1.2.2 Jerome Kohn “Introduction” to the papers published in Social Research, vol. 69, no. 2, Summer 2002.
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II
The main body of this issue of Social Research is made up of papers delivered at two conferences that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the first of which took place at New School University in October 2001 and the second at Carl von Ossietzky Universität in Oldenburg, Germany, in December of the same year. The first eleven essays are from the New York conference and, due to limitations of time for translations, only the last two are from the German conference. All the papers from the second conference will be published in a volume forthcoming in Germany.
The New York conference was planned by the Hannah Arendt Center at New School University. Eminent scholars and writers, almost all of whom have dealt extensively with Arendt, were asked not to eulogize either the book or its author but rather to give talks that in one way or another arose from ideas or themes in Origins and then to proceed in whatever direction they wished. My hidden intention, revealed only now, was based on the fundamental Arendtian principle that the sense of the reality of an object (and ultimately of the world as the assemblage of whatever appears in it) depends on a diversity of points of view and is consummated in agreeing that it is one and the same object following the communication of those distinct viewpoints. It is of course up to the reader to decide whether and to what extent the real Origins emerges from the variety of perspectives presented here. All of the following papers stand on their own. Analysis or detailed description would be gratuitous, and only a few typological remarks indicating their variety will be offered, which will not strictly adhere to the order in which the papers were delivered and are published.
Richard J. Bernstein's paper was a keynote address, and indeed it strikes a chord that reverberates in one way or another through the greater part of these papers, i.e., that the lasting significance of Origins is not historical but political and, moreover, that its political relevance is not only to the totalitarian regimes that Arendt analyzed but also to some of the most pressing political predicaments of the contemporary world.
In that vein, Jonathan Schell sees a dire need today for a new conception of politics, "a politics of natality," as he calls it. Facing the all too real possibility of humanity's self-destruction through its own actions, he finds that the new politics, whose principles he states, is also possible insofar as we recognize that "beginning...is the supreme capacity of man; politically...identical to man's freedom" (in Arendt's words at the end of Origins).
In addressing "the paradox of populism" in Arendt's thought, Margaret Canovan is fully aware, on the one hand, of Arendt's trenchant critique of the ideologically driven mobilization of masses in totalitarianism; on the other, she views the actuality of democratic mobilizations of the people, rare though they may be, in movements such as Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s as instantiations of thoroughly Arendtian principles. The people acted and by acting reinvigorated and memorialized republicanism: they built institutions to administer justice and guarantee political freedom "from the ground up," and they showed "an exceptional degree of political realism and common sense."
Seyla Benhabib believes Arendt "has emerged as the political theorist of the post-totalitarian moment" and that her concept of a right to have rights is particularly resonant in the changing "political geographies" -- due to the existence of "refugees," "asylees," "stateless persons," and "guest workers and immigrants" (all of whom Benhabib carefully distinguishes) -- in the "global world" in which we now live. Benhabib traces the roots of Arendt's concept of a right to have rights to Kant, and takes up that concept where Arendt left it.
Some of the authors chose to look at Origins critically, which was altogether encouraged. If I may be anecdotal for a moment, I remember Arendt handing me a copy of Margaret Canovan's first book on her and saying "pay close attention to the criticisms." It was not a question of their being right or wrong: she meant that by attending to the criticisms, the realization of what she had not done might afford insight into what she was trying to do. (Arendt's distinguo worked in a similar way: in order to see what something is she had first to see what it is not, A is not B, B is not C, neither B nor C are A, and so forth.)
Andrew Arato's and Claude Lefort's criticisms are formally similar. Arato finds that Arendt underplays the role of dictatorship in totalitarianism and argues, not that dictatorship and totalitarianism are coextensive, but that the anti-institutionalism of dictatorship "is an essential condition for the establishment and the preservation of a totalitarian regime." His argument may lead the reader to consider why Arendt so sharply distinguished totalitarian from tyrannical or despotic practices, particularly in regard to their ability to generate power. Lefort thinks that Arendt's emphasis on the momentum of totalitarian regimes obscures "the permanency of the structure and the spirit of the Party," especially in the Soviet version of totalitarianism. He concludes his analysis by saying that Arendt "has not measured the abyss which separates two forms of society: totalitarianism from modern democracy." Apart from the fact that an abyss cannot by definition be measured, the reader may question whether Arendt really saw an abyss between those two kinds of society, though she certainly did between totalitarianism and republicanism as forms of government.
George Kateb's criticism of Arendt is of a different nature and at the conference proved much more controversial. Some felt that it was not about Arendt at all (which is odd, considering that Kateb knows Arendt as well as anyone), particularly in associating her quest for meaning over empirically verifiable truth with the coercive quality of totalitarian ideologies, or metaphysical systems, or theologies, or even aesthetically compelling stories. However that may be, Kateb stoically and proudly stands for "a cultivated ability to endure meaninglessness," and finds "almost no trace" of that stance in Arendt. Yet contrary to his intention, I cannot but hear Arendt's voice when he writes that "atheism's overall meaninglessness may make particular meanings all the more precious, and...may intensify wonder at the fact that there is a world at all." Except that in such a context Arendt would not have used the word "atheism": she was not sufficiently religious.
