Hannah Arendt and the power of the impersonal.
by Adam Kirsch
In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisić, a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia, who struck her as “a man you can trust.” With his “clear, serene face, lively eyes, and big reassuring grin,” he reminded Drakulić of one of her daughter’s friends. Many of the witnesses at The Hague shared this view of the defendant—even many Muslims, who told the court how Jelisić helped an old Muslim neighbor repair her windows after they were shattered by a bomb, or how he helped another Muslim friend escape Bosnia with his family. But the Bosnian Muslims who had known Jelisić seven years earlier, when he was a guard at the Luka prison camp, had different stories to tell. Over a period of eighteen days in 1992, they testified, Jelisić himself killed more than a hundred prisoners. As Drakulić writes, he chose his victims at random, by asking “a man to kneel down and place his head over a metal drainage grating. Then he would execute him with two bullets in the back of the head from his pistol, which was equipped with a silencer.” He liked to introduce himself with the words “Hitler was the first Adolf, I am the second.” He was sentenced to forty years in prison.
None of Drakulić’s experience in creating fictional characters could help her understand such a mind, which remained all the more unfathomable because of Jelisić’s apparent normality, even gentleness. “The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become,” she wrote. What Drakulić discovered, in other words, is what Hannah Arendt, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, some forty years earlier, called “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” Drakulić titled her book “They Would Never Hurt a Fly,” after Arendt’s description of a typical Nazi functionary who “does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity. Out of sheer passion he would never do harm to a fly.” Arendt’s concept has become so famous that it is hard to remember how bitterly controversial it was when she first used it. Many readers resisted what looked like an attempt to trivialize the Nazis. “No banality of a man could have done so hugely evil a job so well,” one critic wrote. Yet even those who dispute Arendt’s judgment acknowledge her influence on the way we think about political evil. As long as ordinary people can be transformed overnight into mass murderers, we are still living in Hannah Arendt’s world.
It is an ambiguous tribute to Arendt, then, that her scholarly and popular profile is higher today than at any time since she died, in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine. In the past few years, a number of Arendt’s works have been published by Schocken Books, where she worked as an editor in the nineteen-forties. “The Origins of Totalitarianism” has been accompanied by several collections of essays—most notably “The Jewish Writings,” edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, which includes Arendt’s wartime journalism. Scholars around the world have kept pace with a torrent of studies—on Arendt and international relations, Arendt and human rights, Arendt and the Jewish question. It is hard to name another thinker of the twentieth century more sought after as a guide to the dilemmas of the twenty-first.
Yet it is not just political theorists who find Arendt a source of fascination. The most intense curiosity about Arendt in the past few years has had less to do with her work than with her life. Above all, the publication in English, in 2004, of Arendt’s correspondence with Martin Heidegger, after decades of speculation about their relationship, brought renewed scrutiny to her intimate life. To a thinker who believed that the personal was emphatically not political, this kind of attention would have been very unwelcome. She derided the “pseudoscientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology, etc.” as nothing more than “curiosity-seeking.” Yet Arendt’s deeply ambivalent relationship with Heidegger—her lover, teacher, and friend—has a more than personal significance, since it casts light on the most vexed issue in her work: her tangled relationship with Jewishness and Germanness.
Arendt’s legend—or, perhaps it is better to say, her image—has become as important to posterity as her theories. In part, of course, this is because Arendt is one of the few women in the traditionally male pantheon of political philosophy. It makes sense that it is feminist readers who find the most food for thought in Arendt’s image—even though Arendt denied that she was a feminist. Julia Kristeva devotes some pages of her recent book on Arendt to her changing appearance, as documented in photographs: from the girlish “seductress” of the nineteen-twenties, gazing poetically at the camera, to the confident intellectual of the fifties, whose “femininity . . . beats a retreat” as her face becomes “a caricature of the . . . battle scars” received during her public career.
