1
Introduction
Years ago, I brought Hannah and Isaiah together. [âŠ] The meeting was a disaster from the start. She was too solemn, portentous, Teutonic, Hegelian for him. She mistook his wit for frivolousness and thought him inadequately serious.
âARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.1
IN 1991, the American philosopher Norman Oliver Brown wrote to his friend and former tutor Isaiah Berlin,2 and favourably mentioned a recently published book entitled Republic of Fear.3 A pioneering study of Saddam Hussein and his BaÊżath Party, the book drew comparisons between the âKafkaesqueâ world of Saddamâs Iraq and its purported precursors in the twentieth century. In so doing, it drew on some of the anti-totalitarian classics, including Berlinâs Four Essays on Liberty and Hannah Arendtâs The Origins of Totalitarianism.4 Berlin was not pleased with this pairing. He wrote to Brown, âI assume that [Republic of Fear] is about the horrors of Iraq, etc., but what deeply offends me is the linking of my name with that of Miss Hannah Arendt [âŠ]. [D]o tell me that you do see some radical differences between Miss Arendt and myselfâotherwise how can we go on knowing each other?â5
The strong dislike for Arendt that Berlin expressed in his 1991 letter to Brown has a long history. It began a half-century earlier, when the two thinkers were introduced to each other in wartime New York. Not much is known about this meeting, but their opinions were certainly different and their personal chemistry evidently bad. The relationship between the two thinkers did not improve, to say the least, when they spoke again at Harvard University about a decade later, probably in 1949. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the political scientist who arranged this meeting, would later recall the occasion as a âdisaster from the startâ.6 Their paths did not cross again for more than fifteen years, as Berlin continued to build his dazzling academic career in Britain, while Arendt established herself as an influential public intellectual in the United States. Nevertheless, they were not far apart socially, culturally or intellectually. They not only shared various research interests but also had many mutual friends, academic contacts and collaborators. Some of them, most notably the British political theorist Bernard Crick, attempted to persuade Berlin of the importance of Arendtâs work. The Oxford philosopher was never persuaded. On the contrary, enhanced by his deep scepticism about the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, Berlin dismissed her theoretical work such as The Human Condition as an assemblage of âfree metaphysical associationâ.7 His contempt subsequently evolved into a lifelong hatred with the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963. He wholeheartedly endorsed the widespread accusation that Arendt arrogantly and patronisingly blamed the victims of the Holocaust and that she proposed a deeply flawed account of evil.
Curiously, despite his disdain for Arendt and her work, Berlin kept readingâor, more precisely, skimming throughâher books and articles, including neglected works such as Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess as well as more major writings such as The Human Condition and On Revolution.8 The more he read, however, the more convinced he was that his assessment of Arendtâs work had been sound. The late Berlin summarised his considered opinion as follows: Arendt âproduces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought.â9 In addition, Berlinâs animosity towards Arendt was never softened either by her death or by the ensuing passage of time. In the 1991 letter to Brown cited above, Berlin described Arendt as âa real bĂȘte noire to meâin life, and after her deathâ. He continued, âI really do look upon her as everything that I detest most.â10
Arendt was aware of Berlinâs hostility towards her. This was thanks in no small part to the writer Mary McCarthy, who repeatedly disputed Berlinâs dismissal of Arendt, so much so that her friendship with him came to be âdestroyedâ as a result.11 Meanwhile, Arendt herself never quite reciprocated Berlinâs hostility. For one thing, she was, and was proud to be, a controversial figure, attracting many embittered critics especially after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. She could not possibly respond to all of them, and from her point of view Berlin did not stand out as an especially important or worthy one. She was aware of his standing and connections in Britain, Israel and the USA, but she hardly considered him to be an original thinker.12 This was partly because Arendt took the superiority of German philosophy over its Anglo-American counterpart for granted. Although she respected Hobbes, she generally saw Britain as something of a philosophical desert and saw little merit in the analytic movement inaugurated by Russell, Moore and others. In this respect, our protagonistsâ prejudices were symmetrical: just as Berlin was unable to appreciate German phenomenology, Arendt was unable to appreciate British empiricism. Nevertheless, Arendt regarded Berlin as a learned scholar, especially when it came to Russian intellectual history. She sometimes used his writings in her classes;13 and her surviving personal library contains a copy of Berlinâs first book, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, and four essays by him.14 It is, however, indicative that the only piece by Berlin that Arendt seems to have read carefully was his introduction to Franco Venturiâs Roots of Revolution. In fact, it is as the author of this introduction that Berlin makes his one and only appearance (in a footnote) in Arendtâs published work.15 For her, Berlin was a respectable intellectual historian and a moderately important member of what she called the âJewish establishmentâ. His animosity towards her was met by her indifference to him, accompanied by occasional suspicion.
