility under
totalitarianism, concepts of history, tradition, and authority, to her later writings on the
Eichmann trial and the life of the mind. Nonetheless, by putting together these writings,
we can arrive at Arendt’s true contribution to the critique of philosophy of history.
One caveat is in order: One of Arendt’s most controversial positions was her
conceptualization of Kant’s aesthetic judgment as a political theory. Notwithstanding the
fact that Kant already has a political theory, some commentators perceived this as an
unjustified imposition on Kant’s writings. Similarly, my reconstruction of Arendt’s
critique of philosophy of history might seem problematic at first glance. However, I will
15 Jerome Kohn, ―Guest Editor’s Introduction,‖ Social Research 74, no.3 (2007), xviii.
16 Arendt has great reverence for Montesquieu, whom she considers one the greatest political thinkers of
the Western tradition. I elaborate this point in the context of Arendt’s views on totalitarianism in Chapter 1.
17 Kohn, 2007, xviii.
18 Emphasis in original. Ibid.
8
demonstrate throughout this project that history is the crucial theme that constitutes the
background of Arendt’s body of thought.
Etienne Balibar observed that ―[m]ore than any great thinker…Arendt is one who
never wrote twice the same book, and more than that, never wrote two successive books
from the same point of view.‖19 According to Balibar, Arendt was constantly reconciling
event, thought and writing, allowing her thoughts to be transformed throughout this
process. While this process gave her writing the character of ―a continuous, unfinished
experiment of thought,‖ it did not ―abolish the permanence of certain crucial questions
that remain on the horizon of the philosophical quest.‖20 I think the critique of philosophy
of history was such a philosophical quest that Arendt embarked on. Prompted by her
observations on the nature of totalitarian ideology, as I will elaborate in the next section,
Arendt engaged in a thorough critique of the tradition of Western philosophy, with a
particular emphasis on the concept of history. I contend that Hannah Arendt’s political
theory was written against this background. Balibar’s observation justifies ―borrow[ing]
elements from texts that belong to different periods and different genres…in order to give
the problem its maximum saliency.‖21 Similarly, in tracing Arendt’s critique of
philosophy to its roots and constructing its main pillars, I will follow Balibar’s
methodology.
In response to the recent approaches in Arendt scholarship, this project takes
seriously the claim that Arendt’s work on the philosophy of history is central to her
19 Etienne Balibar, ―(De)Construction the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of
Hannah Arendt’s Practical Philosophy,‖ Social Research 74, no.3 (2007), 727.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
9
thought. Arendt’s writings on history not only analyze the development of our modern
understanding of history, but also identify a lethal threat to individual difference and to
capacity of action in our contemporary political thinking.
II
The starting point of this project is the totalitarian movements of the twentieth
century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt observed that totalitarianism created a
parallel world based on ideology—a world without connection to reality that substitutes
obedience for judgment and obligation for responsibility. By the logical coercion of
ideology, totalitarianism stripped human beings of their capacity for thought and action in
accordance with their proper judgment. For Arendt, the quintessential theorist of human
action and plurality, this observation posed a disturbing question. The human action is
independent; it cannot be subsumed by any logical deduction or external power. How
could totalitarianism become so powerful? How could it eradicate freedom and
responsibility? Arendt’s analysis led her to conclude that totalitarian movements relied on
a concept of historical necessity that derived from laws of Nature or History. The concept
of historical necessity, which is probably the only intellectual content of totalitarian
ideology, dictated action, negating freedom and responsibility.
This analysis of totalitarianism could be interpreted in two different ways. On the
one hand, one could argue that twentieth-century totalitarianism is an anomaly, an
aberration in the history of the Western world, ―the cradle of civilization.‖ On the other
hand, one could dig deeper into the Western philosophical tradition and try to understand
10
whether totalitarianism represented something decisive about our ―heritage.‖ Arendt took
the second road. She decided that ―we can no longer afford to take that which was good
in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a
dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.‖22 While Arendt thought that one
could not simply separate the good in the tradition from the bad, she still defined
totalitarianism as a ―subterranean stream of Western history that has finally come to the
surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.‖23 It seemed that, for Arendt, hope was
not completely lost: one could still restore the dignity of the tradition, or at least from its
ruins build the foundations of a new political theory. This is the true motivation for the
project that Arendt undertook vis-à-vis the Western tradition: a thorough critique of the
philosophy of history.
I do not presume——and neither does Arendt argue—that a particular
understanding of history and historical necessity is the only reason for the rise of
totalitarianism in Europe. On the contrary, Arendt rejects the notion that there was a
single cause. Rather, a variety of forces ―crystallized‖ to bring about totalitarianism. My
project examines the concept of history mainly because it has been largely overlooked in
Arendt scholarship. However, Arendt also declared: ―I have a suspicion that philosophy
is not completely innocent in this business.‖24 As I will demonstrate throughout this
22 Arendt, 1968, ix.
23 Ibid.
24 Quoted in Robert Bernasconi, ―When the Real Crime Began. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of
Totalitarianism and the Dignity of the Western Philosophical Tradition‖ in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of
History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide, ed. Richard H. King and Dan Stone (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2007), 56.
11
project, this suspicion constitutes the central motive of her later work on freedom, action
and political responsibility.
Why history?
In order to further elaborate the focus of this project on the philosophy of history, allow
me to summon to my help William Galston’s reflections on the concept of history.
According to Galston, the idea of history in modern thought developed in three stages:
The idea of progress arising from the assumed congruence of intellectual and
political advancement or, more generally, belief in the efficacy of conscious
human endeavor directed toward universal enlightenment; the idea of history, a
force or purpose guiding the totality of human beings toward an end that may not
be evident to or intended by an single being; and historicism – the doctrine that
every human situation is circumscribed by a historical fatality that is indivisible,
unknowable, and arbitrary in the sense that it is not the inevitable or predictable
outcome of any preceding situation.25
Galston contends that each stage was born out of the inability of its predecessor to
produce a convincing account of history that corresponded to the existing reality. The
idea of history emerged, for example, as a response to the ―growing realization of the
ambiguous moral or political effects of enlightenment and the dubious status of the
25 William A. Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 4.
Emphasis mine.
12
doctrine of human intellectual equality that underlay it.‖26 Historicism for its turn, came
into existence when ―the directionality and the rationality‖ of the idea of history started to
seem doubtful.
It is not clear that each stage is in fact superior to its predecessor in terms of
explanatory capacity. Moreover, no stage was able to completely eradicate and replace
the previous one in the social, political and cultural realm. Galston rightly points out that
our modern understanding of politics and political philosophy can be best understood as a
continuous struggle among these modalities of thinking.
While Arendt engages with the different meanings of the concept——without
necessarily differentiating them in a systematic manner—she ―is not really concerned
with history as a distinct form of social inquiry.‖27 Rather, the philosophy of history
traditionally conceptualized history as the ultimate source of meaning in human life. It
provided individuals with a conception of personhood, a notion of meaning of one’s
existence in the world and in time.28 This conception determined the fate of political
action, particularly in the modern period. Arendt raises the question of history because of
the multiple ways in which it is connected to the central pillars of political life, such as
freedom, action and responsibility.
In the following chapters, I follow Arendt’s intellectual trajectory. The first
chapter, devoted to Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, captures the main characteristics
of the supremely destructive political phenomenon of totalitarianism. The foremost
26 Ibid.
27 Phillip Birger Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
1993), 26.
28 L.W Beck, introduction to On History, by Kant, ed. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), xiii.
13
driving force of totalitarian ideologies was belief in progress as a universal and automatic
process. Arendt suspected that the tradition of Western philosophy provided the
background for totalitarian ideologies. This observation prompted Arendt first to analyze
Marxism with an eye to its proto-totalitarian tendencies and later to evaluate the Western
tradition of political thought from Plato to Marx. Her analysis resulted in a full-fledged
critique of the philosophy of history, which I then start to develop in Chapter 2. Let me
note that Arendt has a very unique conception the Western tradition of philosophy.
Philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular is older and more
encompassing than the Western political philosophy. However, Arendt is concerned with
a particular school of thought that began in Greece with Plato and Aristotle and later
developed in the West.
Arendt’s main concern in the Western tradition of philosophy is the relationship
between philosophy and politics, theory and action. The fickle, unpredictable, and
incalculable nature of action always presented a problem for philosophy. It was seen as
one of the most elusive of human activities because of its futility and boundlessness.
Therefore, beginning with Plato, philosophy developed a two-fold reaction to politics: On
the one hand, it denigrated the realm of human affairs and politics that organizes this
realm to an inferior status. It privileged, instead, philosophy as the realm of truth and the
philosopher as the holder of access to truth. On the other hand, it reduced political action
to mere making or fabrication instead of grounding it in human plurality. The political
actor was modeled after the solitary craftsman as opposed to a social agent acting in
concert with others.
14
A breakthrough in this way of thinking came about with Hegel. Hegel’s
philosophy of history showed an interest in the realm of human affairs. We can observe
the implications of this paradigm shift in Hegel’s reflections on the French Revolution.
Unfortunately, Hegel’s interest in history fell short of elevating the status of political
action. On the contrary, it helped obscure the meaning of politics from a different and
unprecedented angle. There are two facets to this critique: First, instead of attending to
the significance of the particular, Hegel drowned the particular deeds and acts, which are
the true material of politics, in an overly broad, self-sustaining fiction of the World Spirit.
Second, it preserved the privileged role of the philosopher.
Chapter 3 follows the development of this philosophy of history in Marx’s
thought. It starts with a very controversial claim: Karl Marx, followed in Hegel’s
footsteps and developed a philosophy of history that neglected the importance of the
political realm to an equal extent. Marx is recognized in the Western tradition as the
quintessential theorist of action. So how can he be accused of failing to attend properly
attend to the true nature of political actions? It is true that Marx rejected Hegel’s idea of
the cunning of reason and posited material existence as the true subject of historical
dialectic. In this respect Marx distanced his political theory from the traditional
assumptions of philosophy that perceived the realm of human affairs as fickle,
unpredictable, futile, and ultimately inferior to the realm of thought. Moreover, Marx
recognized action as capable of generating meaning in human life. However, I
demonstrate that Marx ultimately adopted a progressive view of world history even
though its content is materialist instead of idealist. We can observe the same
characteristics of Hegel’s concept of history—a progressive history towards the
15
realization of freedom—in Marx. Just like Hegel, Marx believed that individual actions
cannot create the desired effects in human history; therefore, they cannot be the driving
force of history. Human destiny is shaped by economic classes, the only force capable of
bringing about enduring historical change.
Marx took a step further. Like Hegel, he believed that freedom would be realized
in history. However, he transformed this ultimate aim of history into a plan of action. He
thought freedom should be the goal of political action and imposed a duty on the political
actors to realize it. While this seems like a noble goal, it presents a problem from the
viewpoint of the relationship between freedom and necessity. According to Marx,
freedom now consisted in bringing about the inherent and necessary meaning in history.
Political action was reduced to realizing this necessary pattern. Political actions were
judged not according to the character and capacity of judgment of those actors who
perpetrated them but by their ability to realize the historical trends. In the most ironical
turn of events, Marx made freedom dependent on necessity.
Hence, in Chapters 2 and 3, I construct the modern problem of freedom within the
context of philosophy of history. However, Arendt’s project is not solely deconstructive.
She does point to the oppositions and contradictions in the Western philosophy’s
understanding of history but she also has a constructive response to this tradition, which
again most of the time remains unattended to in Arendt scholarship. One of the oft-noted
characteristics of Arendt’s writing is her ability to salvage the heritage of the past. Arendt
reminded us of the possibilities of political life by bringing to our attention the Greek
concept of action and the republican conceptions of politics that underpinned the
experience of the American founders. Similarly, Arendt salvages from the tradition of
16
philosophy the foundations of a political theory that can restore the dignity of the political
life. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Arendt’s solution.
In Chapter 4, I examine the affinity between Arendt’s political thought and Walter
Benjamin’s philosophy. I demonstrate that Benjamin, like Arendt, identified progress as
the central problem of modernity. Arendt and Benjamin both thought that the
contemporary conditions of existence as defined by progress and a break with the
tradition. In the ―Theses on the Philosophy of History,‖ Benjamin summed up his views
on history by two powerful images: progress as catastrophe and blasting open the
historical continuum. I show that Arendt unequivocally adopted this notion of progress as
catastrophe. As a response to the idea of progress, Arendt also adopted Benjamin’s
fragmented history, of redeeming elements of the past for purposes of a critical
examination of the present and the future. With the imagery of the gap between past and
future, Arendt carved a space for dealing with the forces of progress and tradition’s claim
on our present and future.
Finally in Chapter 5, I turn to Arendt’s appropriation of Kantian aesthetic
judgment. While Kant’s philosophy of history represents the forerunner of the idea of a
telos in history, Arendt did not hold Kant to the same critique that she raised against
Hegel and Marx. On the contrary, she found Kant’s political philosophy—but not his
philosophy of history—particularly attractive for its ability to integrate the individual
with the society through public sense – and doing so without sacrificing autonomy and
individuality. While Kant’s idea of history is problematic from the viewpoint of freedom,
Arendt detected a unique conception of the essence of the political in Kant. At the end of
her inquiry into the philosophy of history, she came to the conclusion that the only way
17
of resisting, of facing up to progress is to ―reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it
were from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern.‖29 Arendt found the
necessary tools to resist the judgment of history in the Kantian conception of enlarged
mentality that is attuned to both particularity and plurality.
III
While much has been written about Arendt, as Jerome Kohn, says ―nothing chez
Arendt is ever as straightforward as…may seem.‖30 I agree with Kohn and believe that
there is room for further interpretation of Arendt’s political theory. In addition to
examining a much-neglected portion of Arendt’s writings and bringing into the light
Arendt’s critique of philosophy of history, my work also contributes to Arendt
scholarship in the following respects.
One common approach in Arendt scholarship is to analyze her writings through
the lens of her German-Jewish identity or her tutelage under Jaspers and Heidegger. A
notorious example is Richard Wolin. In Heidegger’s Children, Wolin depicted
Heidegger’s influence on young intellectuals of the 1920s.31 Included in this group was
Arendt, who, like Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith, was a Jewish student of philosophy.
These students of Heidegger would eventually have to reconcile their view of
Heidegger’s philosophy with his despicable political stance. Unlike the rest of the group,
29 Arendt, 1978a, 216.
30 Kohn, 2007, 14.
31 Richard Wolin, Heidegger's Children: H with, Hans Jonas, and Herbert
Marcuse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
18
Arendt had a personal relationship with Heidegger. Based on this relationship, Wolin
presented Arendt as an impressionable young student and lover of Heidegger’s, whose
intellectual contribution to philosophy would amount to nothing more than salvaging
aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy. Nothing can be further from the truth. While
Heidegger’s philosophy left a lasting impression on Arendt, her political thought
developed far beyond that of the impressionable pupil that Wolin made her to be.
Similarly, even though Arendt was very much influenced by the cosmopolitan political
thought of Karl Jaspers, a close friend of Arendt’s as well as her teacher and mentor, she
did not take over Jasper’s views completely, either. Throughout her long intellectual
career, Arendt read the tradition of Western political thought, perhaps with a more critical
and discerning eye than any other modern thinker. She studied political philosophers like
Kant, Hegel and Marx and this encounter had a profound influence on her political
thought. Unfortunately this influence often goes unmentioned. In this project, by bringing
to the forefront Arendt’s intellectual conversation with the Western political tradition, I
contribute to remedying this situation.
While emphasizing Arendt’s intellectual conversation with the Western political
tradition, I seek to avoid a pitfall that Arendt scholars frequently seem to fall into: the
problem of decontextualizing Arendt’s writings. Let us keep in mind Quentin Skinner’s
warning to political theorists, reminded to us by Jeffrey Isaac.32 Skinner criticized the
practice of treating the major philosophers of the Western tradition (such as Aristotle and
Machiavelli) ―as if they were engaged in a transhistorical conversation about big issues
32 Jeffrey Isaac, ―Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics‖ Political Theory vol. 21, No.3 (1993).
19
that surpassed all context.‖33 Skinner was concerned that this attitude would only produce
―anachronism and misinterpretation.‖34 Isaac shows that much of Arendt scholarship
suffers from ignoring this Skinnerian insight. While constructing Arendt’s theory of
action as a modern day Nietzchean aestheticist political theory, interpreters of Arendt are
ignoring her main project: coming to terms with our conditions of existence under
modernity – particularly in the aftermath of World War 2 and the experience of
totalitarianism.
It is true that Arendt’s writings are characterized by a profound engagement with
the tradition of Western philosophy. This serious enterprise of criticizing the tradition and
setting her political theory against it allows Arendt scholars to reconstruct her thought as
a timeless conversation with the big issues in Western political thought. But Arendt is
mainly interested in tradition because of its contemporary relevance. As Margaret
Canovan reminds us, ―[Arendt’s] theory of action, just like the rest of her political
thought, is rooted in her response to totalitarianism and is not an exercise in nostalgia for
the Greek polis.‖35 I believe that this project highlights that Arendt’s interest in
philosophy and history is similarly rooted in political experience. Arendt was above all
concerned with redeeming the dignity of the human activity, responsibility and judgment,
when the ideology of historical necessity made these concepts utterly irrelevant.
33 Ibid., 534.
34 Ibid.
35 Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt : A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. (Cambridge ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2.
20
IV
This project is concerned with the complex problems that result from the
emergence of the problem of history in modern Western political thought. A
comprehensive account of this problem from the viewpoint of the history of ideas would
require us to delve into the emergence of the idea of progress from Galileo to Descartes
and to examine the views of Herder, Fichte and Schelling, who influenced Hegel’s
philosophy of history. Instead, this study has a thematic focus. It follows Hannah
Arendt’s critique of the modern concept of history in Western political thought from Kant
to Benjamin via Hegel and Marx.
This presentation may suggest that the aim of this project is purely historical; i.e.
that it intends to develop an understanding of the modern concept of history from the
viewpoint of intellectual history without any interest in its practical implications or
contemporary status. On the contrary, I believe that Arendt’s writings contain valuable
insights into the conditions of modernity. They enhance our understanding of the
interplay between philosophy of history and personal responsibility. Remember that
Arendt drew a sharp distinction between political thought and the tradition of political
philosophy. Even though she was known as a political philosopher, she refused the label
and considered herself a student of political theory. In contradistinction to the tradition of
political philosophy, which degraded political action into the category means and ends,
political theory, Arendt believed, was grounded in political experience.
In her brilliantly executed analysis of Arendt’s political thought, Canovan argued
that the fundamental conditions that gave way to totalitarianism did not end with
totalitarianism. The crisis of our time is ongoing. From the viewpoint of philosophy of
21
history, the concept of history has not fallen out of use. It proves an important way of
thinking about modern politics and organizing contemporary political life. The advanced
democracies of the West are still using the banner of ―triumph of history‖ when waging
war to bring peace and democracy to the rest of the world. I believe that Arendt’s work
on history and this project can help us analyze such uses of the concept of history and
interpret our contemporary situation.
22
Chapter 1: Totalitarianism and Historical Necessity
It has been characteristic of our history-conscious century that its worst crimes have
been committed in the name of some kind of necessity or in the name—and this amounts
to the same thing—of the ―wave of the future.‖ For people who submit to this, who
renounce their freedom and their right of action, even though they may pay the price of
death for their delusion, anything more charitable can hardly be said than the words with
which Kafka concludes The Trial: ―It was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.‖1
1. Introduction
The first part of the twentieth century brought about a series of unprecedented
events. The two world wars not only economically and socially devastated Europe, but
also altered its political landscape irrevocably. Millions of people perished in Nazi
concentration and extermination camps and in the Soviet Gulag; millions more were
displaced or rendered stateless. The world, for the first time, witnessed a regime of total
domination and totalitarian terror.
Hannah Arendt was among the most prominent thinkers who systematically
analyzed these events. As a political thinker and a Jew, Arendt wanted to understand the
dynamics of not only the totalitarian National Socialist state, which designated as its
supreme purpose the total annihilation of European Jewry, but also the Soviet communist
1 Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A revaluation” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,1994a), 71.
23
state, which also ruthlessly carried out the destruction of millions of people. In her very
widely acknowledged and controversial book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt
investigated the social and political elements that crystallized into the totalitarian regimes
of Germany and Soviet Russia.2 Arendt observed that what made their crimes
unprecedented was neither the unimaginably great number of victims, nor the large
number of perpetrators. What was unprecedented, she argued, was both the
mechanization of murder and the extraordinary ideological conviction that allowed for
the creation of a hitherto unknown world, where ethical distinctions between good and
evil were rendered fluid. Totalitarianism, in other words, built a system that deprived all
men of individuality and spontaneity and prepared them for roles as either executioner or
victim.
In this chapter, I explore Arendt‟s most interesting insight on totalitarianism,
namely the reliance of totalitarian movements on the concept of ideology. The worst
crimes of this century, Arendt observed, were committed in the name of ideology.
Ideology starts with an axiom and proceeds according to an internal logic that its
supporters believe corresponds to the unfolding of historical process. Accordingly, the
entire progress of history can be understood in terms of the initial premise of the
ideology.
The logical or historical necessity embraced by totalitarian regimes raises a
particular question regarding the relationship between theory and practice. An ideology‟s
2 Arendt writes, in fact, “The central [thing] is the event, into which the elements had abruptly crystallized
themselves… The title of my book [is] utterly wrong, it should have read: „The Elements of
Totalitarianism.‟ ” Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, cited in Arendt und Benjamin, Texte, Briefe,
Dokumente, ed. Detlev Shoettker and Edmut Wizisla, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 30.
24
claim to total explanation requires that it not only explain the past but predict and even
calculate the future. The particular premise of Marxism that history is class struggle, for
example, can easily be interpreted by the leaders of the movement as a death sentence for
the dying classes. The logical force of the argument provides the supporters of ideology
with a plan of action.
The claim to a total explanation of history is an innovation of totalitarian
ideologies. From the point of view of action, the logical coercion of ideology implies the
constriction of freedom, which Arendt describes “as an inner capacity of man … identical
with the capacity to begin.”3 Over men‟s action, which Arendt characterizes as a
beginning, “no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power.”4 With the force of
ideology, however, every human action is brought under the control of the movement.
Human beings are rendered incapable of thinking and acting in accordance with their
proper judgment. They submit to the “logical necessity” of the totalitarian ideology.
The connection between ideology and action is particularly problematic under
totalitarianism, but the relationship between theory and practice, i.e., “the pattern by
which action is derived from an idea,” 5 has always been a central theme of Western
political thought. Particularly in the period subsequent to the completion of The Origins
of Totalitarianism, Arendt concentrated on exploring the connections between thought
and action and between freedom and responsibility in Western political thought from
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), 473.
4 Ibid.
5 Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror. Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 93.
25
Plato to Marx. Arendt‟s historical and theoretical inquiry will be the subject of the
chapters that follows.
For now, Arendt‟s inquiry raises the following question: does the connection
between the Western tradition of philosophy and totalitarianism imply that philosophy
bears responsibility for the horrible events of the twentieth century, and Nazi terror in
particular? Indeed, a connection between the “German problem” and the philosophical
tradition has been suggested more than once. Moreover, the Nazis were the first to claim
certain philosophers and philosophical ideas as their own. Yet Arendt firmly rejects this
proposition: “Nazism owes nothing to any part of Western tradition. Be it German or not,
Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman. Whether we like Thomas Aquinas or
Machiavelli or Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche…they are not the least responsible
for what is happening in extermination camps.”6 She recognizes instead that the “great
playground of history” provides a hiding-place, an intellectual environment that can
easily be manipulated. It is precisely for this reason that we need to problematize the
relationship between philosophy and history. We need to find ways of understanding
history differently so that it does not become a necessity, a hindrance to our freedom;
instead, every moment and every event should become a possible occasion for the
exercise and enhancement of human freedom.
In the first part of this chapter, I analyze Arendt‟s arguments about totalitarianism,
with a special emphasis on necessity, logical deduction and process-thinking. I
demonstrate that despite the common perception of totalitarian government as defying all
6 Hannah Arendt, “Approaches to the German Problem” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed.
Jerome Kohn (New York : Harcourt, Brace & Co.,1994b), 108.
26
law, totalitarian regimes operate within a legal framework, which Arendt characterizes as
“totalitarian lawfulness.” An examination of common characteristics of totalitarian
regimes reveals the reliance of totalitarian lawfulness on terror, ideology and the laws of
Nature or History. In the second part, I explain the political nature of this problem. The
belief in ideology replaces individual thinking with logical processes and freedom with
submission. In the third part, I consider critiques of Arendt‟s concepts of ideology.
Finally, I conclude with an evaluation of Arendt‟s analysis of Nazism and Bolshevism.
2. Totalitarianism: A Novel Form of Government
Ever since totalitarianism emerged as a new form of government, political
scientists, sociologist, historians and philosophers have been confronted with the task of
analyzing the circumstances in which it arose and the internal dynamics that allowed its
perpetuation.7 In her own attempt to come to terms with the drastic experience of
totalitarianism, Arendt asks a fundamental ontological question about its nature: is
totalitarianism really an unprecedented phenomenon?8
7 See for example Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1963); Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952);
Carl Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New Work: Praeger, 1965); Franz Neumann,
Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1944).
8 This is the main question of the final chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Ideology and Terror.”
This chapter did not appear in the first edition of the book in 1951. After concluding her empirical analysis
of the totalitarian regimes, Arendt developed a set of invaluable theoretical insights into the nature of the
totalitarian governments. These insights culminated in “Ideology and Terror”, which appeared first in the
1955 German edition and then in the revised English edition. Some commentators, like Roy Tsao, argue
that it is confounding conclusion to the book because “it presents an argument that at times seems to be
27
Arendt‟s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism demonstrates that in its
attempt at total domination, totalitarianism replaced traditional social, legal, and political
traditions with new institutions.9 Totalitarianism “transformed classes into masses,
supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement,
shifted the center of power from army to the police, and established a foreign policy
openly directed toward world domination.”10 It engaged in a radical transformation of all
aspects of the sociopolitical realm. Totalitarianism ultimately created a new world where
the difference between right and wrong was so blurred that neither laws, nor moral
imperatives, nor common sense could provide a reliable yardstick for action. In this
sense, the totalitarian regime is different from traditional forms of political oppression,
namely tyranny, despotism, and dictatorship, the characteristics of which have been
identified and distinguished from one another early on in Western political thought.11 If
nearly as discontinuous with the prior chapters of part III, as they in turn had been with those of the prior
two parts.” Roy Tsao. “The Three Phases of Arendt‟s Theory of Totalitarianism” in Social Research 96
(2002): 581. While the chapter might be problematic from the viewpoint of the structure of Arendt‟s
argument in this book, it is an excellent resource for understanding the theoretical issue totalitarianism that
presents for Arendt.
9 Particularly in part 3, chapters 10-13.
10 Arendt, 1968, 461.
11 Not all readers of Arendt agree that totalitarianism is an unprecedented modern phenomenon. John
Stanley argues that according to the criteria that Arendt set (ideology; terror as an instrument of rule; fluid,
anti-bureaucratic power structures; interdependence between the leader and his followers; destruction of all
nonpolitical bonds between subjects; mobilization) Zulu Chief Zhaka, who was mentioned in passing in
The Origins of Totalitarianism, was a totalitarian leader. However, the kind of ideology that totalitarianism
of the twentieth century embraced stemmed from belief in progress as a universal and automatic progress,
28
totalitarianism is genuinely unprecedented, Arendt asks, then is there “such a thing as the
nature of totalitarian government, whether it has its own essence and can be compared
with and defined like other forms of government?” Or is it a “makeshift arrangement,” an
impromptu regime born out of the failure of traditional political systems in the wake of
the Second World War? 12
In examining the nature of totalitarianism, Arendt finds that traditional methods of
analysis present us with a problem. Western political thought has shown us that every
regime known rests on a basic human experience that constitutes the basis of that political
formation.13 If this is true, and if totalitarianism has a particular nature that is specific to
it, then the latter must be based on a particular human experience that has never before
which is proved by science, experience, and the laws of nature. Without this particular worldview, in
Arendt‟s account, totalitarianism would have been devoid of its legitimating force. We will consider this in
detail below. John Stanley, “Is totalitarianism a New Phenomenon?” in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays,
ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
12 Arendt, 1968, 461.
13 Arendt‟s argument is based on her more detailed and extensive study of Montesquieu, which has been
posthumously published under the title of “On the Nature of Totalitarianism.” In this article, Arendt
observes that in addition to discovering that each form of government has a principle of action, according
to which rulers as well as the ruled in that political system act (more on this below), Montesquieu also
realized that there is a common ground, a determinate human experience which defines the basis, source or
origin of each type of government. In monarchy, this human experience is distinction, i.e., the fact that men
are different from each other by birth. The opposite of this experience, the inherent equality of men, is the
basis of republican government. Finally, fear is the inspiring principle of action and hence the underlying
human experience of despotic government. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in
Understanding” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co.,1994c).
29
come to the foreground of the political organization of mankind. Considered from the
viewpoint of the history of ideas, it is very unlikely that such an experience exists. The
forms of government under which human societies have lived are few and have not
significantly changed over the course of history. The analytical tools of Western
philosophy from Plato to Kant would lead us to characterize totalitarianism as a modern
form of tyranny. Totalitarianism would seem to be no different than traditional forms of
tyranny, where rule by a sovereign unrestricted by law and hostile to the interests of the
governed is the norm, and fear is the supreme principle of government.14 Yet Arendt
vividly depicts the way totalitarianism defies traditional characterizations. The political
experience under totalitarianism is utterly different, even unprecedented. It is elusive in
the face of conventional political wisdom. How and with which analytical tools can the
phenomenon of totalitarianism then be adequately examined?
Arendt‟s ingenuity lies in her reformulation of the conventional framework of
political analysis. She observes that in traditional political philosophy, all definitions
employed to categorize forms of governments have been based on the dichotomy of
“lawful and lawless government,” versus “arbitrary and legitimate power.”15 The Western
philosophical tradition never contested the proposition that governments either operate in
accordance with a set of predetermined rules in a politically legitimized power structure
or exercise arbitrary authority in a manner unrestricted by laws.16 Totalitarian regimes,
14 Arendt, 1968, 461.
15 Ibid.
16 Arendt‟s primary example here is Kant. Kant classified states according to (a) who governs it (b) in
which manner it is governed. The first classification, the forms of domination, describes the locus of power.
Depending on where the ruling power lies, there can be only three forms: autocracy, aristocracy, or
30
Arendt contends, are novel precisely because they explode this dichotomy between law
and lawlessness. Totalitarian rule defies, discards, or abolishes all “positive law”17, but it
is neither arbitrary nor lawless. The novelty and ultimate danger inherent in
totalitarianism stems from the fact that totalitarian regimes claim to obey a different kind
of law, the law of History or Nature. Arendt calls this “totalitarian lawfulness.”18
3. Characteristics of Totalitarian Lawfulness
What are the characteristics of totalitarian lawfulness? I will analyze Arendt‟s
concept of totalitarian lawfulness in five different but interconnected dimensions: the
source of authority, the subject of law, the legal framework, terror, and ideology.
democracy. The second “depends on the form of government (forma regiminis) and relates to the way in
which the state setting out from its constitution (i.e., an act of the general will whereby the mass becomes a
people), makes use of its plenary power.” Kant, “Perpetual Peace” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991a), 101. Constitutional government, for Kant, is lawful
because it embodies the principle of separation of powers; legislation, execution and judgment are handled
by separate offices. In despotic governments, these powers are not separated. All forms of domination
(autocracy, aristocracy and democracy) are illegal as long as they are not checked by laws. Arendt, 1994c,
330.
17 It is safe to assume that Arendt follows Montesquieu‟s definition of positive law, i.e., the kind of law that
human beings have come up with because of the necessity of living together with other individuals in a
society.
18 Arendt, 1968, 462.
31
a. The Source of Authority
The first characteristic of totalitarian lawfulness is its “source of authority.” As
opposed to regimes based on positive laws, which are established through consensus and
in accordance with authority recognized as legitimate, totalitarian regimes, Arendt
observes, claim to obey and execute the laws of History or Nature “from which all
positive laws always have been supposed to spring.”19 The adherence of totalitarian
regimes to the laws of History or Nature is seen as providing the totalitarian movement
with a superior form of legitimacy. Exactly what kind of legitimacy does totalitarian law
lay claim to?
According to totalitarian ideology, all positive laws receive their legitimation
from these two supra-human forces, History and Nature. But inherent in positive laws is a
form of mediation. Positive laws must always mediate between the source of authority
from which they derive their legitimacy (such as “the „natural law‟ governing the whole
universe, the divine law revealed in human history, or customs and traditions expressing
the law common to the sentiments of all men”20) and the requirements of real-life
circumstances. Arendt describes this situation as a “discrepancy between legality and
justice.”21 The general and universal nature of positive laws fails to adequately address
demands of each concrete and individual case. Totalitarian regimes declare that they are
able to bridge this gap and establish true justice on earth. Their claim to bring about
19 Ibid., 461.
20 Ibid., 462.
21 Ibid.
32
perfect justice is supported by the identification of the subject of law with the mankind.
This identification constitutes the second characteristic of totalitarian lawfulness.
b. The Subject of Totalitarian Law
The subject of totalitarian law is mankind itself. Totalitarian law does not
prescribe criteria of right and wrong for individual behavior; it does not concern itself
with individual interests. It perceives these interests as a petty legality that may be
sacrificed for the interest of the mankind as a whole. Instead, totalitarian law applies to
the totality of mankind. More precisely, totalitarian ideology claims to “transform the
human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise
would only passively and reluctantly be subjected.”22 In order to achieve this aim,
totalitarian law destroys the plurality of human beings and instead reduces their existence
to “One Man of gigantic dimensions.”23 Only this One Man, the totality of the mankind,
is at the same time both the true subject of totalitarian law and also the protagonist of the
course of History or Nature.
c. The Legal Framework of Totalitarian Law
A third characteristic of the totalitarian law concerns the kind of legal framework
it establishes, which Arendt sees as the fundamental difference between totalitarian law
and all other concepts of law.24 In order to illustrate this point, Arendt employs Cicero‟s
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 466.
24 Ibid., 462.
33
concept of consensus iuris (association or partnership in justice), which in a republic is a
prerequisite of the constitution of a “people” that is bound together by law. Since every
individual who breaks the law can only be judged if he has taken part in the consensus
iuris, according to Arendt, this basic consent constitutes the basis of moral judgment and
legal punishment.25 This type of consensus legitimizes and stabilizes the legal framework
of the body politic. When the eighteenth-century revolutionaries set out to create a new
model of government, they adopted this model of the republic, which is based on
obedience to a set of rules determined and consented to by the people who make up the
republic. This popular support constitutes the basis of governmental power.26
Totalitarian law departs from this traditional understanding of consensus
formation in that it does not want to establish its own consensus iuris; it does not want to
create a new framework of legality. On the contrary, totalitarian regime wants to do away
with positive laws; it “promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and will
of man.”27 The consequence of this shift from the structure of positive laws to direct
appeal to the law of Nature or History is most drastic from the viewpoint of stability of
the legal framework. As we have seen, the source of positive laws is either Nature or
Divinity. Whereas the authority of these sources is “permanent and eternal,” the positive
laws that translate this authority into human relations are “changing and changeable
according to circumstances.”28 In the face of the constantly changing world of human
25 Ibid.
26 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 41. In this article, she uses
the framework of legality to distinguish power from violence.
27 Arendt, 1968, 462.
28 Ibid., 463.
34
activity, however, these positive laws provide in the very least a framework of
permanence and stability, which they derive from the eternal character of their source of
authority. In its rejection of positive law, totalitarianism destroys this stable and
permanent framework. Instead, “all laws have become laws of movement.”29 This
observation is the most significant aspect of Arendt‟s analysis and the starting point for
her critique of totalitarian ideology. What exactly does Arendt mean by it?
Arendt‟s study of totalitarianism analyzes its two “brands,” Nazism and
Bolshevism under the same banner. We will examine below whether such a move is
justified. For the purposes this section, however, it suffices to note that for Arendt,
Nazism‟s law of Nature and Bolshevism‟s law of History may be equally characterized as
laws of movement. The common underlying characteristic is that in both ideologies, the
current state of existence is perceived not as an end product but only as a stage in a larger
(and ultimately infinite) process of progressive development. The idea of the classstruggle,
which Bolshevism believes is the expression of the law of History, is dependent
upon Marx‟s notion of society as the product of a steady historical movement. This
movement progresses according to its own rules towards the end of historical time.
Similarly, the Nazi belief in race as the driving force of nature is based on the Darwinian
idea of natural selection and the development of species. In the course of this natural
development, the present species is neither the beginning nor the end; it is only a phase.
Arendt points out that “the refusal to view or accept anything „as it is‟ ” and “the
consistent interpretation of everything as being only a stage of some further
29 Ibid.
35
development” is the reason why term “law” has completely changed its meaning.30 It no
longer denotes a stable framework that regulates human relations but instead the
expression of this progressive and ever-continuing development.
What is problematic about this state of affairs? Arendt observes that once Nature
and History are transformed into “supra-gigantic forces whose movements race through
humanity,” they start to pose a serious threat to individual existence, “dragging every
individual willy-nilly with them—either riding atop their triumphant car or crushed under
its wheels.”31 In this progressive movement, Nature and History dictate their own rules
and eliminate the obstacles in their way. Whatever stands in the way of progress becomes
superfluous: in order to guarantee the continuation of development, whatever is
superfluous may be eliminated. But the problem that the law of History or Nature poses
does not stop here. This movement, this ever-expanding progress, is a natural or historical
necessity. It follows from this premise that the elimination of the superfluous classes or
the harmful individuals in order to maintain this progress is only a necessary sacrifice.
Only with such elimination can the “result of natural or historical movement rise…like
the phoenix from its own ashes.”32 Only when mankind submits to this movement does it
fulfill the meaning of its existence. Arendt‟s judgment on this movement is clear: ―The
Hegelian definition of Freedom as insight into and conforming to ‗necessity‘ has here
found a new and terrifying realization.”33
30 Ibid. 464.
31 Arendt, 1994c, 341.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 346. Arendt‟s examination of Hegelian philosophy of history is taken up in Chapter 2.
36
d. Terror
The fourth dimension of totalitarian lawfulness is its instrument. Terror is the
means by which the law of movement is realized; it is the essence of totalitarian
government. In her article “Mankind and Terror,” Arendt defines terror as “a means of
frightening people into submission.”34 Terror in this very restricted sense of frightening
people into submission has been utilized as an instrument by various political regimes
throughout the centuries. For this reason, commentators have likened totalitarian terror to
the crimes of older tyrannical regimes. 35 In this view, it is the personal ambitions of a
powerful tyrant, combined with the political conviction of an “end justifies the means”
rationale that accounts for the totalitarian assault on the political structure and human
plurality.
Arendt agrees that a historical examination seems to lend credibility to such a
perspective on totalitarian terror:
There have almost always been wars of aggression; the massacre of hostile
populations after a victory went unchecked until the Romans mitigated it by
introducing the parcere subjectis; through centuries, the extermination of native
peoples went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and
Africa‟s slavery is one of the oldest institutions of mankind and all empires of
antiquity were based on the labor of state-owned slaves who erected their public
34 Hannah Arendt, “Mankind and Terror” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,1994a), 297.
35 Dana Villa points out that of such works, one example is Arthur Koestler‟s Darkness at Noon, which
describes Stalinist totalitarianism as “Machiavellianism run amok.” Villa,1999, 14.
37
buildings. Not even concentration camps were an invention of totalitarian
movements.36
However, this interpretation of totalitarian terror as an extension of the tyranny, war, and
cruelty that humankind has witnessed from time immemorial fails to recognize the
unprecedented nature of totalitarian terror. If we submit to such “liberal rationalizations,”
Arendt argues, we run the risk of misunderstanding totalitarian terror. It is true that for
each state of totalitarian domination, a precedent in world history can be established. The
ruthless terror at the first stages of the movement, for example, serves the purpose of
eradicating opposition—a political strategy that has been used by tyrannical governments
throughout the centuries. One can liken the elimination of political factions within the
ruling cadre under Soviet regime to the French Revolution devouring its own children.
But each of these analogies falls short of capturing the essence of the kind of terror
utilized by totalitarian governments. What accounts, then, for the unprecedented nature of
totalitarian terror?
Arendt suggests looking at the two types of terror that have been the bloodies and
most effective politically in terms of eliminating the opposition: the terror of tyranny and
the terror of revolution.37 When judged against these two types of terror, the novelty of
totalitarian terror appears in a new light. Both of these terrors have traditionally been
directed against framework of laws that regulate and guarantee freedoms and rights in a
society. Perpetrators of revolutionary terror, for example, undertake bloody massacres
36 Arendt, 1968, 440.
37 Arendt, 1994d, 298.
38
until all the political, social and cultural elements of the previous regime have been
eradicated and a new code of laws is established. Similarly, the tyrannical despot stops
only when all citizens are coerced into dutiful obedience and all public life is wiped out.
Thus they share an aim: doing away with the present state of affairs. Their terror comes
to an end when that aim is accomplished. Totalitarian terror, on the contrary, does not
have an end. It becomes only more ruthless and bloodier when the opposition is
eliminated. Arendt provides examples from Soviet Russia and Germany. In Soviet
Russia, concentration camps grew in number after 1930, when the opposition within the
party had already been crushed and the civil war period had effectively come to an end.38
In Nazi Germany, the number of concentration camps, which was no more than 10 in the
first years of the regime, increased steadily after 1937, at a time when regime no longer
met any internal resistance.39 What then is the purpose of terror under totalitarianism?
The peculiarity of the totalitarian terror lies in this premise: under totalitarianism,
everything must be in a constant state of movement, and terror is required to maintain
this. The function of terror and the need for totalitarian regimes to rely on terror,
especially after the opposition against the totalitarian regime has been largely eliminated
is understood best in the light of the third characteristic of totalitarian lawfulness
mentioned above namely that totalitarian law takes the form of a law of movement. We
have seen that totalitarian regimes are founded on a belief in an ever-expanding progress
in the realization of the meaning of History or Nature. This movement has its own
internal dynamics and rationale; it moves according to its own rules. Only when mankind
38 Ibid., 299.
39 Ibid.
39
acts as a totality according to the role assigned to it by the movement are the forces of
Nature or History truly liberated. The function of terror is precisely to guarantee this
unhindered development; it eliminates the obstacles on the way of progress. Terror is the
essence of totalitarian regimes.
In Arendt‟s analysis, the actual role of terror seems problematic. If totalitarianism
rests on the idea of movement, and if this movement is indeed a historical necessity, then
it cannot be hindered. The necessity according to which the movement in History or
Nature is shaped will eventually ensure that the movement proceeds according to its
predetermined course. Terror is then ultimately superfluous: the very idea of necessity on
which terror rests renders it redundant.
Arendt suggests that totalitarian movements have an answer to this objection: it is
true that the movement of Nature of History cannot be indefinitely deferred, but it can be
delayed.40 Arendt notes that this movement is inevitably slowed down by the very
existence of human beings who are born free and with a will to action. It is, moreover,
inevitably slowed down due to the very existence of human beings. Human beings are
born free and with a will to action. For Arendt, the fact that each human being is a new
beginning is the basis for the spontaneity of human action. In this sense, human freedom
is incompatible with the needs of a totalitarian movement. The movement of Nature and
History does not care about the interests or welfare of one person. It requires that human
species fulfill the course of its destiny in accordance with the guiding principle in Nature
or History. In the grand scheme of things, then, terror is required to ensure that “ „the
objective enemy‟ of History or Nature, of the class or the race”—that is, whoever stands
40 Arendt, 1968, 466.
40
in the way of the realization of these two forces—is done away with.41 Terror is not only
the means by which the forces of History or Nature are liberated. It is an accelerator,
which helps these movements reach “a speed that they never would reach if left to
themselves.”42
At this point, I would like to briefly emphasize the political nature of Arendt‟s
analysis. The idea of necessity in History or Nature alters the meaning of personal
responsibility. Guilt and innocence become, as Arendt puts it, “senseless notions.”43 The
ever-expanding natural or historical process has already determined the superfluous
elements in the system that stand in the way of development. The “inferior races” (in the
case of Nazism) and the “dying classes and decadent peoples” (in the case of
Bolshevism) are designated as the enemies of mankind and its progress.44 The individuals
in these groups, who are sacrificed for the sake of the species, the whole of mankind, may
be subjectively innocent insofar as they have taken no action against the regime. But they
have to be punished because they willingly or unwillingly hinder the movement of Nature
of History by their very existence. The executioners of the terror, on the other hand,
believe themselves to be innocent in a different sense. They do not commit murder per se,
but “execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal,” the court of History
or Nature.45
41 Ibid., 465
42 Ibid., 466.
43 Ibid., 465.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
41
In “Mankind and Terror,” Arendt points out that this feature constitutes another
difference between totalitarian regimes and tyranny.46 Arendt recalls the story of the
Roman emperor Nero, who desired that the whole of humankind have only one head, so
he could cut off this head and get rid of any opposition to his rule once and for all. Nero
knew that this was not possible, but it was a dream that would grant him total domination
if it came true. Arendt reminds us that the führer principle of Hitler, which was also
employed (perhaps even to a greater extent) by Stalin, is quite similar. It “operates on the
assumption not just that only one will survives among a dominated population but also
that only one mind suffices to take care of all human activities in general.”47 According to
totalitarianism, humankind is a concrete and unified entity. Hence, there is no reason why
it could not be represented and ruled by a single leader.
