Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Caroline Ashcroft

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812297942
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political theorists of the twentieth century to wrestle with the role of violence in public life. Yet remarkably, despite the fact that it was perhaps the most pressing issue of her era, this theme in her work has rarely been explored. In Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft deepens our understanding of Arendt's conception of the role of violence, offering a critical reading of her work and using it as a provocation to think about how we might engage with contemporary ideas.Arendt has generally been thought to exclude acts of violence from "the political, " based on her supposed idealization of ancient democratic politics. Ashcroft argues that Arendt has been widely misunderstood by both critics and advocates on this. By examining Arendt's thought on violence in key examples of political practice such as modern Jewish politics, the politics of Greece and Rome, and the French and American revolutions, Ashcroft reveals a more pragmatic notion of the place of violence in the political. She argues that what Arendt opposes in political violence is the use of force to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty. What Arendt criticizes is not violence as such, but the misuse of violence and misunderstandings of politics which exclude participatory power altogether.This work also engages with a wider set of concerns in political theory by obliging us to rethink the relations between violence and politics. Arendt's work offers a way to bridge the gulf between sovereign or realist politics and nonhierarchical, nonviolent participatory politics, and thus offers valuable resources for contemporary political theory.

CHAPTER 1

The Modern State and Its Problems

The modern political world is a world of sovereign states. This is one of the most consistent features of politics in the modern era and shapes how we understand and organize contemporary politics. The sovereign state guarantees security, internal and external; citizenship rights of political participation are predominantly understood within the framework of sovereignty; individual lives are shaped and regulated by its laws. Arendt understood this and both feared and railed against the seemingly unquestionable dominance of sovereignty and the threat it posed to the contemporary political world. It is “almost self-evident,” she wrote, in the months following the end of the Second World War, from her perspective as a German Jewish refugee in America, “that the whole Continent [of Europe] is likely to collapse because of the principle of national sovereignty.”¹

When Arendt wrote these words in 1945, she was still reeling from her discovery of the extent of the German totalitarian state. She had first heard about Hitler’s death camps in 1943, and even with her own experience and knowledge of the regime, found the existence of the camps almost inconceivable. It was not simply the level of barbarism that shocked her but the inexplicable irrationality of the whole endeavor. This was something new to the long history of tyranny and despotism—this was something other than despotism in the older sense. With this thought, she turned her attention to analyzing the roots of totalitarianism as she began working on the text that would become The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her work on totalitarianism brought Arendt to prominence in American academia and beyond, and it is what her legacy continues to be irrevocably connected with, more than any other theme. This is quite justified; her reflections on totalitarianism would shape her work and thought to the very end of her career. It is at the core of her understanding and critique of modern politics, as a motivating factor in her attempts to recover or revive certain political concepts.

Arendt’s personal experience of totalitarianism in Hitler’s Germany was, in comparison with that of many other German Jews, mercifully limited: her flight from Germany preceded the worst of the horrors. Yet even so, German totalitarianism shaped her life in important ways. It led to her exile from Germany in 1933 and again from newly occupied France to America in the early 1940s. Because of this exile, she held refugee status for eighteen years, from 1933 to 1951, when she became a naturalized US citizen. Although not politically active as a young woman, Arendt had possessed a keen interest in Zionism since the 1920s and, after the Reichstag fire of 1933, she provided support to the Zionist cause by offering her apartment to Jewish political figures fleeing persecution and by undertaking illegal research collecting evidence of anti-Semitism in Germany for the German Zionist Organization.² The latter activity resulted in Arendt being arrested and held for eight days, after which she was released thanks partly to an absence of evidence against her, but more importantly, to the unusually affable official responsible for Arendt’s capture and interrogation. Nonetheless, the experience showed Arendt she was no longer safe in Germany, and with her mother (Arendt’s only close relation in the country) she left for Paris, via Prague and Geneva.