Kristeva’s reverie on Arendt’s “psychic bisexuality” is not the kind of attention that gets paid to Kant or Heidegger. Yet it is a sign of the way that Arendt has emerged as something both more and less than a political theorist. The most rewarding way to read Arendt, and the best way to make sense of both the strengths and the limitations of her work, is to approach her as Michelle-Irène Brudny does in “Hannah Arendt: An Essay in Intellectual Biography”: “I definitely take Hannah Arendt to be less a political philosopher or a political theorist . . . than an author in the strong sense of the word.” Kristeva, still more emphatically, considers Arendt’s writings “to be less a body of work than an action.” Like so many Jewish writers of her generation, Arendt attempted in her work to shine the light of intellect on the extreme darkness she lived through. That she chose to do this in the most impersonal of genres—philosophy and history—rather than through memoir, or even poetry (which she loved to read, and wrote from time to time), is itself a clue to the immense psychological pressures that shaped her work and, in the end, partly disfigured it.
The power of the impersonal is the great theme of Arendt’s work, and it is no coincidence that she first discovered it in the most literary, least theoretical of her books, “Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess.” It was the first book she wrote (not counting her doctoral dissertation), but it was not published for almost two decades, and it remains, even today, a kind of orphan in the Arendt canon. Readers of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” tend to ignore this impressionistic biography of a late-eighteenth-century hostess and letter writer, whose Berlin salon was one of the breeding grounds of German Romanticism. Yet the Rahel biography, as Kristeva says, is “a veritable laboratory of Arendt’s political thought.”
Arendt acknowledged her deep affinity with Rahel Varnhagen, née Levin, calling her “my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now.” What they had in common was their predicament as highly gifted Jewish women in a culture that exacted a terrible psychic toll both on women and on Jews. In Berlin, at the time of the French Revolution, Rahel’s friends included some of Prussia’s greatest minds. They were drawn to her freedom from social convention, and to the exquisite sensibility that informed her cult of Goethe, her extensive correspondence, and her love affairs. Yet during the Napoleonic Wars, as Prussian nationalism began to flourish, many of Rahel’s German friends deserted her; her Gentile fiancé, whom she saw as her ticket to respectable society, refused to marry her. She was left alone with her inwardness, mourning “the thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess.” Not until she was dying did she decide that, all the same, Jewishness was the one thing “I should on no account now wish to have missed.”
When Arendt first discovered Rahel, in the late nineteen-twenties, she recognized her as both a tutelary spirit and a cautionary tale. Arendt was born in 1906, into a family that, like so many German Jewish families, ardently pursued Rahel’s ideal of culture, or Bildung. “With us from Germany,” she wrote bitterly during the Second World War, “the word ‘assimilation’ received a ‘deep’ philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it.” Again like Rahel, Arendt was conspicuous for her intelligence from an early age; as a young woman, she was nicknamed Pallas Athene. When, in 1924, she went to Marburg University, she entered into the study of theology and philosophy as into her own inheritance, even though she recognized that they might be uncomfortable subjects for a Jew. When she signed up for a seminar on the New Testament, she sternly warned the professor, Rudolf Bultmann, that “there must be no anti-Semitic remarks.”
Yet Arendt could not have suspected just how fraught her encounter with philosophy would turn out to be. Like all the most enterprising students, she enrolled in a class with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was then at work on his magnum opus, “Being and Time,” but already he had a reputation as a thrilling teacher. As Arendt remembered a lifetime later, in her tribute to Heidegger on his eightieth birthday, “Little more than a name was known, but the name made its way through all of Germany like the rumor of a secret king.” She was thus more than prepared to respond when the married, thirty-five-year-old professor began to fall in love with her.