Beyond this superficial similarity, the core principle of totalitarian rule is
strikingly different from tyranny. Unlike the tyrannical despot, the totalitarian ruler does
not have enjoyment of the fruits of his domination as his ultimate purpose. Such an aim
would not even occur to the totalitarian leader, because unlike the tyrant, he does not
perceive himself as a “free agent with the power to execute his arbitrary will, but, instead
the executioner of laws higher than himself”48—the laws of History and Nature.
According to totalitarian ideology, these laws are infallible, unchangeable, and
prescriptive of human behavior. The only task left to totalitarian leader is then to interpret
and execute these laws on earth. Only one man, the leader, is necessary—and sufficient—
46 Arendt, 1994d, 346.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid. 346.
42
to realize the true destiny of humankind in accordance with these supra-human forces; all
other men are superfluous.
e. Ideology
The final element of totalitarian lawlessness is ideology. In order to understand
the role of ideology, let us first consider Arendt‟s examination of Montesquieu and the
concept of principle of action.49
Arendt argues that among all political thinkers Montesquieu has a unique place
because he supplemented the inquiry into the nature of the government with a novel
question: “What makes a government act as it acts?”50 Montesquieu realized that the
traditional two-dimensional understanding of government as a distribution of power
between ruler and the ruled had limited ability to explain the nature of political regimes.
He therefore introduced a two-fold analysis. On the one hand, he classified governments
according to their “nature,” i.e., their political structure. In this classification, there are
49 Arendt had great reverence for Montesquieu. She praised Montesquieu for being one of the last thinkers
that in line with the Western tradition asked questions as to the nature of politics and the different forms of
government. At the same time Montesquieu was a political writer instead of a systematic thinker. It allowed
him allowed him to contemplate on the great questions of philosophy, such as the nature of power, without
having to sacrifice his valuable insights for the sake of a consistent political philosophy. For a detailed
exposition of Arendt‟s analysis of Montesquieu‟s classification of governments and the nature of power,
see Hannah Arendt, “Montesquieu‟s Revision of Tradition” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 2005) and Hannah Arendt, “The Great Tradition I. Law and Power,” Social
Research 74 (2007): 713-726. Arendt certainly saw an affinity between the nature of her reflections on
political life and Montesquieu‟s.
50 Arendt, 1994, 329.
43
three types of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic. In republican
government, the whole body or a part of thereof is sovereign; in monarchy, the power is
in the hand of one man, but his rule is in accordance with fixed and established laws; and
finally, in a despotic government, the power is exercised by a single person according to
his own will and caprice. This final form of government is, therefore, unlawful.51
Montesquieu observed that even though lawfulness is the starting point for the
classification of governments, this principle is not enough to explain the actual actions of
citizens living within those governments. So he argued that in addition to its structure,
every government has a “principle.” There is a difference between the nature of a
government and the principle: “its nature is that by which it is constituted, and its
principle that by which it is made to act.”52 In every type of government both the ruler
and the ruled conduct themselves in political life according to this “principle of action.”
In a republic the principle of action is virtue; in a monarchy it is honor; and finally in a
despotic government the principle of action is fear. One caveat: Montesquieu‟s
classification cannot be interpreted in a way that suggests that all people in a government
act in accordance with the principle of action in that government at all times. Yet this
classification is not one of “ideal types” either. Arendt contends that Montesquieu‟s
classification results from his analysis of the public life. In every type of government,
men conduct themselves in public life according to a set of certain, common principles.
What is at stake in the adherence to these principles is the very existence of the
51 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 107.
52 Montesquieu, 1977, 117.
44
government. When people fail to follow these principles or when these principles are no
longer recognized as valid basis for action, the political regime itself is jeopardized.
What is the principle of action in totalitarianism? Arendt argues that no such
principle of action is needed or useful
“[i]n a perfect totalitarian government, where all individuals have become
exemplars of the species, where all action has been transformed into acceleration,
and every deed into execution of death sentences—that is, under conditions in
which terror as the essence of government is perfectly sheltered from the
disturbing and irrelevant interference of human wishes and need.”53
I argue that Arendt‟s account of the futility of a principle of action under totalitarianism
is two-fold. A principle of action is unnecessary under totalitarianism because (1)
totalitarianism destroys the public space within which action can take place and (2)
totalitarianism eradicates individuals‟ will to action. Let me elaborate on these points.
Arendt believes that freedom requires a space within which it can be realized.54
The ultimate aim of totalitarianism is precisely to crush this public arena within which
men exercise their freedom of action. The contrast between totalitarianism and despotic
government in this context highlights once again the distinctiveness of totalitarian
movements. The tyrannical government, as we have seen above, destroys the framework
53 Arendt, 1994c, 343.
54 In The Human Condition, Arendt conceives the public realm as a response to the problem of freedom
under the conditions of modernity. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago & London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
45
of laws that guarantee the rights and freedoms of citizens. 55 Arendt likens the resulting
landscape of public life to a desert—a “desert of neighborlessnes and loneliness.”56 While
the barren image of the desert of loneliness arouses feelings of oppression, isolation, and
desolation, in comparison to the totalitarian framework this setting still allows for some
amount of action. “This desert is no longer a living space of freedom,” in Arendt‟s words,
so it must not be mistaken for the public space necessary for individuals‟ realization of
their right to freedom, “but it still provides some room for the fear-guided movements
and suspicion-ridden actions of its inhabitants.”57
Totalitarian government, with its ruthless terror, manages to destroy even this
barren space. Moreover, totalitarianism replaces every channel of communication and
medium of interaction with “a band of iron.”58 Within this iron band, totalitarianism
squeezes individuals; it melds them together until there is no more individuality or
plurality, until the whole of mankind resembles “one Man of gigantic dimensions.”59
Totalitarian terror not only eradicates the positive framework of laws, which guarantee
liberty and freedom, it also obliterates the space between individuals, which is the
essential prerequisite of action. Hence, since there is no more room left for action, there is
no need for a principle of action under totalitarianism.
55 See Chapter 1, for the discussion of totalitarian terror and how it differs from tyrannical and
revolutionary terror.
56 Arendt, 1994c, 344.
57 Arendt, 1968, 466.
58 Ibid.,, 465.
59 Ibid., 466
46
The second reason why there is no need for a principle of action in totalitarianism
is explained by the absence of will to action. The principle of action in tyranny, as
Montesquieu observed, is fear. Fear, according to Arendt, corresponds to the experience
of isolation, impotence and helplessness under despotic government.60 The atomized,
isolated habitants of the tyrannical desert retain only minimum contact with one another.
The principle of their sparse interaction is fear; they behave so as to avoid the wrath and
punishment of the tyrannical despot. Against totalitarian terror, however, fear cannot
provide a reliable principle of action, because totalitarian terror does not choose its
victims according to their sins against the regime. It attributes no value to the degree of
opposition to the system—or to the degree of sympathy, for that matter. Individual
actions and deeds are simply irrelevant in its choice of victims. The terror of
totalitarianism is directed against enemies of the regime, which are determined by the
objective necessity of Nature or History. Under totalitarianism, as we have argued above,
there is no positive law, but only an accelerating movement that assigns individuals
particular roles. Arendt provides an example from Nazi Germany. Himmler selected the
candidates for SS troops from their photographs. The “objective,” purely racial criteria of
Nature determined not only who would be killed, but also who was going to be a part of
the killing troops.61
Under totalitarianism, then, there is no room for the human will to action.
Individuals are expected to fulfill the role objectively assigned to them by historical or
natural necessity without any resistance. Instead of a principle of action, therefore, the
60 Arendt, 1994c, 344.
61 Arendt, 1968, 468.
47
totalitarian regime requires a motivational guide to prepare people for their unreliable,
unstable, unworthy existence under to the laws of movement. “This two-sided
preparation, the substitute for a principle of action,” Arendt tells us, “is ideology.”62
How does Arendt define ideologies? She describes them as “systems of
explanation of life and world that claim to explain everything, past and future, without
further concurrence with actual experience.”63 Not all opinions, then, are ideologies, but
only those that claim to have found the key to the meaning in history or nature.
Socialism, for example, is not an ideology as long as it restricts itself to pointing out to
the class struggle and advocating revolutionary change to bring about social justice. It
does, however, become an ideology according to Arendt‟s account, when it starts to claim
that the defining axis of history is the class struggle, and that in accordance with history
the proletariat will necessarily win this struggle and bring about a classless society. In a
similar fashion, racism becomes an ideology when it starts to claim that the driving force
of nature is the Darwinian idea of natural selection interpreted racially. These two
struggles, the struggles of race and class become world-explanatory fictions when they
are seized on by totalitarian movements. Arendt is careful to note that “the very claim to
totality” of ideologies make them “almost predestined to play a role in totalitarianism.”64
What makes racism and communism the decisive ideologies of the twentieth century
above all others is the fact that the fundamental experiences upon which these ideologies
62 Ibid.
63 Arendt, 1994c, 349.
64 Ibid., 350
48
rest—the struggle among races (for racism) and the class struggle (for communism)—
turn out to be politically more significant than all other types of political experience.
Note that Arendt‟s concept of ideology does not correspond to the classical
Marxist definition of ideology as the production of a false reality in order to hide
economic and political class interests in a society. Ideology is not a merely tool of
manipulation, either. Even though the elites might be using ideology to a greater extent,
they are not exempt from its influence.65
The subject matter of ideology, according to Arendt‟s account, is history. The
particular idea that constitutes the core belief of an ideology is applied to history so that
history is perceived as an unfolding development in constant change. The movement of
history is thereby explained as one consistent process, which can be determined,
explained and calculated by this idea. There is a movement inherent within the idea itself
that requires no outside factor to set it into motion. Racism, for example, is dependent on
the belief that there is a motion in the very idea of race itself, the elimination of certain
species through natural selection. When the ideology is applied to history, the movement
in history and the logical process of this idea correspond to one another. Everything in
history is explained as stages of this same development. The historical or natural
movement can be comprehended by logical deduction, precisely because logical
deduction itself operates in terms of processes.
65 This relative imperviousness of the elites to totalitarian ideology in real life will be the subject of Claude
Lefort‟s critique of Arendt. I will consider Lefort‟s objection below.
49
4. Characteristics of Totalitarian Ideology
Now that we have differentiated to totalitarianism as a type of regime and
identified ideology as one of its core elements, we need to examine the characteristics of
totalitarian ideology. Arendt argues that ideology has three defining features. First,
ideology aims at total explanation. Every ideology claims not only to explain all events
in history and the happenings of the present, but also to reliably predict the course of
future events. Second, ideological thinking is impervious to reality. It cannot be
interrupted by a new event or idea drawn from experience. Everything is explained by the
one idea that forms the basis of ideology (racism or class struggle) and hence there is
nothing that can be learned from individual experience. Finally, ideology “starts from an
axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with
a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.”66 This constitutes the
“scientific” character of ideology, which, as I will explain below, is the core of feature of
Arendt‟s analysis.
By referring to totalitarian ideology as scientific, Arendt, of course, does not
mean that totalitarian ideology adheres to the scientific methods. On the contrary,
because its claims that are impossible to falsify, totalitarian ideology would not withstand
scientific examination. Therefore, it is more apt to refer to is as “pseudo-scientific.”
In “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” Arendt places stronger emphasis on the
second characteristic of ideology, its distance from existing reality, insofar as this feature
foreshadows the connection between ideology and terror. Totalitarian ideology regards
all reality as amenable to fabrication. If, for example, Das Schwarze Korps believed that
66 Arendt, 1968, 471.
50
“all Jews are beggars without passports,” they would make sure to alter the existing laws
to strip Jews of their income, wealth and citizenship—to make the socio-political reality
correspond to the ideology. The unpredictability of human action, however, always
creates an inconsistency between actuality and ideology. As long as human beings exist
and continue to act, their actions may transform the human world. The role of terror is to
ensure that everything in the real world remains true to the fabricated reality. Up to this
point, the argument reiterates the connection between terror and ideology, but Arendt
here introduces a new insight: underlying the totalitarian attitude is “the belief in the
omnipotence of man and at the same time of superfluity of men; it is the belief that
everything is permitted and, much more terrible, that everything is possible.”67
Thus, Arendt argues, totalitarianism reached the unprecedented conclusion that
truth as well as reality is subject to fabrication. Western philosophy, up to this point, had
subscribed to the view that truth would reveal itself at the end of time, when the events of
history had completely unfolded. Totalitarian systems transformed this expectation when
they realized that they could “bring into being a reality, whose structures will be known
to us from the beginning because the whole thing is our product.”68 This central
conviction of totalitarian governments that “everything is possible” differs from the
simple nihilistic principle of nineteenth-century utilitarianism that “everything is
permitted.” The totalitarian principle extends beyond the realm of utilitarianism, which
was restricted to the motives of self-interest.69 It reflects an interest in arranging the
67 Arendt, 1994c, 354.
68 Ibid.
69 Arendt, 1968, 440.
51
world in accordance with the laws of History, an attempt at total domination by
organizing and reorganizing the world in conjunction with the ideological narrative of the
totalitarian movement. This connection between making and knowing is the underlying
attitude of the totalitarian systems. It allows totalitarianism to eradicate the fundamental
distinction between truth and falsehood. Let me elaborate on the function of logicality in
this context.
Arendt contends that the greatest accomplishment of Hitler and Stalin, the means
by which they transformed their respective ideologies into political weapons, was
“stringent logicality as a guide to action.”70 Marx was the first to discover the power of
ideas to move the masses, but Hitler and Stalin perfected this method when they realized
that it was not the content of the idea itself but the strictly logical process of ideological
argumentation that mattered. The logical process of their ideological thinking allowed
them to draw conclusions which “to the onlooker, looked preposterously „primitive‟ and
absurd.”71 Yet, for the leaders of these totalitarian movements, once nature dictated that
certain races were “unfit to live” and doomed to extinction, or once history indicated that
certain classes were dying away and would soon become superfluous, it was only natural
to pronounce the death sentence on the members of these classes and races and annihilate
them. Once the first premise was established and agreed upon, the result was only a
logical conclusion. Arendt explains the working of this logical process with the following
example from Bolshevism:
70 Arendt, 1994c, 355.
71 Arendt, 1968, 471.
52
We are all agreed on the premise that history is a struggle of classes and on the
role of the Party in its conduct. You know therefore that, historically speaking, the
Party is always right (in the words of Trotsky: “We can only be right with and by
the Party, for history had provided no other way of being in the right.”) At this
historical moment, that is, in accordance with the law of history, certain crimes
are due to be committed which the Party, knowing the law of history, must
punish. For these crimes, the Party needs criminals; it may be that the Party,
though knowing the crimes, does not quite know the criminals, more important
than to be sure about the criminals is to punish the crimes, because without such
punishment, History will not be advanced but may even be hindered in its course.
You, therefore, either have committed the crimes, or have been called by the Party
to play the role of the criminal—in either case, you have objectively become and
enemy of the Party. If you don‟t confess, you cease to help history through the
Party, and have become a real enemy. The coercive force of the argument is: if
you refuse, you contradict yourself and through this contradiction, render your
whole life meaningless.72
This model of logical deduction as an argumentative process, more than the content of
ideology itself, led individuals to draw the most far-fetched consequences and set them
into motion. What is the core of the problem?
Arendt sees it as a political problem. The danger inherent in subscribing to
pseudo-logicality as a guide to action lies in the willingness of human beings to trade
72 Ibid., 473.
53
their capacity for independent thinking for the ease of logical processes. The logical
process emancipates individuals from the reality of existence. Its promise is alluring: a
world of total knowledge, where everything can be explained by the premise and where
the next step is completely predictable in advance. Logicality is a straight jacket that
operates independent of factual world, a never-ending process that its internal rules. But,
to those who submit to it, it provides the security that they are saved and that nothing
unexpected can happen to them anymore. In contradistinction to logical thinking, free
thinking requires connection with reality, a world of mutual existence that provides our
thinking faculty with objects of thought. Our political and legal institutions not only
guarantee liberties but also through channels of communication allow us to exist as
groups, societies, nations. When individuals lose this common world, this mutual
guarantee of living together, they fall into pseudo-logical reasoning. Under conditions of
totalitarianism—political isolation and loneliness in the private realm—the strict
avoidance of contradictions through logical reasoning seems to offer the only reliable
yardstick for confirming one‟s existence.
Arendt‟s argument hereby comes full circle. The starting point of her study of
totalitarianism was the basic human experience underlying totalitarianism. Here she
found it: isolation in the political realm and loneliness in the private sphere. Isolation and
ideology make up the totalitarian condition.
54
5. The Critique of Ideology
Arendt‟s analysis of ideology and its prominent role in totalitarianism has been
subjected to scrutiny from various angles. I would like to mention some major criticisms
that raise the most pertinent questions for Arendt‟s analysis of totalitarianism.
George Kateb argues that ideology is a necessary component of Arendt‟s account
of totalitarianism and points out that Arendt assigns major importance to ideology in the
earlier chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, even before she articulates her
thoughts most clearly in the final chapter, “Ideology and Terror.” According to Kateb,
Arendt‟s account underlines the power of ideas by showing that no matter how evil
ordinary people are in their day-to day existence, in order to plan and commit murder on
a large scale, they must submit to a system of beliefs that turns them into “actively
ideological creatures.”73 Ideology employs people‟s natural vices or enables them to give
in to their vices by getting rid of their inhibitions. Ideology is, therefore, indispensable for
murderous regimes—a point on which Kateb agrees with Arendt.
Kateb‟s criticism of Arendt is two-fold. First, he questions the role of ideology in
her political thought. He points out quite rightly that Arendt has always been a friend of
the narrative form, especially as it pertains to our understanding of human beings as
creatures that crave for meaning. Even as Arendt emphasizes the necessity of finding
meaning in ones‟ life, her concept of meaning remains very elusive. If people really seek
after meaning in their lives as she suggests, they will not be satisfied with her concept of
meaning, which denotes a perpetual quest rather than something concrete. They could, in
this case, be taken in by ideologies, which are essentially systems of meaning. Ideologies
73 George Kateb, “Ideology and Storytelling,” in Social Research 69 (2002): 321.
55
create a new and powerful system of ideas and beliefs. Given the importance attributed to
meaning in Arendt‟s philosophy, Kateb asks, how come she shows no sympathy towards
people who might have given in to ideology in the search for meaning?
However, Kateb‟s critique of Arendt suffers from narrowly focusing on the
concept of meaning. He seems to attribute to Arendt a notion of meaning as something
individuals seek to find, discover or create on their own. This is a remarkably
individualistic conception of meaning, one that is clearly at odds with Arendt‟s
understanding of public life. According to Arendt, we live in a political community with
others. It is only within this community and by acting in concert with others that we
realize the meaning of our existence. Therefore, Arendt is first and foremost concerned
with the protection and preservation of this public space of freedom. Kateb suggests that
people will hold on to any meaning, even those provided by ideology, but for Arendt, this
meaning will just not cut it.
Even though Kateb finds the importance attributed to ideology by Arendt
justified, he thinks that Arendt exaggerates the role ideology plays for the masses. This is
the second prong of his critique. Contrary to Arendt, he argues that ideology matters most
to the leaders of the totalitarian movement, the upper cadres, middle bureaucrats and
intellectual sympathizers, whereas it matters only intermittently to the large majority of
people. A major factor that contributed to the rise of totalitarian leaders, according to
Kateb, was the need for strong leadership in an era of crisis after the World War 1.
Against Arendt‟s diagnosis of a crisis of meaningless, which was addressed by the
embrace of ideology, Kateb contends that the masses were experiencing a crisis of
demoralization and dispossession caused by war, defeat and economic depression in the
56
early part of the twentieth century. Ideology had greater appeal for those in the upper
echelons of totalitarian movement, who saw in this crisis situation an opportunity to
realize their ideals of creating a new world order.
By contrast, Claude Lefort criticizes precisely this deep conviction on the part of
the leaders of totalitarian movement.74 According to Arendt, totalitarian rulers took their
respective ideologies “dead seriously, took pride the one in his supreme gift for „ice cold
reasoning‟ (Hitler) and the other in the „mercilessness of his dialectics‟ (Stalin).” She
asserts that “[t]his stringent logicality as a guide to action [that] permeates the whole
structure of totalitarian movements and governments…is exclusively the work of Hitler
and Stalin.”75 Lefort‟s critique goes as follows: while Arendt presents the law of
movement as a blinding force that allows individuals to commit terrible crimes without
feeling any sense of guilt, she does not believe in this law herself. Therefore, she should
admit that the law of Nature and the ideology that supports it are just political tools to
justify the party line and especially the ruthless terror. Lefort is therefore disappointed to
see her place the law of Nature and ideological conviction at the center of her study of
totalitarianism.
I think Lefort fails to distinguish between Arendt‟s empirical observations on the
workings of totalitarian government and her assessment of it. It is true that Arendt does
not subscribe to the totalitarian law of movement, but this does not preclude her from
observing that the upper cadre of the totalitarian movements, especially the leaders Hitler
and Stalin, believed in this law.
74 Claude Lefort, “Thinking with Arendt against Arendt” in Social Research 69 (2002): 447.
75 Arendt, 1968, 471-472.
57
Lefort also argues that Arendt does not clearly define her concept of ideology,
instead wavering between two positions. At first Arendt argues that the law of movement
requires and therefore creates ideology. Later she reverses her position and claims that
the law of movement is derived from ideology. Which comes first? The law of movement
or ideology?
Lefort is right to point out that the direction of causality is not clear, but Arendt is
unequivocal about an intrinsic link between law of movement and ideology that helps
perpetuate both of these concepts. Perhaps the missing unifying element is the totalitarian
leadership. While Arendt‟s description of the “totalitarian rule” gives the impression of a
somewhat metaphysical image of a regime with a mind of its own, the importance she
places on the leadership of the totalitarian movement may solve this mystery. All
elements of totalitarian movement, i.e. law of Nature, ideology, terror are brought
together by the leader of the totalitarian movement, who understands his role as “the
authoritative „executor‟ of a dynamic “law” governing the course of human history.”76
So far, I have examined in detail the characteristics of totalitarian regimes with an
emphasis on their reliance on terror and ideology. Two main themes emerge for from this
analysis. The first is the idea that “everything is possible.” Aided by the logical processes
of ideology, the totalitarian regimes problematize the relationship between making and
knowing. Second, the totalitarian regime‟s dependence on the law of movement and its
all-encompassing force made a parody of individual responsibility. These themes, which
run through Arendt‟s examination of the totalitarian governments, lay the groundwork for
her inquiry into the Western political tradition. I will take up these themes in the
76 Tsao, 2002, 606.
58
following chapters. Before concluding this chapter, I would like to consider Arendt‟s
claim that Nazism and Bolshevism may be evaluated under the same banner.
6. Nazism and Bolshevism in Perspective
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, while defining totalitarianism as a distinctly
new phenomenon with characteristics that differentiate if from all other types of
government, Arendt also brings together the Third Reich and the Soviet Union as the
“burden of our times.” Nazism and Bolshevism, she argues, are decidedly the part of the
same phenomenon.77 From the viewpoint of the history of ideas, pairing these two
ideologies was a novelty. Unlike traditional couplings of Nazism with the fascism of
Mussolini‟s Italy,78 for example, Arendt‟s approach, which derives in large part from the
77 Arendt consistently prefers Bolshevism over “Communism” or “Stalinism.” Tsao provides convincing
reasons for this preference. First of all, the term designated for Arendt the very lack of any meaningful
political content apart from the moment‟s momentary and volatile political agenda. In this sense, the term
resembled “Nazism” or “National Socialism.” She also avoided “Stalinism” so as not to give the
impression that the whole movement was the consequence of one dictator‟s abuse of power. Rather, it
referred to a comprehensive system. What Arendt meant by “Bolshevism” was “the Soviet Communist
Party under Stalin, along with the state institutions and nonstate organizations under its control—not only
those in the Soviet Union and its postwar satellites, but also the prewar Comintern agencies and Popular
Front parties all across Europe, from the Balkans to Spain.” Tsao, 2002, 593.
78 George Sabine‟s A History of Political Theory and Ernest Nolte‟s Three Faces of Fascism follow the
same logic of comparison—and rightly so, as Mussolini was the first leader to describe his government as
“totalitarian.” George Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1937); Ernest
Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism. (New York,
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965).
59
necessity to confront the consequences of totalitarianism as a whole, prompted criticism.
Her refusal to identify the ways in which Nazi Germany and Soviet Union differs made
her argument vulnerable to criticisms of “imbalance and exaggeration.”79
Arendt‟s failure to pay sufficient attention to the differences between the two
regimes stems in part from how The Origins of Totalitarianism was constructed. When
Arendt was writing parts I and II of the book, she considered Nazism merely the direct
successor of imperialism. Only after completing the majority of the book did Arendt
arrive at a deeper understanding of totalitarianism. She came to regard Nazism as a
species of totalitarianism, of which Bolshevism is another version. Having arrived at this
striking conclusion, she did not integrate it fully into the already-written part of the text
save for a few revisions to avoid any blatant inconsistencies. 80 While Arendt‟s thesis
would be decidedly stronger if she acknowledged differences between Nazism and
Bolshevism, I think her critique of totalitarianism as a novel system that exhibited itself
in both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia still holds up. What interested Arendt above all
was the basic set of features that these regimes shared that made totalitarianism both a
possibility and a historical reality. In order to argue this point, I would like to first
79 Stephen J. Whitfield, Into the Dark. Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1980), 26. One such difference is the status of anti-Semitism, namely that anti-Semitism
played no part in the Bolshevik version of totalitarianism. Arendt has no answer to this criticism and does
not feign to provide an answer, either. The historical development of her thought on the question of
totalitarianism as explained in the next paragraph, however, seems to provide a reason for why Arendt
failed to pay sufficient attention to the role of anti-Semitism as well as other differences between Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia.
80 Tsao, 2002, 58. Tsao provides a full account of the development of Arendt‟s views on totalitarianism.
60
consider the intellectual roots of Nazism and Bolshevism, namely Darwin and Marx
respectively and then their historical incarnations, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
According to Arendt, both Nazism and Bolshevism claimed a “higher form of
legitimacy.” The Bolshevik version of totalitarianism subscribed to the supreme idea of
class-struggle as the expression of the laws of history. Bolshevik ideology was based on
the Marxian notion of society as a product of struggle, which in every epoch takes place
between the dominant and the dominated classes, and the development of this movement
toward when the class formation will be superseded. In a similar vein, Nazis saw race as
the expression of law of Nature. Nazis‟ own interpretation of the Darwinian idea of
natural selection and development of species provided the content of the Nazi ideology.
The common point of both Bolshevik and Nazi versions of totalitarianism is that they
both perceived their respective ideologies as the driving force behind history and the
concept of “development” accordingly a central role.81 Obviously the foci of these two
approaches are remarkably disparate, as Marx‟s orientation is historical and Darwin‟s
approach is naturalistic. But as long as the driving force of both approaches is
“development,” whether this development is derived from History or Nature is
secondary. Arendt expressed this idea in the following fashion:
Darwin‟s introduction of the concept of development into nature, his insistence
that, at least in the field of biology, natural movement is not circular but unilinear,
81 Arendt, 1968, 464.
61
moving in an infinitely progressing direction, means in fact that nature is, as it
were, being swept into history, that natural life is considered to be historical.82
The intellectual affinity between Darwin and Marx is not Arendt‟s own imposition on
these two distinct theorists. Marx and Engels were not only familiar with Darwin‟s theory
of evolution but were also convinced that historical materialism was very much in line
with Darwin‟s theory. In a letter to Engels, Marx described Darwin‟s The Origin of the
Species as “the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”83 In a
similar vein he wrote to Lassalle that Darwin‟s book “is very important and serves me as
a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”84 In Das Kapital, Marx
explicitly praises Darwin‟s methodology and shows an interest in adopting it for the
purposes of social theory:
A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of
the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such
book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the
formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments
of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of
man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal
attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says,
82 Ibid., 463.
83 Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 126 in M.M. Bober, Karl‘s Interpretation of History (New
York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1965), 36.
84 Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 125 in M.M. Bober, 1965, 36.
62
human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former,
but not the latter?85
Despite their enthusiasm, Marx and Engels had reservations about the Darwin‟s theory of
evolution.86 They were skeptical that the theory of nature could be directly appropriated
to examine the affairs of society. Darwin acknowledged that his theory of evolution was
indebted to Malthus‟s theory of population, which Darwin took over in order to apply it
to the natural world. But Malthus‟ theory of population, Engels believed, was not tenable.
Human society, especially the capitalist relations of production, cannot be understood
merely with reference to the scarcity of food. To do that would be sanctioning bourgeois
individualism, competition and the pursuit of self-interest as a law of Nature. Marx and
Engels see history precisely as the process of rising above animal needs and freedom
from necessity. The following reflections on Darwin, therefore, include both approval
and sarcasm:
It is noteworthy that Darwin rediscovers among plants and animals his English
society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets,
85 Marx, Capital (Harmondsworth, Eng. : Penguin Books, 1976-198) vol. 1. 406, footnote. This quote is
noteworthy for bringing together Marx‟s two influence in terms of his methodological approach to the
study of society: Darwin and Vico. For more on Vico‟s concept of history, see chapter 2. For more on Vico
and Marx, see chapter 3.
86 Bober, 1965, 36- 39.
63
“inventions,” and the Malthusian struggle for existence. It is Hobbes‟ bellum
omnium contra omnes.87
Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on
his country men, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for
existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is
the normal state of the animal kingdom.88
It is evident then that while Marx and Engels were skeptical of unreserved application of
Darwin‟s ideas to a theory of society (because of its decidedly non-Marxian
implications), they applauded Darwin‟s theory of evolution in terms of its “scientific
method, empiricism, realism and indisposition to metaphysical speculation.”89 They
definitely considered it a reliable model for a developmental view of class struggle in
history.
While Arendt‟s emphasis in “Ideology and Terror” is decidedly on the ideological
foundations of the Nazi and Bolshevik movements, and hence their intellectual
forefathers Darwin and Marx, a brief historical examination of the two totalitarian
regimes in their empirical incarnations, namely the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
might be warranted to justify Arendt‟s position.
Stephen Whitfield, in his examination of Arendt‟s view on totalitarianism,
presents the following observations on the differences between the two totalitarian
87 Marx, Letter, June 18, 1862, in Marx and Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Part III, vol.3, pp. 77-78 cited in
Bober, 1965, 37.
88 Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p.19 in Bober, 1965, 38.
89 Bober, 1965, 38.
64
movements.90 First, the labor camps in the USSR and the concentration camps the Nazi
Germany, while seemingly similar in function, played a very different role.91 The Russian
labor camps were based in the humanistic ideology of overcoming necessity and hence
were built to achieve rational industrial development. The Nazi concentration camps, on
the other hand, were devoid of any utilitarian purpose, except to annihilate Jews in
greater numbers. Second, the support bases of the two movements were remarkably
different. Where the Soviets appealed to the workers, the Nazis recruited their supporters
from among the middle and lower-middle class.92 Despite the lack of reliable
information, one can conclude that the respective political cadres of the parties also
reflected this dissimilar support basis.93 Third, while both movements undertook drastic
revolutionary measures vis-à-vis the civil society, Nazism‟s efforts could not match the
radical reforms that Communism undertook to overthrow the traditional order. The Nazis
did everything in their power to weaken the civil service, universities, churches and trade
unions, but the Bolsheviks reorganized the entire society in accordance with the Marxist
principles. Finally, leader played an important role in each movement, as Arendt
observed.94 Yet, Whitfield convincingly demonstrates that Hitler‟s role was far more
central to the Nazi movement than Stalin‟s role to the Bolshevik movement. Hitler was
90 Whitfield, 1980, 26.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., 27.
93 Ibid. Whitfield observes that the information on the composition of the party cadre under Lenin and
Stalin is not readily available. Moreover, the party members were disinclined to reveal their bourgeois
origins, so whatever information is available is not reliable.
94 Arendt, 1968, 346.
65
“the constituent delegate of the German people,” “the supreme judge of the nation.”95
Stalin was ultimately the general secretary of the Communist party.
Upon closer examination, however, none of these differences prove decisive. As
the war progressed, the economic function of the Nazi concentration camps increased.96
The Soviet labor camps, on the other hand, started to resemble their German counterparts
in terms of the working conditions and the life expectancy of inmates. As far as the
radical reorganization of the society is concerned, the Communist had more time to
transform both the economy and the society.97 Finally, while Stalin‟s role might have
derived its legitimacy from his position in the party (which in turn was dependent upon
the claim to be vanguard of the proletariat), his authority over the party, society, and the
whole nation was no less complete than Hitler‟s.98
For the purposes of this project, I would like to briefly re-emphasize the
dimensions that Arendt found common to both Nazi and Bolshevik totalitarian
movements: the pseudo-scientific logic of totalitarian ideology, the ability to organize the
masses, the loyalty of its followers to the movement, the role of the leader, and the role
of terror. While the two countries differed, their totalitarian movements shared these
common characteristics, which also made totalitarianism as a system different from any
95 Whitfield. 1980, 28
96 Ibis., 29
97 Ibid., 30-31. Whitfield compares the two regimes in terms of other aspects: anti-Semitism, their success
in terms of reaching the goal of total domination, and their treatment of their own citizens. He finds that
while the differences between the two regimes in those aspects were significant, both regimes would still
deserve to be called totalitarian. Ibid., 32-44.
98 Ibid., 31.
66
previous regime, particularly the traditional tyranny. I therefore believe that Arendt was
justified in insisting on singling out totalitarianism as a novel phenomenon seen in both
Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
7. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have examined Arendt‟s analysis of the totalitarian regimes in
the twentieth century. The guiding force of Arendt‟s inquiry was the conviction that the
totalitarian ideologies became the “keys to history.” A tireless belief in the laws of Nature
and laws of History guided the efforts of these totalitarian movements to change the
world. Totalitarianism believed that it could transform the world in accordance with an
image that Nature or History provided. This is the true novelty of totalitarianism and this
insight is Arendt‟s true contribution.
My contention in this project is that this experience is Arendt‟s starting point for
an inquiry of the tradition of Western political thought. In the previous section, I
examined Nazism and Bolshevism and argued that Arendt was justified in her treatment
of Nazism and Stalinism in similar vein as far as they both subscribe to a law of
movement. Despite this finding, for the remainder of this work, my focus will be on the
Bolshevik version of totalitarianism and its roots in the tradition of Western philosophy.
The main reason for this choice is Arendt‟s own line of inquiry. When Arendt turned to
the tradition of Western philosophy, she was mainly interested in the intellectual
connection between the concept of history and historical necessity and political action,
judgment and responsibility. I delve into these problems in the next two chapters.
67
Chapter 2: Hegel and the Problem of Historical Necessity
If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who
by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may reclaim our human dignity;
win it back, as it were, from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age,
without denying history’s importance but denying its right to be the ultimate judge.1
1. Introduction
In the first chapter, I argued that one of Arendt‟s most interesting insights in The
Origins of Totalitarianism was her account of how totalitarian movements rely on the
concept of “historical necessity.” The worst crimes of this century, Arendt observed,
were committed in the name of an ideology that the perpetrators believed to be supported
by science, experience, and the universal truths of Nature and History. The elements of
totalitarianism that Arendt analyzed were fused together by progress—a universal and
automatic process—which was believed to embrace all periods of history. In totalitarian
movements, history and nature became the laws of necessity. The people were expected
to yield to progress and renounce their freedom and the right to action. Terror, in this
context, represented an instrument of progress that would accelerate the course of history
and nature, eliminating any obstacles standing on its path.
Where did this idea of historical necessity come from and how did we submit to
it? How did ideologies come to be regarded as “the keys to history” that presumed to
explain everything, yet in the process became completely divorced from reality?
1 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking” in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978a), 216.
68
In this chapter, I take up Arendt‟s examination of the Western philosophical
tradition, in which she traces this concept of necessity to a particular understanding of
nature and history. Hegel‟s notion of history—a dialectical movement towards the
realization of human freedom—represents an important paradigm shift in Western
political thought. According to Arendt, it is the moment at which the focus of philosophy
shifted from politics to history. Hegel, of course, is not single-handedly responsible for
this transformation; his philosophy is merely the culmination of a long tradition, which
regards history as a man-made process and action as a kind of fabrication. I will
demonstrate how this change of focus has conditioned our understanding of history and
prepared the way for a Marxist theory of action.
2. The Concept of History
“The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern”2 is Arendt‟s seminal essay on the
philosophy of history, where she lays out with great skill—though not necessarily
systematically—her thesis on the birth and the development of the modern idea of
history. In this essay, Arendt contrasts the modern notion with its ancient counterpart,
tracing the transformation from the earlier concept to a later one that accompanied the
rise of the natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This modern
conception of history has led to an understanding of politics and political philosophy that
carries reprehensible consequences; hence, it constitutes Arendt‟s primary focus. In order
to understand its significance, she suggests, we must begin with an examination of its
antecedent—specifically, the concept of history as it existed in ancient Greek thought.
2 Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” in Between Past and Future (New York:
Penguin Books, 1977a).
69
The essay begins with Herodotus, the historian par excellence. Arendt reminds us
that the task of the historian, in the words of Heredotus, is to preserve and remember the
great deeds of man, to save them from oblivion so that their glory will shine through the
centuries. This responsibility of the historian is rooted in a uniquely Greek understanding
of the relationship between nature and history that may not be evident to the modern
reader. According to the Greek concept of nature, “all things that come into being by
themselves without assistance from men or Gods” are immortal.3 This realm of eternity
or ever-presence, which surrounds all human existence, does not change. Of course, the
human world is constantly transformed as generations of men follow one another down
the path of history. But human affairs take place in “a natural or historical spectacle that
[is] essentially always the same.”4 Moreover, nature does not depend on human beings
for its existence; it exists independently of remembrance and memory.
The eternity of nature stands in sharp contrast to the ephemeral existence of
human beings. Men‟s time on this earth is limited to the duration of their biological
existence; “the hallmark of human existence” is mortality.5 Human beings are different
from all other species in that their existence in this world is not fully accounted for by the
survival of the species, humankind, to which they belong as its members. On the
contrary, each person has an individual life, “a life-story,” which he constructs from birth
to death. Moreover, all creations of human beings, all things that owe their existence to
human beings—works, deeds, and words—are doomed to perish, “infected, as it were by
3 Ibid., 42.
4 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 27.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 18.
70
the mortality of their authors.”6 However, as human beings inject themselves into the
world, they perform great deeds and produce great works. These instances are unique and
extraordinary. They disrupt daily existence and cut through the “circular movement of
biological life.”7
The only means by which humans secure permanence for themselves and the
singular nature of their deeds is “remembrance.” Human beings are capable of
understanding and accounting for their deeds and acts in a particular way, weaving them
into a narrative that becomes the subject matter of history. A lasting memory is created
out of remembrance:
History receives into its remembrance those mortals who through deed and word
have proved themselves worthy of nature, and their everlasting fame means that
they, despite their mortality, may remain in the company of the things that last
forever.8
According to Arendt, such an association between nature and history demonstrates that in
antiquity, these conceptions were by no means mutually exclusive, but rather, connected.
Similarly, the modern concept of history is intertwined with a modern understanding of
nature. More specifically, the birth of the modern idea of history corresponds to and was
stimulated by the spectacular development of the natural sciences in the sixteenth and
6 Arendt, 1991, p. 43.
7 Arendt, 1998, p. 19.
8 Ibid., 48.
71
seventeenth centuries.9 The scientific discoveries of this epoch contested the reality of the
outside world available to human perception “as an unchanged and unchangeable
object.”10 For Arendt, Cartesian philosophy is representative of this change. Descartes‟s
method, which postulated that “everything is to be doubted,” became the defining feature
of the world we live in. The underlying experience characterizing Descartes‟s mistrust of
the human capacities for sensory experience, according to Arendt, was neither a sudden
faltering of “faith in God” nor a “suspicion” of the human capacity for reason as such.11
Rather, it became clear to Descartes, in the face of recent developments in the natural
sciences, that “neither the given evidence of the senses, nor the „innate truth‟ of the mind,
nor the „inner light of reason‟ ” could guide men‟s quest for knowledge.12
The fundamental breakthrough that changed the fate of philosophy was the
discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which contradicted our daily
experience of observing the Sun traveling across the sky. The more sophisticated our
instruments of observation became (with the invention of the telescope, for example), the
more man became convinced “that his senses were not fitted for the universe, that his
everyday experience, far from being able to constitute the model for the reception of truth
and the acquisition of knowledge, was a constant source of error and delusion.”13 Clearly,
in the matters of universe, neither sensual perception nor mere observation was sufficient
to understand the world we live in. In their stead, natural sciences embraced a new of
model investigation: the experiment. In the realm of philosophy, Descartes developed this
9 Ibid., 53.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 54.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 55.
72
initial skepticism into a methodological system, and in doing so became the founder of
modern philosophy.
3. Vico
The most significant consequence of the development of natural sciences―at
least, the one most relevant to our contemporary understanding of history―was “the
positive version of subjectivism,” according to which man must be able to understand the
things he has created, even while remaining incapable of knowing the world and its
natural processes.14 Arendt illustrates this position using the seventeenth-century
philosopher of history Giambattista Vico, who abandoned the study of nature for the
study of history because he believed that unlike nature, history is knowable by men. Just
as God created the universe and knowledge of the universe is therefore available to him,
men can possess knowledge of historical truths because they are “the makers of
history.”15
Arendt‟s account seems to situate Vico in close proximity to Cartesianism, but in
fact, neither Vico‟s reputation nor his method paralleled Descartes‟s. While Vico‟s New
Science is today seen as a masterpiece with impressive insights into history, philosophy,
and even anthropology, Vico (unlike Descartes) was largely ignored by his
contemporaries. Nisbet, in his brief but insightful treatment of Vico, provides two reasons
for this lack of attention. The first explanation was Vico‟s dedication of his work to the
service of Christianity: “For all the originality and creativity of his historical,
sociological, philological, and economic works, he chose to cast them in the rigorous
14 Ibid., 56.
15 Ibid., 51.
73
perspective of not merely Providence but faith in a church whose intellectual fortunes
were fast waning in Vico‟s time.”16 A second and more important reason was his
methodology, which, despite stemming from the same suspicion and quest for truth that
had inspired Descartes, was decidedly antithetical to Cartesianism. Whereas Descartes
shunned all empirical, biographical, and archival data in favor of pure, deductive reason,
for Vico, no science was possible that did not depend on direct observation and historical
material.17 Finally, the “allegorical title-page, pullulating erudition and strange language”
of New Science also contributed to the unpopularity of Vico‟s work by making it appear
outdated.18
As a consequence, neither Vico nor his book enjoyed fame and success during his
lifetime. Only in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the rise of Romanticism,
did a particular interest in his work develop.19 Vico was finally recognized as a great
philosopher of history a century after his death, when New Science was discovered and
translated into French by the historian Jules Michelet.20
Vico‟s study of history led him to differentiate between two types of knowledge:
verum and certum. Verum is “a priori truth, dependent on axioms and principles which
man himself constructs, and requiring only strict adherence to deduction for steadily
more complex conclusions to emerge.”21 This knowledge, for Vico, represented the kind
16 Robert Nisbet. History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 160.
17 Ibid.
18 Antony Grafton, introduction to New Science, by Giambattista Vico (London, New York: Penguin
Books, 1999), xii.
