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Arendt and the Modern State: Variations on Hegel in The Origins of Totalitarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Roy T. Tsao
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Extract

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), unlike her later books, is centrally concerned with the nature and fate of the modern state. The book presents a series of political pathologies – antisemitism, imperialism, tribalism, and totalitarianism – that Arendt regards as the result of failures in the state's dual mission to integrate diverse social groups into a single body politic, and to uphold the uniform rule of law for all. Her underlying conception of the state bears a striking, though unacknowledged affinity to that of Hegel. Like Hegel, moreover, she argues that citizens' mutual recognition of one another's human rights, as mediated through state institutions, is an indispensable condition for full human self-consciousness and agency. Her version of this argument is developed first through an excursus on the origins and effects of racism among Europeans living in Africa, and then through an analysis of the unique plight of stateless refugees.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , Winter 2004 , pp. 105 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2004

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References

I would like to thank Peg Birmingham, Margaret Canovan, George Kateb, Jerome Kohn, Patchen Markell, Larry May, Gaelen Murphy, and Walter Nicgorski, along with this journal's manuscript reviewers, for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951], rev. and expanded edition (New York: Harcourt, 1973).Google Scholar Henceforth abbreviated OT. All parenthetical page references in the body of this essay refer to this text; all of the passages cited also appear in the differently paginated first edition.

2. Arendt expressed her regret over the misleading nature of the title of The Origins of Totalitarianism in her published reply to a Eric Voegelin's review of the book for The Review of Politics. Arendt, , “A Reply,” Review of Politics 15/1 (1953): 76–84,Google Scholar reprinted in Arendt, , Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Kohn, J. (New York: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 401–408.Google Scholar Unfortunately, Arendt's remarks there about the book's intended structure were in some respects no less misleading; on this matter, see Tsao, Roy T., “The Three Phases of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism” Social Research 69, no. 2 (2002): 589–90.Google Scholar

3. Arendt, , The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958);Google ScholarArendt, , On Revolution [1963] rev. ed (New York: Viking, 1965).Google Scholar

4. The magnitude of that shift is partially masked by the fact that all editions of the book since 1955 have included a new concluding chapter (“Ideology and Terror”) that more closely reflects Arendt's theoretical concerns in The Human Condition. On the evolution of the text, see Ludz, Ursula, “Hannah Arendt und ihr Totalitarismusbuch: Ein kurzer Bericht Über eine schwierige Autor-Werk-Geschichte,” Hannah Arendt-Studien 1: Totlitäre Herrschaft und republikanische Demokratie, ed. Grunenberg, Antonia (Frankfurt: 2003), pp. 81–92.Google Scholar

5. That is not, however, to deny that some (though not all) of the underlying concerns of The Origins of Totalitarianism would remain important to Arendt in her later writings as well. For these continuities, see Canovan, Margaret, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 7 and passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Arendt, , The Human Condition, p. 43.Google Scholar

7. see Tsao, , “The Three Phases of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism,” 582–91;Google ScholarCanovan, , Hannah Arendt: pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

8. Prior to their incorporation in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt's treatment of several of the themes discussed in this essay made their first appearance in the pages of The Review of Politics. See Arendt, , “Race-Thinking Before Racism,” Review of Politics 6/1 (1944): 36–73;CrossRefGoogle Scholar“Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism” Review of Politics 7/4 (1945): 441–63;CrossRefGoogle Scholar“The Nation,” Review of Politics 8/1 (1946): 138–41.Google Scholar

9. These unfavorable comments usually concern Hegel's philosophy of history, which she (erroneously) interpreted as a conception of history as a quasi-natural process. See Arendt, , “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern” [1958] in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 85–86;Google ScholarArendt, , On Revolution, pp. 51–54.Google Scholar

10. Curiously, Arendt's debt to Heidegger seems much less pronounced in The Origins of Totalitarianism (at least its first edition) than in her later works. (The book's only overtly Heideggerian motif, its account of what Arendt calls “loneliness” in mass society, occurs in “Ideology and Terror,” a chapter added only in the book's later editions.) This may have something to do with the fact that Arendt had been personally estranged from Heidegger at the time she wrote the book; she renewed contact with him in 1950,Google Scholar after the manuscript was already completed.