The fact that Heidegger and Arendt were lovers was no secret to her close friends—“Oh, how very exciting!” Karl Jaspers exclaimed when Arendt told him—and it has been public knowledge since Elisabeth Young-Bruehl revealed it in her 1982 biography. But the affair became a kind of highbrow scandal in 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger, a professor at M.I.T., wrote about it in a short book, “Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger.” Ettinger, who had been granted access to the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence for the purpose of writing a new biography of Arendt, instead made it the subject of a sensational exposé. The book was loftily derided by Arendtians; yet, without the curiosity that Ettinger excited, it is doubtful that Arendt’s and Heidegger’s estates would have consented to the publication of their letters, which cast a fascinating new light on this most important chapter in Arendt’s life.
The correspondence, which is collected in “Letters 1925-1975,” is revealing, first of all, in its very incompleteness. Arendt kept all of Heidegger’s letters, from the very beginning; he kept few of hers, and none from the early years. As a result, Heidegger’s voice dominates the book, just as his personality and his decisions dominated the affair. As one would expect, Heidegger—an older male professor, who also happened to be one of Europe’s greatest philosophers—treats his teen-age lover with a combination of passion and condescension. He is capable of poetic raptures: “The demonic struck me. . . . Nothing like it has ever happened to me,” he writes not long after their first meeting. Yet while Arendt’s intellect helped draw him to her, he is deeply patronizing about her intellectual ambitions. He urges her to take a “decisive step back from the path toward the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure,” and to concentrate instead on becoming “a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness.”
Understandably, after a year of covert meetings and emotional confrontations, Arendt left Marburg for Heidelberg, where, in Jaspers, she found a more equable teacher. It is just possible to glimpse in the letters the pain that the affair caused Arendt—above all, by enforcing a sense of powerlessness. Early on, in an autobiographical composition addressed to Heidegger and titled “Shadows,” Arendt described herself in the third person: “Her sensitivity and vulnerability, which had always given her an exclusive air, grew to almost grotesque proportions.” As late as 1929, when Arendt ran into Heidegger at a train station and for a moment he failed to recognize her, she found the experience shattering: “When I was a small child, that was the way my mother once stupidly and playfully frightened me. I had read the fairy tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying: but I am your child, I am your Hannah.—That is what it was like today.”
The full significance of her experience with Heidegger did not unfold, however, until the early nineteen-thirties. As the Weimar Republic collapsed and Nazi violence grew, Arendt began to hear unsettling rumors about Heidegger’s sympathy with National Socialism. Her letter to him on the subject is lost, but we can gauge her anxiety from Heidegger’s response, which is tentatively dated “Winter 1932/33.” “The rumors that are upsetting you are slanders,” he begins, and proceeds to give an evasively technical defense of his treatment of Jewish students and colleagues. (If he refused to supervise a Jewish student’s dissertation, he explains, it was only because “I am on sabbatical this winter semester”; and, besides, “the man who, with my help, got a stipend to go to Rome is a Jew.”) Nowhere in the letter is there any denial of Nazi sympathies. Instead, Heidegger simply assures Arendt that, whatever happens, “it cannot touch my relationship to you.” After reading this letter, Arendt could not have been entirely surprised when, in 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and became the rector of Freiburg, with the mission of aligning the university with the new party-state.
By that time, Arendt was already in exile from the land of her birth. In the spring of 1933, just after Hitler took power, she began to do clandestine work for a Zionist organization, documenting anti-Semitism in the new Germany. She was arrested and interrogated, and, after eight days, released. Immediately, she and her mother fled the country, slipping across the Czech border at night. But while she later dated her political awakening to the Reichstag Fire, it is clear that, for several years before 1933, she had been growing more and more alert to the untenable position of Jews in Germany. The private humiliation and political betrayal she suffered at the hands of Heidegger, the living embodiment of German intellect, only brought home to her the lessons she was already learning from her study of Rahel Varnhagen.