19 Ibid., xii.
20 Nisbet, 1980, 160.
21 Ibid., 163.
74
of truth to which Descartes‟s method had aspired. The second kind of knowledge, certum,
is not absolute and can be obtained from direct experience of the world, via thorough
examination of material past and present.22 Vico gradually came to the conclusion that
Cartesianism is applicable as a method to only mathematics or logic; it is utterly useless
in acquiring the knowledge of history, which he conceived in the widest sense as the
study of how human beings constitute society.23 In contrast to Cartesian method, Vico
“held that the validity of all true knowledge…can be shown to be such only by
understanding how it comes about, i.e., its genetic or historical development.”24
In accordance with these guidelines, Vico‟s desire was to place history in the
realm of true sciences. In New Science, he summarized his methodology as follows:
The civil world is certainly the creation of mankind. And consequently, the
principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications
of the human mind. If we reflect on this, we can only wonder why all the
22 Ibid. Mark Lilla reminds us that verum/certum was initially not an epistemological differentiation but “an
existential distinction meant to respond to [a] theological problem,” i.e., the interaction “between the truth
(verum) that pertains to the divine, and the certainty (certum) that is ours as fallen human beings.” Mark
Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern Man (Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 24.
23 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980),
9. Vico was also critical of Cartesianism from the viewpoint of the theological problem mentioned above.
He criticized Cartesianism for wanting to understand the relationship between human and the divine by
beginning with man. According to Vico this was a “transgressi[on of] the divine/human boundary from
below.” “By this he means that by location the first indubitable principle in the thinking human mind
(cogito ergo sum) Descartes is actually trying to scale the heavens under his own power.” Lilla, 1993, 35.
24 Ibid., 11.
75
philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world of nature, which
only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of
nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know because they created it.25
Isaiah Berlin explains that this method represents a particular application of a broader
principle, per caussas, which is frequently found in scholastic philosophy.26 This
principle postulates that “we can be said fully to know a thing if, and only if, we know
why it is as it is, or how it came to be, or was made to be, what it is, and not merely that it
is what it is, and has the attributes it has.”27 It is in this sense that God knows the world
by virtue of being its creator and human beings are capable of understanding history as its
makers.
In examining the human world, Vico observed, we discover commonalities upon
which all human societies have agreed. The consistent recurrence of these civil
institutions in different societies over time, indicate that people share a common ground
of truth. Vico believed in the creative and guiding existence of Providence.28 It is thanks
to this providential force, according to Vico, that the passions and private interests of
25 Giambattista Vico, New Science (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 119.
26 Vico‟s spelling, cited in Berlin, 1980, 13.
27 Ibid.
28 Croce argues that while Hegel was not familiar with Vico‟s writings, a mental tendency, which he calls
“Vicianism,” influenced the history of thought after Vico. The main tenets of this “mental tendency‟ are
“[Vico‟s] criticism of Descartes‟ immediate knowledge,” “his conversion of the truth with the created,”
“his unity of philosophy and philology…in the vindication of history against skepticism and
intellectualism of the eighteenth century.” Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 238.
76
individuals were brought together in an orderly fashion to create civil institutions of
society. Therefore, only an examination of the principles of these organizations will
provide us with the universal and eternal principles of history, upon which every science
must be based.
Vico‟s shift of focus grew out of the realization that in order to comprehend
God‟s creation, nature, we must be able to understand the making process behind it.
Understanding the external world is, therefore, impossible. Nonetheless, we are able to
understand the creative process behind history as shaped by human beings. Hence, for
Arendt, Vico‟s New Science is emblematic of a shift of interest from things themselves to
process.29 Accordingly, in the modern age, history emerged as something entirely
different: “a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which owed its
existence exclusively to the human race.”30
4. The Modern Concept of History
The modern concept of history, understood as a man-made process is one of
Arendt‟s central themes, and it recurs frequently in her writings. 31 Such an emphasis on
process, which Arendt has demonstrated to be common to natural sciences and the study
of history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is in her view nothing short of a
paradigm shift. Its influence spans centuries. Arendt‟s central concern here is the
29 Arendt is quick to note that thanks to technological developments, man is now capable of initiating
processes in nature which would not have come about without our interference. Today, we can accomplish
in the natural realm what Vico believed that we could accomplish in the historical realm. Therefore, Arendt
suggests, had Vico lived in this century he would have turned to science, not history. Arendt, 1977a, 58.
30 Ibid.
31 See for example On Revolution, 55.
77
disappearance of the particular. The process draws attention away from “single entities or
individual occurrences and their special separate causes.”32 The event becomes a byproduct
of the process.
Invisible processes have engulfed every tangible thing, every individual entity
that is visible to us, degrading them into functions of an over-all process…What
the concept of process implies is that the concrete and the general, the single thing
or event and the universal meaning have parted company. The process, which
alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a
monopoly of universality and significance.33
The drastic consequences of this new concept of history-as-process can only be
adequately understood in relation to the Greek concept of history. In this light, Arendt‟s
effort to present a comparative account of history as a concept takes on a new and fresh
meaning.
Arendt insists that the distinction between the modern and ancient concepts of
history is not “whether or not antiquity had a concept of world history or an idea of
mankind as a whole.”34 Rather, both Greek and Roman understandings of history “take it
for granted that the meaning or, as the Roman would say, the lesson of each event, deed,
occurrence is revealed in and by itself.”35 In antiquity each event exhausted its meaning
within its own confines; the significance of the particular instance did not depend on the
32 Arendt, 1977a, 61.
33 Ibid., 63.
34 Ibid., 64.
35 Ibid.
78
general process. Each event was meaningful in and of itself. In the case of the Greeks,
this meant that the “great” events possessed a certain quality that justified and
necessitated remembering them. For the Romans, history was conceived “as a storehouse
of examples,” which served as a source of authority that on the one hand outlined the
duties of each generation and on the other hand provided it with the necessary wisdom
and guidelines.36
In direct opposition to this notion stands our modern conception of history and
historical process, which “bestow[s] upon time-sequence an importance and dignity it
never had before”37:
The great advantage of [the modern] concept [of history] has been that the
twofold infinity of the historical process establishes a time-space in which the
very notion of an end is virtually inconceivable, whereas its great disadvantage,
compared with ancient political theory, seems to be that permanence is entrusted
to a flowing process, as distinguished from a stable structure.38
With such an understanding of history's temporality, things themselves lose their
particular meaning. They acquire significance only in the context of a forward movement
greater than particular instances, in the context of a process that engulfs and transcends
them. We will come back to the idea of progress, but let us first understand in detail the
36 Ibid. 65.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 75.
79
implications of the idea of process and how it relates, in Arendt‟s thought, to historical
necessity.
As was noted previously, history-as-process is a recurring theme in Arendt‟s
writing. In On Revolution, which dates from the same period as “The Concept of
History,” Arendt takes up the problem of revolution and situates it within the context of
our modern understanding of history.
While the term “revolution” in current parlance is invariably associated with
novelty and new beginnings, Arendt brings to our attention the fact that the term acquired
these meanings only gradually. It originated not as a political but as an astronomical term.
Referring to “the regular, lawfully revolving motion of the stars,” the word implied an
irresistible and circular movement free from any outside interference.39 When applied to
the human affairs, “it could only signify that the few known forms of government revolve
among the mortals in eternal recurrence and with the same irresistible force which makes
the stars follow their preordained paths in the skies.”40 Amid the haphazard events and
rising or sinking fortunes of human destiny, the word implied something much more
constant and cyclical. Since the original meaning of “revolution” was far from denoting
the birth of a new order, it is no surprise to observe for example that the Glorious
Revolution was thought not a revolution but a restoration of monarchical power.41
39 Arendt, 1991, 42.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 43. Habermas also notes that “In Edmund Burke‟s memorable polemics against the French
Revolution the distinction, which was self-evident in 1689, still finds its echo: The Glorious Revolution
gains its significance as a sort of natural upheaval without the intervention of human arbitrariness and
violence, in definitive contrast with the Great Rebellion, with its regicide and civil war, in the preceding
decades.” Jürgen Habermas. Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 83.
80
However, one original meaning, the notion of an “irresistible movement on a
predetermined path,” is still expressed forcefully in our modern understanding. Arendt
recounts the following anecdote about the French Revolution to illustrate the moment
when the word “revolution” was first used with “an exclusive emphasis on irresistibility
and without any connotation of a backward revolving movement”:
The date was the night of the fourteenth of July 1789, in Paris, when Louis XVI
heard from the Duc de la Rouchefoucauld-Liancourt of the fall of the Bastille, the
liberation of a few prisoners, and the defection of the royal troops before a
popular attack. The famous dialogue that took place between the king and his
messenger is very short and revealing. The king, we are told, exclaimed, “C‟est
une révolte,” and Liancourt corrected him: “Non, Sire, c‟est une révolution.”42
What is significant about this minor anecdote, according to Arendt, is that it marks the
advent of a new aspect to the term “revolution.” The term now denotes a forward
movement that lies beyond the human interference. There is no stopping it and no turning
back. It represents a law unto itself, to such an extent that even the king‟s power is not
sufficient to halt its progress. The rise of this new idea is exemplified by the new imagery
and metaphors used during the French Revolution, such as Demoulins‟s torrent
révolutionnaire, Robespierre‟s tempête révolutionnaire or marche de la révolution, or
Georg Forster‟s depiction of “the majestic lava stream of revolution which spares nothing
42 Ibid., 47.
81
and which nobody can arrest.”43 The revolution is invariably seen as “a force greater than
man.”44
I identify two sources in Arendt‟s account for how revolution came to be
perceived as this irresistible, forward-moving process. The first source is the individual
experiences of those who made the revolution. Caught within a process far greater than
they would have ever imagined, the revolutionaries clearly no longer believed themselves
to be “free agents.”45 Instead, they perceived themselves as actors in a grand historical
play where the roles were written and assigned by history itself. A second source is the
experiences of those “who watched [revolution‟s] course, as if it were a spectacle from
the outside.”46 To the outsiders, the revolution seemed like a spectacle in which the actors
had lost all control over the course of the events.47 Both of these types of experience led
to an iconic image of history as an irresistible force “which compelled men at will, and
from which there was no release, neither rebellion, nor escape, the force of history and
historical necessity.”48 Later revolutions bore the same stamp of historical necessity; the
October Revolution is a case in point. Arendt puts it beautifully:
43 Quoted in Arendt, 1991, 48-49.
44 Ibid., 49.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 51.
47 Arendt contrasts this course of events with the American Revolution, where exactly the opposite took
place and man‟s control of over his own destiny became the dominant sentiment of the American
experience. Ibid.
48 Ibid., 51.
82
What the men of the Russian Revolution had learned from the French
Revolution…was history and not action. They had acquired the skill to play
whatever the great drama of history was going to assign them, and if no other role
was available but that of the villain, they were more than willing to accept their
part rather than remain outside the play… [T]hey were fooled by history, and they
have become the fools of history.49
I derive two central conclusions from Arendt‟s analysis of the French Revolution. First,
as a consequence of the French Revolution, necessity as an inherent characteristic of
history was freed from its cyclical connotations and became a rectilinear movement
stretching into an unknown future.50 Second, the main modality of political thought
became necessity and not freedom—a significant transformation that represented nothing
short of a paradigm shift from concern with politics to concern with history.51 We can
observe the most far-reaching consequence of this paradigm change in Hegel‟s
philosophy of history, to which I will now turn.
5. Hegel’s Philosophy of History
Hegel is not only one of the most influential thinkers of Western philosophy, but
also the archetypical philosopher of history. While Hegel‟s thoughts on history are not
confined to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, his philosophy of history is
49 Ibid., 58
50 Ibid., 55.
51 Ibid., 53.
83
most clearly articulated in these lectures, which were delivered for many consecutive
years at the Humboldt University of Berlin but never published in his lifetime.
In his introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History,
posthumously published under the title “Reason in History,” Hegel distinguishes three
modes of history writing. The first of these modes, “original history,” is exemplified by
the historical narratives of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius. Original
history is compiled by historians who have personally witnessed the events and situations
that they describe. In this case, the task of the historian is to immortalize the past by
weaving into a narrative events that would, without his intervention, be preserved only in
subjective experience and personal memory. According to Hegel, the result is a written
historical record, which constitutes the beginning of “the real objective history of a
nation.”52 The most accurate description of original history is as a sort of chronicle
writing. For Hegel, the experiential nature of this modality of historical writing is also the
source of its shortcomings. First of all, the scope of original history is naturally limited to
the subjects that are of immediate interest to the author by virtue of his personal
experiences or their proximity in his external environment. The period of history that is
depicted is relatively short and refers to individual events and human beings. It does not
necessarily follow, however, that the historian presents his own personal reflections. On
the contrary, the author “must allow the individuals and nations themselves to express
their aspirations and their awareness of what their aspirations are.”53 This is the second
important aspect of original history for Hegel, which also constitutes its most important
52 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, ed.
Johannes Hoffmeister (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 13.
53 Ibid., 14.
84
shortcoming. The spirit [Geist] of the historian overlaps with the spirit of events that are
depicted. In other words, there is a unity between the author and his times. When the
author depicts the events, he does not impose an alien consciousness onto them.54 Instead,
he lets the maxims of these nations, their cultures, and their own awareness of these
principles to shine through. Even though this kind of history makes for fresh, lively,
enjoyable reading, it does not suffice to make a “learned historian.” The historian‟s
immersion in the spirit of the events prevents him from being able to “rise above it,”
which is a necessary condition of proper reflection on history.55
The second level of history writing, “reflective history,” is achieved when the
subject matter of history extends beyond those events that were immediately available to
the writer. The subject of reflective history is a nation or, more comprehensively, the
entire world history. The most significant difference between original and reflective
history is the disruption in the latter of the unity between the consciousness of the
historian and his times. The writer approaches the subject matter of history in his own
spirit, which is different from the spirit of the events depicted. Unlike the chronicler, who
records the events, deeds, and situations he has lived through, the historian proper has the
task of transforming the past “into a work of representational thinking for the
representational faculty” [ein Werk der Vorstellung für die Vorstellung].56
Hegel identifies several forms of reflective history. In its most unrefined form,
such as in Livy‟s account of Roman history, reflective history presents itself almost as
54 “When the spirit of the events is fully developed, it becomes aware of itself; one of the main
characteristics of its life and activity is its consciousness of its own ends and interests and of the principles
which underlie them.” Ibid., 13.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
85
original history, but extended back in time. Even though the historian tries to depict the
spirit of past times by providing extremely thorough and detailed descriptions of the
events that happened, the spirit of the historian himself shines through his historical
narrative:
Thus Livy puts into the mouths of old kings of Rome, the consuls and generals of
ancient times, speeches which only an accomplished advocate (or factious orator)
of Livy‟s own times could have delivered, and which contrast glaringly with
genuine traditions from antiquity.57
Moreover, the manner in which the material is selected, abridged, and accounted for
gives this kind of history a “stilted, pompous and pedantic air.”58 The opposite extreme is
to create “a faithful and accurate portrait” of the past ages. Although these antiquarian
accounts sound quite authentic because of their depiction of individual traits, particular
interests, political actions, and private affairs in a lifelike matter, for Hegel, they still
prove insufficient in terms of presenting an overall view, a general design.
General representations are necessary in history writing. The second stage of
reflective history, “pragmatic history,” manages to integrate these necessary
generalizations. Pragmatic history brings the past into the present by emphasizing the
general significance of events instead of their particularity. Unfortunately, Hegel also
finds pragmatic history to have a significant shortcoming: these histories are generally
written with the aim of deriving lessons from history. What is wrong with that? First, the
57 Ibid., 17.
58 Ibid.
86
lessons of these generalizations are never truly correct, because each historian infuses the
material with the spirit of his own times. Second, they have no general relevance, since
each age presents each nation with peculiar circumstances. Each such nation must make
decisions with reference to itself alone, and hence the lessons derived from its course of
action can never be applied to another nation or another situation. History, in this sense,
does not repeat itself.
“Critical history,” the third stage of reflective history, is not a proper form of
history writing but rather the “the history of history.”59 Its intention is to extract from its
subject matter as much information as possible in order (arguably) to test the credibility
of the whole. But for Hegel, this is no more than another method of bringing a present
into the past and doing so by “substituting subjective fancies for historical data.”60 The
final stage of reflective history is “specialized history” [Spezialgeschichte], which selects
a particular field (such as history of art, religion, or law) as its focus. While fragmentary
and particular in character and representing only a single perspective, this type of history
can illuminate the wider context of a nation‟s history if it is written in this broader
fashion. Because of its general perspective, this form of history provides the transition to
the third and most esteemed type of history, philosophical history of the world.
Philosophy of history is a “consider[ation] of history from a philosophical point of
view.”61 It is the only form of history in which the particular and the universal as well as
the past and the present are truly united. According to Hegel, the philosophical approach
59 Ibid., 22.
60 Ibid., 23.
61 Ibid., 25.
87
illuminates the true content of history, the idea of freedom. Let me describe his
philosophy of history in greater detail.
Hegel‟s starting point is the well-known and controversial idea that “reason
governs the world.” History, accordingly, is “a rational process,” which corresponds to
the rational and necessary evolution of the World Spirit [Weltgeist]. Hegel acknowledges
that from the viewpoint of history, this approach would appear to involve the imposition
on history of an external perspective, a mere presupposition, but he contends that
[w]ithin philosophy itself, it is not a presupposition; for it is proved in philosophy
by speculative cognition—that reason…is substance and infinite power; it is itself
the infinite material of all natural and spiritual life, and the infinite form which
activates all material content.62
The study of world history, therefore, should be guided by the principle that there is an
ultimate design, a rational process behind the particular trajectories of nations. The true
substance of history is the course and development of the world spirit.
The idea that the history is governed by laws of reason may sound unfamiliar, but
Hegel reminds us that its corollary has existed for a long time in our understanding of the
laws of nature.63 Anaxagoras was the first to suggest that the world was governed by laws
of reason. He argued that there is no self-conscious intelligence in nature but that the
movements of celestial bodies follow certain rules. The task of the scientist is to abstract
this knowledge from the physical reality of things and arrive at the unalterable general
62 Ibid., 27.
63 Ibid, 34.
88
laws of the universe. Just as this idea, which was once “of epoch-making significance in
the history of human spirit,”64 is now trivial to us, the notion that there is reason behind
history is equally unusual. Yet Hegel wants us to see that World Spirit realizes itself not
only in nature and society, but also in history.
6. The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of History
I argue that Hegel‟s focus on reason in history introduces a complex problem, two
axes of which are (1) the question of the place of the particular and contingent within the
universal and necessary (2) subjective freedom versus historical necessity. In fact,
Arendt‟s criticism of Hegel goes to the heart of this debate. She contends that “Hegel
negates concrete reality, contingency, and therefore the individual when he interprets
history as a logically comprehensible sequence of events and processes that follows an
inevitable course.”65
Other readers of Hegel disagree. Forbes, in his introduction to the Lectures on the
Philosophy of History, not only defends Hegel based on his “respect for and appreciation
of fact, an insatiable appetite for sheer information in every subject that is almost unique
in history of philosophy” but also argues that
[Hegel‟s] philosophy is such that sheer fact and contingency are given a unique
philosophical status; “Reason” is such that “Reason in history,” properly
understood, must, among other things, mean precisely that grasp of the particular
64 Ibid.
65 Hannah Arendt, “Søren Kierkegaard,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1994), 46.
89
fact and appreciation of the uniqueness of historical individuality which Hegel has
been accused of lacking, regarding them only as steps to a pre-ordained goal.66
I think Arendt‟s analysis of Hegel is overly broad and consequently fails to do justice to
the attention paid to the individual in Hegel‟s work.67 Hegel, first of all, posits the
substance of World Spirit as freedom. This freedom can be realized when the subject
follows his own conscience and morality, pursues and implements his own universal
ends.68 The end of the world spirit is realized through the freedom of each individual.69
However, even though Hegel‟s own writings are balanced in the attention they
pay to the particular and the universal, the common notion that Hegel‟s philosophy treats
the universal as supreme is not entirely baseless. The proponents of his philosophy claim
that this is a miscomprehension based on his unpolished language in “Reason in History,”
“in which his philosophy was vulgarized to make it intelligible to a largely nonphilosophical
audience.”70 It is true that these writings were meant to be delivered as
lectures, rather than published as articles. As such, they constitute one of the most
accessible Hegelian texts and yet are at the same time liable to self-contradiction. But
66 Duncan Forbes, Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in
History, G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1975), xvi.
67 For a nuanced reading of the notion of contingency in Hegel‟s philosophy of history, see Dieter Henrich,
“Hegels Theorie über den Zufall” in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).
68 Hegel, 1975, 55.
69 Ibid.
70 Zbigniew Pelczynski, “Hegel and International History,” in Reason and History: or Only a History of
Reason, ed. Philip Windsor (Leicester; London: Leicester University Press, 1990), 36.
90
observing the supremacy of the universal over the individual in Hegel is not a
miscomprehension. I believe that support for such a reading can be found in at least two
different places: First, in Hegel‟s methodology, which emphasizes the necessity of
eliminating the contingent in order to focus on universal history, and second, in the
intertwined nature of reason and history in his philosophy. As a result, the balance
between the particular and the universal is tipped inescapably towards the latter in
Hegel‟s philosophy of history. Let me examine these two points.
Methodologically, I would like to bring up two related sub-points. First, all
history-writing necessitates generalization for purposes of representation. An important
aspect of historiography is distinguishing the essential from the accidental. On this basis,
Hegel‟s philosophy of history concerns itself not with individual situations but the
universal reason behind them. Since the aim of philosophy is to discover the overall
design, the universal element, it needs to “eliminate the contingent [Das Zufällige].”71
The particular ends of the subject are mere external circumstances. Reason cannot
concern itself with these particular and finite ends; it deals with the absolute, the one idea
that binds together these individual instances. In an oft-quoted passage, Hegel explains
this approach:
When we contemplate the display of passions, and consider the historical
consequences of their violence and of the irrationality which is associated with
them (and even more so with good intentions and worthy aims); when we see the
evil, the wickedness, and the downfall of the most flourishing empires the human
spirit has created; and when we are moved to profound pity for the untold
71 Hegel, 1975, 28.
91
miseries of individual human beings—we can only end with a feeling of sadness
at the transience of everything. And since all this destruction is not the work of
mere nature but the will of man, our sadness takes on a moral quality, for the
spirit in us (if we are at all susceptible to it) eventually revolts at such spectacle.
Without rhetorical exaggeration, we need only compile an accurate account of the
misfortunes which have overtaken the finest manifestations of national and
political life, and of personal virtues or innocence, to see a most terrifying picture
take shape before our eyes. Its effect is to intensify our feeling to an extreme pitch
of hopeless sorrow with no redeeming circumstances to counterbalance it. We can
only harden ourselves against it or escape from it by telling ourselves that it was
ordained by fate and could not have been otherwise.… But even as we look upon
history as an altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and
the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask:
to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrifices have been
made? This usually leads in turn to those general considerations from which our
whole inquiry began. From this beginning, we proceed to define those same
events which afford so sad a spectacle for gloomy sentiments and brooding
reflection as no more than the means whereby what we have specified as the
substantial destiny, the absolute and final end, or in other words, the true result of
history, is realized.72
In this passage, Hegel acknowledges that there is so much injustice and suffering in the
world that it almost seems as if history has not been rational at all. But these “empirical
72 Ibid., 68. Italics mine.
92
details,” which are “at the mercy of chance,” are not the subject matter of the philosophy
of history. Its subject matter is what lies beneath them. The task of the philosophy of
history is to “understand [these details‟] true import,” i.e., their purpose and significance
for the development of the World Spirit.73
Arendt does not take lightly the reduction of individual acts and occurrences to
mere contingency .In the tradition of philosophy, the realm of human affairs has always
been relegated to a low status because of the unpredictability inherent in action.74 With
the secularization of the world, this “problem of freedom” resurfaced with a pronounced
emphasis. Hegel‟s unsuccessful “pseudo-solution” was to integrate the contingency into a
philosophy of history.75 We will consider it in detail below.
A second relevant aspect of Hegel‟s method is the unit of analysis. In the realm of
world history, the key players are individual nations.76 The Universal Spirit finds a
determinate form in the nation, which is henceforth both particular and universal. The
course of world history, in its most general representation, is as follows: the development
of the World Spirit follows a progressive course from East to West. Each nation
embodies a purpose or idea, which is then replaced by another nation and its universal
73 Ibid., 66.
74 More on this in Chapter 3.
75 Hannah Arendt, “Willing” in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978b), 28.
76 Avineri draws attention to the fact that Hegel‟s notion of nation [Volkgeist] differs from the way it has
been interpreted by later-nineteenth-century political theories: “Hegel does maintain that a Volk has to
found a state, since the very existence of a body politic is an expression of its actuality and its ability to
function in the objective world. But this does not imply the emergence of a unitary state, let alone a nation
state, nor is the dominance of any given Volkgeist reducible to its political power…What distinguishes a
dominant Volkgeist is thus its overall culture, and not its political or military might.” Shlomo Avineri,
Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 222.
93
principle in a process of gradual development and growth. Each nation can therefore be
dominant only once in world history. The first stage of this development is the Oriental
world, whose spirit Hegel compares to the “spirit of childhood”: “This natural spirit is
still immersed in nature and is not yet self-sufficient; it is therefore not yet free, and had
not undergone the process by which freedom comes into being.”77 In China, India, and
Persia, the great empires of the Orient, the ruling principle of the spirit was such that only
one individual—the ruler—was actually free: “The splendid edifices of the Oriental states
are substantial forms which contain all the determinations of reason, but in such a way
that the individuals remain purely accidental.”78
The second phase in the development of the World Spirit is the world of Greece
and Rome. The world of Greece is characterized by the multiplicity of city-states. It is the
realm of “beautiful freedom.”79 The principle of individuality originates in this stage,
though it is “still embedded in substantial unity.”80 Unlike Greek culture, which Hegel
depicts in admiring terms because of the unmediated harmony of the social life, the
Roman world is characterized by hard work and servitude. The universal end of this stage
is the principle of the state, but in it, the individuals are completely engulfed. Only
through a struggle between abstract universality and individuality does history arrive at
the last stage, the Germanic world,81 where freedom is established and all men become
77 Hegel, 1975, 130.
78 Ibid., 201.
79 Ibid., 202.
80 Ibid.
81 Avineri notes that the term “the Germanic world” (die germanische Welt) is coeval with the western
Christian world, and hence encompasses not only Germany and other Nordic nations but also France, Italy,
94
free. The struggle between the abstract universal principle of the Spirit and the
particularity of the individual is finally reconciled. The direction of historical change is
towards a better and more perfect condition. In positing this movement of history against
the natural world, where “no matter how general their variety there is nothing new under
the sun, and in this respect its manifold play of forms produces and effect of boredom,”
Hegel departs from ancient philosophy‟s cyclical understanding of history and embraces
a new and powerful paradigm, that of progress.82
As far as the nation is concerned, Hegel‟s characterization is again only at times
balanced in terms of the relationship between the particular and the universal. He argues,
for example, that “a nation consists on the one hand of distinct moments which combine
to give it its general character; on the other, it also embodies the opposite principle of
individuality, and these two principles together constitute the reality of the Idea.”83 Yet,
Hegel warns us that even though the universal must always be realized through the
particular, the idea of progress as one sweeping thought overshadows the importance of
the particular. Arendt notes unsympathetically that “this personification of the state,
achieved through its conquest by the nation and shaped after the model of autonomous
individual,” was first coined by Hegel in his theory of state and history. While it is not
true that the concept was invented by Hegel, his theory of state and history probably
exerted the most significant influence on Western political thought. Even after Hegelian
idealism disappeared and Hegel‟s idea was replaced by other notions such as the spirit of
Spain, and England. Hence, Avineri argues, later attempts to ascribe a national, ethnic, or linguistic
supremacy to Germany based on Hegelian philosophy are completely unfounded. Avineri, 1974, 228.
82 Hegel, 1975, 124.
83 Ibid., 74.
95
a people or the soul of a race, Hegel‟s concept of “individualization of the moral
universal within a collective” continued to haunt Western philosophy.84
Thus far, I have discussed how reason and history are intertwined in Hegel. His
philosophy of history is organized around a single dominant aim: bringing reason and
history into accord with one another. The result of this process will be freedom. How do
reason and history coincide? How will freedom be realized in history? The progress of
human history must be carried out through the singular acts and deeds of the individuals
with their own passions, purposes, and interests. How is individual freedom then
reconciled with historical necessity?
The picture that Hegel paints here supports a particular understanding of the
relationship between freedom and necessity. Hegel acknowledges that “nothing great has
been accomplished in the world without passion,” where passion denotes the active
interests of those engaged in a cause.85 Even when men act with a definite cause in mind,
their actions may produce results that are significantly different from what they intend.
The ultimate outcome of these actions, however, does not destroy the universal plan in
history, but fits in with a larger, determinate purpose. Individuals act according to a
certain plan even though they do not or cannot fully grasp it. Especially in the early
stages of the development of the World Spirit, the reason embedded in history is not fully
clear. This universal purpose is revealed to the backward glance of the philosopher.
Hegel calls it the “cunning of reason”:
84 Hannah Arendt, “The Nation,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1994), 209.
85 Hegel, 1975, 73.
96
[I]t is not the universal Idea, which enters into opposition, conflict and danger; it
keeps itself in the background, untouched, and unharmed, and sends forth the
particular interests of passion to fight and wear themselves out in its stead. It is
what we may call the cunning of reason that it sets passions to work in its service,
so that the agents by which its gives itself existence must pay the penalty and
suffer the loss.86
The notion of the “cunning of reason” is inevitably the subject of controversy. To what
extent do the individuals actively participate in the World Spirit? Is reason a super-force
that deploys the interests of the subject to reach its own ends? A sympathetic reader,
Charles Taylor, argues against taking Hegel‟s “picturesque image” literally. The
individual passions are not used by reason for a higher foreign purpose. Our
interpretation of Hegel‟s cunning of reason must take into account that even in the early
stages of history, men have a vague sense of the Spirit of the times that they are living in
and its demands. However, when the interests and ambitions of certain individuals and
the interests of the World Spirit coincide, these individuals become the bearers of a
mission.87 Hegel calls them “the great men of history.”88
These “great individuals of history” occupy a significant yet ambivalent role. The
authority they enjoy has nothing to do with physical strength; instead, “their power
resides in this inner content, which is present in the universal instinct of mankind.”89 The
aim of these great individuals of world history, Hegel argues, corresponds to the will of
86 Ibid., 89.
87 Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 98.
88 Hegel, 1975, 76.
89 Ibid., 76.
97
the World Spirit. Their objective is to give reality to the state of the world, which is not
yet fully known, and “it is through its attainment that they find satisfaction.”90 The World
Spirit finds expression in the person of these individuals, and thanks to this quality, others
are drawn to world-historical individuals as if by “an inward compulsion.”91 These
individuals recruit followers and become the leaders of world-historical change. One such
figure is Caesar, who could “discern the weakness of what still appears to exist in the
present, although it possesses a semblance of reality.”92 Caesar epitomizes the worldhistorical
individual in that he realized the deteriorated state of the Roman Empire,
understood the necessity of replacing the old structure with a new one, and acted upon
this insight. The real-life example from Hegel‟s time is Napoleon, “the World Spirit on
horseback,” who, “unconscious of being the incarnation of the Spirit,…acted out of the
usual human mixture of short term goals, desires and passions.”93 Even though these
world-historical figures themselves perished, they accomplished the work of the World
Spirit. As long as the development of the Spirit continues, the individual fate of these
great men of history is of no consequence to the course of world history.
Other, less sympathetic readers of Hegel disagree with this interpretation. Shlomo
Avineri, for example, finds Hegel‟s doctrine of the world-historical individual
problematic since it is not clear to what degree such individuals are aware of their role in
90 Ibid., 84.
91 Ibid., 76.
92 Ibid., 84.
93 Hannah Arendt, 1978b, 180. Hegel describes Napoleon with unreserved excitement: “It is indeed a
wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,
reaches out over the world and masters it.” Hegel, cited in Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London;
Routledge, 2000), 1.
98
history. The two examples above, of Caesar and Napoleon, illustrate this problem.
Avineri argues that three different interpretations are possible: (1) The world-historical
men are wholly conscious of the development of the World Spirit, (2) they are
“instinctively” conscious of the idea of history and their role in it, or (3) they are totally
unaware of it.94 Avineri‟s conclusion is that there is support for each of these
interpretations in Hegel‟s writings, and the dilemma is ultimately unresolved.
Charles Taylor, as a response to Avineri, attributes this discord to the unpolished
nature of the text, which Hegel did not edit for publication. Taylor asserts that “the texts
can fairly easily be recognized around the notion that the world-historical individuals
have a sense of the higher truth they serve, but see it through a glass darkly.”95
I believe that despite this point of contention, a common denominator unites the
commentators on Hegel. If the actors in history are only somewhat aware of the
development of reason in history and their own role in this process, then who is fully
aware? The answer, according to Hegel, is the philosopher. This response constitutes one
of the main tenets of Arendt‟s critique of Hegel.
7. From Politics to History
I would like to elaborate Arendt‟s critique by examining the relationship between
politics and philosophy. In “What Is Existential Philosophy?” (1946), Arendt examines
the history of Existenz philosophy and its perennial problems.96 For Arendt, Kant‟s
94 Avineri, 1974, 233.
95 Taylor, 1979, 100.
96 Hannah Arendt, “What is Existential Philosophy?” in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994). Benhabib explains that the term Existenzphilosophie
that Arendt uses in the German version of this article has a much wider connotation, which is missing in
99
description of the opposition between thought and Being marks the beginning of Existenz
philosophy:
The unity of thought and Being presupposed the pre-established coincidence of
essentia and existentia; that is, everything thinkable also existed and everything
extant, because it was knowable, had to be rational. Kant, who is the real, though
secret, as it were, founder of modern philosophy and who has also remained its
secret king until this very day, shattered that unity.97
According to the Kantian theory, knowledge, the “what” of our sensory perceptions, does
not correspond to the “that” of our concepts of understanding; in fact, they are radically
distinguished from one another. In a similar context, Arendt explained this problem as
follows: “Nothing we see or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is
given to senses.”98 To reproduce Benhabib‟s illuminating example, although I can
recognize a certain bottle of wine to be “Bordeaux 1989,” it would not “substitute for the
actual taste of the wine on my palate.”99 This example illustrates Hegel‟s assertion that
“the This of sense…cannot be reached by language.”100
translations of the term to English as “existentialism” or “existential philosophy.” Seyla Benhabib, The
Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, Md.; Oxford : Rowan & Littlefield, 2003), 60. I will
follow Benhabib and hence Arendt‟s original term in referring to the movement in question as “Existenz
philosophy.”
97 Arendt, 1994, 168.
98 Arendt, 1978a, 8.
99 Benhabib, 2003, 48.
100 Arendt, 1978a, 8.
100
With the discovery of this discrepancy between the realm of thought and the
world of appearances, Kant was the first philosopher, according to Arendt, to expose the
inescapable antinomy inherent in the structure of reason. The entire body of Western
thought thereafter either struggled within the framework of opposition between thought
and Being drawn by Kant or followed in the footsteps of Hegel, who, according to
Arendt, is the “last of the old philosophers because he was the last to evade this question
successfully.”101 Hegel was able to evade the question because he provided a framework
within which all natural and historical phenomena were unified as a whole. Neither
Hegel‟s embrace of history as the ultimate determinant of human actions nor Marx‟s
substitution of the material forces of production for the World Spirit behind history
provide sufficiently political answers to the dichotomy of thought and Being.102
However, Hegel‟s philosophy of history continued to exert enormous influence on the
generations of philosophers that followed him.
Arendt offers an insight into why such a “restoration of unity of man and world in
a doctrinaire and purely hypothetical way”103 might be appealing in a 1954 lecture
entitled “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought.”104 Here,
Arendt goes back to one of the recurring themes of her body of thought: the relationship
between politics and philosophy. Traditionally, the concern of philosophy with politics
stems from the need to liberate the philosopher from the realm of human affairs, to
101 Arendt, 1994, 169.
102 In fact, in this respect Marx was an avid disciple of Hegel instead of a critic. I will consider this in detail
in the next chapter.
103 Ibid., 175.
104 Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought” in Essays in
Understanding: 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994).
101
organize the human world in such a way that the philosopher can philosophize without
disturbance. In contrast, contemporary political thought takes up the realm of action with
a genuine interest. Although the twentieth-century concern with politics dates back to the
catastrophic experiences of the two world wars and the creation of totalitarian regimes in
Europe, one of the earliest examples of such a world-oriented philosophy, Arendt
contends, can be detected in the Hegelian version of the modern concept of history.105 It
is interesting that Arendt praises Hegel for bringing human affairs for the first time into
focus, a position that at first glance appears counter to Arendt‟s previous argument. Did
she not argue that the concern with history in Western philosophy was the beginning of a
paradigm change that turned the focus of political philosophy away from politics?
Further examination reveals that these two positions are not contradictory but
complementary. Hegel‟s position seems to offer a solution to a perennial problem of
philosophy—an improvement over the ancient and Christian solutions, but nonetheless
unconvincing to the modern audience, Arendt defines this problem as the question of
“how to deal philosophically with that realm of Being that owes its origin exclusively to
man and which therefore could not reveal truth as long as truth was understood as not
man-made but given to man‟s senses or reason.”106 In brief, how can we make sense of
the realm of human affairs?
As opposed to the ancient and Christian answers to this problem, where the realm
of action was conceived to exist, instrumentally, for the sake of something else (the other
world, a divine being, or immortality), Hegel‟s solution imbued the realm of human
actions with a meaning and importance it has not previously enjoyed. In fact, Hegel was
105 Ibid., 430.
106 Ibid.
102
the first philosopher to lead philosophy into this dimension, where theory is mediated by
“historical consciousness and social praxis.”107 It is not entirely surprising that Hegel is
one of the first philosophers to pay serious attention to realm of action. As previously
mentioned, he was influenced heavily by the French Revolution, which he thought that
refuted the centuries-long belief in the futility of the contingent, unpredictable, everchanging
realm of human affairs by realizing abstract ideas such as “liberté, fraternité,
égalité.” The French Revolution therefore led to not only a belief in an infinite progress,
but also a concern with human affairs in general.108 Hegel not only realized the
importance of the challenge raised by the revolution to philosophy, he embraced that
challenge and made it the center of his philosophy.
8. Hegel and the French Revolution
Hegel‟s concern with the realm of politics is perhaps best analyzed by Joachim
Ritter. In his perceptive analysis of Hegel‟s thoughts on the French Revolution, Ritter
dispels the accusations raised against Hegel in Lectures on Hegel and his Time by Rudolf
Haym. In these influential lectures, which remained the last word on Hegelian philosophy
for decades, Haym had branded Hegel “the philosophical dictator of Germany,” the
founder of political conservatism and deification of the Prussian state. Ritter counters that
statements by Hegel referring to the state “as the actuality of the ethical idea” or “as a
secular deity,” connote that the state is concerned with man in his relation to the divine
and not only in relation to the daily necessities of everyday life, as in natural theories of
107 Habermas is quick to note that Hegel ultimately withdrew from this dimension; “he has salvaged the
dialectic as ontology, has preserved its origin in theory for philosophy.” Habermas, 1974, 139.
108 Arendt, 1978b, 154.
103
society.109 These statements, in other words, are metaphysical assertions, which signify
that “Hegel incorporates state and society into metaphysical theory and understands them
as the realization of Being in historical existence.”110
Another Hegelian claim that Haym brings up is the infamous “what is rational is
actual and what is actual is rational.” According to Haym, this identification of reason
with reality makes Hegel as a conservative. Ritter dismisses this interpretation, arguing
that Hegel‟s statement is only another metaphysical assertion. On the one hand (in
Ritter‟s view), Haym‟s critique was right: Hegel brought to the forefront the problems of
the contemporary age and of the society that emerged politically with the revolution in
France.111 With modern developments in technology and science, “the most basic
foundations of our spiritual life have been torn down and reordered.”112 As a result,
speculative philosophy and concepts such as being, the divine, and the absolute have lost
their meaning. On the other hand, Haym was wrong to conclude that in Hegel‟s use of
these categories indicates that his philosophy can only be reactionary. In contrast, Ritter
argues that there is in Hegel‟s philosophy an important dimension that Haym failed to
take into account. Hegel was the first philosopher to understand philosophy as something
“of its own time.” He argues, in other words, that philosophy can continue to be “the
knowledge of being when, and only when, it is at the same time knowledge of its own
age.”113
109 Joachim Ritter. Hegel and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass; London, England: MIT Press,
1982), 43.
110 Ibid., 37.
111 Ibid., 39.
112 Haym quoted in Ritter, 1982, 38.
113 Ibid., 40.
104
Hegel did realize that a new, modern age had come into being. This situation,
however, presented for him a particular question—the question of how to understand the
present epoch, which has completely severed its ties with the philosophical tradition.
Hegel realized that philosophy cannot evade the question of emancipation from historical
tradition; it needs to address it directly. Therefore Hegel set out on this task by putting the
French Revolution, the determining political event of his time, in the center of his
philosophy. Because of the role played by the revolution in Hegel‟s philosophy, Joachim
Ritter believes that “There is no other philosophy that is a philosophy of revolution to
such a degree and so profoundly, as that of Hegel.”114
Ritter argues that Hegel‟s reaction to the French Revolution must be divided into
two time periods.115 In the Tubingen period (1788-1793), which leads to Hegel‟s
friendship with Hölderlin and Schelling, Hegel‟s reaction is enthusiastic. In this epoch,
Hegel believes that philosophy must be in the service of revolution, which will allow
people immediate participation in the government. In a passage from his period, which
Steven Smith notes “could almost be mistaken for the young Marx,” Hegel describes his
expectation of a revolution in Germany.116 This revolution will be the ultimate realization
of Kantian system and its sociopolitical implications, which Hegel equates with the
political achievements of the French Revolution.117 In the second period, from roughly
1795 on, Hegel‟s passion begins to fade in the light of the Reign of Terror. Hegel
observes that the revolution did not result in lasting solutions to political problems.
Disillusioned with the experiment in radical republicanism, Hegel turns to the philosophy
114 Ibid., 43.
115 Ibid., 46.
116 Steven B. Smith, “Hegel‟s Discovery of History” in The Review of Politics, vol. 45, no. 2, 172.
117 Ibid.
105
of history. But he never becomes an outright opponent of the revolution, even in the face
of the experience of terror and the failure of the revolution to establish durable
institutions. On the contrary, he underlines the necessity and the irresistibility of the
revolution. For Hegel, the revolution established the central political problem of the
modern age, and we cannot escape from it
The problem that revolution placed in the hands of philosophy without completely
resolving it is the political realization of freedom.118 What is the legal and institutional
framework in which political freedom can be actualized? The answer to this question
becomes the key task of philosophy for Hegel. It is also a question that can only be asked
and answered in relation to world history. With the French Revolution, the principle of
freedom has been elevated to the universal level that applies to all political and legal
order. The subject of world history is the realization of men‟s freedom.
Ritter‟s analysis supports Arendt‟s thesis that Hegel‟s philosophy was a break
with the tradition in that it turned the focus of philosophy to the realm of human affairs.
The problem with his newfound interest in the realm of action is that he reduces the
meaning inherent in the realm of human affairs to the larger process of history. In other
words, in marrying the idea of freedom to the philosophy of history, Hegel continued to
obscure the importance of political action, though from a new and different angle.
Habermas concurs with Ritter on the central role revolution played in Hegel‟s
philosophy.119 He also adds a second thesis, which sheds lights on Hegel‟s willingness to
drown the importance of political action within a universal theory of world history.
According to Habermas, Hegel elevated revolution to the primary principle of his
118 Ritter, 1982, 47.
119 Habermas, 1974.
106
philosophy in order not to sacrifice philosophy to the challenge posed by the revolution.
In other words, Hegel feared the revolution and wanted to feel secure from it. The only
way to do that was to integrate the revolution firmly into a theory of world history.
Hegel‟s philosophy, according to Habermas, is as much a critique of the revolution as it
is a philosophy of the revolution.
For Hegel, the revolution is the world-historical event that for the first time
conferred real existence and validity on the abstract right.120 Hegel acclaims the
revolution insofar as it helped the condition of right to achieve external existence. But at
the same time, Hegel criticizes the revolutionaries who incorporate this principle into
their action as their immediate goal. These are “engineers, who desire to confer
immediate reality to the general norms.”121 They create “the terror of absolute
freedom.”122 The only valid force is the one inherent in the historical process. The
external force can only be that of particular against the particular and hence must be
rejected.123
Habermas‟s analysis parallels Ritter‟s in that Habermas also detects two different
periods in Hegel‟s attitude towards the French Revolution. In the first phase, Hegel
assigns philosophy a practical task: Philosophy must understand the historical necessity
of bringing about abstract right and give it the form of a conscious reform. Philosophy
cannot compel by external force, but it can prove the corruption of existing world. Even
if the aim of theory is not revolution, but reform, Hegel realized the potential of this
120 Abstract Right is the first chapter of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. It refers to the “inherently single will
of a subject” confronting an external world. This is the basis of what constitutes a “person.”
