Arendt argues that the Western philosophical tradition has devalued the world of human action which attends to appearances (the vita activa), subordinating it to the life of contemplation which concerns itself with essences and the eternal (the vita contemplativa). Hannah Arendt This investigation spans the rest of Arendt’s life and works. Because the activity of labor is commanded by necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave; labor is characterized by unfreedom. The common world of institutions and spaces that work creates furnish the arena in which citizens may come together as members of that shared world to engage in political activity. As noted earlier, Arendt bemoans the “world alienation” that characterizes the modern era, the destruction of a stable institutional and experiential world that could provide a stable context in which humans could organize their collective existence. She eventually majored in Classical Greek and Philosophy. By systematically elaborating what this vita activa might be said to entail, she hopes to reinstate the life of public and political action to apex of human goods and goals. In 1958, she published The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. must bedisinterested). proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.”. The quality of freedom in the world of appearances (which for Arendt is the sine qua non of politics) is to be found elsewhere in the vita activa, namely with the activity of action proper. In view of this characterization of labor, it is unsurprising that Arendt is highly critical of Marx’s elevation of animal laborans to a position of primacy in his vision of the highest ends of human existence. In 1925 she began a romantic relationship with Heidegger, but broke this off the following year. The Origins of Totalitarianism, like many of Arendt's books is structured as three essays, "Antisemitism", "Imperialism" and "Totalitarianism". Her position has generated a vast corpus of scholarship, most of which falls into the context of the realist-liberal divide. There is no simple way of presenting Arendt’s diverse inquiries into the nature and fate of the political, conceived as a distinctive mode of human experience and existence. This is not, however, to gloss over the profound differences that Arendt had with Heidegger, with not only his political affiliation with the Nazis, or his moves later to philosophical-poetic contemplation and his corresponding abdication from political engagement. This type of terror exceeds fear. Summary: Hannah Arendt’s last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled The Life of the Mind. . Hannah Arendt is a most challenging figure for anyone wishing to understand the body of her work in political philosophy. She witnessed the collapse of politics, in this sense, under Nazi totalitarianism. non-animal) activity. (Again it is Plato who stands accused of the instrumentalization of action, of its conflation with fabrication and subordination to an external teleology as prescribed by his metaphysical system). Hannah Arendts Analyse der totalen Herrschaft ist … Born into a secular-Jewish family, Arendt fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, eventually settling in New York, where after the war she covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Arendt has also come under criticism for her overly enthusiastic endorsement of the Athenian polis as an exemplar of political freedom, to the detriment of modern political regimes and institutions. Rather, Arendt claims, what distinguishes these modern revolutions is that they exhibit (albeit fleetingly) the exercise of fundamental political capacities – that of individuals acting together, on the basis of their mutually agreed common purposes, in order to establish a tangible public space of freedom. Her goal was to propose a phenomenological reconstruction of different aspects of human activity, so as to better discern the type of action and engagement that corresponded to present political existence. This phenomenological approach to the political partakes of a more general revaluation or reversal of the priority traditionally ascribed to philosophical conceptualizations over and above lived experience. So, we have the activity of labor which meets the needs that are essential for the maintenance of humanities physical existence, but by virtue of its necessary quality occupies the lowest rung on the hierarchy of the vita activa. Hannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of thetwentieth century. Its necessity was now justified by recourse to supposed laws of history (such as the inevitable triumph of the classless society) or nature (such as the inevitability of a war between “chosen” and other “degenerate” races). Hannah belonged to an underprivileged family, and after the death of her father at a very young age, her struggle with limited financial means intensified. . Intellectually, she was an independent thinker, a loner not a "joiner", separating herself from schools of thought or ideology. Humanity in this mode of its activity Arendt names homo faber; he/she is the builder of walls (both physical and cultural) which divide the human realm from that of nature and provide a stable context (a “common world”) of spaces and institutions within which human life can unfold. In 1959, she published “Reflections on Little Rock,” her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil rights movement. It follows, for Arendt, that political philosophy has a fundamentally ambiguous role in its relation to political experience, insofar as its conceptual formulations do not simply articulate the structures of pre-reflective experience but can equally obscure them, becoming self-subsistent preconceptions which stand between philosophical inquiry and the experiences in question, distorting the phenomenal core of experience by imposing upon it the lens of its own prejudices. Likewise, the emphasis she places upon direct citizen deliberation as synonymous with the exercise of political freedom excludes representative models, and might be seen as unworkable in the context of modern mass societies, with the delegation, specialization, expertise and extensive divisions of labor needed to deal with their complexity. Published in the same year as On Revolution, Arendt’s book about the Eichmann trial presents both a continuity with her previous works, but also a change in emphasis that would continue to the end of her life. It was precisely the failure of this capacity that characterized the “banality” of Eichmann’s propensity to participate in political evil. It endeavours to illuminate the continuities and connections within these works in an attempt to synchronize them as a