When she came to write about Rahel’s life, then, Arendt brought to it a passion and a personal commitment born of her own experience. No one could have believed more seriously than Rahel in the cultivation of the spirit. Yet to Arendt she appears as merely the victim of a terrible illusion—“the hapless human being, the shlemihl, who has anticipated nothing.” The lesson that Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for “it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration.” To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls “specificity,” the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community. Arendt had said of herself, in the “Shadows” letter, that “she did not belong to anything, anywhere, ever”; so, too, Rahel was “exiled . . . all alone to a place where nothing could reach her, where she was cut off from all human things, from everything that men have the right to claim.” Avoiding that helpless “place” became the goal of Arendt’s life and thought. The categorical imperative of her political theory might be phrased: Thou shalt not be a shlemihl.
By the time she finished writing “Rahel Varnhagen,” in 1938—thanks in part to the prodding of Walter Benjamin, her friend and fellow-exile—Arendt had come to see Rahel’s predicament as an early sign of the political naïveté that had left European Jewry so vulnerable to Nazi persecution. The biography was written, she later said, “with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism (although, naturally, without any premonition of how far the physical annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe would be carried).” And, just as Arendt’s attitude toward Rahel was an unstable mixture of sympathy and criticism, so, too, her reaction to the Jewish crisis was a blend of urgent concern and haughty contempt.
Arendt’s tendency to blame the victim, which produced such an explosive effect in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in the nineteen-sixties, is already obvious in the articles she wrote during the war for Aufbau, the German-language Jewish newspaper in New York. Arendt had been able to flee Vichy France for the United States in 1941, thanks to a visa she received with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a volunteer group that used both legal and illegal means to get Jews and others in peril out of the country. She moved into two rooms on West Ninety-fifth Street, and was joined a few weeks later by her mother, who also managed to escape France by way of Lisbon. It is a measure of Arendt’s dauntlessness, and her determination to make her voice heard publicly, that before the year was out she was hired as a columnist for Aufbau. It was the first step in an American journalistic career that eventually, as her facility in English improved, led her to become a contributor to Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.
Arendt’s wartime articles, collected in “The Jewish Writings,” offer a crucial insight into the political experiences that shaped her theoretical work. In particular, they show Arendt developing a self-contradictory brand of Zionism, which might be called a Zionism of necessity. Faced with the collapse of Jewish assimilation, Arendt turned to Zionism as an “escape route from illusion into reality, from mendacity and self-deception to an honest existence.” And the major subject of her wartime writing is the need for Jews to regain their political self-respect—to refuse any longer to be shlemihls. As she wrote in 1941, “One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself.” That was why Arendt strongly urged the creation of a Jewish army, which would enable the Jews to hold up their heads as equals among the Allied powers.
What Arendt’s Zionism lacked, however, was any positive content, any genuine interest in Judaism or Jewish history. This attitude was typical of the assimilated German Jews of her generation, a natural product of an upbringing where, as she recalled, “I did not know from my family that I was Jewish. . . . The word ‘Jew’ never came up when I was a small child.” Arendt’s Jewishness was constituted by anti-Semitism: “I first met up with it through anti-Semitic remarks . . . from children on the street. After that I was, so to speak, ‘enlightened.’ ”
It stood to reason, then, that in 1948, when the State of Israel was established and the existential threat to the Jewish people had receded, Arendt rapidly disembarrassed herself of her Zionism. While she retained a lifelong interest in the fate of the Jewish state—“Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else,” she told Mary McCarthy—she had an equally strong distaste for its politics and for most of its citizens. Among the posthumous revelations that have done the most damage to Arendt’s reputation are the letters that she wrote from Jerusalem in 1961, when she was attending the Eichmann trial. Her description of the crowd at the courthouse, in a letter to Jaspers, passes beyond condescension into outright racism: “On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.”
The venom of this description, like the undisguised pleasure that Arendt took in leaving Israel—“I have never before grasped the concrete meaning of ‘relief’ so clearly,” she wrote at the end of a 1955 trip—suggests the great emotional forces at play. As she put down roots in New York City—she lived on the West Side of Manhattan until her death—and became a sought-after writer and lecturer, Arendt’s ideas about self-respect, that Rahelian imperative, began to change. Now the solidarity she had once sought in Zionism began to appear not as a source of strength but as another evidence of weakness—a way of clinging to one’s people because one was too weak to stand alone.