121 Ibid., 125. This critique was picked up by Edmund Burke against the French Revolution.
122 Hegel in ibid.
123 Ibid., 129.
107
theory to develop indirectly its own political force. To Hegel, such a potential, even if not
materialized, was unacceptable. Therefore, he set out to revise the position that he had
espoused in the earlier political writings. In the second phase, Hegel argues that
philosophy can fully comprehend reality only after the reality has come to an end. In this
sense, philosophy always arrives too late to provide instruction on “how the world ought
to be”: “Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”124 With this assertion,
Hegel expels praxis entirely from philosophy.
According to Habermas, the World Spirit can be understood as the solution to this
revolutionary potential of philosophy. It is clear to Hegel that the actualization of reason
is the necessary direction of the world history. But if Hegel rejects the revolutionary
consciousness as the vessel of change, then who or what is to guarantee the development
of history in this course? According to Habermas, it is for this reason that Hegel invents
the World Spirit, which “is permitted to use history as a blood altar on which the
happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are offered as
sacrifice.”125 Thanks to this World Spirit, Hegel can theorize social and political change
and yet completely eliminate revolutionary action from this theory. It is “the
124 “A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any
rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time
when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson of the
concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity
that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this world, which it has grasped in its substance, in
the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old,
and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy.” G.W.F. Hegel,
Preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 23.
125 Ibid.,, 137.
108
meaningfulness of the process of history in its entirety” (as opposed to the “melancholy
haphazardness” of individual actions observed by Kant) that provides for Hegel the most
convincing dimension for man‟s reconciliation with “the reality of human affairs, i.e., of
things which owe their existence exclusively to men.”126 Hegel was indeed the first
philosopher to take philosophy into the dimension where theory is mediated “by
historical consciousness and social praxis.”127 But he immediately withdrew from this
dimension and drowned particular deeds and acts, which are the true material of politics,
in an overly broad, self-sustaining fiction of World Spirit.
9. The Role of the Philosopher in Hegel’s Philosophy
It is no surprise that Arendt sees the tendency to turn to history as the last in a
series of long attempts to evade the question of politics. Even though Hegel‟s approach
allowed genuine attention to be paid to historical and political events, it did so without
breaking away from a traditional framework of truth and knowledge. In establishing a
complete harmony in history by bringing together thought and action, philosophy and
politics, Hegel managed to leave intact “the philosopher‟s most cherished privilege of
being the only one to whom truth is revealed.”128 In other words, Hegel‟s approach was a
compromise that still preserved the superior position of the philosopher, who has access
to the nature of the absolute truth.
Moreover, not only did Hegel preserve the traditional position in the western
philosophical tradition of the wise man, whose wisdom, in Arendt‟s words, “could be
126 Arendt, 1977a, 85.
127 Habermas, 1974, 139.
128 Arendt, 1994, 431.
109
justified only from a position outside the realm of human affairs and be thought
legitimate only by virtue of the philosopher‟s proximity to the Absolute,”129 but he also
transformed the philosopher into the historian by converting metaphysics into a
philosophy of history. Progress in history is now such that the meaning of the absolute
will reveal itself to the backward glance of the historian at the end of time. As Habermas
put it, “the unrest set in motion by the Revolution, and subsequently arising continually
anew, was a knot which history would have to unravel in the future and only then.”130
The a posteriori character of the kind of philosophy of history embraced by Hegel
presents a formidable problem for the relationship between necessity and freedom.
Arendt reminds us that in retrospect, from the viewpoint of memory, “a freely performed
act loses its air of contingency under the impact of now being an accomplished fact, of
having become part and parcel of the reality in which we live.”131 In other words, once an
act occurs, it seems to us that its coming into existence was inevitable. We can hardly
think of an alternative course of history in which this act would not have occurred.
Arendt quotes Bergson, whose significant insight on the relationship between necessity
and freedom has been for the most part neglected: “By virtue of its sheer factuality,
reality throws its shadow behind it into an infinitely distant past; thus it appears to have
existed in the mode of potentiality in advance of its actualization.”132 Bergson warns us
that the deeds and occurrences of the past acquire an air of inevitability because of having
already come into existence. This is the source of our ability to “think away” the past.
129 Ibid., 432.
130 Habermas, 1974, 121.
131 Arendt, 1978b, 30.
132 Bergson, quoted in Arendt, 1978b, 31.
110
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt grounds this argument in a socio-historical
context. She identifies many “constructs” in postwar Germany that presume to explain
everything “by obscuring all details.”133 Among them she counts “the „ghetto mentality‟
among European Jews; or the collective guilt of the German people, derived from an ad
hoc interpretation of their history; or the equally absurd assertion of a kind of collective
innocence of the Jewish people.”134 The problem with these overgeneralized constructs is
that “no alternative to what actually happened is even considered and no person could
have acted differently from the way he did.”135 This example clearly demonstrates that
this problem is not merely philosophical but also profoundly political. Such a narrative
renders judgment and political responsibility utterly superfluous.
The aforementioned relationship between philosophy and politics was derived from
philosopher‟s hostility to human affairs, from an antagonism between life of the mind and
the realm of action. In the second part of the The Life of the Mind, “Willing,” Arendt takes
up Hegelian philosophy from a slightly different perspective, from the viewpoint of the
relationship between willing and thinking. The clash between thinking and willing is of a
different kind, between two mental activities. Just as memory is our mental organ for the
past, which helps us make “present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the
senses,”136 will is “our mental organ for the future.”137 With the rise of the modern age, the
problem of the will resurfaced with a pronounced emphasis because the notion of progress
as the deciding force of history. Hence human affairs demanded that unprecedented attention
133 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York,: Penguin Books, 1994), 297.
134 Ibid.
135 Ibid.
136 Arendt, 1978b, 11.
137 Ibid., 13
111
be paid to the future.138 The clash between thinking and willing originates precisely from the
disparate and even opposite time-orientations of the two faculties: “Both, it is true, make
present to our mind what is actually absent, but thinking draws into its enduring present
what either is or at least has been, whereas willing, stretching out into the future, moves in a
region where no such certainties exist.”139 As our mental organ of the future, the will
constantly disturbs the quiet of thinking. Every instance of volition necessarily involves the
realization of a project that requires the subject to cease to withdraw from the realm of
appearances and instead engage in activity. Otherwise the will‟s project cannot be realized.
The will‟s orientation, therefore, is constant disquiet, impatience, worry, and eventual selfannihilation.
140 Arendt observes that in this sense of always wanting to do something, the
will is always in constant tension with thinking, whose mode of existence is inactivity, or
“doing nothing.”141 In this context, Hegel is exemplary for having reconciled willing and
thinking with unparalleled determination.
In reading Hegel‟s original interpretation of history in terms of the relationship
between time and will, Arendt follows Alexandre Koyré‟s influential translation and
commentary.142 Koyré‟s thesis is that “Hegel‟s greatest originality” is “the insistence on the
future, the primacy ascribed to the future over the past.”143 Arendt first explains the
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid., 35.
140 Ibid., 37
141 Ibid., 37.
142 Alexandre Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna” in Études d’histoire de la Pensée Philosophique, ed. Armand Colin
(Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1961).
143 “C‟est cette insistence sur l‟avenir, la primauté donnée à l‟avenir sur le passé, qui constitute, a notre
avis, la plus grande originalité de Hegel.” Koyré, 1961, 162. Koyré‟s interpretation of Hegel was influential
112
inventive nature of this interpretation. Of course, any nineteenth-century philosopher, who
would share in the belief in progress, would also share this interest in the future, and in this
sense Hegel‟s philosophy, like his predecessors‟, can be characterized in terms of the
supremacy of the future over the past. But Hegel was above all a philosopher of history. In
his philosophy, through the backward glance of the philosopher/historian, the past becomes
“internalized” [er-innert] and reconciliation is achieved between the thinking ego and the
outside world.144 In this respect, it is not the future but the past—and hence the thinking
ego—that is in the foreground of Hegel‟s philosophy.
In his analysis of the construction of time in Hegelian philosophy, however, Koyré
demonstrates the primacy of the future. The concept of time in question is not the “empty
frame, in which everything is born and perishes,”145 but the becoming of the Spirit. Mind‟s
attention is always geared towards the outside events, “the incessant movement of natural
things or the incessant ups and downs of human destinies.”146 These future events, which are
in the process of coming to us [à venir], will ultimately complete and accomplish Being.
Opposed to the future-oriented will stands the thinking ego, which can assert itself only with
the disappearance of the future, i.e., “when everything has reached its end, when Becoming,
in whose process Being unfolds and develops, has been arrested.”147 It is clear that there is a
for Arendt in other respects as well. Her characterization of Hegel‟s philosophy as a philosophy of
reconciliation, which has its roots in an existential unhappiness, the disintegration of reality, and the
necessity of creating a more harmonious and meaningful world through philosophical reflection bears the
mark of Koyré‟s interpretation of Hegel‟s philosophy. See Arendt, 1978a, 142-143.
144 Arendt, 1978b, 40.
145 Hegel, quoted in Koyré, 1961, 150.
146 Arendt, 1978b, 42.
147 Ibid.
113
tension between the mind‟s organ of the future, the will, which is restless, and the mind‟s
organ for the past, thinking, which longs for the completion of this process.
Hegel, according to Arendt, attempts to unite these opposing forces in his philosophy
of history, in which the hidden Reason behind the world events unites the independent wills
of all human actors under an ultimate goal that the actors themselves never intended. This
attempt, Arendt argues following Koyré, is ultimately unsuccessful. On the one hand, the
very possibility of a philosophy of history necessitates an arrest in real time; it requires that
history come to an end. On the other hand, the primacy of the future demonstrated above
demands that as long as men live on earth, time will never come to an end. In order for the
claim to truth of Hegel‟s philosophy to materialize, it must be certain that the future will not
bring anything new; in other words, the future should cease to exist. It is clear to Koyré (and
hence to Arendt) that there is no ultimate resolution to the tension between the past and the
future.148
Hegel‟s end of history is thesis is controversial.149 What is important for our
discussion, however, is the concept of progress that Hegel‟s philosophy ultimately produces.
This dialectical understanding of progress is what Marx will later take from Hegel and what,
in the course of the twentieth century, will turn into process-thinking. Hence let us look
148 Ibid.
149 Early interpreters of Hegel (e.g., Marx, the young Hegelians, and the German historicist school) saw the
end of history thesis as a serious and central part of Hegel‟s systematic thought. Later interpretations of
Hegel, on the other hand, either downplayed its importance by limiting it to a particular dimension of
Hegel‟s thought (Lőwith on Christian eschatology) or completely omitting it (W. Kaufman) For a detailed
discussion, see the section entitled “The Myth of the End of History” in Jon Stewart, ed., The Hegel Myths
and Legends (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 18-236.
114
closely at the particular reconciliation of action and thought, of willing and thinking, in
Hegel‟s idea of progress.
The unity of thought and action is accomplished in Hegelian philosophy in
speculative thought, whose object is not Being, but Becoming. When the object of the
thinking mind is defined as such, Hegel finds a way to reconcile the demands of the intuited
movement of Becoming (which is a circular movement150) and the will (which requires a
rectilinear time conception). The solution is the idea of World Spirit. The World Spirit
transcends the particular existence of individuals and individual nations; it directs the
particular human wills “toward a „meaningfulness‟ arising out of reason‟s need, that is
psychologically speaking, out of the very human wish to live in a world that is as it ought to
be.”151 On the one hand, each new generation and every civilization has to start anew, but
thanks to the accumulated experience and knowledge of past generations and civilizations,
their starting point is higher. This picture ensures continued upward development. Arendt
visualizes this movement with the following figure152:
Infinite Progress
Synthesis = Thesis
/
Synthesis = Thesis Antithesis
/
Synthesis = Thesis Antithesis
/
Synthesis = Thesis Antithesis
/
Thesis Antithesis
150 Arendt asserts, drawing again on Koyré‟s interpretation that “[t]he only motion that can be intuited is a
movement that swings in a circle forming „a cycle that returns into itself…that presupposes its beginning,
and reaches its beginning only at its end.‟ ” Arendt, 1978b, 47.
151 Ibid., 49.
152 Ibid.
115
Another representation of this movement is as follows:
This particular construction of the World Spirit guarantees infinite progress while at the
same time allowing for the ultimately cyclical movement of the birth and decline of
civilizations.
With the demonstration of the notion of progress in Hegel‟s philosophy of history,
our argument now comes full circle. We discussed the abandonment of the cyclical time
concept of antiquity and the initial development of the rectilinear time concept with the
French Revolution. With Hegel, we see this transformation completed in the realm of
philosophy. Not only is necessity in history established, but the philosopher‟s position as the
privileged observer to whom the meaning of this development is revealed is guaranteed.
The second prong of Arendt‟s critique follows from this observation. Once history is
conceived as a process—and a necessary process at that—from which individual events
derive their significance and intelligibility, the historian/philosopher, whose backward gaze
can penetrate the underlying “objective meaning independent of the aims and awareness of
the actors,” can “overlook what actually happened in his attempt to discern some objective
trend.”153 In other words, if particular occurrences, deeds, and acts acquire meaning only
153 Arendt, 1977a, 88.
116
within a larger process that encompasses these events and transcends them, then any
meaning, any order, any necessity can be imposed upon this process. As Arendt puts it
bluntly:
The trouble is that every axiom seems to lend itself to consistent deductions and this
to such an extent that it is as though men were in a position to prove almost any
hypothesis they might choose to adopt, and not only in the filed of mental
constructions like the various over-all interpretations of history which are all equally
well supported by facts, but in the natural sciences as well.154
Let‟s for a moment take a step back from this argument. How interpretive, really, is
the grid of history? Are all historical events and occurrences dependent upon opinion and
interpretation? Arendt answers this question partially in “Truth and Politics.” While
underlining the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, Arendt also
acknowledges the existence of indisputable facts that no historian or philosopher of history
can manipulate at will. It is true that in order to make sense of human history, one needs to
adopt a certain perspective and construct a narrative into which what seem sheer happenings
can be fitted. But the necessity to understand history within an interpretative framework
cannot be employed to deny the existence of “factual matter” or to justify “blurring the
dividing lines between, fact, opinion and interpretation or as an excuse for the historian to
manipulate facts as he pleases.”155 The reality of human condition is such that every
154 Ibid, 86.
155 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977b),
238.
117
generation creates its own story, its own narrative to understand the meaning of its
existence. While Arendt concedes that each generation has the right to adopt its own
perspective, the existence of certain factual matter cannot be denied. In order to further
illustrate this point, Arendt relates the following anecdote:
During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found
himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar republic on
the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your
opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome
and controversial issue?” He replied, “This I don‟t know. But I don‟t know for
certain they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”156
This anecdote serves for Arendt as a reminder of the existence of the most elementary kind
of factual information that no force can ever erase. While it would then be wrong to
conclude that history is entirely a matter of opinion (after all, no one will ever claim that
Belgium invaded Germany), history is still open to interpretation. Especially within the
framework of a totalitarian state, which can throw its power behind a particular perspective
on history, more fragile individual acts and events will likely drown within the larger
process of history. For example, “if the subject matter of inquiry, for example, is the Soviet
Russian history, one can very well tell a story about the necessities of Soviet
industrialization and turn a blind eye to the Stalin‟s totalitarian dictatorship.”157
156 Arendt, 1977b, 239.
157 Arendt, 1977a, 86.
118
Finally, once this process starts, Arendt contends, it goes one step further. Now
any hypothesis can be taken as the starting point and be acted upon. This starting point
does not need to be a self-evident truth derived from traditional metaphysics of logic, nor
does it have to correspond to the factual reality of the world. The nature of action is such
that, if it is accepted as a hypothesis and acted upon, it will not only materialize but also
create its own reality. For Arendt, this is the beginning of the perception that “everything
is possible not only in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself.”158
10. Conclusion
Arendt‟s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism demonstrates that totalitarian
systems are founded upon the idea that everything is possible. The experience of
totalitarian systems has shown the world that any hypothesis acted upon with consistence
and persistence can be realized: “What once was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to
be proved or disproved by actual facts, will always turn into a fact, never to be
disproved.”159 The course of this development, for Arendt, is such that the understanding
of history as a man-made process is a hop, skip, and a jump away from the creation of
history based on any given hypothesis.
Of course Hegel is not single-handedly responsible for this transformation with
his cunning of reason as a secret force working behind man‟s back. But it first took Hegel
to transform the philosopher into the historian, and politics into a philosophy of history in
order for Marx to turn Hegel on his head and leap from theory into action, from
158 Ibid., 87.
159 Ibid.
119
contemplation to labor. Marx‟s contribution to the development of this understanding of
history will be the subject of the next chapter.
120
Chapter 3: Marx and the Problem of Knowing and Making
Marx’s objection to Hegel says: The dialectic of the world spirit does not move cunningly
behind men’s backs, using acts of the will that appear to originate with men for its own
ends but is instead the style and method of human action. As long as the world spirit was
“unconscious,” that is, as long as the laws of the dialectic remained undiscovered, action
presented itself as an event in which the “absolute” revealed itself. Once we abandon our
prejudice that some “absolute” reveals itself through us behind our backs and once we
know the laws of dialectic, we can realize the absolute.1
1. Introduction
Hegel‟s concept of history as a dialectical movement towards the realization of
human freedom represents a significant paradigm shift in the Western political thought. I
examined the Hegelian concept of history and Arendt‟s critique of Hegel‟s position in the
previous chapter. Arendt‟s critique of Hegelian philosophy focuses on the concept of the
World Spirit as the vehicle of historical development. She argues that the World Spirit
has significant reverberations for human actions. It subsumes political acts and deeds
under the general category of historical development and diminishes their significance.
Hegelian philosophy, in short, fails to acknowledge the realm of human affairs.
Arendt‟s argument does not stop there. She also argues that Hegel‟s philosophy
conditioned our understanding of history in Western philosophy. His immediate
1 Hannah Arendt, “From Hegel to Marx” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 2005c), 71.
121
successor, Karl Marx, followed in Hegel‟s footsteps and developed a philosophy of
history that neglected the importance of the political realm to an equal extent. This is a
controversial claim; Marx is the archetypal theorist of action in the modern age. The
Marxist conception of history explicitly rejects the notion of a World Spirit as the moving
force of the dialectical progress of history. If, therefore, attention to realm of human
affairs is Arendt‟s central concern, then Marx‟s theory of modern society should be
judged very positively by Arendt. But Arendt is not content with Marx‟s theory of action.
In the Marxist theory of politics, action considered a category standing in opposition to
thought. She writes that “Even Marx, in whose work and thought the question of action
played such a crucial role, uses the expression „Praxis‟ simply in the sense of „what man
does‟ as opposed to „what man thinks.‟ ”2
In this chapter, I demonstrate that Marxism also fails to give sufficient attention to
and confer due importance on the realm of human affairs. This claim runs contrary to the
traditional reading of Marx and Marxism. What, exactly, is Arendt‟s critique of
Marxism? Can we trace Arendt‟s discontent with Marx to his understanding of history?
These are the guiding questions of this chapter.
For Arendt, Marx is the last great thinker in the tradition of Western philosophy.
Marx‟s greatest ambition as a political thinker was to “realize philosophy.” By “realizing
philosophy,” he meant transforming philosophy into a practical guide for revolutionary
activity of the working class. Arendt takes this demand seriously. In this chapter, I argue
that Arendt sees in Marx‟s attempt to realize philosophy both new possibilities and new
dangers. I contend that Arendt has two aims: (1) to point out the dangers posed by Marx‟s
2 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking” in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978a), 7.
122
idea, demonstrated by their adoption by totalitarian movements as an ideology and
prescription for action, and (2) to salvage the positive parts—the possibility of a political
philosophy concerned with action. I will show that the least convincing of Arendt‟s
arguments is the link she established between totalitarianism and Marxism. Her argument
fares much better and is more helpful for constructing a modern theory of political
agency when she considers the place of Marxist theory within the tradition of political
philosophy from a broader perspective.
Marx‟s critics are numerous, so it is important to note the originality and
importance of Arendt‟s critique. I believe that Arendt does not criticize Marx for
predictable reasons. In the beginning of chapter on Marx in The Human Condition,
Arendt quotes Benjamin Constant‟s statement in his writings about Rousseau:
Certainly I shall avoid the company of detractors of a great man. If I happen to
agree with them on a single point I grow suspicious of myself; and in order to
console myself for having seemed to be of their opinion… I feel I must disavow
and keep there false friends away from me as much as I can.3
Arendt finds that this statement also expresses the spirit of her critique of Marx,
and I agree. I believe that Arendt‟s analysis does not diminish the value of Marx‟s theory
of action. On the contrary, her critique puts Marx‟s achievements in a new perspective.
Arendt‟s analysis is full of praise for Marx for perceiving “certain trends in the present
3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 79.
123
which could no longer be understood in the framework of the tradition.”4 She commends
Marx for showing “more understanding of factual reality than his followers have ever
been capable of.”5 I believe that in Marx‟s social analysis, Arendt finds the beginning of
a political philosophy firmly grounded in reality. Yet, Marx could not manage to give
voice to “the authentic and very perplexing problems inherent in the modern world,”6
because he wanted to answer these new problems in the context of traditional ideals and
thus failed to overcome the traditional dichotomy between theory and practice. However,
he did outline the general principles of a new philosophy concerned first and foremost
with the realm of human affairs.
In the first part of this essay, I outline Arendt‟s interest in Marx and argue that we
can detect two different orientations in Arendt‟s study of Marx: on the one hand an
interest in totalitarian elements in Marxism and on the other hand a concern with Marx‟s
role in Western intellectual tradition. In the second section, I look at the importance of
Marx‟s place in the tradition of political thought as Arendt conceives it. The third section
deals with what Arendt perceives to be the totalitarian elements in Marxism, namely
perspectival thinking and process-thinking. Section 4 takes up three fundamental ways in
which Marx subverts tradition; sections 5 and 6 elaborate on the final claim by looking at
the relationship between theory and practice, and Marx‟s theory of history, respectively.
Section 7 presents Arendt‟s critique of Marxist theory of history. The final section
4 Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin
Books, 1977a), 21.
5 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 25.
6 Arendt, 1977a, 21.
124
concludes with some observations on the implications of Arendt‟s critique of Marx for
her philosophy of history.
2. Arendt’s Interest in Marx
Arendt‟s writings on Marx are numerous and cover a range of topics, from Marx‟s
philosophy of history to his theory of action, from the social question to the role of
revolutions. Within this range, Arendt‟s study of Marx is characterized by two distinct
orientations. The first is concerned with Marxism as it relates to the rise and success of
totalitarian movements. Arendt‟s intention is to find the “missing link” between
totalitarianism and Marxist ideology. Later, Arendt‟s interest in Marx takes a different
focus, seeking to comprehend Marx within the tradition of political philosophy. She
examines Marxist theory as part of the larger issue of the relationship between
philosophy and politics and between theory and action. This second approach is more
balanced and nuanced; it adopts a broader view of Marx and Marxism. The more Arendt
immerses herself in the Marxist theory of action, the more she seems to lean toward the
second approach, though both orientations can be observed simultaneously in Arendt‟s
texts.
Arendt‟s interest in Marx began with The Origins of Totalitarianism. In her
analysis of the elements of totalitarianism, Arendt initially omitted the historical, social,
and intellectual background of Bolshevik ideology. She was aware that a complete
picture of totalitarianism was not possible without confronting Marxism, one of the most
respectable currents of Western philosophy, but she wanted to emphasize unprecedented
nature of totalitarianism. She believed that all the other elements that she analyzed in the
125
book (racism, imperialism, tribal nationalism of the pan-movements, and anti-Semitism)
were “subterranean currents in Western history which emerged only…where the
traditional social and political framework of Europe broke down.” She believed that
including Marxism as an ideological element would reduce totalitarianism‟s “shocking
originality,” and she wanted to avoid diversions from this aim.7 Ultimately, she found an
examination of Marxism unavoidable, believing that it would reveal “the missing link
between…commonly accepted categories of political thought” and our “present
situation.”8
Jerome Kohn, editor of four volumes of Arendt‟s selected writings, relates that
her voluminous unpublished manuscript on Marx has insightful observations (on the
nonscientific character of Marx‟s thought despite its influence on the social sciences, the
common misunderstandings of Marx, and the differences between Marxism and Marx‟s
own writings), but it does not amount to a systematic analysis.9 Kohn confirms that by
1953, when Arendt was well into her work on Marx, she had a different orientation than
when she had started. She was no longer concerned with Marx himself, instead focusing
on his role within the tradition of Western philosophy. For this reason, she titled her
lectures on Marx, delivered the same year, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western
Political Thought.”10 In On Revolution (1961), Arendt argued that
7 Quoted in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, (New Haven [Conn.];
London: Yale University Press, 2004), 276.
8 Kohn, “Introduction” in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 2005), xii.
9 Ibid., xiv.
10 Ibid., xv.
126
[t]he ideological elements in [Marx‟s] teaching, his belief in „scientific socialism,
in historical necessity, in superstructures; et cetera are secondary and derivate in
comparison; he shared them with the entire modern age and we find them today
not only in the various brands of socialism and communism but in the whole body
of social sciences.11
Arendt‟s newfound interest in Marx‟s role in the tradition of philosophy provides the
context for analyzing the link that Arendt perceived between the totalitarian movements
of the twentieth century and Marxism. Arendt came to the conclusion that Marxism is not
the cause of Bolshevism and of the crimes in the twentieth century.12 Instead, she
recognized that the “great playground of history” provides a hiding-place, an intellectual
environment, for the birth and development of many ideas. Marxism, Arendt believed,
was at the end of tradition, the breakdown of which is the “negative condition” for the
birth of totalitarianism.13 Arendt‟s effort is aimed at understanding this condition and
rethinking about politics and political action in the post-totalitarian world, where the
return to the bonds of the tradition is neither possible nor desirable.
11 Arendt, 1991, 62.
12 “Nazism owes nothing to any part of Western tradition. Be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant,
Christian, Greek or Roman. Whether we like Thomas Aquinas or Machiavelli or Luther or Kant or Hegel or
Nietzsche…they are not the least responsible for what is happening in extermination camps.” Hannah
Arendt, “Approaches to the „German Problem‟ ” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954 ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,1994a), 108.
13 Kohn, 2005, xiv.
127
3. Marx and the Tradition of Political Philosophy
In her writings on Western political thought, Arendt places Marx decisively at the
end of the tradition that started with Plato—a tradition that can be understood in terms of
the dichotomy of thought and action, of philosophy and politics. Before proceeding with
this analysis, let us try to understand what Arendt means by “our tradition of Western
philosophy.” Arendt acknowledges that philosophy in general and political philosophy in
particular is older and more encompassing than Western political philosophy. For Arendt,
“our tradition of philosophy” refers to a particular school of thought that began with Plato
and Aristotle and was later accepted and developed in the West.14
This tradition of philosophy is marked from the start by contempt for human
affairs, politics in particular. Plato introduced a clear-cut division between the realm of
human affairs and philosophical reflection in The Republic, where he described the
sphere of human of human affairs as a realm of “darkness, confusion and deception.”15
This disdain the for human realm had two sources. On the one hand, there is the
prepolitical necessity of biological life. Human beings, as living things, depend on the
fulfillment of their biological needs for survival. Greeks, for whom this biological life
was a necessary precondition for politics, already held in contempt all activity connected
with it. According to Arendt, this is the first sense in which politics is derivative.16
14 Arendt, “The End of Tradition” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 2005a), 81.
15 Arendt, 1977a, 17.
16 Arendt, 2005a, 83.
128
Politics is dependent on the fulfillment of biological necessity; it is in this sense “limited
by labor from below.”17
Politics is also derivative in a second sense. The realm of politics, which has come
into being because of the necessity of living and acting together, has only a negative
relationship to philosophy. The activity of politics, the necessity of living and acting in
concert with other fellow beings, interferes with philosophical activity, i.e., solitary
reflection. If the philosopher aspired to truth, the highest aim of human life, it was
necessary for him to abandon the common world of human interaction. According to
Arendt, this opposition between politics and philosophy characterizes the tradition of
Western philosophy.
Arendt argues that this tradition, which started when the philosopher withdrew
from the sphere of politics, came to an end in Marxist political theory. With the
proposition that truth lies not outside of society but within the society itself, Marx
established a new standard for philosophy. Instead of running away from this common
world, Marx turned the focus of philosophy to “changing the world.”
Even though Marx is at the end of this tradition, according to Arendt, he is still a
part of it. The real break in tradition occurred with the terror and ideology of the
totalitarian movements. With totalitarianism, Western civilization arrived at a moment
when it is impossible to judge the crimes committed by means of the traditional
categories of moral responsibility or established legal standards. Within the tradition of
Western philosophy after Hegel, a rebellion had already started that challenged the basic
assumptions of traditional political thought, metaphysics, and ethics. Along with
17 Ibid.
129
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Marx questioned the fundamental principles of Western
philosophy.18 These great thinkers “foreshadowed” the break in tradition, according to
Arendt, but they did not necessarily cause it. Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were
detecting and responding to the modern problems brought about by social, political, and
industrial change. They were inspired by the real challenges of the newly transformed
social and political relationships and the changing role of religion and morality, but their
solutions still remained within the established boundaries of Western philosophy.
How can we understand Arendt‟s insistence that none of these philosophers broke
away from the tradition completely, particularly in the light of the fact that the
contributions of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were quite radical and groundbreaking?
Arendt argues that the common aspect of the challenges presented by Marx,
Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to the tradition is the inversion of fundamental dichotomies.
In Marx‟s case, this dichotomy is one of theory and practice. Marx‟s effort to bring into
focus the realm of human affairs, which had traditionally been repudiated in favor of
philosophical reflection, underlines the interconnected nature of theory and praxis. In
other words, praxis has significance only insofar as it is connected to theory, and vice
versa. The tradition of philosophy operates with the tension created by these two polar
opposites. In asserting the importance of the realm of human affairs, in this sense, Marx
only reversed the traditional hierarchy of thought and action, activity and contemplation.
He did not break away from the traditional framework of the dualism.19 In order to
18 Arendt, 1977a, 28.
19 Also in Arendt, 1998, 17.
130
understand this paradigm, Arendt suggests that we consider the origin of the dichotomy
established by Plato.
Plato‟s cave allegory unfolds in three stages of “turning away”: From the shadows
of the objects to the actual objects in the cave; from the cave to the sunlight; and finally
from the eternal realm of essences back to the cave. According to Arendt, the most
significant “turning-about” or inversion that Plato introduced is the reversal of the
Homeric world. Plato‟s argument against Homer is based on the denigration of the
material world we live in and the assertion of the superiority of the world of ideas. It was
“a turning-about by which everything that was commonly believed in Greece in
accordance with the Homeric religion came to stand on its head.”20 Plato separated the
world of eternal ideas from their shadowy appearances—the material world. He
embraced the world of ideas and gave the material world an inferior position, which it
retained until Marx came onto the stage of Western philosophy.
Marx is not solely responsible for the reversal of traditional (Platonic) categories.
Arendt contends that if it weren‟t for Hegel, Marx‟s reversal of the tradition would not
have been possible. As I argued in Chapter 2, Hegel‟s philosophy of history, which
transformed world history into a continuous development and the philosopher into a
historian, redefined the meaning of tradition:
20 Arendt, 1977a, 37. Arendt takes up the cave allegory to a larger extent in “Socrates,” in this case with
emphasis on motives and perceptions of the philosopher. Hannah Arendt, “Socrates” in The Promise of
Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005b), 29-32.
131
[I]t was [Hegel] who for the first time saw the whole of world history as one
continuous development, and this tremendous achievement implied that he
himself stood outside all authority-claiming systems and beliefs of the past, that
he was held by the thread of continuity in history itself. The thread of historical
continuity was the first substitute for tradition, by means of it, the overwhelming
mass of the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and
conflicting authorities, all of which had somehow been able to function together,
were reduced to a unilinear, dialectically consistent development actually
designed to repudiate not tradition as such, but the authority of all traditions.21
Once Hegel‟s concept of history had redefined the categories of history and tradition as
such, Marx was able to question and overturn the established hierarchy of action and
thought, of theory and practice, which Plato had started and Hegel had taken for granted.
Before going into the Marx‟s arguments against the tradition (which I argue is the
broader and ultimately more productive aspect of Arendt‟s critique of Marx), I would like
to examine what Arendt considers the totalitarian elements in Marxism: perspectival
thinking and process-thinking.22
21 Arendt, 1977a, 28.
22 It must be noted that this concept is not similar to perspectival thinking Arendt develops in her theory of
public space but a concept that refers to the Nietzschean loss of authority, as we will see below.
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4. Totalitarian Elements in Marxism
a. Perspectival Thinking
In “From Hegel to Marx,” Arendt pays particular attention to the reversal or
inversion of the categories of Western political thought. Arendt focuses on two examples.
The first example is Marx‟s adoption of Hegelian dialectic. Marx turned Hegel on his
head, because he substituted matter for spirit as the subject of dialectic. The second
example is Nietzsche‟s “redefinition of value,” which is a reversal of the Platonic
hierarchy. Although neither of these attempts steps outside this hierarchy, they do carry
an extraordinary significance. The implication of such a reversal or inversion is that “the
traditional hierarchy of values, if not necessarily their content, is established arbitrarily,
or willfully, as Nietzsche would put it.”23 This marks for Arendt the beginning of the end
of tradition. The fall of the established framework of tradition started with a challenge not
to the substantial content of the tradition, but to its authority. The collapse in the authority
of tradition is what Nietzsche calls “perspectival thinking.” The implication of
perspectival thinking within the context of tradition is that each previously assumed
system of truth becomes just one perspective among others and that no such system can
be legitimately proven to be superior or more plausible. We are left with “a multitude of
equally legitimate and equally fruitful perspectives.”24
Although Nietzsche is credited with diagnosing the rise of “perspectival
thinking,” Arendt argues that Marx is responsible for introducing it into all fields of
23 Arendt, 2005c, 72.
24 Ibid.
133
humanistic study. Marx‟s influence extends far beyond the method of “vulgar Marxism,”
which focuses on a differentiation of base and superstructure that reduces all political and
cultural phenomena to the material circumstances.25 Moreover, Arendt is convinced that
Marx himself never employed this method. Marx‟s legacy was new and effective for a
different reason. His innovation was to conceptualize all spheres of human relations—
social, economic, cultural, and political—“within one functional context.”26 This context
was only one among many possible frameworks of interpretation. It did not have any
binding authority, so it could be easily abandoned for another. In order to illustrate this
point, Arendt cites the example of Weber, whose work on the relationship between the
Protestant ethic and capitalism owes much to Marxist historiography. Like all historicalperspectival
thinking, Weber‟s study produces results that amount to an explanatory
framework without authority: “Everything can be explained without ever generating a
binding truth analogous to the authority of tradition.”27
Arendt places particular emphasis on “the adoption of framework of tradition with
a concurrent rejection of its authority.” This is the true import of the reversal of
traditional categories, on the one hand by Marx and on the other hand by Nietzsche.
Arendt underscores the implications of Marx‟s adoption of Hegelian dialectic in this
context of the relationship between tradition and authority. She argues that “nowhere has
the acceptance of tradition with a concomitant loss of its substantial authority proved
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 73.
134
more costly,”28 more far-reaching, influential, and dangerous for our understanding of
action and freedom than even Marx himself imagined.
What exactly is the significance of Marx‟s adoption of the Hegelian dialectic?
What was it about Marx‟s alteration of the dialectic that had such “costly” consequences?
According to Arendt, the answer lies in Marx‟s transformation of the dialectic in into a
“method,” a practical tool that could be applied to any reality. By abstracting dialectic
from the context in which it was embedded in Hegelian philosophy, Marx actually
liberated the dialectic from its content. He turned it into a “method,” a practical tool that
can be applied to any reality regardless of its substance. This is the crucial relationship
between process thinking, which characterizes ideologies29 and the totalitarian regimes of
the twentieth century. The Marxist adoption of the dialectic, in this sense, is the missing
link between Hegelian philosophy of history and totalitarian ideology.
Before elaborating “process-thinking” in further detail, I would like to take a step
back to discuss perspectival thinking. In the course of the development of her thought,
Arendt abandons the term “perspectival thinking” but does not completely give up the
concept behind it, instead referring to the rejection of the authority of the tradition for a
multiplicity of viewpoints by a more familiar name, “nihilism.” Within this new context,
the reversal of tradition acquires a new meaning. What is dangerous for Arendt is no
longer the rejection of the authority of the old framework of thinking in favor of a new
one, but the attempt to find “the results that would make further thinking unnecessary.”30
28 Ibid., 74.
29 For a detailed examination of the relationship between ideology and process-thinking, see Chapter 1.
30 Arendt, 1978a, 176.
135
It is not the attempt to reexamine old values per se, but the effort to hold on to a
framework without thinking through the consequences, that poses a danger.
In Thinking, one of her last works, Arendt arrives at the following conclusions:
First, thinking requires us stop and think; it necessitates suspension of all worldly
activities. Second, thinking also has an “after-effect”; it undermines the established
criteria of conduct, engaging us to question our beliefs of right and wrong.
For Arendt, this destructive potential is inherent in the activity of thinking.
Thinking is a quest for meaning, the product of which is the examination and dissolution
of all accepted rules and doctrines. By negating all previously accepted creeds, thinking
leaves agents with no established standard of conduct in their daily lives. Each time a
new difficulty arises, agents have to think it through and make up their minds
accordingly. When the Athenians accused Socrates of being subversive, bringing disorder
into the cities and corrupting the youth, their worry was that they would be left with no
rules to follow. The traditional rules of conduct would not be able to withstand the “wind
of thought.”
Thinking, in this sense, can be a dangerous activity. Arendt illustrates this
difficulty with the characters of Alcibiades and Critias from Socrates‟ circle. According
to Arendt, Alcibiades and Critias had been aroused to license and criticism, but in the
most negative way possible. The practice of examining, judging, and thinking without
reference to a pre-established doctrine made them skeptical of values in general. They
came to the conclusion that “If we cannot define what piety is, let us be impious—which
136
is pretty much the opposite of what Socrates had hoped to achieve by talking about
piety.”31
Compared with the danger inherent in non-thinking, however, this risk is trivial.
When examination is forsaken for the sake of the comfort provided by adherence to
already-established rules of right and wrong, a habit is formed. This is the habit of
subsuming particulars under a general rule regardless of the content of the rule, which
might not otherwise withstand examination. The problem is that once the habit of sticking
to the rules is formed, it lingers. One set of rules can be easily exchanged for another set.
It is not the rules themselves but the habit of mindlessly following the rules—the absence
of thinking—that is dangerous. Moreover, Arendt argues that “the more firmly men hold
to the old code, the more eager will they be to assimilate themselves to the new one.”32
Arendt reevaluates the kind of danger that is created by the Marxist and
Nietzschean reversal of traditional categories in this context. She argues that thinking,
“the quest for meaning, which relentlessly examines anew all accepted doctrines and
rules, can at any moment turn against itself,” rejecting and abolishing old values, or
declaring the opposite of the old values as the new belief system.33 This is what happened
with Marx‟s reversal of the Hegelian dialectic and the Nietzschean inversion of the
Platonic categories of thought. Like all critical thinking, the Marxist and Nietzschean
philosophies went through a process whereby they “at least hypothetically” rejected all
the previously accepted values, opinions, and assumptions.34 In this sense, Marx and
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 177.
33 Ibid., 176.
34 Ibid.
137
Nietzsche were nihilists. But such a result, according to Arendt, is a common and even
desirable product of thinking. What proved dangerous was engaging in this effort with
the “desire to find results that would make further thinking unnecessary.”35 It was not the
questioning of the old values that was problematic but the religious adherence to the new
set of rules, the new framework.
The overall implication of this move for Arendt‟s thought is a more refined
critique of Marxism. The problem with Marx is no longer his attempt to break free from
the tradition or to reject its authority. The most significant consequence of Marx‟s social
and political theory was the acceptance of the implications of his own critique of the
tradition and its reversal as an established truth. In Arendt‟s crudest arguments, as in
“From Hegel to Marx,” she comes across as a conventionalist or even a traditionalist,
who bemoans the loss of authority on the part of tradition. She does not fully explain why
tradition is so binding and central and why the attempt to reject its authority is so
catastrophic in its consequences. In its more refined form, however, Arendt‟s critique
resonates with a modern understanding of action and responsibility. We can hear a plea
on her part to think and act responsibly in the absence of tradition. A break with tradition
occurred, but it is not necessarily a bad thing.36 On the contrary, it provides us with the
opportunity to fully realize ourselves, to look into our grand inventory of political thought
and resuscitate concepts and ideas that have been buried, forgotten, and neglected (such
as action) in favor of more “respectable” ones (such as thinking). It is a plea to consider
35 Ibid.
36 For a more detailed consideration of “the break with tradition,” see Chapter 4.
138
the consequences of our actions at each and every new occasion that arises throughout the
course of our lives.
b. Process-Thinking
The second totalitarian element in Marxism according to Arendt is processthinking,
in which dialectic as a method of reflection turns into a logical process. The
dialectic that Marx inherits from Hegel is the familiar three-step process of thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis. Thesis by way of antithesis leads to synthesis, which later
becomes the thesis of a new dialectical process. What is important for Arendt in this
dialectical process is its automatic nature. Once the process starts with a thesis—any
thesis—it cannot be halted, altered, or stopped. Moreover, it is not the dialectical process
per se that is problematic but its application to thought, “in which all reality is reduced to
stages of a single gigantic developmental process.” Arendt uses the concept of processthinking
to construct the missing link from Hegel to Marx, which can be visualized as
follows:
Hegelian dialectic –> Dialectic materialism –> Dialectic as ideology –> Totalitarianism
(Dialectic as method)
Arendt believes that dialectic as a method was unknown to Hegel. Dialectic as method
refers here to the process by which reality is divided into stages that are only parts of
larger developmental process. Similarly, ideological thinking that adopts dialectic as its
method was unknown to Marx. But by turning dialectic into a method, Marx paved the
way for dialectic to be appropriated by totalitarian ideologies.
139
Marx‟s philosophy of labor, Arendt remarks, coincides with the evolution of
theories of development of the nineteenth century. Just as the sciences recognized the
evolution of life as a process, Marx theorized about the historical development of making
as a process. It is no coincidence therefore that Engels called Marx “the Darwin of
history.” 37 Both Marxism and evolution had a common characteristic: the concept of
process.38
In Hegelian philosophy, the dialectical movement is that of the Absolute, which
gradually reveals itself to human consciousness. Arendt claims that Marx substituted the
material conditions of production for the Spirit and formalized development as a selfpropelled
process. We will consider this below in detail. What is important at this stage is
to note that for Arendt, the Marxist concept of development is one step away from
ideological process-thinking. Once the dialectic as a method is established, it can be used
as a tool from which everything else is derived with the facility and accuracy of a logical
process. Consequently, the process is severed from all experience, even the initial idea
that started the process. Not the idea itself, but the logical process seizes the masses. As
we have demonstrated in chapter 1, for Arendt the disastrous consequences of this
transformation have been illustrated by totalitarianism, which operates with the
conviction that any hypothesis, if acted upon consistently, will come true. So it is not the
idea that is important, but the process by which the realization of the initial hypothesis is
made possible.
37 Arendt, 1998, 116.
38 See Chapter 1 for an elaboration of the relationship between Darwin‟s theory of evolution and Marx‟s
social theory.
140
In this account, process is judged unequivocally by Arendt in the most negative
terms. However, Passerin d‟Entrèves reminds us there is a deep ambivalence toward the
concept of process in Arendt‟s writings.39 Arendt argues, for example, that the concept of
process is closely intertwined with action, a central category of her political thought:
The very notion of process, which is so highly characteristic of modern science,
both natural and historical, probably had its origin in this fundamental experience
of action…, [which] in contrast to all other human activities consists first of all of
starting processes.40
Arendt‟s claim is very strong: not only is action related to process, it is process-like in its
nature: “It sets in motion a chain of events which is irreversible and whose outcome is
unpredictable.”41
The dilemma is hence clear. On the one hand, the concept of process is related to
one of most dangerous features of modernity, i.e., understanding history and nature as a
developmental process, which prepared the way for the totalitarian ideologies and
political catastrophes of the twentieth century. On the other hand, process is intrinsic to
action, the human activity for which Arendt has the highest regard. The concept of
process can be separated neither from action, the very realization of human freedom, nor
39 Maurizio Passerin d‟Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London; New York:
Routledge, 2001), 56.