11. There are some exceptions. The pertinence of Hegel to Arendt's later work, particularly The Human Condition, has been noted, in passing, in Shklar, Judith, “Hannah Arendt as Pariah” [1983] in Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 370;Google ScholarBernstein, J. M., “From Self-Consciousness to Community: Act and Recognition in the Master-Slave Relationship” in The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy, ed. Pelczynski, Z. A. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 34;Google Scholar and Kateb, George, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), p. 44 n.2.Google Scholar This matter has been more recently explored by Allen Speight in “Arendt and Hegel on the Tragic Nature of Action,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 28/5 (2002): 523–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Some commonalities and differences between Arendt's views on modern society and Hegel's (with brief remarks on The Origins of Totalitarianism) are discussed in Cohen, Jean and Arato, Andrew, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 177–200.Google Scholar

12. Arendt's recently published Denktagebuch, a collection of notebooks whose dated entries provide a detailed view to the sources and development of her later thought, begin only in 1950; the manuscript for The Origins of Totalitarianism was completed the previous year. See Arendt, , Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973, ed. Ludz, Ursula and Nordmann, Ingeborg (Munich: Piper, 2002).Google Scholar

13. For Arendt's friendships with Alexandre Koyré and Jean Wahl, see Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 117, 245, 251.Google Scholar Anne Weil, the wife of EricWeil, is mentioned throughout Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt and wasapparently a major source for it. For the influence in France of Koyré, Wahl, and Eric Weil as interpreters of Hegel, see Roth, Michael S., Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

14. Young-Bruehl, , Hannah Arendt, pp. 116–17.Google Scholar According to Young-Bruehl, both Arendt and her first husband GÜnther Stern attended some of Kojève's Hegel seminars at the Ècole Pratique des Hautes Études, which ran from 1933 to 1939; Young-Bruehl mentions no specific dates. The partial list of participants in those seminars that Michael Roth has compiled from incomplete official records includes one “Stern” for the 1935–36 year. See Roth, , Knowing and History, p. 226.Google Scholar

15. Wahl, Jean, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophic de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929).Google Scholar

16. Weil, Eric, Hegel et I'état (Paris: Vrin, 1950).Google Scholar

17. The notes Kojéve prepared for these seminars were later assembled for publication by Raymond Queneau. See Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1969).Google Scholar

18. Hegel, , Philosophy of Right [1821] ed. Wood, A. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [hereafter abbreviated PR], §§ 182–83.Google Scholar

19. PR §187.Google Scholar

20. PR §258.Google Scholar

21. PR §253.Google Scholar

22. PR §303; see also §§301–302.Google Scholar

23. This more limited focus accounts for the otherwise inexplicable way in which Arendt can refer in passing to a “religiously determined, mutually hostile past” between Christians and Jew reaching back to the recesses of European history, or to the “ubiquitous hatred of Jews” in the “backward countries” of Eastern Europe, while dismissing the significance of such factors to her argument (OT, pp. xii, 29Google Scholar).

24. In discussing the Jesuits’ role in fomenting antisemitism in the Dreyfus affair, Arendt does not attribute their motives to their religious beliefs as such, but rather to their frankly antirepublican ambition to recapture “a political share in the management of the state” (OT, p. 104Google Scholar). In this regard, it is worth noting that she makes a point of praising the later courage of Catholic bishops and parish clergy in standing up for French Jews against the German occupiers and the Vichy authorities (OT, p. 93Google Scholar).

25. OT, pp. 135, 148.Google Scholar Arendt's understanding of the economic dimension of imperialism is much indebted to J. H. Hobson's classic study of the subject. See Hobson, , Imperialism [1902], 3rd ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), pp. 78, 85, 361.Google Scholar

26. OT, pp. 148–49.Google Scholar Arendt credits Luxemburg in particular for her “brilliant insight” into the dependence of capitalism on noncapitalist economies. But even that laudatory reference is somewhat misleading: while Arendt represents that claim as a thesis concerning imperialist expansion in particular, it actually concerns what Luxemburg takes to be the conditions for the accumulation of capital as such. See Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital [1913] (New York: Monthly Review, 1968), pp. 452 and passim.Google Scholar

27. Arendt's implied rejoinder to Lenin in this statement is noted in Benhabib, Seyla, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield: 2003), p. 77.Google Scholar

28. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C. B. (New York: Penguin, 1981), chap. 11, p. 161.Google Scholar

29. See Leviathan, chap. 21, p. 272.Google Scholar

30. See especially PR § 253.Google Scholar

31. The usual term in German for “citizen,” “BÜrger,” like the French “bourgeois,” referred originally to the privileged condition of medieval town-dwellers; it lacks the political connotation of the French citoyen. See Hegel, , Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. Haldane, E. S. and Simson, F. (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 2: 209;Google Scholarcompare PR §261.Google Scholar See also Hegel, , Jenaer Realphilosophie, ed. Hoffmeister, J. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967), p. 294Google Scholar (cited in Avineri, Shlomo, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. PR §§ 244, 244A, 272.Google Scholar

33. It is worth recalling that the word “racism” itself had entered English usage only a little more than a decade before Arendt wrote, and its accepted meaning at the time seems to have been largely the same as Arendt's own. See The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., (1989), s.v.Google Scholar

34. See Kateb, , Hannah Arendt: pp. 61–63;Google Scholar compare Benhabib, , Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, pp. 85–86.Google Scholar

35. Arendt does not claim that Africa had never known civilizations of its own; indeed, she speculates that the tribes she describes may well have been “the survivors of some unknown disaster which ended a civilization we do not know” (OT, p. 192Google Scholar).

