Hannah Arendt

Politics, History and Citizenship

Phillip Hansen

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745666945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The new study provides a fresh and timely reassessment of the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. While analysing the central themes of Arendt's work, Phillip Hansen also shows that her work makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates. Specifically, Hansen argues that Arendt provides a powerful account of what it means to think and act politically. This account can establish the grounds for a contemporary citizen rationality in the face of threat to a genuine politics.

Amoung other issues, Hansen discusses Arendt's conception of history and historical action; her account of politics and of the distinction between public and private; her analysis of totalitarianism as the most ominous form of 'false ' politics; and her treatment of revolution.

The book is a balanced and opportune reappraisal of Arendt's contributions to social and political theory. It will be welcomed by students and scholars in politics, sociology and philosophy.

1 History and the Decline of Politics

Towering over the work of Hannah Arendt is the figure of Karl Marx.¹ For Arendt, Marx’s thought illuminates the tensions and contradictions of modern politics more fully and faithfully than does that of any other theorist. She sees him as the last great thinker in the Western tradition of political thought, a tradition which extended back to ancient Greece and until the nineteenth century provided the inescapable framework within which questions of human purpose were posed for people in the West. She takes seriously Marx’s demand to ‘realize’ philosophy because this demand could arise only when philosophy itself, whose primary characteristic was precisely its unrealizability, was no longer capable of orienting people to their world and giving meaning to their existence. The ‘end’ of philosophy, the attempt to transform it into a practical guide for the revolutionary activity of the working class – according to Marx the sole legitimate heir to classical philosophy – pointed to new human possibilities which the old standards could no longer accommodate.

To be sure, the Western tradition was brought to an end not only in Marx’s work but in that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as well.² Yet, given Arendt’s distinctively political concerns, Marx’s influence on Arendt was arguably the most profound. In the first place, Marx’s impatience with contemplation and introspection, his desire to ‘change the world’ using the powerful forces of production created by capitalism, constituted a more definitive break with the main currents of the Western tradition than the equally challenging reflections of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who were in this respect more traditional philosophers. Secondly, while all three thinkers sought to break with the standards of Western thought, in the process remaining paradoxically wedded to them, Marx was ironically less ambivalent about their worth (which is why contemporary deconstructionists, intent upon overturning metaphysics, attack Marx in the name of Nietzsche). Arendt, too, was not so much opposed to the standards of Western thought as concerned about their distorted expression in social life. Finally, although the ideas of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were not without political significance, Marx alone made politics itself the vehicle for the achievement of a more fully human existence. For him the world of action took precedence over the world of thought. Arendt was basically in sympathy with this position, at least in view of the alternative: a ‘worldless’ subjectivism which, as we shall see, was for her no small contributor to the problems of contemporary public life.

Arendt was certainly no Marxist and had little sympathy for Marxism in any of its forms, ‘orthodox’ or ‘critical’, ‘Soviet’ or ‘Western’.³ Yet her criticisms of Marx’s ideas have little in common with traditional conservative ones. These criticisms generally take Marx to task for giving a false account of the human condition. Arendt’s view is in fact quite the opposite. Particularly in his treatment of labour in modern society, Marx ‘sounded a depth of experience reached by none of his predecessors … and none of his successors.’ His thought is characterized by ‘the faithfulness of his descriptions to phenomenal reality’, and his ‘loyalty and integrity in describing phenomena as they presented themselves to his view cannot be doubted …’⁴ In her own way echoing Marx’s materialist concerns, Arendt claims that if there is a problem with Marx’s analysis, it lies not with Marx’s ideas but with the historical conditions within which they emerged. Marx only gave a powerful voice to ‘the authentic and very perplexing problems inherent in the modern world …’⁵ His ‘utopian ideal of a classless, stateless, and laborless society was born out of the marriage of two altogether non-utopian elements: the perception of certain trends in the present which could no longer be understood in the framework of tradition, and the traditional concepts and ideals by which Marx himself understood and integrated them.’⁶

There is something else as well. Arendt saw in Marx’s work an evident concern for freedom and the desire to realize it more fully than ever before in history. Marx believed, and Arendt agreed, that the modern world held previously unheard-of material possibilities which could open up new opportunities for political action. For Marx, modernity made possible for the first time the (potential) realization of ancient dreams and hopes, particularly the liberation from needless toil, from compulsive labour.

Arendt shared at least some of these dreams and hopes. But she wondered whether Marx had grasped them properly and if modernity’s achievements were as hospitable to them as he had thought. For Arendt, Marx was a powerfully contradictory thinker: his own ideas betrayed his deepest commitments. At the heart of Arendt’s account of Marx is the claim that his defence of freedom and action ultimately served an iron necessity which denied freedom, and a passive and contemplative behaviour in the face of this necessity which was the antithesis of action. What might be said of an age in which its arguably most profound analyst could end up trapped in such contradictions?