40 Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books,
1977b), 85.
41 Maurizio Passerin d‟Entrèves, 2001, 57.
141
from the necessity and irreversibility inherent in our understanding of nature and history,
which is what threatens freedom. How can we make sense of this contradiction?
We can perhaps raise the same critique against Arendt that she herself employed
in criticizing Marx: “Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in the
second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted.”42 Arendt is not a second-rate
thinker by any means, and following her own logic, this contradiction should signal to us
a central theme in Arendt‟s writings: the relationship between freedom and necessity.
Perhaps the best we can do is to concur with d‟Entrèves that:
What Arendt said of Marx—that his attitude toward labor never ceased to
equivocal—can be said of Arendt too: her attitude towards process is
characterized by a deep ambivalence which affected her assessment of modernity
as well as her understanding of the relation between freedom and necessity.43
The final point about process-thinking is the following. Arendt does not think that
process-thinking came to an end with the demise of totalitarian ideologies. On the
contrary, the danger inherent in process thinking is that it has become a part and parcel of
our contemporary mode of thinking. In On Violence, Arendt once again takes up the
problem, this time in the context of the bureaucrats, the “scientifically minded brain
trusters in the councils of government.”44 Arendt observes the increasing influence and
42 Arendt, 1977a, 25.
43 D‟Entrèves, 2001, 58.
44 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 6.
142
prestige of bureaucrats in state business. She is troubled by not only their cold-blooded
attitude, which allows them “to think the unthinkable,” but also their inability to think.
She is apprehensive that instead of spending their time thinking, “an old-fashioned,
uncomputerazible activity,” these bureaucrats engage in hypothetical thought
experiments, the results of which are not tested against actual, empirical reality:
The logical flaw in these hypothetical constructions of future events is always the
same: what first appears as a hypothesis—with or without its implied alternatives,
according to the level of sophistical—turns immediately, usually after a few
paragraphs, into a “fact,” which them gives birth to a whole string of similar nonfacts,
with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise
is forgotten.45
In these observations, which sound frighteningly contemporary and relevant, Arendt is
adamant about the application of the concept of process to thinking activity and its
disastrous consequences. Yet, this time she illustrates in the most explicit fashion, the
reason for her concern, in the words of Richard N. Goodwin:
[The] most profound objection to this kind of strategic theory is not its limited
usefulness but its danger, for it can lead us to believe we have an understanding of
events and control over their flow which we don‟t have.46
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 7.
143
Process-thinking creates a pseudo-understanding, a false sense of ability to control
events, which goes against the very nature of action and freedom.
5. Three Fundamental Claims of Marx
Arendt claims that Marx‟s efforts to overturn the established categories of
Western philosophy can be summed under three broad categories.47 She argues that each
of these claims proved to be more paradoxical than Marx had anticipated. Each of them
involved a contradiction that turned out to be insoluble in terms of Marxist social and
political theory. But Arendt is not ready to overlook Marx‟s political theory or the
perplexity introduced by these statements. As I have noted above, Arendt believed that
grand contradictions and equivocal positions occurred for a reason in the works of great
authors. They provide us with a window into a thinker‟s central issues and prominent
concerns. Of course, the validity this assertion with respect to Marx is questionable.
Nevertheless, it points the reader in a valuable direction. With this remark Arendt
introduces the three struggles that she will undertake vis-à-vis Marxist thought
throughout her writings.
a. Labor
The first point involves Marx‟s statement that the “labor created man.” The
background of this assertion is on the one hand the origin of man, namely as God‟s
creation, and on the other hand the characteristics that differentiate mankind from other
47 Arendt, 1977a, 21.
144
creatures on earth. According to Marx, man creates himself and the material world
around him with his own labor, and this characteristic is what makes him different from
all other living beings. This is a controversial stance; traditional philosophy, by contrast,
holds that man is a rational animal rather than a laboring one. The paradoxical aspect of
Marx‟s assertion is as follows: according to this claim, labor is “the most human and
most productive of man‟s activities.” If so, “what productive and what essentially human
activity will be left,” Arendt asks, once the revolution takes place and the human beings
are liberated from the necessity of labor?48
Arendt analyzes in detail Marx‟s concept of labor in The Human Condition.
Traditionally, in asserting the importance of contemplation over the realm of action,
Western philosophy has neglected the difference between the types of activity, which
Arendt classifies as work, labor, and action. Marx took a decisive step in subverting the
Western intellectual tradition by claiming the superiority of the vita activa. He radically
reduced all action to labor by claiming that the essence of man is labor. Arendt‟s critique
of Marx is well-known. She argues that Marx‟s philosophy of labor, by subjecting all
human activity to necessity, prevented him from paying due attention to politics and
political action—the only realm in which human freedom can truly be realized.49
48 Arendt, 1977a, 24. Also in Arendt, 1998, 105: “The fact remains that in all stages of his work he defines
man as an animal laborans and then leads him into a society in which the greatest and most human power
is no longer necessary. We are left with the rather distressing alternative between productive slavery and
unproductive freedom.”
49 Arendt‟s critique of Marxist conception of labor attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Due to the
constraints of this chapter, I will not go into the details of the shortcomings of Arendt‟s critique of Marx.
145
b. Violence
The second point is the value that Marx attributes to violence. Starting with the
assertion that “violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,”
Marx imbues the concept of violence with a new meaning that transcends the traditional
understanding of the concept in Western philosophy. Arendt posits Marx‟s concept of
violence in opposition to the Aristotelian concept of speech. The distinguishing
characteristic of mankind, according to Aristotelian definition, is the ability to form a
body politic through communication. Political life depends on the effectiveness of speech
through persuasion, not brute force. Marx‟s view of violence, by contrast, glorifies the
use of force and directly contradicts speech, which is what Arendt calls “the most human
form of intercourse.”50
The revolution and its aftermath again present a challenge for Marxism. When
class struggle is concluded and the state disappears, there will be no occasion for
violence. “If violence is the midwife of human history and violent action therefore the
most dignified of all forms of human action,” what will be the meaningful, expressive
action, Arendt asks, in its absence?
In order to argue this point Arendt relies on the following interpretation of history
in Marx: the central process of history is the development of human power. When
production relations do not correspond to the development of the productive forces in
For an excellent exposition, see Bhikhu Parekh, “Hannah Arendt‟s Critique of Marx” in Hannah Arendt:
The Recovery of the Public World (New York, NY: St .Martin‟s Press, Inc., 1979).
50 Arendt, 1977a, 23. For more on Arendt‟s views on speech in the Greek political tradition, see “Socrates.”
Arendt, 2005b.
146
society, a period of violence and war will be necessary to overcome this discrepancy and
carry humanity to the next stage of its development. In this interpretation, violence is the
medium through which human development realizes itself. It is only in such periods that
“history show[s] its true face and dispel[s] the fog of mere ideological, hypocritical
talk.”51
Parekh criticizes Arendt‟s interpretation by arguing that Marx does not take an
ontological view of violence and that there is no support for her claim that Marx
perceived violence as “the most dignified form of human action.” On the contrary,
Parekh argues, Marx takes a pragmatic view of violence. Violence does not have any
power of its own; it can only aid in removing the obstacles to the birth of a new social
order. Struggle is necessary to organize the proletariat, but that struggle does not have to
take from of violence. Whether violence will be used at all depends on the dominant
class. If the dominant class does not put up resistance, then violence will be unnecessary.
52
Parekh is right to point out to the pragmatic nature of violence in Marx, but I
believe that Arendt‟s real objection to the concept of violence has two facets: First, the
pragmatic use of violence is problematic, and second, Marx misrepresents the nature of
violence. Let‟s start with the first.
From a pragmatic point of view, violence can be justified as long as it serves the
purpose of bringing about a new social order. Arendt criticizes the role of violence in
Marxist social theory in the same fashion as she criticizes the concept of developmental
51 Arendt, 1977a, 22.
52 Parekh, 1979, 91.
147
history in Hegel. It is clear that the value of a period of violence can only be judged in
retrospect; its function and hence value depends on the superior stage of development
that will follow it. It is inevitable then that whoever undertakes this violence will claim to
be justified in his actions in accordance with the laws of history. The ultimate judgment
on these acts is deferred to an indefinite future period, to the court of history itself.
I presented a brief critique of this view in discussing Arendt‟s study of Hegel in
chapter 2. The teleological character of this conception of violence presents a formidable
problem from the perspective of the relationship between necessity and freedom. In
retrospect—that is, from the viewpoint of memory—Arendt reminds us that “a freely
performed act loses its air of contingency under the impact of now being an accomplished
fact, of having become part and parcel of the reality in which we live.”53 In other words,
once an act occurs, it becomes very difficult for us to interpret the past in such a way that
that particular act/event could not have taken place. Any period of violence, therefore, by
the sheer fact of having happened, can seem to us inevitable, necessary, and justifiable in
retrospect.
Second, according to Arendt, violence is instrumental by nature; in other words, it
can only be justified with respect to its effectiveness in bringing about a desired end. She
also believes that human action is unpredictable—that we can never be positively sure of
the consequences of our actions in the human realm. For this reason, violence can only be
justified with respect to short-term goals, if at all.54 In response to the events of 1968,
Arendt observes, for example, that “France would not have received the most radical bill
53 Hannah Arendt, “Willing” in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978b), 30.
54 Arendt, 1970, 79
148
since Napoleon to change its antiquated education system if the French students had not
rioted; if it had not been for the riots of spring term, not one at Columbia University
would have dreamed of accepting reforms.”55 Violence for very specific goals can be
effective in the short term; hence, “violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is
more the weapon of reform than of revolution.” So, according to Arendt, even if violence
were allowed to be used as a means in the political realm, it could not be used in the
service of revolution, but merely to propel reform.
However, even non-extremist, short-term goals should not save violence from
being banished from the realm of political action, because there is always the danger that
means will overwhelm the ends. Violence never remains solely a means; it always
becomes an end in itself. Arendt believes that merely by using violence as an instrument
to achieve limited, short-term goals, we introduce violence into the practice of politics
more generally: “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most
probable change is to a more violent world.”56
One possible objection to Arendt‟s examination of violence in Marx is to point
out that her position is rooted more in her observations of totalitarianism and the
historical role violence played under the communist regimes of Lenin and Stalin than in
an examination of Marx‟s own views. Marx‟s reaction to the reign of terror during the
French revolution and the Jacobin dictatorship provides some support to this objection.
Marx denounces the Jacobin terror and renounces the French revolution as a model for
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 80.
149
the communist revolution.57 Of course, his rejection of terror is not based on moral
principles. Rather, Marx observes that the political order that Jacobin regime is trying to
establish suffers from a lack of the proper socioeconomic preconditions. The time is not
right to bring about the desired change. The Jacobins are thus forced to employ other
measures, such as terror, to impose the state on civil society. “Terror,” therefore, “is less
a means towards the realization of a revolutionary aim than a mark of failure.” 58 Marx
criticizes Robespierre in an 1844 newspaper article:
The classical period of reason [Verstand] is the French Revolution. Far from
seeing in the very principle of the state the source of social want, the heroes of the
French Revolution see social wants as the source of all political disorder…
According to [Robespierre], will is the principle of politics. The more one-sided
and hence the more accomplished is the political reason, the more does it believe
in the omnipotence of the will.59
Because of its premature timing and the resulting necessity to impose its political
will on the socioeconomic conditions of the society, the French Revolution can never be
a model for the proletarian revolution. On the contrary, studying the lesson of the French
57Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (London, Cambridge: U.P., 1968), 187.
58 Avineri, 1968, 189.
59 Marx, Vorwaerts, 7 August 1844, Werke, 1, 402. Quoted in Avineri, 1968, 190. There is close affinity
between Marx‟s thoughts in this passage and Hegel‟s critique of the French Revolution in the
Phenomenology.
150
Revolution should teach the proletariat to refrain from revolting before the
socioeconomic conditions are ripe and as a result from having to resort to violence:
If the proletariat brings down the domination of the bourgeoisie, its victory will be
merely ephemeral, only a moment in the service of the bourgeoisie (just like anno
1794), so long as within the process of history, within its “movement,” those
material conditions have not been created that make necessary the abolition of the
bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive fall of bourgeois
domination.60
One can therefore conclude that, contrary to what Arendt claims, Marx is very
attentive to the precarious role of terror in revolution. Terror, by itself, will achieve
nothing. The recourse to terror signals, to Marx, the untimely nature of the attempted
revolution and the resulting weakness and frustration on the part of its leaders.
Arendt acknowledges this distinction between Marx and Marxists in a short
passage in On Violence. Here, she casts the role of violence in Marx‟s theory of society in
a more sympathetic light. She rearticulates the role of violence in the Marxist philosophy
of history, but argues that this role was only “secondary” for Marx. It was not violence
per se but the social contradictions in an epoch of history that demanded and brought
about change: “The emergence of a new society was preceded, but not caused, by violent
outbreaks, which [Marx] likened to labor pangs that precede, but of course do not cause,
60 Marx, Deutssche Bruesseler Zeitung, 11 November 1847 (Werke, iv, 338-9), Quoted in Avineri, 1968,
191.
151
the event of organic birth.”61 Arendt recognizes that under the influence of Marxist
teachings, the revolutionary Left, while acknowledging the role of agency in revolutions,
denounced the use of violence as its vessel.62 Only the Right employed political violence
by organizing armed uprisings.
c. The role of philosophy
Arendt‟s final point on the reversal of the traditional categories of the Western
philosophy concerns the role of philosophy. The central focus of this claim is Marx‟s
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which reads, “the philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”63 Arendt interprets this
statement in the light of the entire body of Marxist thought as “the philosophers have
interpreted the world long enough; the time has come to change it,” which she claims is a
variation of an earlier statement: “you cannot aufheben philosophy without realizing it.”64
The statements “are so intimately phrased in Hegel‟s terminology, and thought along his
lines,” that if one does not pay close attention to their content, they can easily be
mistaken for “an informal and natural continuation of Hegel‟s philosophy.”65
61 Arendt, 1970, 11.
62 Rosa Luxembourg‟s brand of Marxism, for example, with its insistence of mass democratic participation,
was very influential on Arendt‟s thought.
63 “Theses on Feuerbach” in Marx-Engels Reader. ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 145.
64 An expression from “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel‟s Philosophy of Right.” Arendt translates the
German verb aufheben as “elevate, conserve and abolish in the Hegelian sense.” In Arendt, 1977a, 21; also
in Arendt, 2005a, 86.
65 Arendt, 2005a, 86.
152
Substantively, however, Marx presents a fundamental challenge to the tradition—nothing
short of a radical transformation of the human world in accordance with the realm of
ideas. According to Marx, German idealism in particular stopped short of changing the
world even though it possessed the conceptual tools to do so: “The goals of social
action,” therefore, “are not new, only the opportunity to realize them is novel and
unique.”66
The problematic aspect of this prediction comes to light in the face of postrevolutionary
society and politics. If the aim of revolution is to aufheben philosophy,
what will take the place of thought and thinking?67 Again, an unresolved tension that
reveals one of the central themes of Marxist thought: the dialectic of theory and praxis.
According to Arendt, this effort to change the world in accordance with
philosophy implies that philosophy precedes action, i.e., that it prescribes the rules on
how the change should come into effect. Arendt insists that the philosophical tradition—
including Hegel—did not pay attention to this fact, that “no great philosopher ever took
this to be the most important concern.”68 But this claim is unfounded. Hegel was acutely
aware of the consequences of such an understanding of the role of philosophy. He
realized the potential of philosophy to bring about political change and purposefully
withdrew from this interpretation when in his later writings he concluded that
comprehension of the reality is only possible when the reality has come to an end. For
Hegel, philosophy interprets the world but cannot instruct; philosophy is “thinking-
66 Avineri, 1968, 139.
67 Arendt, 1977a, 24.
68 Arendt, 1977a, 23.
153
after,”69 an activity that happens after its subject matter has ceased happening. The sole
purpose of philosophy is clarification, explaining and attributing meaning to events. The
separation of thought from praxis was not an omission on the part of Hegel; it was a
deliberate move that stemmed from a particular understanding of the role of philosophy.70
Considered in this light, Marx‟s challenge to the tradition is all the more
significant. Marx‟s enterprise was not entirely unprecedented. Instead, he dared to push a
particular possibility in the tradition to its ultimate potential, to bring a decidedly
Hegelian idea to its full fruition. Avineri relates that Marx was drawn to Hegelian
philosophy precisely because of its inherent potential to change reality. In an 1837 letter,
Marx wrote that he was troubled by the antagonism between the “is” and the “ought” in
German philosophy since Kant. With the discoveries of Hegel, Marx felt that “if
previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its center.”71 Hegelian
philosophy presented for Marx an opportunity for the realization of revolutionary
ideals—a potential that Hegel himself had refrained from bringing into reality.
For Marx, theory and practice form an indivisible unity. The subject matter of philosophy
is the specific cultural and historical problems of men. When confronted such a problem,
“philosophy, the epitome of reason, is compelled by its inner logic not merely to interpret
but also change it.”72 The change, however, can only be brought about in accordance with
a conception of the future, “conceived not abstractly and ahistorically…but as it
69 Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (New York:
Humanities Press, 1958), 23.
70 see chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of this point.
71 Marx, November 10, 1837, letter to his father. In Marx-Engels Reader, 1978, 7.
72 Bhikhu Parekh, Marx’s Theory of Ideology (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 87.
154
organically grows out of the present.”73 Philosophy can provide answers to these
questions. Yet those answers must be not only accessible by thought but also constituted
by the very activity of men in a specific, concrete historical context. In the next section, I
will look at the relationship between theory and praxis, which constitutes one of the
fundamental tenets of Arendt‟s critique of Marx.
6. Theory and Praxis
The relationship between theory and practice starts with Plato‟s definition of
theory as the kind of knowledge given to reason and the senses as a consequence of
“speechless and actionless seeing,” i.e., contemplation. Arendt argues in her article
“Socrates” that contrary to what is often maintained, Plato‟s concept of the “ideas” was
not primarily a concept of standards and measures. Such an interpretation is
understandable because Plato himself used the concept for political purposes, i.e., to
introduce absolute standards into the realm of human affairs in an effort to make
philosophy useful for politics. However, politics could not conform to such standards; the
concept could thus not be made useful for politics. Politics remained the realm of
unpredictable, unreliable, fickle realm of human affairs. But political philosophy fulfilled
an important role: “to provide standards and rules, yardsticks and measurements with
which to the human mind could at least attempt to understand what was happening in the
realm of human affairs.”74
73 Ibid.
74 Arendt, 2005b, 38.
155
With the development of natural sciences in the sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries and the accompanying mistrust in human abilities (expressed in its ultimate
form in Cartesian philosophy), the traditional concept of theory and its relationship to
knowledge came under scrutiny.75 The traditional notion of theory, with its emphasis on
contemplation, could no longer be upheld. It was replaced by the modern scientific
theory, which Arendt defines as “a working hypothesis, changing in accordance with the
results it produces and depending for its validity not on what it „reveals‟ but on whether it
„works.‟ ” Theory became “mere values whose validity is determined not by one or many
men but by society as a whole in its ever-changing functional needs.”76 That is to say,
theory was valuable only insofar it was useful.
Arendt is clearly disturbed by this transformation. The modern conception of
theory is devoid of a sense of wonderment, which the original meaning of the word
“theory” captures. Wonderment led men to philosophize in the first place. Now instead
they are left only with functional ideas. This situation is devastating for both action and
theory. Action finds meaning only in relation to theory. Similarly, thought‟s connection
to the human world provides it with a reality check. The opposition between acting and
thinking introduced by this new meaning of theory was so severe that it rendered both
theory and action meaningless. The final blow to the tradition came from totalitarianism,
which destroyed the common world of human affairs, the only real link between thinking
and acting.
75 A favorite Arendtian subject——see Arendt, 1977b and 1991.
76 Arendt, 1977a, 40. Also in Arendt, 2005b, 8.
156
Marx is not responsible for totalitarianism‟s destruction of the common world of
human affairs. But the strict separation of thought from action and the latter getting the
upper hand is a “very real development [that] is reflected and foreshadowed in Marx‟s
political thought.” Marx did not completely get rid of the Platonic theory of ideas, but “he
did record the darkening of the clear sky where those ideas, as well as many other
presences, had once become visible to the eyes of men.”77 The only way to bring together
praxis and theory for Arendt is to engage in political philosophy. The aim of true political
philosophy is to make the human world the object of philosophical wonderment.78
Marx indeed came closer to this objective with his concept of “making history.”
Arendt argues that in his rejection of the idea of “the Cunning of Reason,” which
retrospectively confers meaning on political actions of individuals, Marx also distanced
himself from the traditional assumptions about the realm of human activity as fickle,
unpredictable, futile, and ultimately inferior to the realm of thought. On the contrary,
Marx believed that action in and of itself is a source of truth—or, more accurately, is
capable of generating meaning in human life. Arendt sees Marx‟s effort to save the
concept of history from Hegelian influence as noble, though unsuccessful. Yet, according
to Arendt, Marx also failed in many important respects. I will examine this part of her
argument in the next two sections.
77 Arendt, 1977a, 40.
78 Arendt, 2005b, 38.
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7. Marx and the Concept of History
Marx‟s concept of history, while relying heavily on Hegel‟s understanding of
history, differs from it in a significant way. For Hegel, as we have previously noted,
history is the realization of the Absolute idea, a growing and unfolding process of its
own. The reality, the totality of objects and facts, proceed from the Idea. Marx in The
German Ideology starts by criticizing this brand of idealism, primarily set out and
established by Hegel.79 His critique of idealism, it must be noted, is not geared towards
idealism as “a particular philosophical doctrine about the nature of knowledge” but rather
towards “a general theory about the nature of consciousness.”80
For Marx, the progress of History is achieved not by the Idea but by reality, the
realm of objects and beings, which is accessible to us through our senses. This view of
history follows from a particular understanding of the individual and society. Against the
idea of human nature espoused by idealism, which perceives human beings as
“autonomous, free, self-determining, inhabiting a realm of its own, guided and governed
by its own principles and capable of being studied on its own terms,” 81 Marx posits man
to be a “natural being.” This implies two things: On the one hand, “as a natural,
embodied, sentient, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited being.” “On
the other hand,” Marx argues, “he is endowed natural powers and faculties, which exists
in him as tendencies and abilities, as drives” by way of which he exerts himself into the
world and changes it according to his will.82
79 Marx, “German Ideology” in Marx-Engels Reader, 1978.
80 Bhikhu Parekh, 1982, 2.
81 Ibid., 3.
82 Marx, 1975, 206-7.
158
By choosing man‟s natural being as his starting point, Marx positions himself
against the tradition of German idealism:
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real
premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are
the real individuals, their activity and their material conditions under which they
live, both those they find already existing and those produced by their activity.83
Even though man is a natural being, he is an integral part of society. He is situated in a
social context, a particular formation of production relations, which shapes his ideas,
beliefs, and conduct. Hence man‟s consciousness cannot be detached from his concrete
existence, which is both natural and social. The mistake of German idealism was to
abstract the individual from his social being and attribute to him an existence independent
of his natural and social context.
Based on the abstract, independent, and autonomous concept of individuality,
German idealism, Hegel in particular, also produced its own brand of philosophy of
history.84 Instead of concentrating on human beings, their social environments and
interactions, German historians and philosophers perceived history as a history of ideas,
which travel through time more or less independently of the human agents who
conceptualize, design, and produce those ideas: “When, for instance,” Marx argues,
83 Marx, 1978, 149.
84 Marx differentiates realistic historiography from idealistic in “A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy.”
159
“wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human
being, this only happens in their form as thoughts… They are thought-entities, and
therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking.”85 Marx
maintains instead that general ideas are not suited to discuss the specific social and
economic experiences of a particular epoch. Each historical epoch is different from
another in terms of its production relations and hence cannot be analyzed in abstract.
What is the proper method of historiography? What is the task of the philosopher?
The answer is clear to Marx: The philosopher has to “leap out of it [philosophy] and
devote [himself] to the study of actuality.”86 The reality is that men do create their
physical and social environments with their own labor. History is the history of the
emergence, development, and satisfaction of human needs.87 Accordingly, the task of
history, which is invariably tied to philosophy, is to analyze and critique the relations of
productions particular to an epoch, in the context of which human needs are created and
situated and in which they evolve:
It is the task of history, therefore, once the other world of truth has vanished, to
establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is in the
service of history, is to unmask the human self-alienation in its secular form now
that it has been unmasked in its sacred form.88
85 Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 1978, 110.
86 In collected works, cited by Parekh, 1982, 8.
87 Avineri, 1968, 79.
88 Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel‟s philosophy of Right” in Marx-Engels Reader, 1978, 54.
160
If the historian heeds Marx‟s call and analyzes economic and social relations, he will
come to the conclusion that history is not a history of ideas but rather a history written by
men: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”89
Although Marx objects to the content of the dialectic, he does not refrain from
borrowing it as method to explain the rules governing the development of history. Just as
in Hegel, Marx‟s dialectical explanation of the evolution of human history holds that the
facts are interrelated and in motion: “There is a continual movement of growth in
productive forces, of destruction in the social relations, of formation in ideas; there is
nothing immutable but the abstraction of the movement—mors immortalis.”90
Following from the dialectic is a progressive view of world history. Marx, like
Hegel, assumes that there is progress from the more primitive condition of mankind to
the more advanced, the ultimate goal of which is the human freedom. The Marxist theory
of history is “a dialectical theory in the service of human freedom.”91 Along this process,
there are different stages, which represent the various epochs of human relationships.
8. Arendt’s Critique of the Marxist Conception of History
A central tenet of Arendt‟s thought is her theory of modernity. Arendt argues that
the rise of the modern concept of history is concomitant with a decrease in political
thinking. More specifically, with the rise of the modern concept of history, a
89 Marx, “Communist Manifesto” in Marx-Engels Reader, 1978, 473.
90 Marx, “Poverty of Philosophy,” Quoted in M. M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History (New
York, W. W. Norton, 1965), 31.
91 Joseph McCarney, “Hegel‟s Legacy” in The Hegel-Marx Connection. ed. Tony Burns and Ian Fraser
(New York: St. Martin‟s Press, 2000), 57.
161
transformation occurred from a concern with politics (human affairs) to a concern with
history (a developmental movement). Arendt claims that whenever a concern with
politics still lingered, it resulted in either “despair,” as in the case of Tocqueville, or “the
confusion of history with politics,” as in Marx.92 The key to understanding what Arendt
considers a “confusion”—“a merciful confusion for Marx himself and a fatal one for his
followers”—can be found in Marx‟s identification of action with the “making of
history.”93
Arendt argues that Marx‟s notion of “making history” is influenced by Vico‟s but
is still decidedly different.94 For Vico, history was made by man (as opposed to nature,
which was made by God), but Vico did not perceive this as a principle that could be acted
upon. Vico, like Hegel after him, conceived history as a process that transcends the
individual actions and petty interests of the actors. The “higher aims” of this development
would be revealed to the backward glance of the historian.
This reading of Vico is supported by Habermas, who argues that the philosophy
of history begins in some sense in the eighteenth century with Vico‟s differentiation of
verum from factum:
According to our first indubitable principle the historical world [has] quite
certainly been made by men… And therefore its essence is to be found in the
modifications of our own spirit…for there can nowhere be greater certainty than
92 Arendt, 1977b, 77.
93 Ibid.
94 We know that Marx had been reading Vico‟s New Science in 1862, as he mentions the book in two
letters, to Ferdinand LaSalle and Engels. Avineri, 1968, 77, footnote 3.
162
where he who also creates the things also gives an account of them. Thus this
science (philosophy of history) proceeds exactly as does geometry, which creates
the world of magnitudes itself while it constructs it according to its principles and
contemplates it; but does so with so much greater reality, as the laws of human
affairs have more reality than those of points, lines, planes, and figures. And this,
O reader, must provide you with a divine pleasure, for in God to know and to do
is the same thing.95
Vico compares philosophy of history to divine intelligence and argues for a similar claim
to knowledge on the part of philosophy of history. However, “even in the best case,”
Habermas notes, “Vico can give man the hope of knowing his history after he has made
it.”96
Mankind is capable of reflecting on the historical world and understanding its
nature only after he created it. The authorship of history, for the first time, is given to the
mankind. However, due precisely to this relationship of making to knowing, mankind
lacks the ability to understand history in its totality—to comprehend the higher,
transcendent aims of historical progress—before actually making history. Vico‟s
understanding of history, in this sense, remains decidedly retrospective, on the one hand
subscribing to the idea that history is “makeable” and on the other hand hanging on to the
belief in a divine purpose that guides the course of history and can only be grasped in
retrospect.
95 Vico, quoted in Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 243.
96 Ibid. 247.
163
Arendt argues that Marx took a step further and conceived these “higher aims of
history” as the end of political action. He politicized the historian and the philosopher of
history. In Marxist theory, the contemplative gaze of the historian, who was able to
penetrate the deeper meaning of historical process, became “the contemplation of the
model that guides the craftsmen and precedes all making.”97 Or, as Arendt puts it
somewhat differently in another context, Marx “changed the direction of the historian‟s
glance; instead of looking toward the past, he now could confidently look into the
future.”98 Habermas is similarly critical of this conception of history when he notes that
[t]he philosophy of history creates the fiction of historical subjects as the possible
subject of history, as though objective tendencies of development, which actually
are equivocal, were comprehended with will and consciousness by those who act
politically and were decided by them for their own benefit.99
Both Arendt‟s argument and Habermas‟ reiteration of Arendt‟s basic claims warrant
explication. What is wrong with this understanding of history?
Arendt‟s criticism can be summed up into three broad, though intertwined, points:
1) She claims that the problem inherent in Marxist political philosophy is that it
started from a concern with history that is similar to Hegel‟s. Just as Marx criticizes
Hegel for beginning his analysis not with the actual existence of real subjects but with
97 Arendt explains model as the “shape” from which Plato had derived his “ideas.” Arendt, 1977b, 78.
98 Arendt, 1970, 27.
99 Habermas, 1973, 252.
164
“predictions of universal determination,” Arendt accuses Marx of beginning not with
concrete action but with an idea of history.
According to Hegel, the higher aim of history is the progressive unfolding and
actualization of the idea of Freedom. Hegel projected this view into the past and
restricted his method to understanding the meaning inherent in human development that
had already occurred. Arendt argues that Hegel‟s “political instinct to restrict his method
to comprehend what was comprehensible in purely contemplative terms” was correct.
Marx‟s radical change, which was “of catastrophic importance,” was to take the “higher
aim” of history and transform it into the product of planned and willed intentions—to use
this aim in setting goals for political action. He charged political actors with the task of
realizing the historical patterns or trends that are supposed to be inherent in the progress
of humankind:
Karl Marx, the greatest theorist the revolutions ever had, was so much more
interested in history than in politics and therefore neglected, almost entirely, the
original intentions of men of the revolutions, the foundation of freedom and
concentrated his attention, almost exclusively, on the seemingly objective course
of revolutionary events.100
Arendt grants that this effort stemmed from noble intentions: “One may suspect that
Marx‟s effort to write history in terms of class struggle was inspired at least partially by
the desire to rehabilitate posthumously those to whose injured lives history added the
100 Arendt, 1991, 61.
165
insult of oblivion.”101 She expresses the same praise for Marx in The Origins of
Totalitarianism:
Those who were rejected by their own time were usually forgotten by history and
insult added to the injury had troubled all sensitive consciences ever since faith in
a hereafter where the last would be the first had disappeared. Injustices in the past
as well as the present became intolerable when there was no longer any hope that
the scales of justice eventually would be set right. Marx‟s attempt to rewrite world
history in terms of class struggle fascinated even those who did not believe in the
correctness of his thesis, because of his original intention to find a device by
which to force the destinies of those excluded from official history into the
moment of posterity.102
Moreover, in Marx‟s dream of a classless society, a kernel of the positive aspects of
progress was conserved. This utopian society was still concerned with the emancipation
of mankind, with the liberation and autonomy of the individual.103 Yet, no matter what
the original intentions were, this model of history proved disastrous in terms of its
political consequences. The goal of political action became future necessity; freedom lay
in bringing out what is inherent, necessary in history. The meaning of action was reduced
to its significance in the larger teleological framework; political actions were judged not
101 Ibid., 69.
102 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 333.
103 Arendt, 1973, 143.
166
according to the character and capacity of judgment of these actors who perpetrated them
but by historical trends.
2) In Marx‟s understanding of history, “the Cunning of Reason” is replaced by
class interest. According to Marx‟s social theory, society in each epoch is characterized
by a set of production relations that determine its distinct character. Based on their place
in these production relations, individuals find themselves in a class, which influence their
ideas, interests, goals, and mode of a behavior—their “whole psyche.”104 In this very
general sense, man is a product of his class.
For this reason, it is not the actions of individual members of the society per se
but the collective action of a social class that has the central role in Marxist theory. As
Bober points out, Marx‟s writings are not completely devoid of references to great
individuals in history. For example, Napoleon is praised by Marx for bringing about the
necessary conditions for a bourgeois society in France, and Feuerbach is remembered for
his epoch-making philosophy.105 Despite this, however, the works of Marx (and Engels)
are characterized overall by a critical attitude toward “great men.” Beneath a plethora of
references to important figures such as Burke, Locke, and Mill that seem to belittle their
accomplishments and minimize their significance lies the common sentiment that very
little in history can be attributed to a single man: “No individual can resist the tides of
104 Bober, 1965, 81.
105 Ibid. See also other examples that Bober collects from writings of Engels and Marx such as Peter the
Great, Adam Smith, and other English thinkers.
167
conditions generated by the system of production, or turn historical currents away from
their courses and direct them into new channels.”106
The same ambivalence also characterizes Marx‟s view of the origin and
motivation of actions—the human will in history. In a language reminiscent of Hegel,
Marx emphasizes the haphazard, unintentional nature of human actions. The desires and
plans of individuals do not culminate in a single, overarching plan. On the contrary, they
“run along numberless different paths, interfering with one another and modifying or
canceling each other.”107 The consequence is that “the results of many individual wills
produce effects for the most part quite other than what is wished—often, in fact, the very
opposite” or that “the ends of actions are intended, but the results which follow from the
actions are not intended.”108 To Marx, the motives of individuals are thus not the driving
force of history. Rather, human destiny is shaped by economic classes, the only force
capable of bringing about enduring historical change.
3) Finally, instead of starting from the most fundamental condition of men‟s
political existence, action, Marx confuses action with fabrication. According to this
understanding of history, meaning (freedom) is the end product of human activity;
production of meaning is similar to a manufacturing process. Hence, just as a table is the
end of carpenter‟s activity, meaning is the end of human activity.
106 Ibid., 86.
107 Ibid., 87.
108 Marx, “From Feuerbach,” quoted in Bober, 1965, 87.
168
Arendt‟s opposition to this claim is strong: meaning, she argues, can never be the
aim or end of human activity.109 Meaning arises out of human activity only after the deed
itself has come to an end; therefore, it cannot be pursued as the end product of action.
What Marx achieves is nothing but a confusion of meaning in human life with the end of
human action. It results in an understanding of history, in which the “meaningfulness of
past achievements was constantly canceled out by future goals or intentions.”
Arendt points out to the inevitability of living and acting together, of individuals
disclosing themselves to one another when they “concentrate upon reaching an altogether
worldly, material object.”110 Meaning arises not from the production process but from
this “web of human relationships.” It is closely related to the world of human affairs and
somewhat intangible, but Arendt insists that it is not a “façade or, in Marxian terminology
of an essentially superfluous structure affixed to the useful structure of the building
itself.” Marx‟s mistake in this sense was the same as that of all materialist political
theories: he failed to see that human existence is not purely material. Human relationships
are also characterized by intersubjectivity.
It is worth noting that Arendt uses the term “materialism” in the broadest sense
possible. The materialist conception of politics, according to Arendt, extends as far back
109 It is interesting to note as a foreword to Chapter 4 that Benjamin, too, did not believe that meaning can
be created by the activity of labor: “That meaning, significance, etc., can be created—qua Marxism—only
through the world—historical labor process of the human species—in which it produces itself—was never
adopted by Benjamin.” In Lindner, “Natur-Geschichte—Geschichtsphilosophie und Welterfahrung in
Benjamins Schriften” in Text und Kritik, Heft 31/32, p. 55. Translated in Jürgen Habermas,
“Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism” in New German Critique, no.17, 1979, p.9, footnote 35.
110 Arendt, 1998, 183.
169
as Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, which operated with the assumption that the foundation
of political community is material necessity. In this sense, Marx‟s materialism is not
entirely unprecedented. Its novel quality consists in basing man‟s material interest on a
“demonstrably human activity, on laboring.”111
The Marxist understanding of labor and production in terms of meaning results, in
any case, in blurring the distinction between general and the particular, between meaning
and end. Since the realization of history is the ultimate end of human action, past actions
and occurrences only have an incidental value. They are absorbed into and rendered
insignificant by the future goals. According to Arendt, Marx‟s attempt to politicize
history fits in with the long-established tradition of trying to make sense of the world of
fickle, unpredictable, unreliable realm of human affairs in Western philosophy.112 Marx‟s
attempt to “deriv[e] politics from history, or rather, political conscience from historical
consciousness,” just like earlier attempts, operates within the paradigm established by the
tradition that attributes a superior importance to thought above action. The fact that
Marx‟s utopian society, for example, is organized around the notion of leisure time
illustrates this claim. Even Marx perceived politics as an interference in human life and
hence failed to explode the traditional hierarchy of reflection and action. Though he
believed that action is the true and real vehicle of history and politics is the only
inherently political activity,113 he failed to pay due attention to single events and
occurrences, the real matter of politics and human freedom.
111 Ibid., footnote 8.
112 See more on this in Chapter 2.
113 Arendt, 2005a, 92.
170
9. Conclusion
Arendt‟s interpretation of Marx is based on the view that historical laws and
historical necessity play an important part in Marx‟s philosophy of history. Marx‟s
adoption of Hegelian dialectics and the developmental view of history allowed him to
reproduce the conception of necessity in his own thinking. Arendt believes that by
carrying dialectics into action, Marx made political action more dependent on what one
can call ideology. A common critique of Arendt‟s view is that Marx‟s dialectics, although
borrowed from Hegel, are radically transformed. He does not believe that historical
epochs necessarily follow one another. He uses the term law only loosely, “to mean little
more than the tendencies inherent in unrestrained capitalism.”114
Even though this argument is valid, it only invalidates the first part of Arendt‟s
interest in Marx, the missing link between totalitarianism and Marxist ideology.
Considered from the viewpoint of political philosophy, whose interest lies illuminating
the realm of human affairs, Arendt‟s critique of Marx remains strong: “History is a story
of events and not of forces or ideas with predictable courses.”115
My conclusion is that Arendt‟s examination of Marxist philosophy bolstered her
belief that occidental philosophy, even in its most action-oriented moments, had failed to
produce a political philosophy that started from human plurality. As a consequence, the
relationship between freedom, necessity, and action could never be resolved. It is for this
reason that Arendt turned her interest to Kant‟s philosophy. He was one of the last
114 Parekh, 1979, 94.
115 Arendt, 1998, 252.
171
philosophers to truly appreciate the meaninglessness of human affairs, “the melancholy
haphazardness” that perpetrated the historical events and developments. Kant perceived
the most problematic aspect of the modern concept of history:
It will always remain bewildering…that the earlier generations seem to carry on
their burdensome business only for the sake of the later…and that only the last
should have the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building.116
Arendt, the theorist of human action and plurality, found herself at home with Kant‟s
attention to ambiguity in the concept of progress and developmental history.
116 Arendt, 1977b, 83.
172
Chapter 4: Walter Benjamin and History as Progress
[T]he thread of tradition is broken and…we shall not be able to renew it.... What has
been lost is the continuity of the past as it seemed to be handed down from generation to
generation, developing in the process its own consistency.... What you then are left with
is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation.1
1. Introduction
The depth of intellectual connection between Arendt and Walter Benjamin is
evident to readers familiar with the friendship between the two, which began in Paris in
1934. Benjamin, who was working on “The Storyteller,” was very impressed with
Arendt‟s work on Rahel Varnhagen and encouraged her to complete the book.2 Later,
before Benjamin left for the Spanish border in 1940, where his attempted escape from
Europe was tragically cut short, he entrusted Arendt with the manuscript of the “Theses
on the Philosophy of History.” Twenty-eight years later, Arendt edited this manuscript
for a collection of Benjamin‟s works. These anecdotes already suggest an intellectual
affinity between the writings of two thinkers. Moreover, our understanding of the depth
of their intellectual exchange has been enhanced with recent work on the subject.3 The
1 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking” in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978a), 212.
2 From Jaspers-Arendt correspondence, quoted in Annabel Herzog, “Illuminating Inheritance: Benjamin's
Influence on Arendt's Political Philosophy,” in Social Criticism, vol. 25. no.5 (2009), 2.
3 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, Md.; Oxford: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003), Maurizio Passerin D‟Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London ;
New York : Routledge, 2001), 56 and most recently Herzog, 2009.
173
emphasis of these works is on the indebtedness of Arendt‟s concept of narrative to
Benjamin‟s idea of storytelling.
In this chapter, I do not contest this interpretation. I agree that there is a profound
affinity between Arendt‟s concept of narrative and Benjamin‟s idea of storytelling.
Arendt was directly inspired by Benjamin‟s focus on storytelling as a way of producing
meaning in human life. However, I would like to emphasize the context in which this
mutual exchange happened. In other words, I focus on the following question: Why did
the idea of storytelling and narrative seem so appealing to Arendt in the first place? I
argue that Benjamin‟s solution of storytelling seemed attractive to Arendt because both
Arendt and Benjamin shared a common understanding of the problems of modernity.
I have demonstrated throughout this project that Arendt criticizes the tradition of
Western philosophy for reliance on a particular understanding of historical necessity.
This philosophical tradition provided the background for totalitarian ideologies, which
the perpetrators believed to be proved by science, experience, and the laws of life. The
foremost driving force of totalitarian ideologies was belief in progress as a universal and
automatic process that embraced all periods of history. In this chapter, I demonstrate that
Benjamin, like Arendt, paid particular attention to the idea of progress and identified it as
one of problems of modernity. Both Arendt and Benjamin perceived the contemporary
conditions of existence as defined on the one hand by an understanding of history as
progress and on the other hand by a break with the tradition. I contend that attending to
the common intellectual background against which the exchange between the two
thinkers took place makes the connection between their works even more explicit. This
inquiry reveals to us why both thinkers were drawn to the same solutions in the first place
174
by pointing out their common starting point, a particular understanding of modernity and
its problems.
Benjamin‟s influence on Arendt is of a particular nature. Unlike Kant, Hegel, and
Marx, Benjamin was not only a philosopher with whom Arendt found herself engaged in
critical dialogue; he was her contemporary and, moreover, a friend and a confidant in
French exile. Arendt had to witness Benjamin‟s growing posthumous fame after his
tragic death in 1940. Moreover, Arendt was influential in bringing the works of Benjamin
to light. Unlike Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Benjamin‟s longtime friends
of Benjamin who focused on the philosophical and theological aspects of his writings,
Arendt emphasized the political nature of Benjamin‟s work and his materialist position.
The controversy between these two interpretations dominated Benjamin scholarship for a
long time.4
As Arendt acknowledges, Benjamin was not a completely obscure figure during
his lifetime. He was a writer, thinker, and literary critic who contributed frequently to
magazines and the literary sections of newspapers. Like Kafka, even though he did not
appeal to a mass audience and was not widely acclaimed before his death, he had won
4 For a detailed account of the publication of Benjamin‟s work and the controversy between Adorno and
Arendt, see “Hannah Arendt und Walter Benjamin. Konstellationen, Debatten, Vermittlungen,” in Arendt
und Benjamin, Texte, Briefe, Dokumente. ed. Detlev Shoettker and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2006). Also see Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism” in New
German Critique 17 (1979) for the triad influences of Benjamin‟s work namely Scholem, Adorno and
Brecht and the then contemporary representatives of each strand in the Benjamin debate.
