You've been doing very good work the past few weeks, James, just in case you're missing any positive feed-back for your labors.

I'd remark, though, that you might be missing some of the emphases in Arendt's account, though her heuristic method of imaginative historical reconstruction has its self-willful moments. Her book on totalitarianism actually was primarily concerned with accounting for the rise of Nazism, with reference to the Soviet Union largely tacked on as an afterthought, to fit with the times. (Hence, her emphasis on the ultimate hollowness of the leadership of the regime is pretty much a direct comment on the unfathomableness or inexplicabilty of Hitler's sway, with no account of motives possibly being commensurable with the extent of its crimes, for all that she duely emphasizes the precedent of colonial wars.) She would deal with the Soviet Union more directly in her subsequent work on revolution, though that focused primarily on a comparison between the American and French experiences. But she wasn't exactly carrying through a Marxist analysis, as given her Heideggerian-Jasperian-Weberian intellectual roots, she was highly critical of Marxism, while refusing to recognize any other kind of it than the quasi-official, if semi-vulgar form with Engels as its official interpreter. In fact, her account of the take-over of the "state" by the "nation" is just a variant of one of her main, if most perplexing, overall themes, namely the contamination of the properly and "purely" political by the "social", a tendency of which she would see Marxism as a prime exemplar. (A couple of pointers might help here: 1) she uses an idealized model of the Greek polis, taken over from the German philosophical tradition, not so much as an affirmative model as what politics "ought" to be, but as a riddling device, to pick apart, analyse and bring into questioning and criticism the taken-for-granted assumptions or presuppositions of the conceptions of politics that have developed in Western modernity. 2) Her perplexing stigmatization of "the social" in politics gains some of its point, if one compares it to the Frankfurt School plaint about the self-enclosed system of domination of "the totally administered society"). Also, there are some things in her account that probably owe to their specifically German background, which is not just where she is coming from, but also largely what she is addressing in this case. Specifically, the highly concentrated and hierarchalized development of heavy industry in the case of the astonishingly rapid economic development of Germany, combined with the relative political timidity of the "buergerlich" class, squeezed between the authoritarian political hierarchy and the fear of the working-class, conditions some of her account of the difference between the "high" bourgeoisie of industrialists and financiers and the broader educated middle-class of professionals and rentiers, which she rather sardonically takes to task. Something from the European and specifically German context that doesn't quite translate into the American context is that class divisions were highly culturally encoded, such that the middle-class, as distinct from the "petty bourgoisie", maintained their status through the pursuit of a high degree of cultural and specifically aesthetic cultivation. Arendt, partly out of her critique of Marx, makes a distinction between labor and work, with the former being repetitive mass-production and the latter associated with the production of whole works, which contribute to the formation of the public world. It is from that standpoint that she sardonically criticizes the aesthetic cultivation of the educated middle-class, as "pampered idleness", that is, as a privatistic-subjectivistic retreat from public activity into a kind of refined consumerism, whereby the distinction between "high" and "low" culture is already being debased and transforming the former into the latter. The longer-run point of that, of course, is that fascism would present itself precisely as an aestheticization of politics.

I would have a recommendation for a good book giving an overview of Arendt's thought/work as a whole: Phillip Hansen's "Politics, Citizenship, History". It's written by a Canadian from a leftie point-of-view, (teaching in Saskatchewan, no less, Tommy Douglas country), which, aside from the clarity and even-handedness with which the book is written, as two advantages: 1) it avoids the mainstream of American Arendt reception, which tends to assimilate her into the framework of Cold War liberalism and 2) it deals squarely with the difficulty of pinning Arendt down politically, for she can at times seem like a conservative, a liberal, or a leftist, often in short order, almost a the same time, and precisely because it takes up a left-wing reception, the book does a good job of grappling with that issue and explicating why that is so.

Posted by: john c. halasz at September 17, 2005 01:50 AM

Thanks, John; I actually read your comment last night, then spent a lot of time researching the Frankfurt School (1, 2). I was quite amused to find this photo of Jürgen Habermas talking to... well, yes, it's the future Benedict XIV, another person who has also expressed serious reservations about "the self-enclosed system of domination of the totally administered society."

The role of the "social" in politics here seems subordinated to the role of the shared experience and shared normativity induced by confrontation of the other-nation; while in Chapter 5 ("The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie") she refers to the shared experience and normativity of the members of the bourgeoisie itself:

Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'êtat. [V.ii]

Setting aside the great harshness of this judgment, it seems that Arendt sees a congruence between the Darwinian and Marginalist explanations of the universe as stripping it of moral context, and thereby stripping public life of moral context. This is not moral relativism, so much as banishing moral "text" from the actions of institutions.

(As an opinionated aside--I personally believe that moral absolutism, which his holiness Benedict XIV has spurned so emphatically, is actually the residue of this banishment. Demonize gays, but disregard the criminalization of the state: that's the outcome of moral absolutism in praxis, and, I submit, an inevitable one.)

This emphasis on the shared drive to expansion is pushed home more forcefully still in VII.iii ("Race & Bureaucracy: the Imperialist Character"):

What overcame Rhodes's monstrous innate vanity and made him discover the charms of secrecy was the same thing that overcame Cromer's innate sense of duty: the discovery of an expansion which was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve only as stepping-stone for further expansion. In view of such a concept, the desire for glory can no longer be satisfied by the glorious triumph over a specific people for the sake of one's own people, nor can the sense of duty be fulfilled through the consciousness of specific services and the fulfillment of specific tasks. No matter what individual qualities or defects a man may have, once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement. As Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed "do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. Chi felt himself a god-nothing less." But Lord Cromer sanely pointed out the same phenomenon of men degrading themselves voluntarily into mere instruments or mere functions when he called the bureaucrats "instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of Imperialism."

It is obvious that these secret and anonymous agents of the force of expansion felt no obligation to man-made laws. The only "law" they obeyed was the "law" of expansion, and the only proof of their "lawfulness" was success. They had to be perfectly willing to disappear into complete oblivion once failure had been proved, if for any reason they were no longer "instruments of incomparable value." As long as they were successful, the feeling of embodying forces greater than themselves made it relatively easy to resign and even to despise applause and glorification. They were monsters of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure.
The attribute of being shared, it needs to be understood, is important insofar as it becomes "what everyone has done," it becomes "normal," the resistance to doing it becomes "insane" or at the very least void of "common sense."

Skimming through the rest of the book, I confess I am flabbergasted to see that there really is very little here to explain the emergence of the totalitarian ideology. There's a discussion of the totalitarian movements, but those are only interesting once we assume the existence of an ideologically infected mob.

Posted by: James R MacLean at September 18, 2005 08:37 AM