coherent but fully-functioning body of thought. This in turn led to the delegitimation of political institutions, and the atrophy of the principles of citizenship and deliberative consensus that had been the heart of the democratic political enterprise. As these issues reappear, Arendt elaborates on them and refines them, rarely relaxing the enquiry into the nature of political existence. Labor and its effects are inherently impermanent and perishable, exhausted as they are consumed, and so do not possess the qualities of quasi-permanence which are necessary for a shared environment and common heritage which endures between people and across time. Patrick Keeney is the author of Liberalism, Communitarianism and Education: Reclaiming Liberal Education. Her father dies of syphilis (4). Another way of understanding the importance of publicity and plurality for action is to appreciate that action would be meaningless unless there were others present to see it and so give meaning to it. In ihrem Werk "Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft" (1955) hat Hannah Arendt ihre politische Theorie vom Totalitarismus als eigenständiges Phänomen des 20. Arendt’s work, if it can be said to do any one thing, essentially undertakes a reconstruction of the nature of political existence. The bland assumption that totalitarianism can be safely confined to history is belied by zealots of various stripes, all of whom are convinced that their manifesto or holy book or prophet has revealed, at last, “the mysteries of the universe.” Such true believers are a danger to us all, in that they are willing to sacrifice their fellow man on the altar of one or another of the inexorable laws of history, nature, or God. Nazism and communism—the two most prominent forms of totalitarianism—were something new: “Totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression. Yet in her next major work, On Revolution (1961) she takes her rethinking of political concepts and applies them to the modern era, with ambivalent results. There is probably no better means of combating fanaticism and extremism than instilling in students a healthy dose of Socratic humility and skepticism. In short, humanity represents/articulates/embodies the faculty of beginning. The question with which Arendt engages most frequently is the nature of politics and the political life, as distinct from other domains of human activity. Image by Steve Browne and John Verkleir via Flickr. Her greatest contribution to political thought is her analysis of the rise of the twentieth-century totalitarian state, a phenomenon that in her estimation lay outside the traditional categories of Western philosophy. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only theconditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life . The faculty of reflective judgement requires us to set aside considerations which are purely private (matters of personal liking and private interest) and instead judge from the perspective of what we share in common with others (i.e. All Arendt quotations are taken from The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968).↩, 2. The impact of the First World War, and the Great Depression, and the spread of revolutionary unrest, left people open to the promulgation of a single, clear and unambiguous idea that would allocate responsibility for woes, and indicate a clear path that would secure the future against insecurity and danger. Where older tyrannies had used terror as an instrument for attaining or sustaining power, modern totalitarian regimes exhibited little strategic rationality in their use of terror. is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of natural development.” The unequivocal laws of nature determined that those of Aryan blood were the rightful rulers of the world. Arendt’s concern with thinking and judgement as political faculties stretches back to her earliest works, and were addressed subsequently in a number of essays written during the 1950s and 1960s. See “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.↩. . However, it may still be possible to present her thought not as a collection of discrete interventions, but as a coherent body of work that takes a single question and a single methodological approach, which then informs a wide array of inquiries. In these works and in numerous essays she grappledwith the most crucial political events of her time, trying to grasptheir meaning and historical import, and showing how they affected ourcategories of moral and political judgment. . Her discussion of the history of totalitarianism; her concept of ‘the banality of evil’; her own experience of nazism and being a refugee, of being stateless; and her thoughts on the contours of the human condition as a plurality have inspired scholars in recent years. Als Schlüsselbegriffe gelten Masse und Ideologie. Yet Arendt sees both the French and American revolutions as ultimately failing to establish a perduring political space in which the on-going activities of shared deliberation, decision and coordinated action could be exercised. from conduct which has an habituated, regulated, automated character; behavior falls under the determinations ofprocess, is thoroughly conditioned by causal antecedents, and so is essentially unfree. Arendt pronounced that housing and homelessness (themes of the conference) were not political issues, but that they were external to the political as the sphere of the actualization of freedom; the political is about human self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos. Hannah Arendt was an influential twentieth century philosopher whose works focused on political views in society. Through this, she develops a basis upon which publicly-minded political judgment can survive, in spite of the calamitous events of the 20th century which she sees as having destroyed the traditional framework for such judgment. Arendt takes issue with both liberal and Marxist interpretations of modern political revolutions (such as the French and American). This complicated synthesis of theoretical elements is evinced in the apparent availability of her thought to a wide and divergent array of positions in political theory: for example, participatory democrats such as Benjamin Barber and Sheldon Wolin, communitarians such as Sandel and MacIntyre, intersubjectivist neo-Kantians such as Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Bernstein and Seyla Benhabib, etc. Arendt understands “politics” as public debate by a community about meaningful aspects of their shared life together. Email: m_yar@hotmail.com non-animal) activity which fabricates the enduring, public and common world of our collective existence. However, in the last phase of her work, she