175
recognition among his peers, thinkers like Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Brecht in
addition to aforementioned Adorno and Scholem.5
In her “Preface” to the edited volume of Benjamin‟s work, Illuminations, Arendt
writes that “the trouble with everything Benjamin wrote was that it always turned out to
be sui generis.”6 She relates the anecdote that when Hofmannsthal read Benjamin‟s essay
on Goethe, which he later decided to publish in 1924, he found it to be “absolutely
incomparable.”7 Hofmannsthal was right in that there was literally nothing like it in
existing literature. Benjamin‟s style, method, and attention to detail were completely
unique. He cannot be easily classified as a scholar, translator, or philosopher, even
though the essence of his thought always remained philosophical.8 As Adorno, too,
pointed out, “Benjamin‟s thought does not respect the boundary line between the
5 Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
6 Arendt, 1968, 3. Habermas somewhat agrees with this observation: “Benjamin belongs to those authors
who cannot be summarized and whose work is disposed to a history of disparate effects. We encounter
these authors only with the sudden flash of contemporary immediacy in which a thought takes power and
holds sway for an historical instant.” Habermas, 1979, 32.
7 Arendt, 1968, 3.
8 From Gershom Scholem to Arendt: “For me what defines Benjamin‟s significance for my own intellectual
existence is axiomatic: the essence of his thought as philosophical thought. I have never been able to see his
stuff from another perspective…Just how far he distances himself from every traditional conception of
philosophy is something I am aware of, of course…” Quoted in Michael Loewy, Fire Alarm: Reading
Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London ; New York : Verso, 2005), 1.
176
conditional and the unconditional.”9 In fact, Benjamin‟s greatest ambition was to produce
a work that consisted entirely of quotations.10 The breadth of Benjamin‟s subject matter
and the peculiar combination of theology with materialism in his work allowed each
reader to find and identity with a different Benjamin: “a baroque Benjamin; a modern
close to Baudelaire; a critic committed to the avant-garde, Kafka, Proust, surrealism, or
Brecht; a theorist of the media; a literary writer, author of Einbahnstrasse and Berliner
Kindheit.”11
I believe, however, that in other respects, especially in his insistence on a
particular understanding of history as one of the conditions of modern man‟s existence,
Benjamin does not stand alone. Benjamin‟s uniqueness, instead, lies in the exceptional
skill with which he brought these ideas to life. He transformed the abstract idea of
progress into a concrete image by way of the allegory of the Angel of Time. His
representation was extremely influential in Arendt‟s understanding of history. For the
purposes of this project, Benjamin‟s work allows us to reconsider/recapitulate in the most
concrete terms the idea of progress and the particular notion of history that we have
focused on so far.
9 Theodor Adorno, “Introduction to Benjamin‟s Shriften” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and
Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 5.
10 Section 5 will explore the concept of quotation in detail.
11 Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art. The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin (New York : Guilford
Press, 1996), 259.
177
Unfortunately there is little surviving evidence regarding the actual substance of
the intellectual exchange between Arendt and Benjamin.12 Despite this difficulty,
common themes can be detected between them. While my focus in this chapter is on the
idea of progress and the end of tradition, I first offer some preliminary observations
explaining why these two thinkers were drawn to the same solutions by pointing out their
common starting point: a particular understanding of modernity and its problems. In the
second part of the chapter, I examine Benjamin‟s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
and demonstrate that the theses, which formulate the material historical understanding of
history as an alternative to historicism, are at the same time characterized by two
peculiarly Benjaminian images: that of progress as a barbaric catastrophe and as a rupture
that will blast open the continuum of history, through which the past can be redeemed. In
the third part, I demonstrate that Arendt unequivocally adopted this notion of progress as
catastrophe. In the fourth section, I explore Benjamin‟s solution to the problem of
progress, namely his rejection of unitary, homogenous time and adoption of a fragmented
historiography. I argue that while Arendt does not subscribe to the Jewish messianic
tradition as it presents itself in the thought of Walter Benjamin, she is significantly
influenced by Benjamin‟s fragmented history, which redeems (or appropriates) elements
of the past for purposes of a critical examination of the present and the future. In fifth
12 We can assume that most of their exchange took place during exile in France, when as Arendt recounts,
Benjamin and Arendt spent their time playing chess and reading the newspapers, whenever the latter could
be found. As to the written exchange, the surviving letters are of an everyday nature: birthday celebrations,
vacation postcards, and small news about common acquaintances. See “Briefwechsel” in Arendt und
Benjamin, Texte, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Detlev Shoettker and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2006), 122-141.
178
section, I analyze Traditionsbruch (the break with the tradition of philosophy) as a major
motive of Arendt and Benjamin‟s work. Benjamin‟s solution to this break was
“quotations.” In place of the authority of tradition, Benjamin turned to the power of
citability. With quotations, Benjamin managed to establish a peculiar relationship with
the past in which while “the corals and the pearls of the past” are preserved, the spell of
the past is broken. In the sixth and final section, I argue with reference to Arendt‟s
reflections on Kafka and the concept of “between past and future” that Arendt was a pearl
diver herself. More specifically, I contend that with these reflections on the past and
future, Arendt carved a particular place within the present for dealing with the forces of
the progress and tradition‟s claim on our present and future.
2. Some Common Themes
The first theme common to Arendt and Benjamin is the rejection of the doctrine
of superstructure, which was only briefly asserted by Marx but then, as Arendt put it,
“assumed a disproportionate role in the movement as it was joined by a
disproportionately large number of intellectuals.”13 It is well-known that Arendt never
subscribed to any form of economic determinism. Moreover, as I argued in Chapter 3,
she believed that Marx himself did not completely subscribe to the doctrine of
superstructure either. For his part, Benjamin was “the most peculiar Marxist ever
produced by this movement, which God knows had its full share of oddities,” as Arendt
humorously observes. He used the concept of the superstructure “as heuristic-
13 Arendt, 1968, 11.
179
methodological stimulus and was hardly interested in its historical and philosophical
background.”14 In the Arcades project, Benjamin stated:
Nor should we adhere too strictly to the words of Marx, who often used his terms
only figuratively—as for instance, in describing the connections under
consideration here as a relation between „base‟ and „superstructure‟ as a
„correspondence‟ and so on… In all these cases, the Marxian concepts…are not
intended as new dogmatic fetters, as preestablished conditions which must be met
in some particular order by any materialist investigation. They are rather, a wholly
undogmatic guide to research and action.15
As Arendt observes, Benjamin does not restrict himself to the dogmatic boundaries
established by orthodox Marxism. He appropriates Marxist concepts as guidelines only
insofar as they prove helpful in the theory and application of revolutionary ideas. His
overall aim is to “break with the vulgar historical naturalism.”16 It is not a coincidence
that among the notes for the Arcades project, Benjamin jotted down Breton‟s words,
which read “I cannot insist too strongly on the fact that…economic determinism is not
the „absolutely perfect instrument‟ which „can provide the key to all the problems of
history.‟ ”17
14 Ibid.
15 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), [N,17].
16 Ibid., [N2, 6].
17 Ibid., [N6, 4].
180
In lieu of a vulgar historical materialism, Benjamin chose to focus on “those facts
of daily existence—food, clothing, shelter, family routines, civil law, recreation, social
relations,” agreeing with Seignobos that those facts “have always been of prime concern
in the life of great majority of individuals.”18 In this “wide-eyed presentations of
actualities,” which for Adorno was a point of critique, Arendt believed that Benjamin saw
more than was visible to the inattentive reader. In these concrete instances of “a street
scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought,” Benjamin tried to find
the common features that made us realize that all these elements belong to the same
epoch of history. With this endeavor, he attempted to demonstrate that the spirit of the
times and its material manifestation were intimately connected.19 In this sense, Arendt
argues that Benjamin‟s thinking was very “complex but still realistic.”20
Benjamin describes the connection of his Arcades project to Marxism as follows:
Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what
matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that
will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in
other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible
18 Seignobos, Charles. Histoire sincere de la nation Française, as noted in Benjamin, 1999, [N5a, 5].
19 Arendt, 1968, 11.
20 Ibid., 13.
181
Urphenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the
arcades.21
Benjamin‟s passion for material objects derived directly from Goethe. He appropriated
Goethe‟s concept of Urphenomenon, “a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of
appearances in which „significance‟ [Bedeutung] and appearance, word and thing, idea
and experience, would coincide.”22 (Bedeutung, the most Goethean of words, is a term
that recurs in Benjamin‟s writings.) Benjamin characterizes his work in The Origin of
German Tragic Drama as
a rigorous and decisive transposition of this basic Goethean concept from the
domain of nature to that of history. Origin—it is, in effect, the concept of
Urphenomenon extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the
Jewish contexts of history.23
The concept of Urphenomenon brings us to another common feature of Arendt and
Benjamin‟s thinking: attention to the particular. In Benjamin‟s writings, this
characteristic presented itself as an attention to small, even minute things. Accordingly,
Benjamin said that his objective was “to discover in the analysis of the small individual
21 Benjamin, 1999, [N1a, 6]. “Urphenomenon” is usually translated as “original phenomenon” or
“originary phenomenon” and is spelled differently in various sources due to differences stemming from
translation. For the sake of uniformity, I chose the use “Urphenomenon” throughout this chapter.
22 Arendt, 1968, 12.
23 Benjamin, 1999, [N2a, 4].
182
moment the crystal of the total event.”24 For Benjamin, the smaller the object, the more
significance it had. He was very much taken in, for example, by the two grains of wheat
in Musée Cluny that contained the entire “Shema Yisrael.”. One of his ambitions, as
Scholem relates, was “to get one hundred lines onto an ordinary page of a notebook.”25 In
the smallest, minutest objects, Benjamin wanted to discover the meaning of the whole.
I would like to contrast this method with the tradition of political philosophy,
which attributes meaning to single events and occurrences only within the larger context
of historical development and the progress of mankind. As we have already demonstrated
in chapters 2 and 3, Arendt was highly critical of this approach. In Benjamin‟s
completely antithetical methodology, which focused on the singular not merely as an
example of the greater concept but as a concrete instance that still retained the power of
the universal, Arendt found a new and fresh perspective to analyze and understand
history.
Finally, a characteristic common to both Arendt and Benjamin is the attention to the
realm of appearance, or, as Arendt calls it, “the wonder of appearance.”26 Benjamin was
interested not merely in ideas but in their actual appearance: “What seems paradoxical
about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears.”27 Arendt
attended to the idea of appearance explicitly in her volume on Thinking (1971), which
was published a mere three years after her essay on Benjamin (1968). In the very first
chapter of this book, Arendt examines “the world‟s phenomenal nature” and observes
24 Ibid., [N2, 6].
25 Arendt, 1968, 11.
26 Ibid., 12.
27 From Benjamin‟s Schriften, Quoted in Arendt, 1968, 12.
183
that the common characteristic of everything in the world that men are born into is that
“they appear and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled, to be
perceived by sentient creatures endowed with appropriate sense organs.”28 For Arendt,
unlike Benjamin, appearance is not only a central concern; it constitutes one of the
fundamental conditions of human existence. From the fact of appearance, Arendt derives
the need for living and sentient beings for whom the fact of appearance makes sense. For
Arendt, the very fact of appearance suggests a form of subjectivity. Nothing exists or
appears in the singular. Everything appears for the sake of another who perceives its
appearance. This, according to Arendt, is rule of plurality, the fundamental condition of
our existence in the world.29
3. History as Progress: Theses on the Philosophy of History
“Theses on the Philosophy of History” is Benjamin‟s last extant piece of
writing.30 During the last winter of his life, 1940, Benjamin wrote eighteen short theses
28 Hannah Arendt, 1978a, 19.
29 Ibid.
30 Even though “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” is the last piece of work that Benjamin produced, the
central theme of this work, a fragmented view of history as opposed to progress, is present in Benjamin‟s
work from early on. In a lecture delivered at the Free Student League of Berlin in 1914, Benjamin offers
the following reflections on history: “There is a conception of history which out of confidence in the
infinity of time discerns only the rhythm of men and epochs which, quickly or slowly , advances on the
road of progress… The following consideration leads, against this conception, to a determinates state in
which history rests collected into a focal point, as formerly in the utopian images of thinkers. The elements
of the end condition are not present as formless tendencies of progress, but instead are embedded in every
present as endangered, condemned and ridiculed creations and ideas.” From Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte
184
that embody his last reflections on two strains of thought that he had tried to reconcile
throughout his entire life: Jewish messianic thought and historical materialism.31 As
Adorno pointed out, in these theses Benjamin came closest to the views that the Frankfurt
School would espouse: the idea of history as a permanent catastrophe, the critique of
progress and mastery over nature and culture.32 This essay, which formulates the
historical material understanding of history as an alternative to historicism,33 is at the
Schriften II: 75. Quoted in Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York :
Columbia University Press, 1982), 49.
31 The intellectual representatives of these two trends in Benjamin‟s life were Scholem and Adorno,
respectively. Benjamin‟s essays did not manage to satisfy both simultaneously. For an examination of the
critical reception of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Adorno, Scholem, and
Brecht, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin
and the Frankfurt Institute (New York : Free Press, 1977), 148-149. Habermas argues that Benjamin‟s
attempt was largely unsuccessful: “Benjamin did not realize his intention to bring together enlightenment
and mysticism, because the theologian in him could not accept the idea of making his messianic theory of
experience serviceable to historical materialism.” Habermas, 1979, 51. Rolf Tiedemann echoes Habermas:
“The retranslation of materialism into theology cannot avoid the risk of losing both: the secularized content
may dissolve while the theological idea evaporates.” Rolf Tiedemann, “Historical Materialism or Political
Messianism” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago : University of
Chicago Press, 1989), 201. Also, for an account of the relatively weak influence of German romanticism on
Benjamin‟s thought, see Loewy, 2005, 5-8 and Rebecca Comay, “Benjamin and the Ambiguities of
Romanticism” in Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris. (Cambridge, UK ; New
York : Cambridge University Press, 2004), 134-151.
32 Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel, cited in Arendt und Benjamin, 2006, 38.
33 A historical materialist understanding of history, which nevertheless distances itself from vulgar
Marxism.
185
same time characterized by two peculiarly Benjaminian images: that of progress, a
barbaric “catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage,” and the rupture that
will “blast open the continuum of history,” through which the past can be redeemed.34
Let‟s start with Benjamin‟s critique of historicism. Benjamin was critical of
historicism, which claimed to articulate the past “the way it really was.” He positioned his
own work against that of the classical historian, who explained the events of the past in
terms of motivation and causality. He defines the Arcades project as a work that
“liberates energies of history that are bound up in the „once upon a time‟ of classical
historiography. The history that showed things „as they really were‟ was the strongest
narcotic of the century.”35
How can Benjamin‟s depiction of historicism as “the strongest narcotic of the
century” be interpreted? The historicist viewpoint that Benjamin positions himself against
is that of Leopold von Ranke‟s, whose aim in writing history was to demonstrate the hand
of God in the workings of history. Ranke believed that history was “the manifestation of
God‟s work upon mankind.”36 In his History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from
1494 to 1514, he rejected the view that the aim of history writing was to examine the past
with the purpose of instructing the present and guiding the future. Instead, he believed
34 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968a), 257; 262.
35 Benjamin, 1999, [N3, 4].
36 Edward Armstrong, “Introduction,” in Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations
(1914 to 1514) (New York : AMS Press, 1976), xi.
186
that history needed to show “what actually happened” [wie es eigentlich gewesen ist].37
Later, Ranke argued that "every age is next to God,” i.e., that every period of history is
unique. The historian who can empathize with the past can understand it in its context.
The main tenet of Benjamin‟s critique of this view is as follows: Historicism
presents history as the history of human civilization. However, historicism fails to realize
that in its attempt to understand and present the history as is really was, it is characterized
by empathy towards the victors. In other words, the kind of history that historicism writes
is not the history of human civilization; it is the history of the victors, the rulers and the
ruling class: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal
procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.”38
Benjamin criticizes historicism precisely for its inattention to the underlying social and
political relationships of each epoch that make certain people and groups the victors:
[T]he cultural treasures owe their existence not only to the efforts of great minds
and talents who have created them, but also the anonymous toil of their
contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism.39
Realizing the true nature of history, in this sense, prompts Benjamin respond to the view
that “there is progress enough if,…while the mass of mankind remains mired in an
37 Leopold von Ranke, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History,
ed. Roger Wines. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), 56-59.
38 Benjamin, 1968a, 256.
39 Benjamin, thesis, 256.
187
uncivilized condition, the civilization of a small minority is constantly struggling upward
to greater and greater heights.” Following Lotze, Benjamin asks, “How, upon such
assumptions, can we be entitled to speak of one history of mankind?”40
An attentive look at history reveals to us that we cannot speak of one history of
mankind. There are always the oppressed, the dominated, the vanquished. For this reason,
Benjamin argues that the historicist view of mankind, which perceives history as a simple
unified history of human civilization and development, must be rejected. In order to save
the writing and understanding of history from conformism, historical materialism should
dissociate itself from historicism and adopt a new approach. The task of the historical
materialist would be to “brush history against the grain.”41 In this endeavor, the historian
adopts certain qualities of the “chronicler, who recites events without distinguishing
between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that
has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”42
There are no “major” events that we need to narrate and “minor” events that we
are allowed to forget. Nothing, Benjamin warns us, is lost for history. It is only the
ideology of progress that suppresses and even obliterates the true nature of historical
events. The starting point of the historian‟s attempt, hence, must be to analyze and reveal
the true nature of progress.
40 German philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze is perhaps better known for his writings on metaphysics,
logic and philosophy of nature and religion than philosophy of history. Benjamin, 1999, [N14a, 2].
41 Benjamin, 1968a, 257.
42 Ibid., 254.
188
It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to
demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea
of progress. Just here, historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself
from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but
actualization.43
Benjamin depicts progress with reference to a cherished Paul Klee painting, Angelus
Novus.44 The painting
shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is
fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels
43 Benjamin, 1999, [N2, 2].
44 Benjamin acquired the painting in 1921 in Munich and kept it his entire life. Scholem argues that when
Benjamin ended his own life in a hotel room in Spain, the painting was Benjamin‟s possession in one of his
suitcases along with a manuscript. See Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and his Angel” in On Jews
and Judaism in Crisis, ed. W. Dannhauser (NY: Schocken Books, 1976), 210. This manuscript was most
likely that of “The Thesis on the Philosophy of History.” Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A
Biography (London ; New York : Verso, 1996), 261.
189
him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.45
The portrayal illustrates Benjamin‟s perception of progress as a forward movement,
brutal, catastrophic, and inhumane: “The continuum of history consists in the permanence
of the unbearable; progress is the eternal return of the catastrophe.”46 Not only does
progress have a tremendous force, but it also looks natural and inevitable.
Benjamin‟s observations have two important implications. The first one pertains
to the sociopolitical teachings of historical materialism. According to orthodox Marxist
diagnosis, the greatest obstacle to the revolution was “the reification which made reality
appear as „second nature‟ rather than historically produced.”47 The potential route to
emancipation therefore required the destabilization of the appearance of reality, i.e., the
overthrow of bourgeois ideology. With his insight into the nature of history, Benjamin
shifted the focus to appearance of progress. Emancipation now required demystification
of the illusory notion of progress, a task that Horkheimer and Adorno would later take up
in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.48
The second implication is rather political. This new shift in focus subjects to
critique the Social Democrats, who according to Benjamin shared similar “dogmatic
45 Benjamin, 1968a, 257-58.
46 Habermas, 1979, 38.
47 Buck-Morss 1977, 60.
48 Buck-Morss, 1977, 60.
190
claims” about progress.49 In fact, Benjamin severely criticizes “the leftist politics” of his
age. It might be helpful to further elaborate these criticisms in order to illustrate better (1)
the nature of the idea of progress; (2) its widespread influence at that time, even among
those of differing political convictions; and (3) its political consequences from the
viewpoint of the working class and revolutionary politics.
The first mistake of the Social Democrats, according to Benjamin, was to adhere
to the idea of progress. This notion of progress, Benjamin argues, had three qualities:
First, it corresponded not only to advances in men‟s abilities and knowledge, but also to
the advancement of mankind itself as a general category. By emphasizing this overlap,
Benjamin wants to distinguish technological developments from the moral, political, and
social history of mankind.50 Developments in technology do not necessarily imply
advances in other realms of human life. On the contrary, technological progress, as
Benjamin observed in his day, could be accompanied by regression in the other
dimensions of civilization.51
49 There is controversy as to whom Benjamin exactly refers to. According to Scholem, the “Theses” were
the product of the “completion of Benjamin‟s awakening from the shock of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.”
Scholem,1976. Rochlitz notes that at the end of the 1930s, the Social Democrats hardly existed as a
political force, and Benjamin‟s references should apply to the communist parties in Western Europe and the
USSR. Rochlitz, 1996, 236. Loewy agrees that according to Benjamin the hope for a strong anti-fascist
movement lay with the Communist Party. Loewy, 2005, 69. Other interpreters think that Benjamin‟s
reflections are of a general kind, because he expressed the same ideas about the Front Populaire. I take
Benjamin to refer to the leftist politics of his time, which is characterized by the same confidence as
historicism in the idea of progress.
50 Loewy, 2005, 85.
51 This is a central theme of the Frankfurt School.
191
Second, progress had no limit and it overlapped entirely with the idea of
“perfectibility of mankind.” In other words, as long as progress was endless, mankind
could be infinitely improved for the better. The reverse was true as well: As long as
mankind kept improving for the better, progress would be infinite. And third, progress
was seen as inevitable and irresistible, “something that automatically pursued a straight
or spiral course.”52
What were the consequences of this viewpoint for the political and economic
strategies of the Social Democrats? Benjamin unequivocally argues that the Social
Democrats were conformist. They regarded sociohistorical development as “the fall of
the stream, with which it thought it was moving.”53 They thought that technological
developments in factory work were political achievements, even though in reality the
technological innovations rewarded only the capitalist and not the worker. They saw
labor as “the source of all wealth and culture,” which was true according Marx‟s theory
of labor value, but they forgot that the sole possession of labor could not benefit the
workers as long as its products were not at the disposal of the working class. Finally, they
thought that the increasing mastery over nature was a positive development for the
working class, without realizing, as Adorno and Horkheimer would suggest, that it also
increased the domination of men over other men.54 Benjamin thinks that this evolutionary
view of history was embraced equally by the leftist politics, which perceived history as a
progressive movement towards rationality, freedom and wealth for the whole of mankind,
52 Benjamin, 1968, 260.
53 Ibid., 258.
54 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).
192
but failed to identify the true nature of history as a class struggle in which there are
dominators and dominated, winners and losers.
Insofar as the role of the working class is concerned, the Social Democrats
perceived the working class as the “redeemer of future generations.” This future-oriented
outlook is remarkably different than Marx‟s past-oriented approach, according to which
the working class “completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of
downtrodden.”55 Why should this change of viewpoint be so consequential for Benjamin?
“This training,” Benjamin argued, “made the working class forget both its hatred and its
spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than
that of liberated grandchildren.”56 Benjamin‟s argument is that, with their belief in
progress, the Social Democrats projected the role of the working class into the future
instead of deriving it from a shared past of domination and oppression. Usually the
present finds a source of action in the past. The injustices and oppressions of the past can
help raise the consciousness of the masses in the present. Without this powerful resource
to appeal to, the Social Democrats lacked the strength and motivation to prompt the
working class to undertake revolutionary social change.
As a result, “the politicians‟ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their
„mass basis,‟ and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus” was the
55 Benjamin, 1968a, 260.
56 Ibid.
193
mark of Social Democracy in Germany.57 These elements, which crystallized into a
conformist attitude, helped Fascism prosper. 58
The continuity of history, assumed by the idea of progress and fervently adhered
to by the leftist politics, is for Benjamin a form of oppression. Within this catastrophic
continuum, there exists moment of revolt and freedom that can only be understood when
the dynamic history comes to a standstill. Against the historical process, Benjamin poses
the historical image.59 We will see in detail in section four what this entails, but let us
first examine Arendt‟s adoption of the idea of progress as it is presented by Benjamin.
4. Arendt and the Notion of Progress as Catastrophe
Arendt‟s first reference to Benjamin‟s notion of progress is found in an unlikely
context: a short article Arendt published in Partisan Review on the occasion of the
twentieth anniversary of Kafka‟s death. In this short essay, in which Arendt praises Kafka
for his masterful storytelling, she concentrates on the common experience that greets his
57 Ibid., 258.
58 Ibid., 257. Benjamin was struck but the lack of comprehension on the part of Social Democrats. For the
Social Democrats, fascism was understood as either a vestige of the past that could only come about in a
non-industrialized country like Italy (Karl Kautsky) or as an ephemeral movement to be soon done away
with by the progressive forces (the German Communist Party). This lack of understanding as to the true
nature of fascism, Benjamin believed, produced the conditions for defeat by it. The fight against fascism,
according to Benjamin, first required realizing that it was a thoroughly modern phenomenon, rooted in
technological progress. See Loewy, 2005, 59.
59 Rochlitz, 1996, 245.
194
readers, “a general and vague fascination.”60 The common feature of Kafka‟s works,
Arendt observes, is the very compelling depiction of necessity as a superhuman force to
which individuals find themselves submitting. Kafka‟s characters come face-to-face with
structures that support this necessary and automatic process: a bureaucratic machinery
that they are unfamiliar with and cannot operate in, and a system of laws that is opaque
and inaccessible. Arendt argues that if contemporary readers think of Kafka‟s world as a
premonition of a world still to come, they are mistaken. The events in the first part of the
twentieth century proved without a doubt that Kafka accurately represented the nature of
the totalitarian regimes that depended on a bureaucratic machine to function. It was
unfortunately not a nightmare but the true nature of an epoch. How is this epoch
characterized?
First, men perceive themselves as a necessary part of a machine, “functionaries of
necessity.”61 They blindly and obediently perform their functions bestowed upon them by
the rules of nature and necessity, renouncing in this processes their supreme faculty of
judgment and personal responsibility. They get caught up in the “superhuman law” of
progress, which they now believe spans all history of human civilization and transcends
their own time and existence.62 The true nature of this progress, Arendt argues, “is best
imagined and most exactly described” in Benjamin‟s description of progress with
60 Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A revaluation” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1994a), 70.
61 Ibid., 74.
62 Ibid.
195
reference to the Angel of History, and she quotes Benjamin‟s ninth thesis in great
length.63
The second reference to the same passage is found in The Origins of
Totalitarianism. In the second part of this book, Arendt examines imperialism, the period
from 1814 to 1914, which she argues set the stage for the coming catastrophes of the
twentieth century.64 According to Arendt, this period “led to an almost complete break
with the continuous flow of Western history as we had known it for more than two
thousand years.”65 In terms of developments in continental Europe, the period of
imperialism is characterized by the emancipation of the bourgeoisie. As an emerging
ruling class, the bourgeoisie defied the limitations of the nation-state and attempted to use
the political and military means of the state for overseas expansion. While the period was
relatively quiet for Europe, it had serious reverberations in Asia and Africa, where the
bourgeoisie tried to realize its imperialist aspirations.
Arendt observes that the central political development brought about by
imperialism is expansion. Expansion is different on the one hand from looting, which
only necessitates temporary military superiority over the opposing party, and on the other
hand from conquest, which requires a stable political framework that can sustain longterm
assimilation. Arendt believes that it is “an entirely new concept in the long history
of political thought and action.”66 The originality of this political concept lies in its
economic roots, i.e., permanent growth of industrial production and economic
63 Ibid.
64 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 123.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 125.
196
transactions. The underlying logic of imperialism is the expansion for its own sake. This
is probably the single most important feature of imperialism that distinguishes it from all
other epochs in history. Imperialism, Arendt argues, is the first stage in the political rule
of an economic class, the bourgeoisie.67
Arendt‟s observations on imperialism are not completely novel or original. In
fact, Arendt owes most of her insights into the nature of imperialism to another heterodox
Marxist thinker, a woman “so little Orthodox indeed that it might be doubted that she was
Marxist at all.”68 This figure is Rosa Luxembourg. From Luxembourg‟s work on
imperialism, Arendt took over the importance of “pre-capitalist” sectors both inside and
outside the national territory, which were constantly “captured” and brought into the
process of capitalist accumulation.69 Capitalism‟s need to constantly expand in order to
keep the system stable and in motion, which was carefully examined by Luxembourg,
appealed to Arendt because of the accuracy with which it depicted the reality of the
capitalist system.
What is striking in Arendt‟s account is the fact that she traces the origins of the
political emancipation of the bourgeoisie to the ideology of progress. Moreover, in order
to describe this ideology, she uses verbatim the Benjaminian image of progress.
Arendt argues that limitless capital accumulation, which constitutes the economic
basis of imperialism, requires a strong and inevitably constantly growing political
structure to match the demands of the expanding economy. This constantly growing
67 Ibid., 138.
68 Hannah Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg: 1871-1919” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace &
World, 1968), 38.
69 Ibid., 39.
197
power base, for its turn, depends on “the image of an endless process of history, which in
order to be consistent with the constant growth of power, inexorably catches up with
individuals, people, and finally all mankind.”70 As a result, the particular combination of
a desire for limitless growth of property and a corresponding craving for never-ending
accumulation of power makes the ideology of progress irresistible.
Arendt distinguishes this particular idea of progress from the eighteenth century
notion of progress, as conceived in pre-revolutionary France, the primary concern of
which was the liberty and autonomy of man. The former idea of progress appropriated
the past with a critical eye in order to bring about social and political change in the future.
Arendt finds the remnants of this idea in the Marxist concept of a classless society.71 By
the time imperialist ambitions had taken over the bourgeois society in nineteenth
century, every trace of hope in the emancipation of man had been eradicated. The idea of
progress entailed nothing more than “to sacrifice everything and everybody to supposedly
superhuman laws of history.”72 In order to describe these “superhuman laws of history,”
Arendt introduces Benjamin‟s notion of the angel of history:
What we call progress is [the] wind [that] derives [the angel of history] irresistibly
into the future to which he turns his back while the pile of ruins before him towers
to the skies.73
70 Arendt, 1968, 143.
71 Also see Chapter 3, section 7, p.40.
72 Arendt, 1968, 143.
73 Arendt‟s own translation. Ibid.
198
Arendt‟s use of the imagery of the angel of history contemplating catastrophic progress is
not accidental. Arendt thought that the aspirations of expansion on the part of the
bourgeoisie, which had to be nourished with corresponding power accumulation,
produced catastrophic social, political, and economic consequences. Very soon, the
“optimistic mood of the progress ideology” was replaced with an idea of process that was
“unable to stop and stabilize” and was destined, as it proved in retrospect, to culminate in
total destruction.
Arendt‟s language in her reflections on the adoption of the idea of progress by the
bourgeoisie seems to suggest that bourgeoisie willingly developed its notion of progress.
Even if they did not do so, they were at least sufficiently aware of the implications of the
destructive consequences of progress, which affected the poor, the underprivileged, and
the powerless. Arendt quotes as representative of this attitude an “author from the Civil
Services in India who wrote under the pseudonym A. Carthill: One must always feel
sorry for those persons who are crushed by the triumphal car of progress.”74
Arendt thus follows Benjamin in her discussion of the idea of progress as both a
supernatural power over which men lose their control and as a process that ends in
destruction and catastrophe. What is there to be done against this ideology of progress?
5. Now-Time and Blasting Open the Continuum of History
According to Benjamin, the view of progress adhered to not only by historicism
but also, unfortunately, by leftist politics is, as we have described, totalitarian. In order to
break free from the domination of this view of history, Benjamin is interested in
74 Ibid., 143, footnote 39.
199
analyzing those particular events and instances that disturb history‟s straight, singular,
homogenous narrative. In his notes for the Arcades project, he reflects:
Comparison of other people‟s attempts to the undertaking of a sea voyage in
which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole. Discover this
North Pole. What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine
my course. In the differentials of time (which for others, disturb the main lines of
inquiry), I base my reckoning.75
Benjamin likens his method to discovering the North Pole, which disturbs the course of
ships. For other thinkers, these off-course wanderings are deviances. For Benjamin, it is
precisely what determines the course of his inquiry. His inquiry is now directed to the
concept of time in order to understand the notion of progress.
Benjamin observes that the concept of progress as an irresistible straight march
into the future requires a “homogeneous, empty” notion of time, In opposition to this, he
argues that “history is the subject of a structure, whose site is…time filled by the
presence of the now [Jetztzeit].”76 To grasp the totalitarian and brutal yet seemingly
natural character of progress is possible only by seizing history through the “notion of a
present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has to come to a
stop.”77 How can this be achieved?
75 Benjamin, 1999, [N1,2].
76 Benjamin, 1968a, 261.
77 Ibid., 262.
200
The first condition is to reject the notion of a universal history, which “musters a
mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time”:78
There is a conception of history which, in its faith in the endlessness of time,
distinguishes only between the differences in tempo of human beings and epoch
rolling with more or less speed toward the future along the track of progress. The
following consideration, on the other hand are concerned with a specific state of
affairs in which history rests as if collected in a focal point as it always has in the
utopian images projected by thinkers. The elements of ultimate state of affairs are
not manifest as formless tendencies of progress, but rather are embedded in every
present as the most endangered, discredited and ridiculed creations and
thoughts.79
Hence, this effort requires “a tiger‟s leap into the past” to seize up the past “only as an
image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and never seen again.”80
The image of the past presents itself to us, but only momentarily. If we can hold on to
that “image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a
moment of danger,” we may be able to construct a narrative of history that can “make the
continuum of history explode.”81 This explosion produces a crack in homogeneous,
78 Ibid.
79 Benjamin, Quoted in Habermas, 1979, 39.
80 Benjamin, 1968a, 255.
81 Ibid., 255, 261.
201
empty time, opening up the possibility of what Benjamin calls “a Messianic cessation of
happening.” Therefore, he argues:
Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where
thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that
configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical
materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a
monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of
happening, or put differently, a revolutionary chance for the oppressed past. He
takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of a homogeneous course
of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the
lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at
the same time canceled.82
According to Benjamin, rather than being unitary and homogeneous, the nature of history
is fragmented. Instead of subscribing to a narrative view of history, which presents events
as the beads of a rosary that follow one another in progression in empty, homogenous
time, historians must realize that each particular period in history, including the present
one, forms a particular relation, a “constellation” to the previous ones. If we fail to do
that, we risk neglecting the alternative images of history. Those images, which are not
recognized by the present, are doomed to disappear irretrievably. Our task is to “find the
constellation of awakening,” “the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what
82 Ibid., 262.
202
has been.”83 Only in the time-now, in the moment in which the true historical time
crystallizes, can we seize the opportunity to grasp the lived experiences of the past and
redeem our past in its fullness.
The notion of redeeming the past as a basis for the future and the realization of
redemption by exploding the continuum of the history is derived from modern Jewish
messianism, which had a strong influence on Benjamin‟s thought.84 Rabinbach argues
that there are four aspects to the Jewish messianic tradition: the restorative, the utopian,
the apocalyptic dimensions, and an ethical ambivalence.85 The restorative aspect
reinstates the ideal content of the past, while at the same time delivering “the basis for an
image of the future.”86 In order to for the past to be evoked, we need to have knowledge
of its lost utopian content. Hence this feature emphasizes the importance of knowledge,
which in the modern Jewish messianic tradition “is thus linked, not to power, but to the
triumph of the redemption.”87 The second, utopian aspect envisions the idea of a utopia
that possesses a new unity and transparency, which has not hitherto existed.
“Redemption,” accordingly, can be realized in this perspective, “either as the end of
83 Benjamin, 1999, [N1,9].
84 Benjamin‟s acquaintance with Gershom Scholem in 1915 introduced him to Jewish messianic thought.
Scholem was then beginning his study of Kabbalah. The two students spent much time together, especially
during 1918 and 1919, and maintained a close intellectual companionship until Benjamin‟s death. Gershom
Scholem, “Walter Benjamin” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. ed. W. Dannhauser (NY: Schocken Books,
1976), 173.
85 Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish
Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985), 87.
86 Ibid., 84.
87 Ibid., 85.
203
history or as an event within history, never as an event produced by history.”88 The
apocalyptic dimension denotes an attitude that opposes historical immanence and
conceives the realization of redemption as a complete negation of the old order. The
strong influence of Kabbalah is undoubtedly discerned in Benjamin‟s focus on the
possibility of redemption only in the time-now, the moment in which the past can be
grasped in its whole, in which the possible alternative trajectories that have been rendered
impossible by the progress of history can be redeemed.
Gershom Scholem observes that Jewish apocalyptic doctrine is present throughout
Benjamin‟s writings:
The secularization of Jewish apocalyptic doctrine is plain for all to see and
nowhere denies its origin. The talmudic image of the angels created anew each
moment in countless hosts, only to be destroyed and return into naught after
having raised their voices before God, unites his earlier with his later writings…
Yet, those ever new angels—one of them he found in Paul Klee‟s painting
Angelus Novus, which he owned and deeply loved— bear the features of the
angels of judgment as well as destruction. Their “quickly fading voice” proclaims
the anticipation of the apocalypse in history—and it was this that mattered to
him.89
88 Ibid.
89 Scholem, 1976, 195.
204
Scholem emphasizes the importance of the very brief and quickly disappearing nature of
redemptive moments in Benjamin‟s work. If the vision for redemption in Benjamin is
dependent on the seizure of the Messianic chips of time, then what are the revolutionary
prospects? Here, once again, Benjamin seems to share the ambivalence of the Jewish
messianic tradition, a strong set of expectations about the future coupled with pessimism
about this worldly salvation, creating a “pendulum swinging between hope and doom.”90
Although his visionary thinking carries the hope of redemption, this is a feeble hope. He
believes that the messianic power with which every generation is endowed and to which
the past has a claim is a “weak” one and “that claim cannot be settled cheaply.”91
Redemption, therefore, lies in our ability in the now-time to grasp the last gaze of
Angelus Novus and seize the opportunity to open the Messianic gate.
Obviously, Arendt does not subscribe to the Jewish messianic tradition as it
presents itself in the thought of Walter Benjamin. She does not take over the idea of
redemption or of an apocalyptic event that will reestablish a new, better order in the
world. She is, however, in many respects significantly influenced by Benjamin‟s idea of a
fragmented history, of redeeming (or appropriating) elements of the past for purposes of a
critical examination of the present and the future. Take for example the nature of
Arendt‟s reflections in The Origins of Totalitarianism, more specifically, its lack of a
clear method or organizational coherence, which has been remarked on by many of her
readers. Perhaps the best explanation of Arendt‟s refusal to commit to a causal
explanatory framework is presented by Benhabib, who argues that Arendt views the
90 Rabinbach, 1985, 87.
91 Benjamin 1968a, 254, author‟s emphasis.
205
attempts to establish continuity between the past and present as a trap of historicism.92
According to Benhabib, Arendt believes that the future is radically undetermined, and
hence the attempt to predict it based on a causal framework would provide us with a false
sense of security and power. Moreover, it would undermine our ability to appreciate the
novelty of the present events. Instead, therefore, Arendt characterizes her method with
reference to the “configuration” and “crystallization of elements,” which upon closer
examination turn out to be decidedly Benjaminian concepts. Consider these reflections by
Benjamin on the novelty of the truly new and the political experience:
Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its
interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the
sobriety of dawn.93
It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of
eternal sameness, and even of repetition in history. Authentic political experience
is absolutely free of this semblance.94
Benjamin is expressing exactly the same views as Arendt. Even though history presents
itself as an eternal recurrence of events, an endless repetition, this is only a semblance.
Authentic political experience is new and undetermined. It would require a special kind
92 Benhabib, 2003, 64.
93 Benjamin, 1999, [N9a, 7].
94 Benjamin, 1999, [N9, 5].
206
of attention, an ability to examine and judge independently to appreciate the novelty and
originality of individual political acts—an idea that Arendt would later develop into a
full-fledged theory of judgment.
Finally as I will show below, in refuting the idea of progress and in insisting upon
human agency in history, Arendt is very much influenced by Benjamin. Having discussed
the idea of progress and Arendt‟s adoption of this concept, let me know turn to the break
with the tradition.
6. Traditionsbruch
In her review of Hermann Broch‟s The Death of Virgil, entitled “No Longer and
Not Yet,” Arendt takes up the idea of break in tradition with reference to Hume, who
once remarked that “one generation does not go off the stage at once and another
succeeds, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies.”95 Arendt disagrees with this
statement. At some turning points in history, such as ours, when the old is decline and the
new is not yet established, generations find themselves in a “empty space,” a “historical
no man‟s land.”96
As I have argued throughout this project, this break with the tradition is one of the
leitmotivs of Arendt‟s work. Arendt reflects incessantly on the link between our
contemporary conditions of existence and the authority of tradition. Her work involves
questioning the relevance of the tradition of political philosophy as a whole at a moment
95 Hume, quoted in Hannah Arendt, “No Longer, Not yet” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1994b), 158.
96 Ibid.
207
when the tradition itself seems to lose its binding authority. The task Arendt sets herself
is dealing with the past without the aid of tradition.
The first point to underline is that Benjamin shares the same conviction that a
radical change had occurred during his lifetime:
The old prehistoric dread already envelops the world of our parents because we
ourselves are no longer bound to this world by tradition. The perceptual worlds
break up more rapidly; what they contain of the mythic comes more quickly and
more brutally to the fore; and a wholly different perceptual world must be
speedily set up to oppose it. This is how the accelerated tempo of technology
appears in the light of the primal history of the present.97
Even though Benjamin‟s emphasis in this quote is on technology, the change in human
experience is not caused exclusively by accelerated technology, nor are the effects of this
transformation limited to our relationship with technological developments, as evidenced
by further reflections on tradition:
[B]etween 1914 and 1918 [Benjamin‟s generation] had one of the most monstrous
experiences in world history… A generation that had gone to school with the
horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing
97 Benjamin, 1999, [N2a, 2].
208
remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a force filed of
destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.98
The transformation in the perception and structure of human experience, which is
perceived as a crisis by many of his contemporaries, culminates according to Benjamin in
a crisis of tradition, “a shattering blow to all that has been handed down—a shattering of
tradition, which is the obverse of the present crisis and the renewal of humanity.”99 There
is a pervasive sense in Benjamin‟s work of the loss of authority on the part of tradition.
When Benjamin talks about “tradition,” his emphasis is less on a particular canonical
doctrine and more on the “very coherence, communicability, and thus transmissibility of
experience.”100 This break, produced in large part by the political experience of his
generation, creates the need for ruthless criticism and reformulation of a road map for
social change and revolutionary action. Arendt also evaluates Benjamin‟s work in this
context.
Arendt maintains that Benjamin belongs to a generation of Jewish thinkers for
whom the Jewish question carried great weight. For “the most clear-sighted among
98 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II:241, Quoted in John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies
of Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1993), 1.
99 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I:477-478. Quoted in John McCole, 1993, 2.
100 Ibid. This view of tradition squares rather nicely with Arendt‟s understanding of tradition, even though
they seem to be at odds at first glance. Though Arendt is concerned with a particular tradition of political
philosophy, she is interested in it insofar as it provides with human beings a structure, a framework for
making sense of the existential questions and the political experience of living in a world together with
others.
209
them,” Arendt argues, this situation carried a significance that went beyond the particular
Jewish question and led them to question the relevance of the Western tradition as a
whole.101 In fact, Arendt contends that the appeal of Marxism as a doctrine and
communism as a revolutionary movement for the intellectuals of this epoch can be
explained in this fashion. In communism, they found not only a powerful tool for the
critique of contemporary political and social situation, but a reevaluation of entire
political and spiritual tradition. For Benjamin in particular, the question of the
relationship between tradition and the present was of utmost significance. Even though
Benjamin could reflect without reservation on the tradition‟s loss of authority, he could
not think of simply returning to “the most fruitful and most genuine traditions of a
Hamann and a Humboldt.”102 Benjamin thought that the break was complete and that new
venues for dealing with the past needed to be explored.
So what was Benjamin‟s solution? Benjamin found the solution in quotations. In
place of the authority of tradition, Benjamin turned to the power of citability. One can
find different sources for this motivation. One explanation can be offered with reference
to an expression of Tocqueville that Arendt was fond of and liked to cite on various
occasions: “Since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future the mind of man
wanders in obscurity.”103 In Tocqueville‟s words one finds the sentiment of despair born
from disconnect with the past, which can no longer serve as a guide for action in
101 Arendt, 1968, 37.
102 Scholem, in correspondence to Benjamin, quoted in Arendt, 1968, 37.
103 Hannah Arendt, “Preface” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 7; Also in
Arendt, 1968, 39.
210
contemporary world. The quotations, in this case, would be the only way to preserve the
shards of wisdom and guidance that can tradition can offer us.
According to Arendt, Benjamin‟s motivation is entirely different. His interest in
quotations stems not from the desire to the preserve the past but from a discontent with
the present and a desire to annihilate it. The power of quotation, for Benjamin, is “not the
strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy.”104 How could this
be so? After all, quotations are concentrated thought fragments, the purpose of which
seems to be to preserve for safekeeping the pieces of a long-gone tradition, history, and
culture. Instead for Benjamin quotations have a double function. On the one hand, they
“concentrate within themselves that which is presented.”105 More specifically, they
represent in the smallest but concentrated form the spirit of an epoch. On the other hand,
due to this concentrated nature and the very fact of being torn out of their context, they
“interrupt the flow of presentation with „transcendent force.‟ ”106
Adorno contends that the fragment as a philosophical form, for which Benjamin is
indebted to Schlegel and Novalis, “retains something of the force of the universal” and
that this is “precisely because it us fractured and incomplete,” torn out of context.107
According to Adorno,
[Benjamin‟s] work, Trauerspiel, is so constructed that, despite the most
meticulous overall architectonic, each of the tightly woven and internally
104 Benjamin, Schriften II, 192, in Arendt, 1968, 39.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Adorno, 1988.
211
seamless sections pauses, as it were, for breath and begins a new rather than
flowing directly into the next section as required by the schema of a gapless train
of thought. Its purpose is nothing other than expressing Benjamin‟s idea of
truth.108
In its brief, condensed, alien nature, the fragment (or quotation) creates the same effect
as messianic time. It arrests the progress of time, of thought. It creates a moment, a gap in
the time-space continuum, which makes possible reflection on past, present and future.
In this particular fashion, Benjamin manages to establish a peculiar relationship
with the past. On the one hand, the past is not and cannot be preserved in its entirety. But
this is a redemptive thought. The past is destroyed so that the present is thereby saved
from its spell. On the other hand, “the rich and strange” in tradition, the corals and pearls
of the past, are kept safe:
Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the
bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and
coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surfaces, this thinking delves into the
past—but not in order to resuscitate the way it was and to contribute to the
renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although
the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a
process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and
dissolves what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in
108 Ibid.
212
new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to elements, as though
they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and
bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments” as something
“rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphenomenon.109
In the next section, I will argue with reference to Arendt‟s reflections on Kafka and the
concept of between past and future that Arendt was a pearl diver herself. More
specifically, I contend that with these reflections on the past and future, Arendt carved a
particular place within the present for dealing with the forces of the progress and
tradition‟s claim on our present and future.
7. Between Past and Future
Hannah Arendt once remarked that Between Past and Future was her best
book.110 This book is not a systematic inquiry but only a collection of what Arendt calls
“exercises in political thought,” yet Arendt said she “believed in its form.”111 It is curious
that given the importance Arendt herself attributed to the book, few of her readers (not
even Young-Bruehl, the author of her best biography) have paid more than a passing
attention to these essays. I contend that Between Past and Future does occupy a special
place in Arendt‟s oeuvre. It stands at the crossroads of Arendt‟s struggle with the
109 Arendt, 1968, 51.
110 Quoted in Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. 2004. Hannah Arendt. For the Love of the World (New Haven;
London: Yale University Press), 473.
111 Ibid.
213
tradition of political philosophy from Plato to Marx112 and her reflections as an engaged
philosopher under the conditions of modernity. Substantively, it contains insights into our
modern understanding of philosophy and history and the relationship between them.
Format-wise, the essays in this book exemplify for Arendt the proper form of reflection
vis-à-vis the forces of history.
“Between past and future” is an elusive concept, difficult both for Arendt to
explain and for the reader to grasp. It is neither a spatial nor a temporal concept; Arendt
refers to it variously as a “gap,” “the odd in-between period,” or “the small non-timespace
in the very heart of time.”113 It is the gap where reflection upon the world and
human beings‟ role in it takes place. Through the activity of thinking, a connection is
established between the events of the past and the anticipated happenings of the future.
This gap makes it possible that “not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses,
the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined
by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet.”114 What is striking in this
account is Arendt‟s insistence on agency. With this brief characterization, she
immediately positions herself against Hegel and underscores the awareness of the actors
themselves in contrast to the retrospective eye of the historian. It is in this gap that “the
actors and witnesses, the living themselves” reflect on the moment they are living in.
A controversial feature of “between past and future” is that Arendt refers to it as a
modern phenomenon and yet an eternal one at the same time. How can we account for it?
112 For more on the tradition of political philosophy and Arendt‟s critique, see Chapter 3.
113 Arendt, 1977, 9; 13
114 Ibid.
214
I argue that the best interpretation of this ambiguity is to read the gap as an eternal
phenomenon whose importance has been heightened under contemporary
circumstances.115 Arendt explicitly notes that the gap “is not a modern phenomenon, is
perhaps not even a historical datum, but is coeval with the existence of man on earth.”116
This does not mean that the gap is inherited from the past generations. Instead, the idea of
agency is introduced once again: “Each new generation, indeed every new human being
as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and
ploddingly pave it anew.”117
At the same time, the gap has increased contemporary significance. We are living,
according to Arendt, in an age, where our connection to the tradition has been completely
severed. This problem of the connection to the tradition of political philosophy did not
arise because philosophy has proved impossible to be applied to the realm of human
affairs—this problem dates back Plato118—or because philosophy has failed to perform
the modern task of grasping history that was assigned to it by Hegelian philosophy of
history. Instead, this become a new and pressing problem
when the old metaphysical questions were shown to be meaningless, that is, when
it began to dawn upon modern man that he had come to live in a world in which
115 In other words, it is an ontological concept which has to do with the structure of human time but it has
gained particular importance due to the contemporary political, cultural, and social circumstances.
116 Arendt, 1977, 13.
117 Ibid.
118 See chapter 3.
215
his mind and his tradition of thought were not even capable of asking adequate,
meaningful questions, let alone of giving answers to its own perplexities.119
Arendt characterizes this as “the discovery that human mind had ceased to function
properly.”120 The gap, therefore, has always existed. But the gap of our generation makes
it exceptionally imperative to appeal to thought. If, for previous generations, the activity
of thinking and reflecting upon the meaning of existence was the business of the
philosopher, today it is a task required for all; it is now a necessity of “political
relevance.”121
8. Kafka’s Parable
Arendt‟s theoretical reflections on the problematic of past and future are
forcefully expressed with reference to one of Franz Kafka‟s parables. It is interesting to
note that despite the affinity between Arendt‟s and Benjamin‟s thought, Arendt‟s image
derives more from Kafka than from Benjamin. However, it is still somewhat fitting that
Arendt should refer to Kafka, since as Arendt agreed that “next to Proust, Benjamin felt
the closest personal affinity with Kafka among contemporary authors.”122 In Kafka‟s
work, Benjamin found a similarity to his own method: “Kafka‟s work is an ellipse with
foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in
119 Arendt, 1977, 9.
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid.
122 Arendt is citing from Scholem. Arendt, 1958, 17.
216
particular the experience of tradition) and, on the other by the experience of modern
man.”123
This parable, which plays a central role in Arendt‟s reflections, is as follows:124
He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The
second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually, the first
supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and
in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives
him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who
are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream,
though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this, it must be admitted,
would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out
of the fighting line and be promoted on account of his experience in fighting, to
the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.125
123 Quoted in Hans Mayer “Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka: Report on a Constellation” in On Walter
Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT Press, 1988), 206.
Mayer argues that Benjamin‟s identification with Kafka disturbed his friends Scholem, Brecht, and
Kraft,204.
124 Arendt, 1978a, 202. It is interesting to note that this parable appears in two different works of Arendt,
first in the Preface to Between Past and Future and then in the final section of Thinking, suggested that
Arendt was reflecting on the gap between past and future throughout the 1960s.
125 Quoted in Arendt, 1977, 7.
217
In this parable, the present is represented equally distant from the past and the future. The
past is something that the lies behind and the future approaches him from ahead. The
Arendt reads this parable as the representation of a “battleground on which the forces of
the past and the future clash with each other.”126
In the light of the previous discussion on Arendt‟s understanding of history as one
of progress, it is no surprise that Arendt finds this imagery apt. Kafka‟s depiction of the
time as a continuum, “a flow of uninterrupted succession,” overlaps neatly with Arendt‟s
view on the modern concept of history. In an effort that particularly pleases to Arendt,
Kafka goes one step further and portrays this history from the viewpoint of the actor, who
stands in this special present between past and future: “The forces are „his‟ antagonists:
they are not just opposites and would hardly fight with each other without „him‟ standing
between them and making a stand against them.”127
Arendt‟s interpretation of Kafka‟s parable both explains the attraction of the
image to her and underscores the centrality of human agency, perhaps even more
forcefully than Kafka conceived it: “The fact that there is a fight at all seems due
exclusively to the presence of the man, without whom the forces of the past and future,
one suspects, would have neutralized or destroyed each other long ago.”128 She remarks
that
126 Ibid., 10
127 Arendt, 1978a, 203.
128 Arendt, 1977, 10. my emphasis.
218
[o]nly because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his
ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—
the beginning of a beginning, to put into Augustinian terms—which splits up the
time continuum into forces.129
The insertion of man creates a “rupture” in the fabric of time, a location for “man‟s home
on earth.”130
Yet Arendt finds Kafka‟s account traditional and insufficiently reflective upon its
own implications. This imagery of this account, according to Arendt, is a successful in
describing “how the insertion of man breaks up the unidirectional flow of man,” but since
Kafka does not modify the traditional image of time moving in a straight line, he fails to
leave enough room for the agent to stand, i.e., a spatial dimension where thinking can
take place.131 Continuing the spatial metaphor, Arendt argues that the insertion of man
would deflect both the forces of past and future, just as the placement of an object at the
clashing point of two antagonistic beams of light would cause them to slightly change
direction. In this spatial dimension, which “resembles a parallelogram of forces,” Arendt
identifies the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought.132 At the point where the two
antagonistic forces of past and future , a diagonal third force would come into existence.
This diagonal force with its starting point at the clash of two antagonistic forces and its
eventual end in infinity is a spatial metaphor for the location of thought activity:
129 Ibid., 11, my emphasis.
130 Arendt, 1978a, 205.
131 Arendt, 1977, 11.
132 Ibid.
219
If Kafka‟s “he” were able to exert his forces along this diagonal, in perfect
equidistance from the past and future, walking along this diagonal line, as it were,
forward and backward, with the slow, ordered movements which are proper
motion for trains of thought, he would not have jumped out of the fighting-line
and be above the melee as the parable demands, for this diagonal thought pointing
toward the infinite, remains bound to and is rotted in the present; but he would
have discovered…the enormous, ever-changing time space which is created and
limited by the forces of past and future.133
The corresponding image is presented by Arendt as follows134:
Arendt‟s agency-prone interpretation recovers two aspects that Kafka‟s presumably
traditional account missed: First is the space for thinking created by the insertion of men,
and the second is the concession that Kafka gives to the tradition, i.e., the necessity of
133 Ibid.
134 Arendt, 1978a, 208.
220
finding an undisturbed, uncommitted, disinterested position of umpire. With this second
point, Arendt brings to the fore a difficulty with Kafka‟s interpretation, the gist of which
is hidden in the concluding sentence of the parable.
At the end of the parable, Kafka‟s “he” reveals his dream. He wants to finally
jump out of the fighting line and become the umpire in the fight between past and future,
“the spectator and judge outside the game of life, to whom the meaning of this time span
between birth and death can be referred because „he‟ is not involved in it.”135 This is a
dream of quiet, of the final resolution of the tension in time.
This dream is all too familiar. Arendt observes that from Parmenides to Hegel,
Western metaphysics searched for this “timeless region, an eternal presence in complete
quiet, lying beyond human clocks and calendars altogether”136 By jumping out of the
line, Kafka‟s “he” becomes one of the spectators, who in their “disinterested,
uncommitted, undisturbed” state are in the best position to judge the spectacle the
clashing forces of the past and future, i.e., human life.137 Kafka, therefore, submits to the
same impetus of a quiet location for the life of the mind that the philosophical tradition
promotes.
What is the problem with this picture? Arendt rightly observes that by jumping
out of the line, Kafka‟s “he” “jumps out of this world altogether.” If, as Arendt
convincingly demonstrated, the clash of the forces of past and the future is given a new
direction by the insertion of this man, then by jumping out of the fight, “he” relinquishes
135 Ibid., 207.
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid.
221
his position in the fight and transforms the meaning and the significance of this imagery
altogether. After all, man “is not just a passive object that is inserted into the stream, to be
tossed about by its waves that go sweeping over his head, but a fighter who defends his
own presence.”138 It is thanks to presence of the agent that the past finds meaning and the
future is given a course.
The advantage of this new image, as reformulated by Arendt, over Kafka‟s
version is now clear. The fighter cannot and should not jump out of the line. There is no
location for him above and beyond human time. It is in this moment, in the gap between
past and future, in the middle of the battleground that reflection takes place. The very
center of the storm is home to the activity of thinking, which not only finds answers but
poses new questions, makes new connections, brings to surface the pearls of the past.
Arendt concludes her reflections on Kafka‟s parable and the concept of between
past and future with reference to the break in tradition. Her judgment on this is clear:
The thread of tradition is broken and…we shall not be able to renew it… What
you are left with is still the past but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty
of evaluation.139
For Arendt, the break with the tradition is a fact, but it is not a sad fact. The tradition has
been broken and its pieces dismantled. But these pieces have become a part of “our
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid., 212.
222
political history, the history of our world.” What we can do now is to salvage those
fragments. In order to illustrate her point, Arendt quotes Shakespeare:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2140
The striking thing about these lines is that they are the same lines that Arendt uses in her
essay on Benjamin. It is with reference to them that Arendt calls Benjamin a pearl diver
and his project one of recovering the “corals and pearls of the past,” and preserving the
“rich and strange.”141
140 Ibid., 212, Also Arendt, 1968.
141 A brief note is necessary to highlight the link that Arendt establishes between Benjamin and Heidegger.
When it comes to the break with the tradition, Arendt argues that Heidegger was an early representative of
those philosophers who gave voice to the problem of modernity by “listening to the tradition that does not
give itself up to the past but thinks of the present” (Heidegger, Kants Theses über das Sein, Frankfurt,
1962, p.8 quoted in Arendt, 1968, 46). In this sense, Arendt contends that “Benjamin actually had more in
common with Heidegger‟s remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-changed into
pearls and coral, and as such could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their
context in interpreting them with „the deadly impact‟ of new thoughts.” Benjamin was, according to
Arendt, closer to Heidegger in his philosophy (especially of language) than to “his Marxist friends.”
223
The argument now comes full circle. Benjamin argued that all interpretations and
thinking about the past take the form of “a secret rendezvous…between an ineluctable
present and a no less determinate past”:
This present may, admittedly, be a meager one. Be that as it may one has to have
it by the horns to be able to ask questions of the past. The present is a bull whose
blood must fill the put if the spirits of the departed are to appear at its edge.142
The present is never safe from the ghosts of the past. The intellectual task is to take the
proverbial bull by the horns. Let us see now how Arendt fares as a pearl diver and a
bullfighter.
9. Exercises in Political Thought
We finally arrive at Arendt‟s essays in Between Past and Future as exercises in
pearl diving. In order to illuminate why these essays are “exercises” in political
Arendt‟s arguments about the affinity between Benjamin and Heidegger‟s philosophy are debatable. As
Benhabib points out, however, Arendt was influenced by both of these philosophers. One the one hand, she
adopted Benjamin‟s method of fragmentary historiography; on the other she was inspired by the
phenomenology of Heidegger (Benhabib, 2003, 95). It is possible that this double influence made her more
susceptible to seeing the connection between Benjamin and Heidegger‟s work. Nevertheless, Arendt was
nevertheless influential in bringing this connection into the light and influencing Benjamin scholars to
analyze it.
142 Benjamin, III:259. Quoted in Irving Wohlfarth, “Resentment Begins at Home: Nietzsche, Benjamin and
the University” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge,
Mass.,: MIT Press, 1988), 225.
224
philosophy, Arendt once again enlists Kafka‟s help. Kafka in his parable points out to the
“experience in fighting” that “he” gained as he tries to stand his ground between past and
future. “This experience,” Arendt tells us, “is an experience in thinking…and it can be
won, like all experiences in doing something, only through exercises.”143 Thinking takes
practice—an idea that may seem peculiar only so if we fail to take into account the kind
of thinking Arendt is concerned with. Arendt immediately refines her comment with a
qualification of the kind of thinking she means: “This kind of thinking is different from
such mental processes as deducing, inducing and drawing conclusions whose logical
rules of non-contradiction and inner consistency can be learned once and for all and then
only need to be applied.”144
143 Arendt, 1977, 14.
144 In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, we find Arendt using Kantian language to make the
same distinction: “Kant distinguished between two types of judging, one in which the universal (the rule,
principle or law) is given for the subsumption, and one in which the universal is lacking and must somehow
be produced from the particular. This activity of judging occurs when we are confronted with a particular.
It is not a question of rendering a general commentary on a given kind of object; rather this particular
object calls for judgment. Judgment is reasoning about particulars as opposed to reasoning about
universals. In the act of subsuming a particular under rose under the universal category „beauty,‟ I do not
judge it to be such because I have available to me a rule of the type „All flowers of such-and-such a species
are beautiful.‟ Rather, the particular rose before me somehow „generates‟ the predicate beauty. I can
understand and apply the universal only through experiencing the kinds of particulars to which we attach
this predicate. Aesthetic judgment therefore is a matter of judging this rose, and only by extension do we
broaden it into a judgment about all roses.” Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed.
Ronald Beiner. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 119. I will take up this point again at the end
of Chapter 5.
225
If we evaluate this remark in the light of Arendt‟s concerns about the modern
concept of history, her central problematic now reveals itself: The modern concept of
history with its emphasis on process and inevitability strips individual actions of their
meanings and thereby erases responsibility, making it possible for us to act mindlessly. In
order to train our minds not to follow the current, we need to gain experience in thinking,
and a special kind of thinking at that. We need the kind of thinking that allows us to
judge actions, events, and occurrences without reference to a set of given rules, but in
terms of their own virtue. That is why she calls these essays exercises. These essays do
not contain “the truth” or prescriptions. They are just examples of what it is that Arendt
thinks we, as actors, are to do in times like ours, when the tradition has been lost and we
are left in between past and future. This helps us to understand why Arendt considered
Between Past and Future her best book. These essays are exercises in thinking, and as
such they represent a (wonderfully executed) effort at the very task Arendt was urging
every human being to undertake.
10. Conclusion
In her essay on Benjamin, Arendt reflects on the nature of fame that struck
Benjamin 15 years after his death with the publication of a two-volume edition of his
writings. She cannot but reminisce on Benjamin with the words of Cicero, and wonder
“how different everything would have been „if they had been victorious in life who have
won victory in death.‟ ”145 How would it be different? One cannot know, but one can at
least speculate that Arendt would have found an intellectual companion to her critique of
145 Arendt, 1968, 2.
226
modern political thought, which revolves around the idea of progress and the rejection of
the court of judgment:
Benjamin‟s use of the “court” stands in radical rejection of “right.” He criticizes
so-called positive right as a rationalization for dominance and violence; it lays
claim to justice only erroneously. Justice must be applied to the individual, to the
particular… Correspondingly, Benjamin also rejects the notion of world history as
world court. Only the revolutionary interruption of history of the messianic
cessation of history can disrupt the repressive continuum and pass judgment over
what has been.146
In Benjamin‟s work every moment presents the possibility of judgment over occurrences
of the past and every moment in turn, contributes the final judgment.
In the final sentences of Thinking, Arendt addresses the problem of “court of
history” by the pointing out to the fact that within the tradition of philosophy, this
problem has been treated with resort to the idea of Progress, i.e., that there is such a thing
as the development of the human race. The ultimate choice, according to Arendt, is
between two alternatives:
146 Lindner, Burckhardt in Leo Lowenthal, “The Integrity of the Intellectual: In Memory of Walter
Benjamin” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago : University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 255.
227
We can either say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the
ultimate judgment to success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the
minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they
have come into being.147
But the answer is clear to Arendt, if we want to “reclaim our human dignity, win it back,
as it were from the pseudo-divinity named History of the modern.” “Without denying
history‟s importance but denying its right to be the ultimate judge,” Arendt now turns to
Kant,148 and her examination of Kant will be the focus of the next chapter.
147 Arendt, 1978a, 216.
148 Ibid.
228
Chapter 5: Kant and Spectatorship
Kant perceived the most problematic aspect of the modern concept of history. It will
always remain bewildering … that the earlier generations seem to carry on their
burdensome business only for the sake of the later … and that only the last should have
the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building.1
1. Introduction
In the first part of this project, I concentrated on Arendt‟s critique of a progressive
idea of history. I demonstrated that Arendt detected two tendencies in Hegel‟s idea of
history: the loss of meaning on the part of the singular/individual/particular, which was
now embedded in the larger process of history and consequentially the lack of attention to
the realm of human affairs. I demonstrated in Chapter 3 that ironically even Marx, the
archetypical theorist of action of the modern age, is not immune to Arendt‟s criticism.
Marx, despite having turned Hegel upside down, was more of a disciple than a critic.
From this perspective, one would expect Arendt to be critical of Kant‟s
philosophy of history. After all, Kant‟s “Perpetual Peace,” as a forerunner of the idea of a
telos in history and a developmental trajectory towards the establishment of peace on
earth both predates and foreshadows the Hegelian concept of history. Yet, Arendt
approaches Kant‟s philosophy with a sympathetic outlook. While she acknowledges the
place that the idea of progress occupies in Kant‟s writings, she also finds something
1 Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books,
1977), 83.
229
salvageable in Kant‟s political philosophy. What does Arendt find so compelling in
Kant‟s philosophy?
2. The Role of History in Kant’s Writings according to Arendt
I argue in this chapter that Arendt‟s critical engagement with Kant particularly up
until the Lectures in on Kant’s Political Philosophy is characterized in large part by a
lack of attention to the problem of history in Kant‟s philosophy. Given her concern with
the problem of history in Western tradition and her criticism of Hegel and Marx for
favoring history over a robust political philosophy of the human realm, i.e. a theory
action, Arendt‟s lack of attention to the importance of history in Kant‟s writings is
startling.
One possible answer to this quandary would be to point out that unlike Hegel
history was never the main concern of Kant. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant
examined the foundation of ethics, and the Critique of Pure Reason dealt with the
foundations of knowledge. The intellectual contribution of Kant to the Western political
thought is neatly summed up by the extensive ground these two works cover: “The
intelligible world under universal moral law and the world of nature under universal
causal law seem the upper and nether millstones of this philosophy, between which all
life would be crushed out of history.”2
Because of this relatively less significant place that history takes up in Kant‟s
work and the scattered timing of Kant‟s articles on history within his body of thought,
commentators of Kant perceive his writings on the philosophy of history as tangential,
2 L.W. Beck, introduction to On History, by Kant, ed. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), vii.
230
out of his “official philosophy,” “hardly more than expressions of Kant‟s personal
interest in historical narratives and his enthusiasm for freedom of the press, freedom of
religion, peace among nations and republican government.”3 Additionally the short
articles, which make up the body of Kant‟s writings on history and the quality of those
writings, aggravate the problem. Despland argues for example that the writings have a
rare quality of intellectual concern and persuasiveness: “their brilliance, however, may
appear to be boldness and their eloquence may seem to imply lack of philosophic care.”4
The result is a severe lack of interest in philosophy of history in Kantian scholarship. It
may be argued then, that Arendt‟s analysis suffered from a similar deficit.
One rare moment in Arendt‟s writings, when she considers the role of history in
Kant‟s philosophy, can be interpreted precisely in this light. At the beginning of the
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt justifies her reading of Kant‟s political
philosophy by way of the Third Critique with the well-known and controversial claim
that Kant “never wrote a political philosophy.”5 Arendt wants to derive a political
3 Ibid. Even the best commentators of Kant are not immune to this criticism. Yirmiahu Yovel, author of one
of the best books on Kant‟s philosophy of history chooses to reconstruct Kant‟s concept of history from his
theory of the highest good and God. While Yovel believes (and convincingly demonstrates) that Kant has a
distinct (if not full-fledged) theory of philosophy of history, he argues that Kant‟s political essays are
peripheral to the theory and can only be reconciled with it by showing that they belong to Kant‟s precritical
thinking (not chronologically but in terms of the method employed). Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the
Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
4 Despland, Michael, Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queen‟s University Press, 1973), 9.
5 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 7. The critiques of Kant as well as Arendt have demonstrated that this claim is not
tenable.
231
philosophy (and one that is not necessarily entirely Kant‟s) from The Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, and therefore wants to convince the reader that Kant did not actually
write a political philosophy. She argues therefore that Kant‟s writings on history are
either ironical (“Perpetual Peace”), or too boring and pedantic (“The Doctrine of Right”)
or not sophisticated enough in quality and depth to be taken seriously to make up Kant‟s
political philosophy.
In considering objections to her choice of topic, i.e. her insistence on
concentrating on Kant‟s aesthetic judgment as a way to understand his political
philosophy, Arendt briefly considers Kant‟s writings on history. If you examine, Arendt
tells us, Kant‟s writings which are touted as political, i.e. the writings collected under the
title “On History” by L.W. Beck, a selection which includes writings such as “What is
Enlightenment?,” “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” and
“Perpetual Peace,” “it looks almost as though Kant, like so many after him, had
substituted a philosophy of history for a political philosophy.”6 “Substituting a
philosophy of history for a bona fide political theory” is the familiar charge that Arendt
brings against the tradition of Western philosophy, particularly against Hegel and Marx.
This critique turns on the insufficient attention that these thinkers paid to the realm of
politics and political action because of their particular understanding of history and
progress. So with this comment, does Arendt bring the question of history to the forefront
of her critique of Kant? Is her critique finally more attuned to the importance of history in
Kant‟s writings?
6 Arendt, 1982, 8.
232
The answer is no. In the second part of the very quote above, Arendt qualifies the
role of history in Kant‟s writings by arguing that “Kant‟s concept of history, though quite
important in its own right, is not central to his philosophy.”7 She goes on to argue that if
we wanted to learn about history, we would turn to Vico and Hegel and Marx, but not to
Kant.
The remainder of Arendt‟s reflections on Kant gives us a brief overview of the
concept of history in Kant as Arendt understood it: History, in Kant‟s philosophy, is a
part of the nature and the historical subject is the human species. The subject matter of
history is not the individual stories of human beings, good or evil deeds, but the
development of the human species through generations. History is the process by which
“all the seeds planted in it by the Nature can fully develop and in which the destiny of the
race can be fulfilled on earth.”8 The world history is a progressive development, the
product of which is culture, freedom or sociability.9
This brief overview by Arendt betrays her in two interconnected ways. First, it
reveals the fact that, despite Arendt‟s claims to the contrary, there is an intimate
7 Ibid.
8 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History” as quoted in Arendt, 1982, 8.
9 In Critique of Judgment [§83], Kant talks about culture as the end product of human progress. Kant,
Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York : Hafner Press, 1951), 281. In “Conjectures on the
Beginning of Human History” Kant mentions the passage from the tutelage of reason to the state of
freedom and finally sociability as the highest end intended for men. Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning of
Human History” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991a).
233
connection between Kant‟s philosophy of history and his main body of work. 10 In his
writings on the philosophy of history, all strands of Kant‟s work, morality, politics and
history came together in the doctrine of republican government and the advance of
mankind from a state of barbarism to perpetual peace, which is a moral obligation. The
ultimate result of history is mankind. Second, Kant‟s concept of history displays many of
the similar characteristics of the concepts of history that Arendt is critical of. Like Hegel
and Marx, Kant believes in progress as a concrete and discernible development in history,
made possible by human reason. The employment of human reason in the conquest of
nature results in the improvement of human traditions and institutions, advancement of
knowledge and the increased happiness of mankind.11
Arendt expands on Kant‟s concept of history, when she examines Jasper‟s
concept of world citizenship.12 She looks at Kant‟s concept of mankind and Hegel‟s
notion of world history as the traditional background of Jasper‟s cosmopolitan world
view. Throughout this discussion, she reasserts her position that according to Kant,
history is a process, the ultimate result of which is the mankind. If we were to examine
the unconnected and unpredictable actions of men and their often catastrophic
10 This reading of Kant‟s philosophy gained acceptance in the second part of the 20th century, with
excellent contributions to the subject first by William Beck‟s edited volume of Kant‟s writings on history
(1963) and later by Despland (1973), Yovel (1980) and William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
11 Kant, “Idea for Universal History” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991b). This point will be elaborated further in the next section.
12 Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace
& World, 1968a), 91.
234
consequences, we would observe that there is little hope for these actions to bring about a
politically unified community which respects and fosters individual autonomy. “Men‟s
actions on the great world stage… in the large [seems] woven together from folly,
childish vanity, often from childish malice and destructiveness,” Arendt quotes from
Kant.13 This creates the sense of “melancholic haphazardness” which permeates Kant‟s
philosophy. According to Kant, to overcome this melancholic haphazardness and find
meaning in the realm of human affairs is possible only if we conceive of a secret force
that would reunite the unpredictable, haphazard actions of individuals in a greater
scheme. Ironically, Arendt accepts in this very brief discussion that it was Kant and not
Hegel, who first conceived of the cunning of history. The secret force of history, while on
the one hand providing a viable solution to the problem of human action, presents a
difficult problem from the viewpoint of autonomy. As Arendt has previously shown in
the case of Marx and Hegel, the unreserved belief in development of human race and
progress, diminishes the significance of the singular/individual/particular. Therefore,
based on Arendt‟s own evaluation of Kant‟s philosophy of history alone, the reader
would expect Arendt to take a more critical stance against Kant‟s writings.
So why is it that the critique of progress does not take the enter stage of Arendt‟s
study of Kant? Or rather, what are the other qualities of Kant‟s writings that allowed
Arendt neglect this aspect of Kant‟s philosophy?
My aim in this chapter is to prove that in Kant‟s writings on aesthetic judgment,
Arendt finds a valuable tool to resist the traditional understanding of history in Western
philosophy. The modern concept of history, which Arendt finds responsible for
13 Ibid.
235
subverting the true value of political actions and hence responsibility and judgment in
political life, is similarly present in Kant. But Kant‟s aesthetic judgment, especially the
concept of common sense, which Arendt reformulates as a political theory, allows Arendt
to formulate a conception of the political realm that is sensitive on the one hand to a
modern conception agency and autonomy and other hand to sociability, communication
and the necessity of sharing the world in common with others.
With this aim in mind, in the next part of this chapter I discuss briefly Kant‟s
notion of history. I demonstrate that Kant has a well-articulated and central concept of
history, even though he does not completely surrender his political theory to a philosophy
of history. The findings of this first section stand in sharp contrast to Arendt‟s position,
which de-emphasizes the role of history in Kant‟s writings. In the remainder of the
chapter, therefore, I turn to Arendt‟s examination of Kant and show the different ways in
which Kant‟s writings seem appealing to Arendt. I conclude this examination with
reflections on “common sense.”
3. Reason in History
The most significant contribution of 18th century to the Enlightenment is perhaps
the notion that there is a systematic ground, a rational import to history. While we
observe this view reach its pinnacle in Hegel with the “becoming of reason,” i.e. growth
as a constitutive character of both human reason and history, we can detect the
beginnings of this alternative view in Kant‟s philosophy. Much like other Enlightenment
thinkers‟, Kant‟s philosophy of history struggles with the idea of progress and the
development of human race in history.
236
There are two ways in which reason plays a role in Kant‟s philosophy of history.
First is the “history of reason becoming known and explicated to himself.”14 This is the
process by which human reason develops, realizes and explicates its own concepts and
principles to itself. This is the ground of scientific knowledge and advancement. The
second way in which reason plays a role in history is “the history of reason shaping the
world.”15 It involves the gradual organization of human world in accordance with reason.
The world of actual appearance is brought together in sync with the moral demands of
reason by shaping the political and cultural world. Under this second point, Kant argues
for a hidden design, a “cunning of nature,” which through on the one hand self interested
action of individuals, on the other hand wars and violence, serve the end of realization of
freedom and reason. For the purposes of this chapter, we will concern ourselves with the
second issue.
Since we started by clarifying Kant‟s terminology, let us also consider the term
“history.” Kant uses the term in two different senses.16 The first meaning of the term
refers to the totality of empirical events and occurrences that are born out of human will
and freedom. The second meaning of history refers to the process in which the human
beings as a species develop and realize their full potential. These two meanings are
interconnected in that the events in history fit together in accordance with the teleological
structure of the process of history.
14 Yovel, 1980, 6.
15 Ibid.
16 Again, I follow Yovel‟s definition. Yovel, 1980, 144.
237
The main contention of this section, following Despland‟s interpretation of Kant‟s
philosophy of history, is that Kant‟s writings on history add up to a full-fledged
philosophy of history rather than a set of unexamined notions and beliefs.17 The
underlying tenet of his philosophy of history is a firm belief in the purposefulness of
natural world and history that remained with Kant his whole life. While his opinions have
been reorganized, clarified and rearticulated in the face of his continuous observations on
the apparent meaninglessness of human affairs, the belief in purposiveness of the
universe (in evolving form) consistently formed the background of Kant‟s political
philosophy.
Kant‟s The General History of Nature and Theory of Heavens announces his view
of cosmos as teleologically organized and operating according to mechanical laws as
early as 1755. Yet, Kant‟s views on history are expressed in a systematic manner for the
first time in Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). This
article attempts to reconcile the concept of human freedom (apparent in the seemingly
disparate and purposeless actions of human beings) and reason in history (which
underlies these disparate actions and orients the development of human race toward an
end).
The Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View begins with
a definition of Kantian understanding of history. History is the narration of the freedom
of the will and its appearances, which are the human actions. From the viewpoint of the
philosopher, history poses the following question: Is there are a “regular progression” in
“the action of individuals as confused and fortuitous” as they may appear? If the human
17 Despland, 1973, 18.
238
will is considered “on a larger scale,” is it possible to detect that the history of the species
is steadily advancing toward the development of the human capacities?18
The drama of human life, according to Kant, is such that “despite the apparent
wisdom of individual actions here and there, everything as a whole is made up of folly
and childish vanity, and often of childish malice and destructiveness.”19 The collective
actions of men do not seem to have a rational purpose. But behind the “history of
creatures who act without a plan of their own,” the philosopher can discover a guiding
principle in history.20
While the article lays out nine propositions to that end, it would suffice to cite the
first three:21
1. All natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be
developed completely and in conformity with their end.
This is the guiding principle of reason. Without it, the history would be
an aimless, random process.
2. In man (as the only rational creature on earth), those natural capacities
which are directed towards the use of his reason are such that they could be
fully developed only in the species, but not in the individual.
Under this principle Kant explains what he means by reason. It is “a
faculty which enables that [a] creature to extend far beyond the limits of
18 Kant, 1991b, 41.
19 Ibid., 42.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 42-44.
239
natural instinct the rule and intentions it follows in using its various
powers.”22 Since the number of projects that man can undertake by
using his reason is limitless and the use of reason requires “trial,
practice and instruction,” the life of a single individual being is not long
enough to accommodate the full course of time necessary for reason to
come to full fruition. It would be required therefore to take into account
a succession of generations, even the whole life course of the species.
3. Nature has willed that man should produce entirely his own initiative which
goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he
should not partake of any other happiness or perfection than that which he
has procured for himself without instinct and by his own reason.
Kant observes that the nature has endowed men with reason and free
will. This means, for Kant, “everything had to be entirely of his own
making.”23 From their very basic needs such as alimentation, clothing
and shelter to the more advanced needs that man‟s existence requires
such as security, defense and institutions of a civil society, men would
need to create everything from scratch. But throughout this process, he
can feel confident and proud in his accomplishments. Kant draws from
this observation the conclusion that there is necessarily (but not
inevitably) a development over the course of human history. This fact is
disconcerting for two obvious reasons: First, while the later generations
22 Ibid., 42.
23 Ibid., 43.
240
can enjoy the fruits of development, “the earlier generations seem to
perform their laborious task only for the sake of later ones” and second
“only the later generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit
the building on which a whole series of their forefathers (admittedly,
without any conscious intention) had worked without themselves being
able to share in the happiness they were preparing.” 24
Kant‟s conclusions from the theses on universal history are pretty straightforward: Even
though we may be too “short-sighted” to perceive it, there is a hidden plan that gives
meaning to the otherwise haphazard human actions. These actions conform to a larger
system, which constitutes the nature‟s scheme for humankind.25
A second article of interest on the subject of Kant‟s philosophy of history is On
the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,”
(1793). In the third section of this article, Kant takes up the relationship of theory to
practice from a cosmopolitan point of view. The aim of this section is to refute
24Ibid., 44.
25 In the same year as “The Idea for a Universal History,” Kant also published “What is Enlightenment?,”
in which he considered the current stage of our existence in the grand plan of history. “If it is now asked
whether we at present live in an enlightened age,” Kant observed, “the answer is: No, but we do live in an
age of Enlightenment. As things are at present, we still have a long way to go before en as a whole can be
in a position (or can even be put into a position) of using their own understanding confidently and well in
religions matters, without outside guidance. But we do have distinct indication that the way is now being
cleared for them to work freely in this direction, and that the obstacles to universal enlightenment, to man‟s
emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, are gradually becoming fewer. In this respect our age is the
age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick.” Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Political Writings, ed.
Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991c), 58.
241
Mendelssohn‟s statement that the humankind on earth does not progress forward,
particularly in terms of his moral existence. Instead, Mendelssohn argues that “we see the
human race as a whole moving slowly back and forth, and whenever it takes a few steps
forward, it soon relapses twice as quickly into its former state.”26
Kant decisively disagrees with Mendelssohn. According to Kant, the human
species is progressing according to its natural purpose both in the cultural realm and with
regards to the moral end of his existence. He agrees with Mendelssohn that the progress
might appear interrupted at times (hence the back and forth), but it is not completely
broken off. Kant bases this argument on the moral duty to do something useful for the
common good. Every individual has an “inborn duty of influencing posterity in such a
way that it will make constant progress … and that this duty may be rightfully handed
down from one member of the series to the next.” 27
A further point that Kant articulates in this article (and has been relevant in the
Arendt‟s analysis of Hegel and Marx) is the role of agency. Consider the following
passage:
If we now ask what means there are of maintaining and indeed accelerating
towards a better state, we soon realize that the success of this immeasurably long
undertaking will depend not so much upon what we do … and upon what methods
we use to further it; it will rather depend upon what human nature may do in and
26 Mendelssohn, quoted in Kant, “Theory and Practice” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991d), 87.
27 Kant, 1991d, 88.
242
through us, to compel us to follow a course we would not readily adopt by choice.
We must look to nature alone; or rather to providence… for a successful outcome
whish first affect the whole and then the individual parts.28
Kant emphasizes here the inevitably incomplete plans and acts of individuals. The life
span of any single individual is too short to encompass the whole plan the nature has in
store for us. To understand this plan, we need to concentrate instead on the bigger picture,
this course that the nature compels us to follow. This course is a cosmopolitan civil
constitution.
The sum of these reflections is the idea of purposiveness in history. As Despland
argues these reflections reveal the influence of Newtonian science on Kant‟s political
philosophy.29 While Kant found Newtonian physics extremely important in that it
redefined nature as a system of causal relations, he believed that the Newtonian
understanding of nature failed to capture the totality of our knowledge of the world. But
even though Kant believed that a metaphysical consideration of Nature was necessary, he
distanced himself from the romantic school of thought (beginning with Herder and
culminating in Hegel).30 While the interest in the purposeful plan of Nature preoccupied
28 Kant, 1991d, 90.
29 Despland, 1973, 24-26.
30 See Kant‟s sympathetic reviews of Herder‟s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Kant
ends his review of the first installment of Herder‟s work with the following remarks: “This attempt is a
bold one…even if it does not entirely succeed in practice. But it is all the more essential that in the next
installment of his work, in which he will have firm ground beneath his feet, our resourceful author should
curb his lively genius somewhat, and that philosophy, which is more concerned with pruning luxuriant
growths that propagating them should guide him towards the completion of this enterprise. It should do so
243
him, he believed that this purpose was dictated to human beings only by the practical
reason (instead of being grounded in spiritual experience as Herder would argue). Kant‟s
is therefore a particular brand of philosophy of history which aimed to reconcile reason in
history with human freedom. Before concluding this section, this points needs to be
further emphasized in order to do justice to the theory and separate it from Hegel‟s
philosophy of history.
While the Nature has a purpose, it is not a process that is independent of human
reason and consciousness. The plan of Nature inheres in human reason but it is ultimately
an innovative power, which needs to be exercised by human beings within a meaningful
process that realizes the goal of history. As the second thesis of The Idea for a Universal
History emphasizes, the very idea of progress represents at the same time the limitation
of man‟s capacities. There is no short cut to progress except for the one that man
develops step-by-step out of the full maturation of his faculties, which can only come to
full fruition throughout the course of the development of human species as a whole.
However, unlike Hegel‟s Absolute Spirit, human collectivity cannot be personified with a
single consciousness.31
not through hints but through precise concept, not through laws based on conjecture but through less
derived from observation, not by means of an imagination inspired by metaphysics or emotions, but by
means of a reason which, while committed to broad objectives, exercises caution in pursuing them.” Kant,
“Reviews of Herder‟s Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind” ” in Political Writings, ed. Hans
Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991e), 211.
31 Yovel, 1980, 144. This point is related to Arendt‟s reading of Kant‟s critique of judgment as we will
explore in detail below.
244
We have now established that Kant has a well-articulated and central concept of
history, which emphasizes the grand plan of Nature for human species. Given Arendt‟s
criticism of Hegelian and Marxist theories of history, Arendt‟s approach to Kant, which
de-emphasizes the role of history, presents a quandary. In the second part of the chapter,
therefore, I turn to Arendt‟s examination in Kant. What does Arendt find so compelling
in Kant‟s philosophy? How can her lack of attention to Kant‟s philosophy of history be
justified? There are several answers already articulated in Arendt scholarship that try to
understand the role and influence of Kant‟s philosophy of Arendt. Let us start with Kant
as the quintessential philosopher of the public realm as advanced by Margaret Canovan.32
4. Kant as the Quintessential Philosopher?
Throughout this project, I established that the relationship between theory and
practice, thought and action, philosophy and politics stands at the center of Arendt‟s
political philosophy. Arendt‟s concern with the relationship between politics and
philosophy was influenced as much by her analysis of totalitarianism as her personal
experience of it. Arendt was shocked by the experience of Nazism, which prompted her
to devote herself briefly to active engagement with politics, particularly of the Jewish
community. However, one of the most influential experiences in Arendt‟s life in this
regard was the example of Heidegger, Arendt‟s former teacher, who publicly allied
himself with the Nazis. The problem for Arendt was beyond the affinity of Heidegger‟s
philosophy with a totalitarian political ideology. It brought to the forefront the question of
32 Canovan, Margaret, “Socrates of Heidegger” in Social Research, vol.57, no 1.
245
a fundamental incompatibility between politics and philosophy, or more precisely a
fundamental hostility to politics and political life on behalf of philosophy.
As Canovan brilliantly constructs, Arendt‟s thought on the subject waver between
two opposite positions.33 The first polar end of her conclusions on the relationship
between philosophy and politics is represented by the figures of Plato and Heidegger.
Plato and Heidegger illustrate the inherently solitary and anti-political nature of
philosophy, which inclines toward alliance with coercion and tyranny. The other,
opposite end of Arendt‟s insights refer to Socrates and Jaspers, which signify the nature
of philosophy that lends itself to communication with others and harmonious coexistence
with political life. Ultimately, Arendt never decides in favor of one position
over the other, leaving the problem rather unresolved.
Within the context of the relationship between politics and philosophy, “Truth and
Politics,” an article that Arendt had written in response to the controversy created by her
Eichmann book, occupies a special place.34 In this article, Arendt takes up the historical
conflict between truth and politics. She makes the by-now familiar argument that the
clash between truth and politics arises from the diametrically opposed way of life of the
philosopher and the citizen. I have previously examined in detail Arendt‟s argument in
this regard, 35 according to which the volatile and flimsy realm of human affairs stands in
sharp contrast to the philosophical activity of reflection. The noteworthy difference is
that in this case, Arendt associates philosophy with truth and politics with opinion. The
33 Canovan, 1990, 150.
34 Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977a).
35 Chapter 3, section 5.
246
philosopher reflects on the nature of eternal ideas and from these ideas derives the
organizational principle of the human societies, the “truth.” The citizens, in contrast,
engage in “opinions” about the realm of action and human affairs, which are constantly
changing and in flux. In contrast to the truth of philosophical reflection, “opinions” might
seem as illusions, trivial occupations.