36. More explicitly than Arendt, but in a manner directly continuous with her own account, Hegel had associated the native Africans' immersion in nature with their adherence to animistic beliefs that left no place for individual freedom or responsibility, and a corresponding disregard for the value of human life as such. While he does not suppose, as Arendt does, that the Africans maintained no distinction at all between themselves and the natural world, he does contend that their awareness of this distinction was limited to their illusory belief that they could exert some (arbitrary) control over nature through sorcery. See Hegel, , Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. Nisbet, H. B. (New York: Cambridge, 1975), pp. 177–84, 216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Coming in a book that covers the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, that's quite a claim—though surely a defensible one, given those earlier massacres' untold millions of victims. Arendt follows the claim with more specific indictments of Europeans' crimes in Africa: “the Boers' extermination of the Hottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in German Southeast Africa, the decimation of the peaceful Congo population—from 20 to 40 million reduced to 8 million” (OT, p. 185).

38. See PR §§ 105–106.

39. See Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. Miller, A. V. (New York: Oxford, 1977), §§ 189–92.Google Scholar

40. Arendt speaks more explicitly of the “common sharing of responsibility” implied in the idea of humanity, and the attendant “predicament of common responsibility” when faced with human beings radically unlike oneself, when elaborating on this same theme in relation to later forms of “tribal” nationalism back in Europe (OT, p. 236).

41. This remark occurs only in Arendt's later German-language version of the text, in the equivalent paragraph to the one in the English-language version containing the statements just quoted. See Arendt, , Elemente und Ursprunge totaler Herrschaft (Frankfurt: Deutsche Rechte Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1955), p. 443, cf. OT, p. 296.Google Scholar

42. See PR §100.

43. See PR §71; Hegel, , Philosophy of Mind [1830], trans. Wallace, William (New York: Oxford, 1971), §§436–37.Google Scholar

44. See Hegel, , Philosophy of Mind, §539;Google ScholarPhenomenology of Spirit, §439.Google Scholar

45. See Hegel, , Philosophy of Mind, §432.Google Scholar

57. OT, Ist ed.,pp. 439.Google Scholar

47. See OT, pp. 301–302. This passage is very obscure; the comparable passage in Arendt's later German-language version of the text is somewhat clearer. Arendt, , Elemente und Ursprunge totaler Herrschaft, pOT. 450–51..Google Scholar

48. For Hegel's insistence that the state must recognize its citizens as human beings, not members of any particular ethnic (or religious) group, see PR §209Google Scholar. For a discussion of Hegel's rejection of nationalism (with textual references), see Pinkard, Terry, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge, 1994), pp. 328, 434 n.101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Arendt emphasizes the way in which the influx of stateless refugees during the interwar years in Europe overwhelmed the ability of states like France to maintain any coherent policies on immigration and naturalization, as ordinary aliens discovered they could avoid deportation by claiming the status for themselves (OT, p. 286)Google Scholar.

50. The phrase “new law on Earth” is used in the Preface to OT's first edition (p. ix);Google Scholar its meaning is clear only in light of the arguments made later on in the book.

51. OT, 1st ed., p. 436.Google Scholar The “Concluding Remarks” appear in the first edition of OT only; this short concluding chapter was dropped in later editions to make room for an additional chapter on totalitarianism. Much, but not all, of the material from the “Concluding Remarks” was shifted to other parts of the text.

52. See Kojève, , Introduction, pp. 158–63.Google Scholar

53. OT, 1st ed., pp. 436.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., 1st ed., p. 439. While the statement occurs only in the original edition's “Concluding Remarks,” Arendt issues a similar demand in the first edition's Preface, which unlike the “Concluding Remarks” was retained in the later editions (OT, p. ix).Google Scholar For broader discussions of Arendt's views on the politics of human rights, see Benhabib, Seyla, “Political Geographies in a Global World: Arendtian Reflections” Social Research 69/2 (2002): 539–66;Google ScholarIsaac, Jeffrey C., “A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights,” American Political Science Review 90/1 (1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. See OT, p. 298Google Scholar. This passage, absent in the first edition, appears for the first time in the German edition of 1955. See Arendt, , Elemente und Ursprunge totaler Herrschaft, pp. 450–51.Google Scholar

56. See Tsao, “The Three Phases of Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism.”

57. OT, Ist ed.,pp. 437.Google Scholar