In Paris, Arendt joined a growing refugee population made up of not only German Jewish refugees but exiles from Eastern Europe too. Her affiliation with Zionism became deeper, and she worked for a time for Youth Aliyah, an organization preparing young Jewish people for emigration to the Palestinian territories. Her exile in Paris possessed a certain appeal as she was surrounded by other refugee intellectuals, in a country where she spoke the language fluently, and in a city in which she evidently felt at home, if not wholly at ease. But she felt herself to be a refugee, and her thinking was, accordingly, increasingly occupied by questions of Jewish politics and what could or ought to be done by the Jews in their increasingly precarious situation in Europe. Also, her time in Paris was not to last. After war was declared between Germany and France, the government ordered “enemy aliens”—such as Arendt—into internment camps across the country. In 1940, Arendt thus ended up imprisoned once again, this time in a women’s camp in Gurs. Just a few weeks after her arrival, however, amid the chaos that ensued as France fell to Germany, Arendt managed to escape. She eventually managed to secure visas to travel to the United States for herself, her husband, Heinrich Blücher, and her mother, and in 1941, they sailed together for New York. This second migration proved more challenging. None of the three spoke English, and Arendt had to learn the language rapidly in order to support the family and manage their affairs. They took little with them; their means were extremely modest; and the three lived in uncomfortably close quarters at the start. Yet New York was also not without its attractions: many other Jewish refugees from Europe had made it their home, among them many of Europe’s foremost academics. Soon after her arrival Arendt was hired as a columnist for Aufbau, a Jewish German-language newspaper, and she began to write extensively, predominantly on Jewish politics. It was not long before her work was also taken up and published by other American journals, in English as well as German.

Yet, despite her relative success in difficult circumstances, the sorrow Arendt felt at the loss of her homeland, her language, and all that went with that is palpable in an article she wrote in 1943 titled “We Refugees.” “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in the concentration camps, and this means the rupture of our private lives.”³

She notes that, amid the forced optimism, suicide was common: “a quiet and modest way of vanishing.”⁴ Man “is a social animal,” she wrote, and “life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off.”⁵ Exile meant the loss of nearly everything that made life meaningful. Furthermore, statelessness stripped individuals such as herself of the legal and political rights that had come to be considered by many in the post-Enlightenment world as fundamental and inalienable. She discovered through her own experience how easily every facet of a human life could be stripped back, in legal, political, social, and private terms. For those who had been less fortunate than Arendt, that became deadly.

Arendt’s reflections on this regime would form the focus of her work for the next decade. Since her time in Paris, Arendt had become a firmly political thinker. This was driven by the urge to understand the position of the Jews in the modern world and especially in Hitler’s Germany; but increasingly, she saw Jewish persecution as a precursor or indicator of broader political problems in modernity that were not limited to any one group. The result was totalitarianism, an essentially new form of political regime, and one not restricted to Germany alone, as Arendt’s analysis of Stalin’s USSR made clear; it could also, in theory, emerge in the modern world wherever similar conditions arose. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Arendt became increasingly convinced that the reason for the collapse of politics into totalitarianism could be found in problematic principles or ideologies of modern politics, namely the ideal of national sovereignty. Thus, as her predictions for the future of Europe indicate, by the end of the war she believed that the dominance of sovereign politics in Europe would result in the emergence of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism was, for Arendt, a political evil without comparison. But it was not without cause.

Sovereignty is, in the end, unsustainable because its fundamental premises are at odds with the reality of the world around us, she believed. “No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth,” she insisted. “Sovereignty is possible only in imagination, paid for by the price of reality.”⁶ Arendt’s postwar fears did not fade with the passage of time. On the contrary, her concern with sovereignty, and her attempts to reveal its inadequacies or dangers, were a constant feature of her work. The “illusory” nature of sovereign power made it no less dangerous. Part of its danger has to do with the relationship of sovereignty to violence and the inevitability of violence that accompanies sovereignty. No substitution for warfare is possible, she notes, “so long as national independence, namely, freedom from foreign rule, and the sovereignty of the state, namely the claim to unchecked and unlimited power in foreign affairs, are identified.”⁷ The claim to unchecked power—both internally and externally—is the basis of modern sovereignty, and its unlimited nature invariably provokes violent conflicts or subjugation and tyranny. In the worst case, this tyranny becomes totalitarianism, a regime form unique to the modern world and, for Arendt, one which was only possible through the idea and institution of sovereignty, a political form and concept belonging to modernity.

Arendt’s idea of sovereignty goes beyond straightforward definitions of the concept, such as that it is the supreme power of the state, or the dominant or absolute political authority, although this is part of how she understands the term. Her continually developing analysis of sovereignty, rather, reveals her conceptualization of what may properly be defined as politics or the political by also serving as an example of the anti-political, in opposition to which her notion of politics takes shape. Sovereignty is a foundational aspect of Arendt’s work because for her it represents precisely what politics should not be. As such, it is at the heart of her critique of contemporary politics, illuminating her understanding of an authentic politics that contrasts with sovereignty and revealing the nature of her concern with violence in the modern world. Because sovereignty is so intimately bound up with the use of violence, it is impossible to understand one without the other in Arendt’s work.