Arendt emphasizes in contrast, the political aspect and hence the power of
opinion. When she claims that not truth but opinion belongs in politics, she agrees with
James Madison, who declared that “all governments rest on opinion.” There are two sides
to argument. First, like Madison argued, the power of political opinion implies that no
ruler, even the most autocratic one, can hope to come to power or retain it without the
support of like-minded individuals. Second, arguing that there are absolute truths in the
realm of human affairs, which stand in no need of justification or support from opinions,
goes against the very foundation of politics.36
Arendt traces back this conflict between truth and opinion to Plato, for whom this
dichotomy was central. More importantly, it was clear to Plato which of the two concepts
was more desirable in human life. Whereas Plato thought that philosophical truth was to
be communicated in the form of “dialogue,” which corresponded to the inherent nature of
the truth, he called the process of persuasion by which the multitudes were led to change
their beliefs “rhetoric” and the agent, who persuaded them, “the demagogue.”37 Similarly,
Hobbes still differentiated between “solid reasoning “and “powerful eloquence,” two
36 Arendt, 1977a, .233.
37 Ibid.
247
“contrary faculties.”38 Whereas the former depends upon the principles of truth, the
second corresponds to opinions, passions and interest of man, “which are different and
mutable.”39
Finally, Arendt observes that in the age of Enlightenment the conflict between
truth and opinion evaporated. Perhaps more accurately, while the conflict survives, the
categories have completely shifted. Now truth is perceived to be hostile to the realm of
politics as opposed to opinion. For Arendt, the best example of this position is Lessing,
who declared: “Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended
onto God.” 40 In pre-modern philosophy, Arendt argues, Lessing‟s saying would have
signified man‟s incapacity to know the truth and hence the necessity to defer ultimate
judgment in this regard to God. In contrast, for Lessing, this declaration assumed the
form of celebration of this inability: “Let us thank God that we don‟t know the truth.”41
The impossibility of knowing the absolute truth opens up the way to interaction and
discussion among fellow human beings. For Lessing, “the insight that for men, living in
company, the inexhaustible richness of human discourse is infinitely more significant and
meaningful than one Truth could ever be.”42
38 Hobbes, Leviathan , ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 483.
39 Ibid.
40 “Sage jeder, was ihm Wahrheit duenkt, und die Wahrheit selbst sei Gott empfohlen.” Arendt‟s
translation. Arendt, 1977a, 233 and also Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about
Lessing” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968b), 31.
41 Arendt, 1977a, 234.
42 Arendt, 1977a, 234.
248
Lessing is an important figure for Arendt. His attention to the common world,
communication between human beings presents many affinities with Arendt‟s own
thinking. In order to illustrate both the difference between opinion and truth and the
appeal of Kant‟s political theory to Arendt, I would like to briefly consider Arendt‟s
reflections on Lessing.
The lecture that Arendt delivered on the occasion of receiving the Lessing Prize
from the city of Hamburg features as the first essay in her “Men in Dark Times.” In this
book, Arendt employs the expression “dark times” in a particular sense, which is not
identical with the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century.43 “Dark Times” are
neither limited to a specific period of history or a particular geography and nor are they
unfortunately rare in history. They are challenging times for the humankind, in which
human beings find themselves in need of guidance in terms of morally and politically
right course of action. In such times we can find direction in the actions of men and
women, who in “their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances
and shed over the time span that was given them on earth.”44
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is obviously such a figure for Arendt. What Arendt
finds attractive in Lessing‟s philosophy in the first place is his relation to the world, that
“irreplaceable in-between,” which forms the relationships between the individual and his
fellow men.45 Even though Lessing, like Goethe, considered the true mark of genius the
harmony with the world “that happy, natural concord,” which comes as a result of both
43 “„In dark times‟ - in finsteren Zeiten – was the poet Bertolt Brecht‟s formulation.” Elisabeth Young-
Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2006), 6.
44 Hannah Arendt, Preface to Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968c), ix.
45 Arendt, 1968b, 4.
249
merit and good fortune, he never achieved this harmony himself. Arendt believes that
“Lessing never felt at home in this world as it then existed and probably never wanted
to.”46 Yet, Lessing never lost the relationship to the world; he committed himself to the
value of relationships between men. His worldview was characterized by “a passionate
openness to the world and love of it.”47
Lessing, I believe, is the quintessential free thinker for Arendt. Lessing promotes
critical thinking, which Arendt describes as “always taking side for the world‟s sake,
understanding and judging everything in terms of his position in the world at any given
time.”48 Such a mentality, Arendt claims, can never give rise to a totalitarian viewpoint.
Here, Arendt‟s reflections remind us of her critique of totalitarian ideology.49 Arendt
argued that totalitarian ideology had three characteristics: Ideology aims at total
explanation of past, present and future. It starts from a premise, which is accepted
without criticism or further reflection, and deduces everything from this initial premise in
accordance with its own closed logic. And finally for this reason, it is impervious to
reality. The process of “pseudo-scientific” logical reasoning of ideology cannot be
interrupted by new ideas, events or experiences.50 Such a definite world view, “once
adopted, is immune to further experiences in the world because it has hitched itself firmly
46 Ibid., 6.
47 Ibid.,
48 Ibid., 7.
49 See chapter 1.
50 Arendt, “Ideology and Totalitarian Terror” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, New York:
Harcourt Brace & Co, 1966).
250
to one possible perspective.”51 Arendt believes that this is the legacy of thinking and
political thought we have inherited from the nineteenth century philosophies of history
and later the pseudo-logic of totalitarian ideology. We are so used to using “history” or
“pseudo-logic” as “crutches” that we are hard pressed to understand Lessing‟s principle
of independent thinking.
For Lessing, this type of independent thinking can be fostered in political
communities characterized by a form of political friendship, which puts demands on the
individuals to share the world with their fellow human beings. Human beings relate to
one another through discourse, and by way of this communication, turn their common
world into “humane world.” The basis of human world, our political friendship, is to be
able to relate to one another through discussion. In this context, the relationship between
truth and opinion plays an important role in Lessing‟s thought. He considered freedom of
opinion the most precious of human freedoms and regarded any attempt “to dominate
thinking by reasoning and sophistries” as tyranny.52 He refused to subscribe to any truth
and to accept their validity in the public realm.
In order to illustrate this point, Arendt refers to Lessing‟s parable of the three
rings in Nathan the Wise.53 Upon being prompted by Saladin to reveal the true religion,
Nathan recounts the story of a man who had a priceless ring with magic powers that
brings the wearer love and grace with God and man. The man promised separately to
51 Arendt, 1968b, 8.
52 Ibid. Notice how Arendt classifies reasoning together with sophistry as an obstacle to thinking.
Remember that she is referring to a particular type of reasoning, the pseudo-logical reasoning that starts
from a given axiom and proceeds according to its own internal logic.
53 A parable that Lessing accepts is adopted from Boccaccio‟s Decameron.
251
each of his three sons that he would receive the ring upon his father‟s death, because he is
the favorite son and most worthy of the ring. On his deathbed, the man cannot bring
himself to choose among his sons and cause pain to the two others. Instead, he
commissions a jeweler to make two copies of the original ring, which even the jeweler
himself cannot tell apart from the original. He bequeaths each son a ring, gives him their
blessing and passes away. The three sons, each trusted with a ring, claim to rule the
household, fight among them and accuse one another of cheating. Finally they resort to
the opinion of a judge to resolve the matter. Instead of a verdict, the judge gives them a
counsel: “Your father loved every one of you and could not bear to see only one ring rule
the house. So love your ring as the one and true ring but learn from your father‟s example
of unprejudiced affection.”54
According to Arendt‟s interpretation of this parable, Lessing is content that the
genuine ring has been lost (and is even hesitant to concede that it ever existed). The
existence of one single truth puts an end to discussion and the political community that it
creates. The most detrimental thing to this common world comes from those “who wish
to subject all men‟s ways of thinking to the yoke of their own.”55
Margaret Canovan, in examining Arendt‟s opinions on the role of philosopher and
the relationship between politics and philosophy, makes the following observation that
Arendt‟s account of Lessing is very reminiscent of her analysis of Kant – another free
thinker and a contemporary of Lessing.56 Like Lessing, Kant‟s philosophy has a political
54 Lessing, “ Nathan The Wise” in Lacoon. Nathan The Wise. Minna Von Barnhelm. (London: J.M.Dent,
1930), 166-170
55 Arendt, 1968b, 26.
56 Canovan, 19990, 160.
252
conception of the public that centers on the idea of communication with others and
exchange of opinions. Canovan goes on to argue that there is one important difference:
while Kant was a philosopher, Lessing was not. He was a writer and Enlightenment
humanist. So when it comes to the possibility of philosophy in harmony with free
politics, Arendt naturally finds the model philosopher in Kant and not Lessing.
Canovan is right to point out that Arendt commands Kant‟s philosophy for all the
aforementioned characteristics. Moreover, Arendt specifically commends Kant for not
falling into the familiar trappings of traditional philosophy:
The expression “political philosophy,” which I avoid is extremely burdened by
tradition. When I talk about these things, academically or non-academically, I
always mention that there is a vital tension between philosophy and politics. That
is between man as a thinking being and man as an acting being. There is a kind of
enmity against all politics in most philosophers, with very few exceptions. Kant is
an exception.57
While it is clear from this observation that Kant‟s political philosophy is noteworthy for
Arendt in terms of the attention it pays to the acting being, Canovan misses one important
point that for Arendt distinguishes Kant from Lessing. Despite the similarities between
Lessing and Kant with regards to the value of communication and openness in society,
57 Hannah Arendt, “„What Remains? The Language Remains‟”: A Conversation with Günter Gaus” in The
Portable Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books; 2000), 5.
253
they differ in their opinions with regards to the necessity of sacrificing the truth for the
benefit of the humanity.58
The limit of human understanding and reason was probably the most important
object of Kant‟s philosophy. Kant concluded that due to the limits of human reason, there
is no way for human beings to know the absolute truth. But, Arendt argues, if truth did
exist, Kant would be unwilling to sacrifice the truth for the sake of discourse among men,
i.e. what constitutes our humanity as we know it. In order to argue this point, Arendt
refers to another context in which Kant values the absolute above any other value,
namely the categorical imperative. When it comes to the principles of human action, for
Kant, categorical imperative by its very nature is the regulating principle of all human
action and “cannot be infringed even for the sake of humanity in every sense of that
word.”59 The categorical imperative, according to Arendt, is at odds with the realm of
human action because its absolute nature clashes with the relativity of human affairs.
While Arendt does not join the critics of Kant‟s moral rigorism, who declare it to be
inhuman and unmerciful, she argues without hesitation that Kant‟s moral philosophy goes
against the human condition. “It is as though,” Arendt concludes, “he who had so
inexorably pointed out man‟s cognitive limits could not bear to think that in action, too,
man cannot behave like a god.”60
Note that Arendt does not completely denounce Kant‟s moral philosophy. When it
comes to the question of responsibility and judgment for example, she reminds us of a
58 Arendt, 1958b, 26.
59 Ibid., .27.
60 Ibid.
254
familiar argument: When confronted with two evils, choosing the lesser evil is the
responsible choice whereas refusing to choose altogether is irresponsible. The proponents
of this argument claim that politics is a different kind of animal, that it is necessary to
dirty one‟s hands if you want to play the game of politics, and that those who denounce
this argument are germ-proof moralists. Arendt reminds us that it was not politics or
political philosophy that denounced any compromise with the evil but religion. A notable
exception to this generalization is Kant, whose categorical imperative is the quintessential
example of this viewpoint. As a consequence, he was subjected to the critique of moral
rigorism. The interesting aspect of this discussion is that once again instead of siding with
critiques of Kant, Arendt notes the weakness of this argument. Arendt thinks that politics
is a different realm with its own set of rules, and hence the rigidity of Kant‟s categorical
imperative may clash with the human condition. Yet, those who advocate choosing the
lesser of the two evils “forget quickly that they chose evil.”61 If the argument of political
pragmatism is to become a pretext for committing ill-willed actions in the realm of
politics, then we might as well opt for a philosophy that denounces it in the first place.
This sentiment is echoed once again by Arendt in The Human Condition, where she
emphasizes Kant‟s motivations in making this argument.62 Kant realized the wide-spread
belief in the means-ends category in all aspects of our social, political and economic life.
His aim was to ban it from the field of political action.63
61 Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed.
Jerome Kohn, (New York : Schocken Books, 2003), 36.
62 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 155-156.
63 George Kateb presents a detailed analysis of Arendt‟s critique of the idea of “necessary evil.” Arendt‟s
position is that necessary evil in politics is still evil and one should not engage in this kind of calculation
255
In the light of this discussion, it would be wrong to conclude, as Canovan did, that
Kant was the model philosopher, who illustrated the possibility of a philosophy
harmonious with politics. Kant‟s moral philosophy leaves Arendt with much to be
desired. Yet, in Kant‟s political philosophy Arendt finds a fruitful conception of
sociability and communication that she appropriates for her conception of the political
realm.
Now, going back to the discussion on truth and opinion we can delineate the
outline of Kant‟s theory of the political realm that appeals to Arendt. Arendt argues that
political thought is representative. In other words, it is not akin to truth, which the
philosopher brings back from his journey into the sky of ideas and sets as the standard of
human behavior. The political opinion is the result of a process that takes into account the
standpoint of others. The freedom of speech, the ability to communicate one‟s opinion to
his fellow human beings is the fundamental condition of freedom: “we think, as it were,
in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts as they communicate
theirs to us.”64 Let us know consider this below.
under any circumstances. This position fails to give enough consideration to the fact that ideally these kind
of calculations come with reluctance and regret. However, Arendt is right in that try, “we can never be
entirely persuaded or persuasive to others that the evil we do is strictly necessary and actually lesser, not
even when we defeat aggressors or punish criminals.” Kateb, George. “Arendt‟s Treatment of Evil and
Morality” in Social Research 74, no 3 (2007), 846. I also think that this argument can easily lend itself to
political manipulation. It can be used as a cover-up for morally suspicious intents and actions.
64 Arendt, 1977a, 234-35.
256
5. The Relationship between Thinking and Judging
In her “Postscriptum” to Thinking, Arendt compares the activity of thinking with
the two other activities of the mind, willing and judging. This comparison reveals an
obvious difference with respect to the subject matter of the three activities. Whereas the
activities of willing and judging deal with the particulars and are closer to the world of
appearances and human experience, the thinking activity is concerned with the invisible,
general ideas. The thinking activity, therefore, always presents a problem. How can we
account for the quest for meaning that the thinking activity pursues when it is apparent
that thinking produces no practical end result, no knowledge, in other words, nothing to
show for the time and energy spent on it? Thinking is “impractical and useless,” so how
do we justify thinking?
One tempting answer is to respond that thinking is indispensable to judging.
Thinking helps us evaluate “what is no more”, i.e. the past that is subject to judgment.
Even though this answer may seem attractive from the viewpoint of thinking by making it
useful and practical for the world of human affairs, it presents a different problem from
viewpoint of judgment. It makes judgment dependant on thinking by arguing that
thinking prepares the ground for judgment. Judgment is a completely separate activity
from thinking. It does not arrive at its conclusions by deduction or induction.65 Instead,
65 Arendt adds: “In short, they have nothing in common with logical operations – as when we say: All men
are mortal, Socrates is a man, hence Socrates is mortal.” Note that Arendt is using the same language as in
the Origins of Totalitarianism. The faculty of judgment thereby is posited against “pseudo-scientific”
logicality of the totalitarian ideologies. On the other hand, it is also counterpoised against Kantian
understanding of judgment, which subsumes judgment to the regulative ideas. Arendt, 1982, 4, emphasis
mine.
257
judgment integrates the solitary thinker back into the world of appearances. It presents a
new “gift” to the thinking ego, which is used to wandering among the general and
abstract world of ideas, to deal with the particulars of the human experience.
For Arendt, this problem of judgment sits at the center of the relationship between
theory and practice. The tradition of philosophy starting with Hegel subsumed the
question of the particular under a philosophy of history, whereby the progress of the
human race and the realization of freedom throughout this process accounted for if not
justified a lack of attention to the realm of human affairs. Now, Arendt‟s enterprise is to
find for judgment its own “modus operandi,” its own way of proceeding. The most
controversial part of her enterprise is the fact that she makes use of Kant, but not his
theory judgment that she deems is ultimately unhelpful but rather Kant‟s third Critique,
the aesthetic judgment.
I would like to concentrate on three fundamental aspects of Kant‟s political
philosophy that Arendt finds of particular importance in Kant‟s Critique of Judgment.
These are
1) the particular, whether a fact of nature, or an event in history;
2) the faculty of judgment as the faculty of man’s mind to deal with it;
3) sociability of men as the condition of the functioning of this faculty, that is the
insight that men are dependent on their fellow men not only because of their
having a body and physical needs but precisely for their mental faculties. 66
What unites these three aspects and makes them attractive to Arendt is their ultimately
political significance.
66 Arendt, l982, 14.
258
It seems controversial for Arendt to emphasize the political significance of Kant‟s
work while she fervently argues that Kant did not write a political philosophy. For
Arendt, the two are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, there are many philosophers
starting with Plato and Aristotle, who did write political philosophies “but does not mean
that they therefore had a higher opinion of it or that political concerns were more central
to their philosophy.”67 As we have examined before, the history of political thought is
marked from its start by contempt of human affairs, politics in particular.68 In contrast,
Kant‟s philosophy exemplifies a truly “political” philosophy concentrated on the political
nature of man – i.e. the necessity of living and acting together, - even though he does not
have an explicit theory of the political realm.
6. Human Species, Man and Men
In the Lectures, Arendt introduces a helpful distinction for examining Kant‟s
political philosophy. The premise of the argument is that Kant has three very different
concepts (or perspectives) for analyzing the realm of human affairs.69
The first of these concepts, perhaps the one that Kant is most famous for, is the
idea of the moral dignity of the individual. This perspective corresponds to the man as the
moral being, “subject to laws of practical reason he gives to himself, belonging to a
Geisterreich, realm of intelligible beings.”70 This is the notion of man in Critique of
Practical Reason and Critique of Pure Reason.
67 Ibid., 21.
68 Chapter 3, section “Marx and the Tradition of Political Philosophy.”
69 Arendt, 1982, 26.
70 Ibid. 27.
259
The second perspective on “man” corresponds to the mankind. This is the notion
of human species that we encounter in Kant‟s writings on history. Arendt reminds us of
progress as the development of human species. This outlook is characterized by its
attention to universal and general, and disregard for the particular and singular. The
tradition of philosophy has repeatedly neglected the significance of the singular and
sought to derive its meaning from the universal process. So Kant is not alone in
embracing the idea of a “universal” history and subscribing to the notion of progress, as
we have repeatedly argued. This notion of man, Arendt argues, can be found in the
second part of the Critique of Judgment.
The third and last meaning of the concept is “men” in plural, “earthbound
creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a
community sense; not autonomous, needing each other‟s company for even thinking.”71
This concept corresponds to the sociability of men, the necessity of living together in a
political community. This is the notion of man found in Kant‟s aesthetic judgment, the
first part of the Critique of Judgment.
Arendt‟s categorization is not without its problems. First of all, Kantian writings
on the notion of history and progress are not limited to the second part of the Critique of
Judgment. As I have argued earlier in this chapter, Kant‟s political writings, - a selection
of writings central to Kant‟s body of thought and very influential in modern and
contemporary political theory, including “Idea for a Universal History,” “Theory and
Practice,” and “Perpetual Peace” subscribe to the same, problematic notion of mankind.72
71 Ibid.
72 Problematic from the view point of the singular.
260
Second, Kant‟s writings cannot be separated from one another with a scalpel. While it is
true that the Critique of Practical Reason, Practical Reason and Judgment are the three
separate pillars of Kant‟s philosophy, they are intimately connected.
Kant formulated his philosophy in answer to three central questions: “What can I
know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” While the last two correspond to the
traditional topics of metaphysics, God and immortality, the first question prompts an
inquiry into rationality and the limits of reason. Although these questions seem to be
dealing with different topics in philosophy, they are as, Arendt herself recognizes, related
in a “basically simple, almost primitive way.” The answer to the first question delineates
the limits of knowledge and in this sense paves the way for the metaphysical questions
about what I cannot know. One might also suspect that there is an inherent sense of
plurality of human nature in the second question.73 The question of “what I ought to do?”
implies the existence of other human beings, because otherwise there would be no ground
for delineating rules of conduct. But according to Kant, the moral law should be
grounded in and dictated by reason. It stems from self-regarding point of view, not otherregarding
motives and hence the plurality concerns fall short of defining Kant‟s moral
philosophy.
So at the face value, Kant‟s three major questions seem to be completely severed
from the fourth question he raises in the writings on history, namely, “What is Man?”
Therefore Arendt‟s categorization of Kant‟s concept of “man” into three categories,
which feature independently in three different works, may seem justified. But, as I have
argued in the first part of this chapter, when discussing the centrality of the philosophy of
73 Arendt, 1982, 20.
261
history to Kant‟s work, all strands of Kant‟s work on morality, politics and history are
ultimately interrelated. The philosophy of history presents as a moral obligation the
progress of humankind and the realization of its potential in accordance with the purpose
designated for it by the Nature. Hence, it would be difficult to accept one conception of
men, while rejecting the other.
No matter how controversial Arendt‟s examination of Kant is, it points us in a
particular direction. The third category of the concept “man” focuses on the political
nature of men, living in communities. This particular attention to the realm of human
affairs, the human condition as it is given to men on earth is a feature that Arendt finds
missing in traditional philosophical thought and is of particular centrality in Kant‟s
philosophy. In fact, I contend that it is the reason that Arendt directs attention to Kantian
theory of aesthetics in spite of his very problematic philosophy of history from the
viewpoint of the status of human affairs. So in the final section, I will try to outline the
contours of the theory of politics and political realm that Arendt formulates based on
Kantian philosophy. In Kant‟s political philosophy, Arendt finds a powerful conception
to resist and overturn the conception of politics which dominated our understanding of
politics for two centuries.74
74 It is fair say that Hannah Arendt was the first interpreter of Kant‟s writings, who did not dismiss the
capacity that Kant‟s political theory offered to deal with particulars. Before Arendt it was widely assumed
that Kant‟s emphasis on universal maxims did not offer the most promising theory for a theory of
judgment. After Arendt, there arose a renewed interest in Kant‟s political philosophy and its capacity to
generate a theory of judgment that addressed the problem of the particular. See Ronald Beiner, Political
Judgment (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Onora O‟Neill, Constructions of Reason:
Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Barbara
262
7. Kant’s Rejection of the Traditional Hierarchy between Philosophy and Politics
Kant is perhaps most notable to Arendt for reversing (or even better doing away
with) the hierarchy between politics and philosophy. The tradition of political philosophy
from its very beginning with Plato has devalued the realm of human affairs at the expense
of philosophy. The physical existence of human body was perceived as an obstacle to
engagement with philosophy. It was seen as a distraction, an unfortunate inconvenience
that diverted the philosopher‟s attention from the search for truth, which lay beyond the
world of material objects and hence cannot be arrived at through sense perception. Kant‟s
political philosophy, of course, is far from being characterized by the same contempt of
the physical senses. Kant‟s whole philosophy depended on the “interplay and cooperation
of sensibility and intellect.”75 The body and the senses are not the enemy of philosophy,
rather an integral and indispensable part of the activity of philosophizing.
For Arendt, this discovery is important in two respects. First, in Kant‟s
philosophy, the philosopher is not afforded the privileged position that he traditionally
enjoys in the Western political thought. Instead, the role of the philosopher is to
comprehend and interpret the experience that all human beings have. In other words “he
remains a man like you and men, living among his fellow men not among his fellow
philosophers.”76 The second aspect follows from the first one. Just like philosopher
Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Nancy
Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge University Pres, 1997).
75 Arendt, 1982, 27.
76 Arendt, 1982, 28.
263
becomes an ordinary person, every ordinary individual becomes a philosopher. We are
charged with the task of reflecting on life, its pleasures and displeasures.
The term that best characterizes Kant‟s philosophy in this regard, and one that he
chose as the title of his works is Critique. It denotes two separate but related meanings.
First, critique as a method of examination stands in opposition to both dogmatism and
skepticism. In the choice between “the truth” and “no truth,” Kant‟s critique introduces a
third alternative that questions the very concept of truth and its attainability through the
faculty of reason. In this fashion, it dismantles the core beliefs, “„the arrogant pretensions
of Schools, which claim to be the sole „possessors of truths.‟” 77 Second, critique as a
mode of thinking implies the use of one‟s own mind, Selbstdenken. It imposes the duty
on each and every one of us to think for ourselves liberated from the influence of
prejudice, authority and tradition.
This last point is no small feat. For Arendt, they form the basis of Kant‟s
philosophy: Equality – particularly with respect man‟s ability and need to reflect upon his
life and existence. Philosophizing is a “general need” common to all human being by
virtue of being endowed with the faculty of reason; it is not the privilege of the
philosopher. In fact, compared to his successors, namely Hegel, Kant‟s position stands
not only more attuned to the original spirit of Enlightenment but also radically
democratic. Arendt cites the following passage by Hegel, which immediately brings the
focus back to the philosophy as the privilege of the philosopher:
77 Ibid., 35.
264
Philosophy by its very nature is something esoteric which is not made for the mob
nor is it capable of being prepared for the mob; philosophy is philosophy only to
the extent that is the very opposite of intellect and the very opposite of common
sense, by which we understand the local and temporary limitations of generations;
in its relation to this common sense, the world of philosophy as such is a world
turned upside down.78
The passage illustrates that instead of establishing critical thinking as an everyday
practice for ordinary individuals and altering the course of western philosophy for good,
Kant‟s successors reverted to the age old understanding of philosophy. Kant‟s political
philosophy was doomed to remain an isolated episode in the tradition of philosophy.
Before considering what this means from the viewpoint of the relationship
between philosophy and politics, let us remember how timely this consideration is for
Arendt. I demonstrated in Chapter 4 that according to Arendt, our contemporary situation
is characterized by a break with the tradition. We are living in a time when the tradition
has lost its binding authority and left us with the task of dealing with the past (and our
current circumstances) without its aid. While at one time it was the business of the
philosopher to reflect on the meaning our existence in the world, today it cannot be
sufficient. Each and every one of us has to engage in this critical reflection, which, for
Arendt, carries a political significance. It is no wonder then that Arendt turns to Kant,
who makes critique a moral duty.
78 Hegel, “ Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik” in Sammtliche Werke, Vol 1, 185. Arendt‟s own
translation in Arendt, 1982, 35.
265
So what is the significance of Kant‟s move from philosophy as the enterprise of
the philosopher to philosophy as Critique, which is bestowed upon all human beings as
not only an ability but also a duty? Arendt argues that with this move Kant abolishes the
distinction between philosophy and politics. Starting with Plato, the realm of politics was
of concern to the philosopher in so far as it interfered with the philosophical life. In other
words, the philosopher had to concern himself with the organization of politics in order to
protect the philosopher from the interference of the many. His interest in political
philosophy consisted in “lay[ing] down the rules for an „insane asylum.‟”79 Now that the
physical life of the individual (which is organized via a political society) no longer
constitutes an objection to philosophy, there is no necessity for the philosopher to
concern himself with political philosophy. Kant, while abandoning the hierarchy of
contemplation above action, also abolished the old tension between philosophy and
politics.
Note that this argument explains in part why according to Arendt Kant failed to
write a full-fledged political philosophy. If we are to find a political philosophy in Kant,
it will be in some of the ideas that permeate all of his work and not in “the peripheral
writings dealing with political subject” since they “contain merely peripheral thoughts.”80
While, I believe that Arendt‟s argument that Kant did not write a political philosophy and
his writings on the politics are merely peripheral is not tenable, this claim again leads the
reader in a productive direction. It demonstrates that Arendt‟s interest in Kant stems from
overcoming the distinction between philosophy and politics, which Arendt believes has
79 Ibid., 29.
80 Ibid., 31.
266
tainted our tradition of Western philosophy from its beginning. The lack of interest of
interest in the life of politics or a superficial one that merely arose from a desire to
prevent political life from interfering with the pursuit of philosophical enterprise undercut
philosophy‟s effort to produce a genuine theory of political life. Given that Kant
abolished this distinction, an examination of his philosophy may genuinely prove fruitful
for formulating a theory for studying human affairs. I believe that this is the ultimate
project that Arendt undertakes vis-à-vis Kantian philosophy.
8. The Political Nature of Critical Thought
While we emphasized the “equalizing” nature of critical thinking, its “political”
aspect still remains to be justified. After all, in our contemporary understanding of term,
critical thinking – which is usually associated with freedom of thought and speech –
refers to the ability to think and make one‟s decisions independently and free from
influence of others. In this form, it is associated most closely with freedom from
government intervention and regulation. Is this what we mean by the political nature of
critical thinking? While this conception would be sufficient for certain philosophers who
understand the political realm as a set of institutions that govern the life of citizens it
would hardly satisfy Arendt‟s understanding of the “political” as the realm of social
interaction and communication between the members of a community. There is perhaps a
deeper meaning to the political nature of critical thinking.
Arendt emphasizes that the political freedom has a different meaning in Kant‟s
political philosophy, defined first and foremost with as “making public use of one‟s
reason.” The following quote illustrates this idea:
267
It is said: the freedom to speak or to write can be taken away from us by the
power-that-be, but the freedom to think cannot be taken from us through them at
all. However, how much and how correctly would we think if we did not think in
community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts and who
communicate theirs to us! Hence we may safely state that the external power
which deprives man of the freedom to communicate his thoughts publicly also
takes away his freedom to think, the only treasure left to us in our civic life and
through which alone there may be a remedy against all evils of the present state of
affairs.81
The “public” aspect of the use of reason immediately introduces a new dimension to the
activity of thinking. Opinion formation depends on the subjection of one‟s thought to
open examination by his fellow human beings. The very validity of thought and opinion
depends on its general communicability, which would be impossible if one did not live in
a community with others. Reason and free thinking implies, therefore, by its very nature
the sociability of human beings, their necessity to live in a political community with other
individuals.
I believe that Arendt finds Kant‟s philosophy particularly attractive for this ability
to integrate the individual with the society through a public sense – and doing so without
sacrificing autonomy and individuality. While Kant‟s idea of history is problematic from
81 Kant, “Was heisst: Sich in Denken orientieren?” (1786) in Gesammelte Schriften, 8: 131-147. Quoted in
Arendt, 1892, 41 – italics Arendt‟s.
268
the viewpoint of freedom, Arendt detects a unique conception of the essence of the
political in the idea of “enlarged mentality,” which according to Kant can be arrived at by
“comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgment of others, and
by putting ourselves in the place of any other man.”82 The public judgment arrived
through an enlarged mentality can be the only way through which the human dignity can
be reclaimed and history can be refused its claim to be the ultimate judge of our actions.
The only way to examine whether this claim holds validity is to judge it against a
particular event of significance, the French Revolution. According to Arendt, Hegel‟s
attitude against the French Revolution was particularly problematic from the viewpoint
politics. Will Kant‟s political philosophy fare better when subjected to the test of the
French Revolution?
9. Kant and the French Revolution
Kant‟s views on the French Revolution can be found partially in the “Old
Question Raised Again: Is the human race progressing?” from “The Contest of
Faculties.” In response to the title question “Is the human race progressing?” Kant
proposes three possible answers: “Human race is either continually regressing and
deteriorating, continually progressing and improving, or at a permanent standstill.”83
According to Kant, none of these options seem tenable. The first alternative is invalid
because if the human race is continually regressing, it would eventually wear itself out.
82 Kant, 1954, § 40, 136.
83 Kant, “The Contest of Faculties”” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991f), 178.
269
The third proposition suggests that from the viewpoint of reason, the back and forth
between progress and regression implies that the humankind is no different from any
other animal species. The second alternative, the eudemonistic conception of history, is
similarly untenable because it would require each and every individual to show a greater
goodness than they posses initially. As long as we subscribe to the belief that the sum of
total good and evil that our nature is capable of remains unchanged, as Kant argues, the
human beings would not be capable of such improvement in their own lifetime. Despite
this, Kant believes that we can find some sort of experience which shows that the making
is both the cause and the author of his own improvement.84 It would prove to us that there
exists such a tendency toward progress within the human race as a whole if not in
particular individuals. This event is the French Revolution.
Kant notes the following observations on the French Revolution:
The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of
gifted people may succeed or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and
atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same
experiment again at such a price, even if he could to carry it out successfully at
the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts
and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy
which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy
84 Kant, 1991f, 181.
270
was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other
than a moral disposition within the human race.85
As Arendt observes, the example of the French revolution illustrates two interrelated
ideas in Kant‟s political philosophy.86 The first idea is progress, which is unequivocally
expressed as the moral disposition of human kind. The second is the viewpoint of the
spectator. Let us take a closer look at these ideas.
As the quote illustrates, Kant in fact does not see the French revolution as
something to be emulated in the future. The events surrounding the revolution are so
horrific, “so filled with misery and atrocities” that it would be wrong to bring about
another revolution. Moreover, participating in carrying out such atrocities is morally
unacceptable to Kant. Even though he believes that it is wrong for a despotic ruler to
suppress the rights of its subjects and act unlawfully, the subjects of such a ruler would
still not be justified in taking action to overthrow him. But this does not prevent Kant
from observing the enthusiasm with which the spectators cherish the event “[f]or the
occurrence in question is too momentous, too intimately interwoven with the interest of
humanity and too widespread in its influence upon all parts of the world.”87 According to
Kant, the true meaning of the event is revealed to the actors, who by virtue of their
noninvolvement and disinterestedness (i.e. by not having taken part in the actual
realization of the event and having therefore no actual interest in the course of events) are
in the best position to judge it impartially.
85 Ibid., 182.
86 Arendt, 1982, 54.
87 Kant, 1991f, 185.
271
Arendt reminds us that the concept of spectatorship is not particularly new or
unique to Kant. The primacy of the spectator over the actor in evaluating the import of a
certain event is probably one of the oldest concepts of philosophy, which favors
contemplative life over a life of action and political engagement. The truth is revealed to
those who contemplate and not to those who actively take part in shaping the course of
events. There are two reasons why the onlooker/spectator has the advantage over the
actor. First, unlike the actors, who are engaged in action and therefore can only perceive
their own, limited role in the course of events, the spectators can see the whole. They are
in other words, better equipped to perceive and comprehend the meaning of the whole.
Second, the actors are concerned with doxa (fame). They want to be recognized by the
onlookers for their actions. They seek fame and recognition. Their judgment, therefore,
cannot be independent or autonomous. They are dependent on the existence of spectators.
It is important to note that the notion of spectatorship as it appears in Kant‟s
political philosophy is different from the Greek idea of spectatorship. The Greek idea of
spectatorship is based on individual acts and particular events. “The Greek spectator”
Arendt tells us “whether at the festival of life or are the sight of the things that are
everlasting, looks at and judges (finds the truth of) the cosmos or the particular events in
its own terms, without relating it to any other process in which it may or may not play a
part.”88 As opposed to this idea of spectatorship, where the meaning and significance of
each event is exhausted within the particular act, Kant‟s idea of spectatorship is coupled
with the concept of progress, the continuous development of humankind, which
constitutes the criteria against which the spectator/onlooker judges a particular event.
88 Arendt, 1982, 56.
272
If the idea of spectatorship coupled with the progress in history seems strangely close
to Hegel‟s philosophy of history, it is because the main tenets of their philosophy are
remarkably similar in this respect. But then where does this leave Arendt? If you remember
our discussion of Hegel‟s concept of history in Chapter 2, Arendt‟s criticism had two
prongs: First, Hegel‟s reflections on history and particularly the French revolution did so
without breaking away from a traditional framework of truth and knowledge. In Hegel‟s
philosophy, like the tradition of Western philosophy preceding him, the philosopher (the
onlooker, the spectator) has the privilege of being the only one to whom the truth is
revealed. By virtue of his privileged position vis-à-vis history, the philosopher sits in sole
judgment of historical events. Secondly, if the history is conceived as a process of
development, whose meaning is revealed to philosopher at the end of history, then particular
occurrences, deeds and acts acquire meaning only within this larger process, which
encompasses these events and transcends them. The individual acts and events lose their
importance.
By emphasizing the idea of spectatorship coupled with progress in history as the
criteria according to which the individual events and occurrences can be judged, Kant‟s
political philosophy finds itself vulnerable to both of these criticisms. Moreover, it almost
overturns the equalizing character of Kant‟s philosophy.89 If one of Arendt‟s aims in
interpreting Kant‟s philosophy was to find the groundwork for a political philosophy
interested in the realm of human affairs (both events and individuals) and not history, then
this enterprise seems to hit a wall at this point.
89 As discussed in section 7.
273
As a possible response, Arendt identifies two ways in which Kant‟s philosophy of
history is different from Hegel‟s.90 First, in Hegel, the subject of history is the Absolute
Spirit. The Absolute Spirit realizes itself through the process of progress. In Kant, on the
other hand, this subject is the human species. From the viewpoint of the above criticism, this
difference is not significant. The nature of the thing that is realized in history (be it the
human species or the Absolute Spirit) has no import for the role of the spectator or the idea
of progress. The second way in which Kant‟s philosophy differs from Hegel‟s is the idea of
“end of history.” In Hegel, history is a finite process. While it takes a really long time (over
many generations), history nevertheless comes to a definite end. This assertion brings with it
the problematic question of “what next?,” i.e “[w]hat, if anything, is going to happen after
this end has come about?” In Kant, on the other hand, the progress is never-ending.
This second difference addresses some of the difficulties with the privileged position
of the philosopher/onlooker. Since history does not come to an end in Kant, the meaning of
history cannot be judged when it comes to an end. It follows from this assertion that a
particular event‟s importance (such as the French Revolution) lies not in the ultimate role it
plays in the bringing about the end of history, but rather in the “hope it contained for future
generations.” It generates a forward looking, optimistic outlook of history and historical
events. The question still remains though: Who is to judge the hope a particular event holds
for the future? Who is the spectator/onlooker?
This point constitutes the most important difference of Kant from Hegel. I believe
that it is the main reason why Arendt privileges Kant‟s philosophy of history over Hegel‟s
and Marx‟s. While Hegel‟s spectator is the lonely/solitary philosopher, Kant‟s spectators
90 Arendt, 1992, 57.
274
appear always in the plural. The cast of spectators include many people with whole range of
interests, beliefs and viewpoints. Kant‟s idea of spectatorship differs and breaks away from
the tradition of philosophy starting with Plato.
10. Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment as a Means of Addressing Plurality and Particularity
In contradistinction to Plato‟s isolated inhabitants of the cave, who are chained by
the legs and the neck and are therefore forced to reflect on the meaning of the shadows on
the cave wall on their own, the defining characteristic of Kant‟s spectatorship is
communication. While without the actors no event/spectacle would take place at all in the
world, the existence of the spectators creates the space within which the spectacle can take
place. Without a public realm, in which the spectators can communicate with one another
and reflect on the spectacle, judgment would not be possible. By emphasizing
communicability, Kant interjects an element of intersubjectivity to the concept of
spectatorship. The judgment of the spectators (in the plural) takes place in a community of
fellow human beings, as opposed to in an isolated environment. Through the common sense,
human beings create and operate in communities:
[U]nder the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to all, i.e.
of a faculty of judgment, which in its reflection, takes account (a priori) of the mode
of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its
judgment with the collective reason in humanity… This is done by comparing our
judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgment of others, and by putting
ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which
275
contingently attach to our own judgment… In itself there is nothing more natural
than to abstract from charm or emotion if we are seeking a judgment that is to serve
as a universal rule.91
The quote illustrates that the common sense fulfills two important functions. The modern
man is autonomous and independent and therefore he needs to think for himself. So on the
one hand, common sense reminds us the maxim of Enlightenment: “think for yourself!” In
this activity of solitary reflection, however, there is always the risk that one cannot abstract
from one‟s private conditions and circumstances. Moreover, the human condition is such
that we live in societies. The common sense integrates men into the human community
without having to sacrifice their individual autonomy. Without being able to communicate
with others and taking the condition of human plurality into account, the results of pure,
solitary reflections would not provide us with helpful roadmaps to navigate and pass
judgment on human world. The common sense, therefore, helps us to take into consideration
the most important quality of human beings; their necessity to live together in a political
society.
Note that this interpretation is much attuned to Arendt‟s task in the Human
Condition. In that work, Arendt wanted to recover the conception of agency and autonomy,
which is under constant attack in contemporary society. This enterprise, however, could not
be simply grounded in the idea of autonomous, self-legislating human beings. It needed to
be embedded in an understanding of sociability of human beings, while at the same time
preserving the dignity and particularity of human condition. Similarly, the conception of
judgment introduced by the idea of common sense does not rest on universal validity.
91 Kant, 1954, §40, 136.
276
Rather, it invokes the idea of plurality by appealing to the judgment of persons, who are
“present,” who make up the public realm.
In addition to the idea of spectatorship, there is one final concept that Arendt
derives Kant‟s critique of aesthetic judgment that allows her to address the problem of the
particularity of events and deeds. While the first point Arendt takes over from Kant
concerns the universalizability of the validity of judgment via sensus communis, the second
point concerns the faculty of thinking the particular. Remember that Kant distinguished
between two types of judgment. The judgment is determinant when the universal rule,
principle, or law is given and the judgment subsumes the particular under it; when the
universal is not given and must be created form the particular, the judgment is reflective.
Aesthetic judgment is reflective judgment. It concerns rendering judgment on a particular
object that I encounter as opposed to a “kind” of object. Think about a particular rose.
When judging about the beauty of this rose, I do not deem this rose beautiful in the
following manner. “All roses are beautiful. This is a rose. Therefore it is beautiful.” It is not
possible to judge the beauty of this particular rose by subsuming it under a general category
of roses, which I accept to be beautiful. Rather, the particular rose generates its own beauty.
Only by looking at this particular rose and appreciating its inherent beauty that I can judge
this rose to be beautiful. What is the import of this for Arendt?
According to Arendt, authentic political experience is new and undetermined. The
concept of history that Arendt is critical of, presents these events as part of greater
scheme of events, which are recurring, calculable and even predictable. In the previous
chapter, I illuminated the unprecedented, unpredictable and incalculable nature of
political action with reference to two Benjaminian quotes:
277
Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences –
where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of
dawn.92
It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of
eternal sameness, and even of repetition in history. Authentic political experience
is absolutely free of this semblance.93
Benjamin, like Arendt, reminds us that political action has a special quality, which
requires us to examine and judge it independently. This is the only appropriate form of
judgment that will allow us to truly appreciate the novelty and originality of political acts.
If the central problem is the subordination of the “new,” of the particular to the universal,
then the aesthetic judgment, Arendt thought, is the reflection suited to recognition of the
particular.94
92 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), [N9a, 7].
93 Ibid. [N9, 5].
94 The question of whether Arendt‟s attempt to draw a political theory out of Kant‟s idea of sensus
communis is ultimately justified from the viewpoint of Kantian philosophy is debatable. Bryan Garsten, for
example, argues that “Kant never deferred to the „common sense‟ to be found in existing opinions. In
metaphysics, in morals and in politics, he always aimed to provide an authoritarian criterion based outside
those opinions.” Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion. A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge,
Mass; London, England: 2006), 86. Nevertheless, for our purposes, this is the appeal of Kant to Arendt and
hence the one reason why she appropriated Kantian political theory. The concept of enlarged thought
which is the byproduct of common sense allowed her to construct a political theory that can resist and
subvert a progressive understanding of history.
278
11. Conclusion
We started this chapter with a diagnosis: Arendt‟s foremost criticism of the Western
tradition is the idea of progress, which implied from the viewpoint of human affairs, lack of
attention to both the significance of events/deeds/occurrences that make up the fabric of
history and the very individuals who make up the political community. While the same
tendency towards the notion of development history is present in Kant‟s philosophy, Arendt,
for the most part, favored Kant‟s political philosophy for its ability to provide political
thought with a conception of politics that centers on human plurality.
One of the most important problems of traditional understanding of history, as
Arendt observed numerous times, is the problem of “the court of history.” Hegel‟s solution
was to leave the historical understanding to the philosopher/historian or narrator. Historical
judgment, Arendt believes, can be reduced neither to “the mere reproduction of the
standpoint of the past historical actors” nor to the standpoint of the narrator.95 If the aim of
historical understanding is to “reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were from the
pseudo-divinity named History of the modern,”96 it needs to represent plurality of the social
world that human beings share in common. The Kantian political philosophy of the common
sense and enlarged mentality provided Arendt with the necessary tools to resist the judgment
of history and to replace it with a conception of plurality that is both attuned to the nature of
particularity and the necessity of individuals to exist in a world shared with others.
95 Benhabib, 2003, 88.
96 Arendt, 1978a, 216.
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