She described this phenomenon in a 1959 speech in Hamburg, where she had been awarded the Lessing Prize: “It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world . . . has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as an almost physical phenomenon.” But the price of that warmth was too high to pay: “In extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness. And worldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism.” For a Jew to tell a German audience, less than fifteen years after the Holocaust, that Jews were barbarians was a shockingly effective means of reclaiming the isolation, the “interspace,” that Arendt so urgently needed.
It was this refusal of solidarity, as much as any specific assertion, that led so many Jewish readers to react with fury to “Eichmann in Jerusalem” when it appeared, in five installments in this magazine, in 1963. Arendt’s report from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat and organizer of the Jewish genocide, remains one of the touchstones of American thinking about the Holocaust. But the anger that her work provoked among many Jews—according to the historian Peter Novick, she “became, for a time, American Jewish Public Enemy Number One”—has proved just as durable. At the time, Arendt’s critics objected to her blanket condemnation of the Jews drafted to serve on the Judenräte—the Jewish Councils established by the Nazis to manage the ghettos—and to her apparently trivializing phrase about “the banality of evil.”
Reading “Eichmann in Jerusalem” today, however, in the light of all we have since learned from and about Arendt, it is clear that these local issues were only the occasions for resentment, not the whole cause. That cause, once again, can be traced back to the “laboratory of Arendt’s political thought,” and to her own experience as a Jewish woman in Germany. What raised Arendt’s Jewish consciousness was her recognition of Jewish helplessness, both psychological and political. But if she responded to that helplessness with an insistence on self-help, she found it hard to avoid condemning those Jews who, in her view, did not or could not help themselves. Rahel was the first of these, the members of the Judenräte the last. “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story,” she wrote.
Arendt’s need to distance herself from Jews, and especially from Jewish victims, accounts for the ironic tone that has always struck readers of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Arendt’s attitude toward Eichmann himself is simply dismissive: her whole characterization of him as a banal bureaucrat, oblivious of the evil he does, is a way of asserting his human and intellectual inferiority. What inflames Arendt, on the other hand, is any attempt by the Jewish witnesses to draw attention to what they suffered. “I hate, am afraid of pity, always have been,” she once told McCarthy, and she mocked anything that appeared to her to be an appeal for pity. “The gist of the background witnesses’ testimony about conditions in the Polish ghettos, about procedures in the various death camps, about forced labor, and, generally, the attempt to exterminate through labor, was never in dispute,” she wrote irritably; “on the contrary there was hardly anything in what they told that had not been known before.” She complained that “the basic mistake” of the trial was that “the Jews want to pour out their sorrow to the world”—though “of course,” she granted, “they have suffered more than Eichmann has.”
In this and many other places, Arendt’s critics saw that the pride she so effortfully cultivated carried shame as its necessary obverse. This shame is what led a critic like Gershom Scholem—whose upbringing was similar to Arendt’s but who left Germany for Palestine and took a Hebrew name—to accuse her of lacking “love of the Jewish people.” It is a measure of Arendt’s toughness, and of her self-knowledge, that she acknowledged the charge, in a deeply revealing letter collected in “The Jewish Writings”: “You are quite right—I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort. . . . I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective. . . . I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”
The Heidegger correspondence confirms that Arendt lived this principle. In 1950, seventeen years after they had last communicated, Arendt and Heidegger met again, when she went to Germany to help track down stolen Jewish cultural treasures. At times, she had been publicly critical of Heidegger’s behavior during his rectorship and afterward, but the renewal of their ties banished all her suspicions. “This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life,” she wrote to him after their meeting. For the next two years, their love enjoyed a brief afterlife, as Heidegger wrote poems about her and told her things like “I wish I could run the five-fingered comb through your frizzy hair.” Even when the jealousy of Heidegger’s wife, Elfriede, brought this quasi-romance to an end, Arendt kept in touch with her old teacher. In the last years of his life, she helped get his work translated in America.