Arendt’s reflections on Rousseau, “the most consistent representative of the theory of sovereignty,” offer a glimpse into how she perceives sovereignty and the problems inherent in it. Rousseau argued that “power must be sovereign, that is, indivisible, because ‘a divided will would be inconceivable,’” Arendt writes. “He did not shun the consequences of this extreme individualism, and he held that in an ideal state, ‘the citizens had no communications one with another,’ that in order to avoid factions ‘each citizen should think only his own thoughts.’”⁸ This attitude of “extreme individualism” was absurd, Arendt argued, because it is wholly at odds with the nature of political interaction. “In reality Rousseau’s theory stands refuted for the simple reason that ‘it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future,’” she continues, quoting his Social Contract. “A community actually founded on this sovereign will would be built not on sand but quicksand. All political business is, and always has been, transacted within an elaborate framework of ties and bonds for the future—such as laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances—all of which derive in the first instance from the faculty to promise and to keep promises in the face of the essential uncertainties of the future.”⁹

If we understand sovereignty as a singular, general will which, as such, possesses absolute power over political decisions at any time, we not only ignore how political communities have always functioned in practice but exclude the elements that provide political stability, namely agreements and promises between citizens, where each possesses powers of their own. Sovereignty therefore fails to account for two aspects which Arendt takes to be central to any authentic vision of politics: first, what she terms “plurality,” the existence of discrete, distinct political actors in the plural; second, the possibility of freedom of choice, impossible where sovereignty is defined as unified will.

So, she concludes, a state governed by Rousseau’s sovereign “in which there is no communication between the citizens and where each man thinks only his own thoughts is by definition a tyranny.”¹⁰ With the tyrant comes an end to freedom. If there is no longer a space for freedom to be enacted, political freedom can no longer exist.¹¹ That is true whether that possibility has been physically closed off, for example, by the outlawing of free public association, or theoretically excluded by our own conceptions of the political, as in the modern idea of sovereignty that Rousseau set out in his work. Today, we no longer understand freedom in its original (i.e., real) terms, writes Arendt, but identify freedom with sovereignty, a move which “is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.” Following its implications through, she suggests that this “leads either to a denial of human freedom—namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign—or the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of freedom, i.e. the sovereignty, of all others.”¹² Either human freedom is assumed not to exist, because it is at odds with sovereignty, or freedom is a zero-sum game of the possession of power over others. The whole idea of sovereignty and the will-freedom identification that it rests on are, she insists, fictitious. “The famous sovereignty of political bodies,” she writes, “has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence.” Through violence, control over political communities can be maintained for some time, yet “if men wish to be free,” insists Arendt, “it is precisely sovereignty which they must renounce.”¹³

The Origins of Sovereignty

Rousseau, while giving us a representative outline of sovereignty in its advanced form, was far from being the progenitor of the modern concept. To find the origins of sovereignty, Arendt explains, we must look back to the beginning of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in parlicular to its “greatest spokesmen” Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.¹⁴ Modern understandings of political power, she claims, “derive from the old notion of absolute power that accompanied the rise of the sovereign European nation-state.”¹⁵ Bodin and Hobbes reflect the philosophical and political views of their time, but through their formulations of sovereignty, they gave a specific shape to those ideas which would become influential in their own right.

However, it is worth observing that Arendt identifies precursors to the problems of hierarchy and violence in the modern state that stretch much further back, indeed, all the way back to the beginning of what she terms our (Western) tradition of political thought. Events and ideas in the prehistory of sovereignty prepared the ground for what came later. She locates the start of the Western tradition of political thought—not, she specifies, our political or philosophical history—in classical Greece. “At the beginning,” she states, “stands Plato’s contempt for politics, his conviction that ‘the affairs and actions of men are not worthy of great seriousness’” and that politics is merely an unfortunately unavoidable distraction from more important matters.¹⁶ Plato is more interested in freeing the mind for its inquiries into matters of the eternal, and so we see in his work and in the work of those he has influenced down the centuries not just the “philosopher’s scorn” for mortal affairs but “the specifically Greek contempt for everything that is necessary for mere life and survival.”¹⁷ Thus, Arendt claims, from the first moment that politics became a subject of systematic inquiry, it was as a necessary evil. Our tradition “unhappily and fatefully, and from its very beginning, has deprived political affairs, that is, those activities concerning the common public realm that comes into being whenever men live together, of all dignity of their own.”¹⁸

The status hierarchy of ancient political thought, which prioritized the activities of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Modern State and Its Problems
• Chapter 2. The Jewish Army and the Reconstruction of a People
• Chapter 3. The Polis and the Res Publica
• Chapter 4. Revolutionary Politics and the Unleashing of the Social
• Chapter 5. Political Violence in Modernity
• Chapter 6. A Politics of Nonviolence?
• Chapter 7. A Space for the Political
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments