Politics in dark times: reflections on Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) analysed liberal democracy, Marxism, the nation-state, and the legal and political impediments to the realisation of human rights. This article considers the reasons for the resurgence of interest in Arendt's work as a resource for understanding globalisation, international conflict, and the plight of refugees. It shows that elements of her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism resonate with current concerns, but more importantly the limitations of her analysis, particularly of racial segregation in the USA, have a direct bearing on the distinction between social equality and political equality. In South Africa confronting entrenched social inequality alongside the constitutional proclamation of political equality Arendt's work has added relevance. This article explores these concerns by way of criticism of Arendt that enlists analysis of the Haitian Revolution. It seeks to identify aspects of Arendt's texts from which lessons can be learnt.

Notes

See Robinson (1965), and Ezra's (2007) overview of the controversy. Žižek (2001) critiques Arendt's psychology of evil. For the relatively minor scandal of her extensive borrowings from the work of Raul Hilberg see Popper (2010). Wasserstein (2009) has renewed the attack. Benhabib (1990) explores Arendt's attempts at configuration and crystallisation in defiance of the traditional canons of historical narrative. Storytelling, not historiography, keeps the promise of politics alive. Rée (2011) offers a useful discussion.

Invoking Arendt in the context of post-apartheid South Africa Van Marle (2009, 17) has cautioned that a society overtaken by law, human rights, and constitutional discourse can reduce freedom to commercial and instrumental considerations. This is far from the active politics of lived community or Arendt's sense of world. See also the contributions to Barnard-Naude, Cornell, and Bois (2009) for the presence of Arendt in post-apartheid jurisprudence. Hanssen (2012) and Moruzzi (nd) provide overviews of the reception of Arendt in the Middle East and the circulation of her ideas in Iran.

It is notable that, except for discussion of jurisdiction in the Eichmann trial (Bilsky 2010), the contributors to Politics in Dark Times do not concern themselves with criticism of Israel as totalitarian. See Benhabib's (2010b) critical and traumatised reflection on the quagmire in Israel–Palestine. For the intimate connection between militarisation (concentrated capital and concentrated coercion) and state formation unhindered by international law see Tilly (1992).

Arendt's reversion to a defensive collective social identity belies the criticism of her vision of the political sphere as assuming an idealised individualism that is denied victims of discrimination: see Allen (2005, 34–35) for this criticism.

See Kant ([1784] 2011, [1795] 1999) and Arendt (1992). Parekh (2008) surveys Arendt's exploration of the right to have rights.

Arendt's dissenting Zionism forms her attempt to articulate an alternative. Criticising the plan to grant Jews (a numerical minority) majority political status and the majority (Arabs) minority status in a Jewish sovereign state, Arendt argued instead for a homeland not based on the vision of a homogeneous state. Colonising and conquering territory will merely produce another group of stateless and rightless refugees. The European model of a nation-state unified by common traditions, language, and shared experiences is less appropriate than the long-term solution of a bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs would have equal rights (see Bernstein 1996). For Arendt's understanding of assimilation see her remarkable study of Rahel Varnhagen written in 1933 and 1938 (Arendt [1957] 1997; and see Moruzzi 2001).

Eurocentrism is evident in the orientation of Arendt's (1970b) essay on Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Working within and against Dinesen's thought, Kenya becomes a memory, a symbolic landscape still not domesticated, the perfect setting for European complexes.

Public education is not a private matter as Arendt ([1954] 1993, 175) herself concedes in ‘The Crisis in Education’ discussing America as a land of immigrants: ‘Since for most of these children [of immigrants] English is not their mother tongue but has to be learned in school, schools must obviously assume functions which in a nation-state would be performed as a matter of course in the home’.

For Berkowitz (2009): ‘What Arendt defends in the Little Rock essay is a vibrant right to privacy as a space where one can be truly unique and different in ways that, because they are meaningfully outside of mainstream opinion, are often offensive and prejudiced’. See Bohman (1997) for a thoughtful consideration. Benhabib ([1996] 2003, 155) sees the Little Rock intervention revealing not only the failure of distinction between the social and the political, but Arendt's own failure of imagination. The question of the political/private distinction points to the complex and sustained relationship between Arendt's thought and that of her teacher, Martin Heidegger (see Richardson 1989).

The divorce of the social and the political recalls Booker T. Washington ([1901] 2008, 105): ‘In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress’—minus, that is, Washington's curtailment of the franchise (for blacks and whites) to an education and property test.

Although Arendt contrasts the French and the American revolutions, one could object that the American Revolution did ultimately descend into the terror of fraternal war. Responding to Abbe Renal, Thomas Paine (1792) disputed the idea of the American Revolution as bloodless. The four volumes of the Abbe Renal's L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissments et du commerce des Européens dans le deux Indes (1770) formed part of Toussaint L'Ouverture's reading.

See in this connection Derrida's ([1994] 2005) work on sovereignty and the thought of Carl Schmitt. In 1993 Derrida participated in a lecture series at the New School for Social Research, New York, dedicated to Arendt's thought.

