The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt
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The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783086399 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2017 |
| Series: | Anthem Companions to Sociology , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 292 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Philip Walsh is associate professor and chair of sociology at York University, Toronto. He has published articles in the areas of social theory, political sociology and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author of Arendt Contra Sociology: Theory, Society and Its Science (2015) and Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory (2005).
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The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt
By Peter Baehr, Philip Walsh
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2017 Peter Baehr and Philip WalshAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-639-9
CHAPTER 1
ARENDT AND TOTALITARIANISM
Charles Turner
Introduction
The term "totalitarianism" is an awkward one. First, while the suffix "-ism" suggests an ideology, like liberalism or socialism, few have said "I am a totalitarian" in the way they have said "I am a liberal" or "I am a socialist." Second, while "totalitarianism" is sometimes treated as the name of an object of inquiry, the adjective "totalitarian" is often used beyond the historical context in which it first arose. Ambiguity surrounds the scope of the term, too: Does it refer to forms of government, to types of state or to whole societies? Do we need it at all? Can we say what needs to be said by making use of other terms such as "tyranny" or "dictatorship"?
Totalitarianism between the Political and the Social
A popular misconception has it that "totalitarianism" is a product of the Cold War. To be sure, for some scholars and politicians it has served as a "counter concept" to "liberalism" or "democracy." Yet when Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the word "totalitarian" was already more than 25 years old (Gleason1995). It first appeared in Italy in 1923. Early that year, Mussolini had proposed a change in the Italian electoral law to allow the party with the largest share of the vote, as long as that was more than 25 per cent, to receive two-thirds of the seats in the parliament, and thus be able to change the constitution. On 12 May, the leftist journalist and politician Giovanni Amendola published an article in Il Mundo in which he described this as a recipe for "a totalitarian system" of rule; this he contrasted with two others: "majoritarian" and "minoritarian." As can often happen in political life, Amendola's term for what he disapproved of was quickly adopted by those it was directed against. Mussolini himself referred to "our radical totalitarian will" and "the totalitarian state," and in 1925 the Fascist theorist Giovanni Gentile went further and proposed a "total conception of life." By this he meant that "it is impossible to be fascists in politics and non-fascists in schools, non-fascists in our families, non-fascists in our daily occupations."
The difference between Amendola and Gentile is instructive. First, like Aristotle, who distinguished between monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by a few) and democracy (rule by all), Amendola gives us three and only three types of government. Second, he refers to forms of government, not to types of society and certainly not to a "total conception of life." This is important because the question of whether we are talking about a "totalitarian government" or a "totalitarian state" or a "totalitarian society" hangs over most prominent work in the field. In an essay from the late 1920s, Carl Schmitt made a distinction that can help us understand this. He said that there is a quantitatively total state and a qualitatively total state: in the former, the activities of the state are driven by concerns that originate in society. The modern welfare state is an example insofar as much of the task of government is defined by questions of social policy that affect all citizens: the family, employment, housing and so on. The qualitatively total state does not attend so much to the administration of society, but does insist on exerting sovereign authority over society (Schmitt 2004, 118). As a student of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt was a traditional authoritarian; Gentile, while agreeing that the state should exert authority over society, was a totalitarian in the sense that he thought that the state also needed to be "militantly invasive": the education system in particular should be used to make fascists of everyone.
Such invasiveness is only possible in modern states with a high degree of what Michael Mann calls "infrastructural power," that is, the power to intervene in civil society; but Mann (1984) thought that insofar as they were both concerned with the shape of society and the lives of the people in it, and made extensive use of this power, little significant difference existed between Western welfare states and those of the Soviet bloc. The decisive difference between them lay elsewhere, namely, in the use they make of "despotic power," the power – that all modern states have available to them – to repress dissent. For this reason Mann refused to use the totalitarian label; "authoritarian" captures perfectly well the way in which both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union made use of their despotic power.
One criticism of Mann is that he misunderstands the character of the infrastructural power deployed in totalitarian states, seeing them as just another case of "state intervention." Yet there is a difference between a state policy that, for instance, says "we need more engineers" or "we need more computer programmers" and one that seeks to shape the attitudes or conduct of each member of society in line with an explicit ideal of what it is to be a person. Claude Lefort captures something of this in commenting on the following passage from Trotsky's late study of Stalin: "L'Etat, c'est moi (I am the state)" is almost a liberal formula by comparison with the actualities of Stalin's totalitarian regime. While Louis XIV identified himself only with the state, the popes of Rome identified themselves with both the state and the Catholic Church, but only during the epoch of temporal power. The totalitarian state goes far beyond caesaropapism, for it controls the entire economy of the country as well. Stalin can say, unlike the Sun King, "La Societe, c'est moi (I am Society)" (quoted in Lefort1988). Communism is not an extreme form of state intervention because "intervention" presupposes that civil society is separate from the state in the first place. Instead, Lefort argues that under communism, for the first time in history, society became self-sufficient. Totalitarianism is not the triumph of the state over society, but, on the contrary, it is the "divinization" of society. As such, the exercise of political power is driven by an apolitical, social logic.