turned to examine these faculties in a concerted and systematic way. Meanwhile, the American Revolution evaded this fate, and by means of the Constitution managed to found a political society on the basis of comment assent. The shortcoming of this distinction in Arendt’s work is amply illustrated by a well-known and often-cited incident. Labor is distinguished by its never-ending character; it creates nothing of permanence, its efforts are quickly consumed, and must therefore be perpetually renewed so as to sustain life. Of the third, Judging, only the title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. Totalitarian ideologies offered just such answers, purporting discovered a “key to history” with which events of the past and present could be explained, and the future secured by doing history’s or nature’s bidding. For Arendt, the popular appeal of totalitarian ideologies with their capacity to mobilize populations to do their bidding, rested upon the devastation of ordered and stable contexts in which people once lived. transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.” As Arendt puts it, “There is only one thing that seems discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” Here, then, is the ultimate nightmarish aim of totalitarian thought: to render men superfluous. As technê andpoiesis the act is dictated by and subordinated to ends and goals outside itself; work is essentially ameans to achieve the thing which is to be fabricated (be it a work of art, a building or a structure of legal relations) and so stands in a relation of mere purposiveness to that end. Hannah Arendt is regarded as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. Herein lies the basis of Arendt’s quarrel with Hegel and Marx, for to define politics or the unfolding of history in terms of any teleology or immanent or objective process is to deny what is central to authentic human action, namely, its capacity to initiate the wholly new, unanticipated, unexpected, unconditioned by the laws of cause and effect. The fundamental defining quality of action is its ineliminable freedom, its status as an end in itself and so as subordinate to nothing outside itself. Rather, terror was no longer a means to a political end, but an end in itself. Arendt’s first major work, published in 1951, is clearly a response to the devastating events of her own time – the rise of Nazi Germany and the catastrophic fate of European Jewry at its hands, the rise of Soviet Stalinism and its annihilation of millions of peasants (not to mention free-thinking intellectual, writers, artists, scientists and political activists). Early life and career Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, Germany, the only child of middle-class Jewish parents of Russian descent. Accordingly the amenability of European populations to totalitarian ideas was the consequence of a series of pathologies that had eroded the public or political realm as a space of liberty and freedom. It is in this instauration, the attempt to establish a public and institutional space of civic freedom and participation, that marks out these revolutionary moments as exemplars of politics qua action. Hannah Arendt refers to Socrates, who recognized early on that every person lives in a form of imposed community with themselves. Rather than following Husserl’s methodological prescription of a “bracketing” (epoché) of the prevalent philosophical posture, Arendt’s follows Heidegger’s historical Abbau or Destruktion to clear away the distorting encrustations of the philosophical tradition, thereby aiming to uncover the originary character of political experience which has for the most part been occluded. Hannah Arendt is not one of them. For the Postmoderns, such as Lyotard, the emphasis placed upon reflective judgement furnishes a “post-foundational” or “post-universalist” basis in which the singularity of moral judgements can be reconciled with some kind of collective adherence to political principles. . The papers of the author, educator and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) are one of the principal sources for the study of modern intellectual life. Hannah Arendt was one of the most original and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Totalitarian movements are different from mere revolutionary movements, in that what they aim at is “not the . Arendt thought that the best inoculation against totalitarian thinking is a citizenry capable of seeing through the false promises, deceits, and illusions of ideologies ready to foist upon us unassailable “truths” about the world. For work is still subject to a certain kind of necessity, that which arises from its essentially instrumental character. Arendt places great weight upon this notion of a faculty of judgement that “thinks from the standpoint of everyone else.” This “broadened way of thinking” or “enlarged mentality” enables us to “compare our judgement not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgement of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everybody else…” For Arendt, this “representative thinking” is made possible by the exercise of the imagination – as Arendt beautifully puts it, “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” “Going visiting” in this way enables us to make individual, particular acts of judgement which can nevertheless claim a public validity. Jahrhunderts entwickelt. It also reappears in his critique of the “scientization of politics” and his concomitant defense of practical, normative reason in the domain of life-world relations from the hegemony of theoretical and technical modes of reasoning. However, we may note the importance that her studies have had for the theory and analysis of totalitarianism and the nature and origins of political violence. In the next years, she worked on her projected three-volume work, The Life of the Mind. The most famous facet of this enquiry, often considered also to be the most original, is Arendt’s outline of the faculty of human judgment. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future, and traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. Nazism declared that the laws of nature had decreed the Aryan race to be superior to all others: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws . Moreover, it will be recalled that in human action Arendt recognizes (for good or ill) the capacity to bring the new, unexpected, and unanticipated into the world. While attending a conference in 1972, she was put under question by the Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Albrecht Wellmer, regarding her distinction of the “political” and the “social,” and its consequences.
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