Arendt’s unqualified support of Heidegger was important in establishing the convenient myth that his Nazi involvement had been, as she put it, a case of an unworldly man getting carried away by politics, and thus “finally a matter of indifference.” Not until the past decade have scholars in Germany and America demolished this notion, by tracing the profound affinities between Heidegger’s thought and his reactionary milieu. It is a task that Arendt herself was equipped to perform, but her loyalty to Heidegger, and to the German tradition he represented, made it impossible.
Arendt’s experience at the Eichmann trial bolstered the belief that defines her political philosophy: that there must be a rigorous separation between love, which we can experience only privately, and respect, which we earn in and require for our public lives. If it is true that, as Arendt once observed, “in the works of a great writer we can almost always find a consistent metaphor peculiar to him alone in which his whole work seems to come to a focus,” then her thought is certainly focussed on the image of distance or separation. A dignified individual existence, she believes, requires distance from others, the “interspace” that she described in the Hamburg speech. Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because “not unlike love,” it “abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse.” What preserves that distance, on the other hand, is pride—the pride of equals that she finds exemplified in the political realm, the “public space.”
This view of politics may help explain why, in “The Human Condition” and “On Revolution,” Arendt exalts it as the highest of human activities. Politics, in her work, is not really an empirical concept—an affair of elections and legislation, still less of tax policy or Social Security reform. Everything having to do with economics, in fact, Arendt prefers to exclude from her definition of politics, relegating it to the nebulous category of “the social.” Real politics is found, rather, in the deliberations of the Founders in Philadelphia, or the debates of the Athenians in their assembly. It is an affair of exceptionally talented individuals—people not unlike Hannah Arendt—arguing with one another under conditions of equality and mutual respect.
Still more revealing than Arendt’s definition of politics is her explanation of why people are drawn to it in the first place. We do not enter the political world to pursue justice or to create a better world. No, human beings love politics because they love to excel, and a political career is the best way to win the world’s respect. In ancient Greece, she writes, “the polis was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all. The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were.” Arendt recognizes that most of the people of Athens, including all women and slaves, were shut out from this arena, but she accepts that her kind of politics is necessarily an aristocratic pursuit. In yet another instance of her favorite metaphor, she defends “the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity.”
Nothing could be more characteristic of Arendt than the longing for respect and recognition that shines through these seemingly abstract arguments. All her experiences as a woman and as a Jew, all the hard wisdom she learned from Heidegger and from Rahel, goes into her yearning for the masculine, aristocratic freedom of the Greek polis. (Richard Wolin, one of Arendt’s sharpest contemporary critics, has called this yearning “polis envy.”) At times, Arendt’s love of the public and the political, and her fear of the private and the psychological, becomes almost neurotically intense. As she wrote to McCarthy, “the inner turmoil of the self, its shapelessness,” must be kept under strict quarantine: “It is no less indecent, unfit to appear, than our digestive apparatus, or else our inner organs, which also are hidden from visibility by the skin.”
This rejection of inwardness, so constant in Arendt’s work, from “Rahel Varnhagen” on, is the key to what is most valuable in her legacy, and also what is most questionable. No one has argued more forcefully than Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity—and not just metaphorically. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she points out that the first step in the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews was to make them stateless, in the knowledge that people with no stake in a political community have no claim on the protection of its laws.
This is the insight that makes Arendt a thinker for our time, when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder. She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to “human rights” or “the international community” so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis. “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments,” she writes in “Origins,” “but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and what is happening now in Darfur. Genocide is a political problem, Arendt insists, and it can be solved only politically.
Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust. Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt’s sympathy, which she could freely give only to those as strong as she was. If, as she wrote, “it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world,” then our love for the world actually makes it harder for us to love the people who inhabit it. This is the dilemma that runs through all Arendt’s writing, demonstrating that what she observed about Marx is true of her as well: “Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead into the very center of their work.” ♦