Amendola and Lefort are at opposite ends of a spectrum of positions that scholars have adopted in trying to make sense of the totalitarian phenomenon. In surveying it we would have to keep two sets of questions firmly in mind, questions which loom large in Arendt's account of totalitarianism. The first is empirical: How far did "totalitarian" states actually penetrate the everyday lives or even the minds of ordinary people, and to what extent were the actions of totalitarian governments driven by concerns about the living conditions and lifestyles of people? The second is methodological: To what extent should students of politics, of any politics including the politics of liberal democracies with minimal government, try to understand politics on its own terms, and to what extent should they understand it in terms of its "social" underpinnings? Another way of putting the last question is: Aristotle or Montesquieu? Arendt always insisted that by "totalitarianism" she was talking about a new form of government in history, not a new type of society (Friedrich 1954). She said this partly because she was impressed by how quickly Nazism had collapsed after World War II, which must have meant that, however repressive the Nazis had been, Nazism had failed to penetrate in a deep or long-lasting way into the fabric of German society, and partly because she disliked sociology and the social sciences generally. Nevertheless, when talking of totalitarian government she is talking about something more than Amendola's electoral laws. How much more?
Durkheim (1960) called Montesquieu a forerunner of sociology because in the middle of the eighteenth century he had introduced a new, non- Aristotelian way of classifying governments. For Montesquieu, forms of government cannot be understood in their own terms; they must be related to two other things: social structure and "the spirit of the laws." His distinction between republic (embracing both aristocracy and democracy), monarchy and despotism is different from what Aristotle would have understood by them, for "the spirit of the laws" – virtue in republics, honor in monarchies and fear in despotisms – and the social structures that make them possible are part of their very definition: republics, for instance, are only possible in small city-states and with equality between citizens; monarchies arise in societies with a marked class hierarchy. Montesquieu said that in modern societies with large populations arranged in class hierarchies you cannot recreate classical republican government – class-divided modern "republics" with strong central governments would still have counted as "monarchies" to him – and that if these hierarchies were flattened, the result might well be equality, but an equality of fear rather than of virtue. In short, despotism. The French revolutionary terror during Robespierre's effort to establish a "reign of virtue" seemed to make his point, and it was left to Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1840s to show that, although equality of condition indeed made modern republics prone to despotism, they might – if they allowed themselves to be instructed by America – avoid it. In the 1940s and 1950s thinkers in the Montesquieu/Tocqueville tradition saw Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and communist Russia as confirmation of a dangerous potential built into democracy (Talmon 1952).
Arendt does not see "totalitarianism" quite like this, but she does see the breakdown of class barriers and class loyalties as an important structural condition for this unprecedented form of government. On the other hand, when she confronts the totalitarian phenomenon head on, she writes mainly about totalitarian movements, totalitarian organization, ideology and the most extreme and distinctive totalitarian techniques of ruling, namely, the secret police and the concentration camp. "Everyday Stalinism" (Fitzpatrick1999) and the social history of the Third Reich receive little attention.
Before we discuss Arendt's account, it is useful to mention Raymond Aron, who was involved in an important dialogue with her over totalitarianism (Baehr 2010c). Aron saw sociology and political science more as partners than antagonists, and this is clear from his use of the term "regime," which means something more than government but less than society. He begins his account of totalitarianism by saying that "what Montesquieu tried to do for the types of regime which he found in history, we shall try to do for the specific regimes of industrial societies" (Aron 1965a, 29). He wrote this less than a decade after the appearance of Arendt's Origins, at a time when some American thinkers – none of them pro-Soviet – were using "industrial society" as a generic term to describe both the capitalist democracies of the West and the communist societies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. For Aron, this failed to capture the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, the most important of which was that the United States was a democracy and the Soviet Union was a one-party state. That is a political science distinction. Yet we can also ask Montesquieu's question about their "essential variables," the basic attitudes on which they rest: democracy entails "respect for laws" and "a sense of compromise"; one-party states depend on "fear" and "faith." It is this last variable, "faith," that makes these one-party regimes of industrial society different from traditional despotisms: they not only rely on fear, but also mobilize the commitments of those subject to them; though nondemocratic, they are highly participatory.