For Hannah Arendt, the modern era is one of widespread and pervasive historical consciousness: the sense, deeply embedded in our culture, that we are the products of a temporal process which has ‘made’ us in a certain way, and that understanding the ‘laws’ by which this process has unfolded provides an indispensible guide to how we should organize our collective life. It is not the idea of history, per se, the idea that we are creatures who live in time, that is the problem. Rather, it is the fact that modern historical consciousness is ‘process’ consciousness – that we see ourselves as radically determined and thus unfree – that is the heart of the matter. In Arendt’s eyes, this denies our reality as acting beings. And since the capacity to act is a fundamental human attribute, it never really disappears but goes underground, so to speak, where it affects the human condition in unacknowledged and therefore potentially destructive ways.

This chapter explores Arendt’s account of history and its relation to public life. It examines the ways in which, according to Arendt, our sense of history has itself been historically transformed and how this transformation reflects changing conceptions of collective human purposes. These purposes involve above all the increasing recognition of the ability of humans to exercise greater command over the forces of nature, human and non-human, and what this means for traditional notions of both the individual and community. Here for Arendt lies Marx’s ultimate importance. As a theorist and celebrant of labour, the human activity concerned with material reproduction and thus most closely tied to mastery over nature, Marx brilliantly spelled out the consequences of both the modern sense of history and the increasing organization of collective life around the demands of labour. The chapter analyzes Arendt’s powerful and provocative critique of Marx’s defence of labour and concludes with some suggestions of how Arendt begins to sketch out an alternative account of both individual responsibility and political community in the modern era.

I

In ‘The Concept of History’, Hannah Arendt identifies two distinct notions of history that have played a central role in Western culture: ancient and modern. The ancient notion of history was developed in the context of the Greek experience and was intimately associated with the polis. The modern notion dates from the beginnings of the modern scientific revolution, roughly the late Middle Ages, although its full impact was not felt until the seventeenth century. It is the modern notion which has been powerfully at the centre of the kind of historical consciousness which has for Arendt proved so baleful for a genuine politics, and it thus provides the primary focus of her account.

While Arendt is critical of modern historical consciousness, she has no doubt that human development has an essential historical component. Human capacities take shape in the flux of actually lived time, and only there. Indeed, because of its roots in remembrance, legitimate political experience requires a sense of the historical. For Arendt, history is a critical category; neither outright rejection nor blind celebration is adequate to the task of understanding our temporal situation. In the end neither the ancient nor the modern notions of history themselves can fully capture the demands of public life.

The motive for history is deeply rooted in human experience. It reflects the desire to bestow the immortality of nature on transient human deeds. History reclaims from the ravages of time those human acts, purposes and accomplishments which deserve to survive their perpetrators and live on in human experience.

It was the Greeks who first saw in history the worldly counterpart to a nature ‘which comprehended all things that come into being by themselves without assistance from men or gods …’⁷ For history the story is all. Its illuminating power, traceable to its capacity to weave apparently unrelated events into a narrative fabric that suggests a beginning and an end, and hence human meaning, ‘reveals an unexpected landscape of human deeds, sufferings and new possibilities which together transcend the sum total of all willed intentions and the significance of all origins.’⁸ In securing deeds from the futility of oblivion, history distinguishes the human from the non-human in nature.

That humans exist in nature is undeniable. In this respect Arendt agrees with Aristotle who ‘explicitly assures us that man [sic] insofar as he is a natural being and belongs to the species of mankind, possesses immortality …’⁹ But humans are part of nature in a specific way. They are capable of accounting for themselves, making themselves the protagonists of tales which illuminate human deeds. The human desire to create meaning animates the art of the storyteller who in this sense is the prototypical historian.

This is something the Greeks understood well. Arendt cites the example of Ulysses: ‘The scene where Ulysses listens to the story of his own life is paradigmatic for both history and poetry; the “reconciliation with reality”, the catharsis, which, according to Aristotle, was the essence of tragedy, and, according to Hegel, was the ultimate purpose of history, came through the tears of remembrance.’¹⁰ This story is not a ‘simple’ narrative of events, but one shaped by the informing power of the storyteller’s imaginative reconstruction of those events. More than curiosity about what happened or the desire for information is involved in the storyteller’s art.

It is this imaginative dimension to history which links it with politics. History is about neither facts nor trends, inexorable patterns of temporal events, but about the experience of acting men and women. At the same time history as experience, unfolding in time and given meaning in a narrative account, is not the same as the account itself. The doer and the storyteller are not the same and what is allowed the historian – the ability to abstract from the flow of temporal events an underlying tendency or development that can be fitted into a pattern – is not available to the historical actor. On the other hand, the historian’s categories are working hypotheses about the past, not the past itself.