Returning to Bernstein's keynote address, the "pervasive thematic concern" he finds in Origins is its opposition to "all appeals to historical necessity or inevitability that seduce us into thinking that what has happened must have happened." Antonia Grunenberg's nuanced account of "Totalitarian Lies and Post-Totalitarian Guilt: The Question of Ethics in Democratic Politics" picks up this theme. Grunenberg sees that the human ability to lie invokes at once the freedom of political activity to change the world, to change what from a historical viewpoint may seem necessary, and the limits within which such change is permissible. Those limits, denied by totalitarians, derive from Arendt's notion of political "responsibility toward the world," not "toward God," or any so-called higher reason, or moral truth.
Jeffrey C. Isaac is also deeply concerned with the question of political responsibility. His paper opposes Arendt's "style" of political thinking to that of Noam Chomsky in the context of "the discourse of human rights" and the recent United States and NATO military intervention in Kosovo. He finds Chomsky's "exposure" of the "hypocrisy" of the "rhetoric" that accompanied that intervention not so much mistaken as "irresponsible" in its willful avoidance of the transgressions of the rights of Kosovars. For Isaac, "in a world of complexity and violence," which ideological "consistency" can only dissimulate, the on-going Arendtian discourse of human rights is eminently responsible, both from practical and moral points of view.
Jacques Taminiaux's paper was unique at the New York conference in its concern with "the philosophical stakes in Arendt's genealogy of totalitarianism," which he pursues in a series of conceptual analyses. First he finds that an early (1946) essay by Arendt, in its contrast of the thought of Heidegger and Jaspers, provides the background against which Origins was written. Next he finds that the first two part of Origins, "Antisemitism" and "Imperialism," anticipate and also concretize the conceptual distinctions between the private, public, and social realms, and between the activities of labor, work, and action, which Arendt went on to draw in The Human Condition. Finally, he traces the implications for active and mental life, both as they appear in the "Concluding Remarks" to the third part of Origins, "Totalitarianism," in its first edition, and in the final chapter on "Ideology and Terror" that Arendt added to the second and all subsequent editions, where they are fully thematized. Taminiaux's analyses have to be read to be appreciated, but what may be said is that he alone gives the impression that Origins, its many permutations notwithstanding, may form a unified philosophical whole.
Readers may find it interesting to consider Roy T. Tsao's paper, prepared for the German conference, in conjunction with Taminiaux's. Tsao carefully traces the "evolution" of Arendt's "theory of totalitarianism," as well as the "structure" of her arguments, through essays that preceded the publication of Origins, through her changing conception of the book as she was writing it, and through her addition after its first edition of the essay on "Ideology and Terror" originally intended for the Marx book [i.e., a book to be called “Totalitarian Elements in Marxism,” which Arendt planned but never wrote, BANG Ed.]. Tsao brings to light important instances of Arendt's evolving theory, such as the change from the totalitarian designation of "potential" to "objective" enemies, and from Arendt's notion of a totalitarian "movement" as "an amorphous organization in the service of a pseudo-spiritual cause" to "a necessarily 'mobile' entity that must continuously propel itself forward -- along a vector defined by its ideology -- if it is to survive at all" (to mention only two among many more such instances). Tsao sees "the enduring value of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism" as lying in the sense it makes "of the psychological and organizational dynamics involved in the most violently extreme political movements of her time." What differentiates Tsao's from Taminiaux's approach can be seen in the operative words of their respective titles: evolution, that is, an unfolding or unrolling of Arendt's theory over time, and genealogy, that is, the descent of Arendt's thought from its original progenitor in philosophy.
The New York conference began on October 11th, exactly one month after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. In his keynote address, Bernstein (whose paper was written before September 11) notes Arendt's "uncanny prescience" regarding the events of that day in her emphasis on the human ability to face up to the wholly unprecedented. Almost every participant added often extempore remarks about September 11 to his or her presentation, and we decided to change the final session of the conference, which had been planned as a roundtable discussion of Origins, to a sort of "town meeting" on terrorism, in which the entire audience was invited to participate. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl prepared introductory remarks in which she stressed three themes from Origins as guidelines: (1) the need to distinguish precisely the features that determine an event as radically new and without precedent, requiring something like Keats' "negative capability" to suspend automatic responses, pre-judgments, and predilections; (2) the need to recognize that what we are confronted with today, as Arendt was confronted fifty years before, is a form of "supranationalism," an ideological "bonding of people" regardless of their nationalities; and (3) the need not only to fight a war against terrorism but also to alleviate the suffering of "superfluous" people in the Muslim world, whether they be uprooted and stateless, as Palestinians are, or alienated from the world of Western and particularly American hegemonic wealth and power. The final meeting of the conference reminded me of what Arendt always said she wanted the closing sessions of her seminars to be, a "free-for-all," except that in our case passions ran so high that disputation turned disruptive, even explosive, in a way I doubt she would have countenanced.
My own paper, which concludes this issue of Social Research, was also prepared for the German conference whose theme was Totalitäre Herrschaft und republikanische Demokratie. The paper addresses this theme by attempting to show in Origins how Arendt's interweaving of a concept of totalitarianism with a description of the specific practices of two totalitarian regimes enabled her to see that "the one crime against humanity" corresponds to "the one human right," the right of all human beings to have rights, which republican democracies can guarantee if and only if they agree to do so. My paper was written for Antonia Grunenberg, Wolfgang Heuer, Ursula Ludz, and other German friends who belong to a generation that bears no personal or moral responsibility whatsoever for Nazism. These friends provide examples for all of us by their acceptance of political responsibility for their nation's past, and by their resolute refusal to play the reckless game of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, in whih "mastering the past" means distorting it.