See, however, her letter to Karl Jaspers concerning McCarthyism and anti-Americanism which is anything but complacent regarding American democracy and academic freedom (Arendt 1953).

Lillian Smith, author of Strange Fruit ([1961] 1994, 242–253), also saw Little Rock as cathartic and linked the campaign for civil rights to anti-colonial movements. Paul Robeson ([1958] 1996, 523) saw in the 1957 Little Rock conflict ‘the magnificent courage and dignity these young people displayed … that won the admiration of the American public’.

An omission also noted by David Scott who detects C.L.R. James responding to Arendt in his portrait of Toussaint L'Ouverture (Scott 2004, 217, 219). See King (2011) for an attempt to mediate.

See Kristeva (2001), chapter 2, for a succinct statement of Arendt's Heideggerian critique of Marxism; Arendt's ([1958] 1998) distinction between work specialisation and the division of labour; and Pitkin (1998) on Arendt's misreading of Marx. For a more nuanced version of Arendt's reading of Marx see Arendt (2002).

Žižek (2001) includes Arendt among those thinkers, such as the Frankfurt School, who veiled their support for capitalism under the criticism of Stalinist totalitarianism. Laclau (1977, 87) offers a related criticism of the deployment of the label ‘totalitarian’. Napoleoni (2008, 68, 77–80) incorporates Arendt's criticism of Marx into analysis of the inability of national governments to control the criminality of globalisation. However, Arendt's criticism of Marxism was not wholesale; see her sympathetic portrayal of the non-dogmatic Rosa Luxemburg (Arendt [1955] 1983).

Arendt as neo-conservative suggests parallels between her thinking (and its reception) and that of Ayn Rand who also drew a careful distinction between economic and political rights (see Rand 1964). Arendt features in Peikoff's (1983) apocalyptic analysis of the parallels between totalitarianism and developments in the US. Peikoff was Rand's anointed successor. See Horowitz (2012).

Gooding-Williams (2009, 196) argues that Abolitionist Frederick Douglass also saw the Founding Fathers intending to found a nation wherein slavery had no place, which meant that one could not be a patriotic American and be pro-slavery or racist. This despite the fact that the US Constitution (1787) protected the slave trade for twenty years and for the purposes of Congressional appointment counted slaves at three-fifths of a whole person. The racial constitution of America, if not to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, reaches back to Britain's involvement in the slave trade (see Bell 2004, 32–33).

Following Dessalines' assassination, the result of his attempt to revoke the land titles of powerful families, the 1806 constitution established a more republican form of government. Henri Christophe's 1807 constitution prescribed an all-powerful presidency, and in 1811 he established a monarchical state in the north of the island. Christophe also wanted to introduce English as the national language. Alexander Pétion's modification and clarification of the 1805 constitution, in the republic founded in the southern and western regions, became the reference point for constitutional change throughout the nineteenth century. Only in 1820 following the deaths of Christophe and Pétion was Haiti united (see Dubois 2004). See Stephanson's (2010) criticism of Buck-Morss’ (2009) erasing of the complexity of the Haitian Revolution.

Confronted with a prolonged labour shortage, the constitution of 1843 states: ‘Art. 6—All individuals born on Haiti, or of African or Indian descent, and all those born in foreign countries to a Haitian man or a Haitian woman, are Haitian; also those who up to this day have been recognized as Haitians. Art. 7—All Africans or Indians and their descendants may become Haitians. The law regulates the formalities of naturalization’ (quoted in Fischer 2004, 241).

Following the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed approximately 300,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless Pat Robertson pronounced Haitians cursed since their pact with the devil whereby they freed themselves from the French. Available online at: http://www.cbsnews.com/ (accessed on 4 March, 2012). For continuing revelations regarding US interference in Haiti see http://www.desalineschildren.com/

George Padmore (1931) locates the post-1805 travails of Haiti within the context of international, specifically the USA, concern with the position of Haiti overlooking the Panama Canal and as a strategic base for the US navy in the Caribbean.

Marx's ‘On the Jewish Question’ ([1843] 1978, 44) addresses the tendency of revolutionary enthusiast to proclaim political life as a mere means whose end is life in civil society; the right to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life.

W.E.B. Du Bois ([1940] 1997, 305) argued for the benefits of self-segregation, not ‘as the final solution of the race problem; exactly the contrary; but it did face the facts and faced them with thoughtfully mapped effort’. He also argued for segregated schooling on the basis that, given the racist structure of US society, the choice is either separate schools or no education at all (Du Bois [1935] 1998), but in the wake of Brown v Board of Education invoked the Haitian Revolution and advocated school integration despite the disadvantage that will be suffered by black children: ‘This is the price of liberty. This is the cost of oppression’ (Du Bois [1955] 1970, 283). Du Bois looked to Africa for help in the struggle against American racists. Regarding the tenacity of racist structure see Bell's (1989, 270) comments on Clarence Thomas's Arendtian articulation of the public and the private.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shane Moran

English and Comparative Literature, University of Fort Hare, Alice 5700, South Africa.