For Aron, totalitarian regimes are merely one variant of the one-party state; in addition to the monopoly of politics by one party, they involve the following features: the party's monopoly of both the means of coercion and the means of persuasion; the subjection of all economic and professional activities to state control; an idealized leader; the will to stamp the whole of the community with the imprint of an official ideology so that society and the state will merge; terror, in which the ideological enemy is more guilty than any common criminal (Aron 1965a, 53). The point here is that not all monopolistic parties have taken ideology seriously; while Amendola first introduced the term "totalitarian" in the context of Italian fascism, and while Italian Fascists were the most willing to embrace the term, from Aron's perspective Italian fascism falls short of totalitarianism. Moreover, although German National Socialism and communism share the features just listed, for Aron Nazism is better described as "authoritarian" rather than totalitarian, because while it may have been murderous and "coordinated" all social and political organizations, it sought legitimacy within an existing social structure that it did not seek to transform root and branch. Bolshevism, by contrast, was an attempt to create a new type of social structure and ultimately a new type of human being. The Aryan to whom the future belonged was thought to already exist; by contrast, homo sovieticus had to be created through a supreme act of collective will.
In Aron's account, then, "totalitarianism" is part of a taxonomy: totalitarianism, fascism and authoritarianism are all subspecies of the species "one-party rule"; and one-party rule is, along with "democracy," one of two species of the genus "industrial society." Arendt was after something more than a neat classification; she wanted less a conceptual map than what she called "understanding" and "judgment": the point of inquiry is not to put a particular regime in the right box, but to make sense of the catastrophes that befell millions of innocent people in the 1930s and 1940s, and to cultivate our capacity for discerning what is at stake for human beings who have to live in their shadow.
The Book
Published in 1951, reissued in 1958 with additional material and two new chapters, then published again in 1968 with one of those chapters removed and a series of new prefaces added, The Origins of Totalitarianism is not an easy book to digest. The prehistory of its publication can help us understand why.
Arendt had spent 1933 to 1941 in exile in Paris, where much of her time was devoted to the welfare of Jewish refugees. She was especially interested in the status post–World War I international treaties accorded them, but also in the character of French anti-Semitism and how it differed from the German variety. War in 1940 brought internment as an enemy alien, and the advent of the Vichy government saw her flee to the United States. She arrived in New York in 1941. The first confirmed reports of the nature and scale of the Holocaust in late 1942 made her determined to write a book on the subject, and by 1946, when she formally proposed a book on the roots of Nazism, provisionally titled Anti-Semitism, Imperialism, Racism, she had already published essays on these topics as well as on the Dreyfus Affair, minorities and statelessness, and the difference between parties, movements and classes, in recently established journals such as Commentary, Jewish Social Studies, Partisan Review and the Review of Politics. The unwieldy character of Origins is partly the result of her efforts to put it together from these set-piece publications. If that were not enough, in 1948, as the Soviet Union consolidated its grip on Eastern Europe, revelations began to appear about the Soviet labor camps. The result was threefold: an essay in July 1948 on the concentration camp for Partisan Review, a memo in December 1948 detailing a "research project on concentration camps" and, in 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism. There were still three sections, but now they were anti-Semitism, imperialism and ... totalitarianism. The first two sections are almost exclusively about the roots of Nazism; in the final section, an effort is made to give German Nazism and Soviet communism – or "Bolshevism" – equal billing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt by Peter Baehr, Philip Walsh. Copyright © 2017 Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Editors' Introduction: Arendt's Critique of the Social Sciences Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh,Part I. BOOKS,
Chapter 1. Arendt and Totalitarianism Charles Turner,
Chapter 2. The Human Condition and the Theory of Action John Levi Martin,
Chapter 3. Eichmann in Jerusalem: Heuristic Myth and Social Science Judith Adler,
Chapter 4. "The Perplexities of Beginning": Hannah Arendt's Theory of Revolution Daniel Gordon,
Chapter 5. The Life of the Mind of Hannah Arendt Liah Greenfeld,
Part II. SELECTED THEMES,
Chapter 6. Hannah Arendt on Thinking, Personhood and Meaning Philip Walsh,
Chapter 7. Explaining Genocide: Hannah Arendt and the Social-Scientific Concept of Dehumanization Johannes Lang,
Chapter 8. Arendt on Power and Violence Guido Parietti,
Chapter 9. The Theory of Totalitarian Leadership Peter Baehr,
References,
Notes on Contributors,
Index,