Thus the historical actor and the historian need each other. And both in turn need a third party: the audience (which of course will include them both). The ancient historian and actor were helped out in this respect because they had an audience already at hand. This was the Greek polis itself, a form of institutionalized remembrance. History and politics are thus linked in a second sense: that of plurality, the presence of the many and not just the one. There is to any genuine historical account a necessary moment of reification or objectification. Its meaning can never be simply subjective. It must be given form in the thought objects of the historian’s tale if it is to have worldly significance, the only significance that distinguishes genuinely human association from other forms of association. Ulysses, for one, knows the events and activities of his life. But he does not fully understand them because they form part of a lived experience defined by relations of plurality, of inter-subjectivity. The events of his life express human purposes and aspirations which cannot be grasped exclusively in terms of self-contained individual activities or states of mind. As the actor, Ulysses could not be his own chronicler.¹¹ His humanity was social and not simply atomic. The story which tells of the life of the person, or a group of people, takes on a life of its own and on these terms enters the world. The life taken on is given to it by the audience, by those for whom its events illuminate their strivings, needs and purposes.

Because the historical tale cannot be merely subjective, the question of historical objectivity looms large for Arendt. The hallmark of a genuinely historical account is precisely its objectivity. But the objectivity Arendt defends is not that of the modern natural sciences with their epistemological commitment to mathematical formulation and deductive and nomological laws. It is rather a sensuous objectivity which has the subjective as one of its elements. Ulysses could not be his own chronicler, his own historian. But neither were his intentions, desires or purposes irrelevant to the truth of the experience which the poet/historian sought to recount. This hermeneutic dimension of engagement with a life story articulated by another, or others, is for Arendt a critical component of history in both senses, as experience and as a narrative account of this experience. Arendt’s claim is that history as understood by the ancients allowed for this in a way that modern history does not.

And because the story is the essence of history, the objectivity of history is necessarily associated with the objectivity of the historian. This objectivity, which Arendt equates with impartiality, owes its origins to Homer’s decision to praise even-handedly the Trojans and the Achaeans, Hector and Achilles. Familiar with the experienceáof the Greek polis, in which the ebb and flow of argument and opinion determined the course of public life, the ancient historian could articulate without favour the opposing standpoints and actions of those engaged in historical events. He could write on the assumption that greatness shone forth for all to see and that great deeds in their universality transcend all considerations of partisanship.

But the objectivity of the historian had at its core a fundamental contradiction. This contradiction lay in the fact that while for the Greeks greatness was understood in terms of permanence, human greatness resided in the most perishable of human creations: words and deeds. The historian and the poet could attempt to resolve the contradiction by casting great deeds in story and song because they never doubted that the realm of human affairs was the forum for the emergence of human excellence. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, argued that nothing of enduring value could be had in the polis. Humans could link up with the truly immortal only in the contemplation of the unchanging essence of things as these presented themselves to thought. The opposition of philosophy to politics necessarily entailed its hostility o history. At issue, then, was not only the status of history but also the dignity of the political sphere itself.

Thus from Arendt’s perspective, it was no surprise that the emergence of philosophy was historically linked closely to the decline of the polis (a development clearly vital for Aristotle’s Politics.) The decline of the polis meant the collapse of that vehicle of remembrance which preserved great deeds for the ages. The legacy of the crumbling of shared understandings about the character and purposes of political life was the ambiguous relation of philosophy to politics. The capacity for politics and the possibility of history imply each other.

The classical or ancient understanding of history ultimately bequeathed to posterity two questions: (1) what is the basis of immortality? (2) who is capable of this immortality? To the first question, we already know the answer: great deeds which ought not to perish. However, in spite of its universalistic orientation, the Hellenic notion of history failed to answer the second question. Arendt cites Ulysses, the mythic hero. But in an essay on Bertolt Brecht, she also writes of the importance of the ballad form as a testimony to the exploits of those otherwise condemned through oppression to the oblivion of time.¹² This suggests that all people are capable of ‘making’ history, although the forms it assumes might differ. Like the political action with which it is so closely tied, it may be that history has an implicitly democratic dimension. The quest for worldly immortality need not be restricted to members of privileged groups or classes.

The modern experience and notion of history have both posed and answered these questions.

II

Given her generally laudatory assessment of the ancient notion of history, it is not surprising that Arendt views the modern understanding of history as seriously deficient. While she does not argue that we have witnessed a progressive decline in the character and conceptualization of our historical experience, she does believe that we have lost sight of the main qualities of a genuine history. To put it metaphorically: the capacity to tell stories, and the stories that can be told, have been transformed.

As Arendt sees it, of decisive importance here is the growth of modern science and, in turn, the emergence of the distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ sciences, between the scientist and the humanist. At the heart of this development was a radically new relation of humans to nature. Where the ancient understanding of both history and science presupposed nature as the domain of immortality, the modern concepts of both assume a nature which is purely a complex of manip...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 History and the Decline of Politics
• 2 Freedom, Action and Public Realm: Hannah Arendt’s Polis and the Foundations of a Genuine Politics
• 3 The Public Realm under Siege: False Politics and the Modern Age
• 4 Totalitarianism
• 5 Revolution
• 6 What is Thinking Politically?
• Conclusion: Whither Political Theory?
• Notes
• Index