Things could have been different. They were contemporaries, Arendt born in 1906 and Berlin in 1909. They belonged to the group of twentieth-century Jewish Ă©migrĂ© intellectuals whose thoughts and life stories were intertwined with each other.16 Born into German-Jewish and Baltic-Jewish families respectively, Arendt and Berlin alike experienced their share of antisemitism in their formative years. Both came to be preoccupied with Europeâs looming crises in the 1930s, decided to abandon a promising career in pure philosophy by the end of World War II and thereafter devoted much of their time and energy to understanding the roots of totalitarianism, containing its growth and pre-empting its resurgence. Both of them had friends and relatives murdered or driven to death by the totalitarian regimes that they came to study in their academic work. Moreover, they themselves lived in the emerging totalitarian world and were consequently in a position to do something akin to what anthropologists call âparticipatory observationâ: data collection by way of actually living in the society one aims to study. As is well known, the young Isaiah Berlin witnessed in horror both the February and October Revolutions in Petrograd. He subsequently returned to Soviet Russia to serve in the British Embassy in 1945â46, after having âa recurring nightmare of being arrestedâ and giving thought to the prospect of suicide in the event of an arrest.17 For her part, Arendt was arrested and endured an eight-day interrogation in Nazified Germany, followed by a five-week detention in an internment camp in occupied France (where she too gave thought to taking her own life) before migrating to the United States to write The Origins of Totalitarianism. Oppression, domination, inhumanity and the subversion of politics were their existential as well as intellectual issues; so were freedom, humanity and politics.
The twin goals of this study are to trace the development of the unfortunate relationship between the historical figures of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, and to bring their ideas into conversation. The former goal is historical and biographical in nature; the latter, theoretical. The former involves the following questions:
When and where did Arendt and Berlin meet, and what happened during those meetings?
How did the personal conflict between the two emerge?
How did Berlin develop his animosity towards Arendt, and she her indifference and suspicion towards him?
What other interactions did they have apart from their actual meetings?
These questions are worth asking not only because they form a fascinating part of twentieth-century intellectual, literary and cultural history. They are worth asking also because the personal, the political and the intellectual were hardly separable in both Arendtâs and Berlinâs lives and works. I take seriously what I believe to be an elementary truth about them both: political theory for them was more than a job or paid work. It was a vocation in the Weberian sense, and each led the life of a political thinker, embodying a distinct theoretical outlook.18 Deeply concerned with urgent issues of their times, both of our protagonists attempted to exercise, albeit in differing ways, influence on the âreal worldâ they inhabited. As I shall show, this mode of living and thinking has its own downsides and consequently is not unequivocally superior to the more detached and institutionalised mode of political theorising that has become the norm today. Still, we have some good reason to feel nostalgic about the time when political theorists took themselves more seriously because their âideas really did have consequencesâ.19
The other, theoretical side of this study concerns a set of fundamental issues that simultaneously connected and divided our protagonists. They connected in that they were central to both Arendtâs and Berlinâs thought; and they divided in that they were answered by the two thinkers in conflicting ways. Those central issues may be formally and schematically stated as follows:
What does it mean for human beings to be free?
What is it like for a person to be denied his or her freedom, and deprived of his or her humanity?20 What are the central features of the worst form of unfree and inhumane society, known as totalitarianism, and how does this paradigmatically emerge?
How should we assess the apparent failure to resist or confront the evil of totalitarianism, such as when one is coerced into cooperating with a state-sponsored mass murderer?
What kind of society or polity ought we to aim to build if we want as many people as possible to be free and live a genuinely human life?
Arendtâs and Berlinâs sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting reflections on these questions will be considered in Chapters 3â6. These chapters are thematically organised, although each is loosely tied to a chronological phase. The third chapter, on âFreedomâ, focuses on the late 1950s and early 1960s, when both of our protagonists fully matured as political thinkers and presented their rival theories of freedom, underpinned by competing views of the human condition. The fourth chapter, on âInhumanityâ, covers a longer period and traces the protagonistsâ lifelong engagement with totalitarianism. It mainly examines two distinct bodies of work: their wartime and immediate post-war analyses of totalitarian politics and society; and their later attempts to reconsider the history of Western political thought in light of the reality of Nazism and Stalinism. Chapter 5, on âEvil and Judgementâ, focuses on Arendtâs Eichmann in Jerusalem and Berlinâs commentary on it. As their dispute is tied to their disagreement over central moral and political concepts, such as responsibility, judgement, power and agency, this chapter also covers the relevant work on these concepts. Chapter 6, on âIslands of Freedomâ, delves more deeply into the two thinkersâ middle and late works to tease out their competing visions of an ideal polity. Along the way, it considers their rival perspectives on a range of real-world politics and societies, including Britainâs liberal present and its imperial past, the United States in the turbulent 1960s and Central and East European resistance to Soviet domination. In the Conclusion (Chapter 7), I briefly restate my main arguments and consider their implications for political thought and political philosophy today.
Although the story I tell in this book has many twists and turns, its backbone is simple and may be programmatically stated as follo...