Hannah Arendt in the 21st Century (original) (raw)

2004, Contemporary Political Theory

Hannah Arendt was the great theorist of mid-20th-century catastrophe. Writing in the aftermath of the Nazi holocaust, she taught us to conceptualize what was at stake in this darkest of historical moments. Seen through her eyes, the extermination camps represented the most radical negation of the quintessentially human capacity for spontaneity and the distinctively human condition of plurality. Thus, for Arendt they had a revelatory quality. By taking to the limit the project of rendering superfluous the human being as such, the Nazi regime crystallized in the sharpest and most extreme way humanity-threatening currents that characterized the epoch more broadly. Arendt explored these currents elsewhere as well. In Stalinism, for example, she discerned a not wholly dissimilar effort to re-engineer human life on a mass scale. Seeking to totalize a single vision, it too obliterated public space and endangered individuality and plurality. But that was not all. Unlike the cold warriors who later appropriated her concept of totalitarianism to stifle criticism of what they called the 'free world', Arendt also excavated what we might call some proto-or quasi-totalitarian crystals in the democratic 'mass societies' of the 1950s: the eclipse of politics by 'social housekeeping' and the colonization of public space by scientistic techniques for manipulating opinion and managing populations. Without in any way glossing over the enormous differences between Nazism, Stalinism, and democratic mass society, she entertained the heretical thought that the latter too harbored structural threats to the fundamental conditions of human being. The result was a far-reaching vision of the distinctive evils of the 20th century and a diagnosis of humanity's vulnerability. Many of the specifics of these analyses are certainly debatable. But this is not the level at which I want to engage Arendt's thought. What interests me, rather, is the larger diagnosis that underlies them. From Arendt's perspective, the 20th century's distinctive and characteristic catastrophes arose from the fateful convergence of two major historical streams. One was the crisis of the nation-state, which had become unmoored from the limits of place by the expansive logic of imperialism; this crisis produced intense national and pannational chauvinisms, stigmatized and vulnerable minorities, and defenseless stateless persons, deprived of political membership and thus of 'the right to