Samantha Power on Hannah Arendt

“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

Samantha Power, a professor at the Kennedy school who writes a lot on human rights issues, wrote an interesting article on the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the April 29th issue of the New York Review of Books. Arendt’s famous work The Origins of Totalitarianism has been resting unread on my shelf for a couple of years and the only other time I have really seen much on her was in reading about Heidegger or in a couple movies on the wartime Jewish escape from Europe. I hope to get around to looking at her work more closely.

The Power article is timely and proceeds from an overview and critique of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, the use of her work by others, and finally (as one might predict) a consideration of how her work is relevant today.

“The reality is that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves.’…the nightmare is that they have shown, have proven beyond doubt what man is capable of.”

While totalitarianism, and the specter of Nazi and Stalinist rule that is associated with it, lends itself to harsh denunciation, one of the main claims of the article is that Arendt was careful, realistic, and self-critical in her analysis. Quoting Yeats, Arendt is said to be able to, “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” Power’s article is very moderate, and uses Arendt’s own words of caution against any radical claims about the present or future based on an analysis of the past. She “warns readers against any attempt at ‘deducing the unprecedented from precedents'” in history and adds that, “To view a subsequent happening as predictable bordered on seeing it as inevitable, which a believer in human agency and political action could never do.”

Arendt was also apparently cautious in addressing the claims of optimistic idealists who want to further human rights, “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inaliable’ those human rights which are enjoyed only by the citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.” However, Power doesn’t lose the opportunity in this article to take a critical stance towards the current war on terrorism, “While Arendt valued what today is termed, ‘hard power,’ she also knew firsthand the danger of state overreaching in the name of self-defense, and the prospect that a merciless ‘counter-ideology’ could emerge. Today, in the name of fighting a war of infinite duration, it has again proven far too tempting for our liberal democracy to give security absolute priority over liberty.”

The article roughly outlines some of the characteristics of Arendt’s totalitarianism:

• She argues that totalitarian regimes are distinct in a number of ways. They manage to attract both the mob, afflicted by its ‘mixture of gullibility and cynicism,’ and the elites.
• They tell lies.
• They take advantage of the unthinkability of their atrocities (“the very immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth”).
• They target “objective enemies,” whole classes of people – “harmless citizens without political opinions” – who must be liquidated not because of their particular views or deeds, but simply because of their group membership…”
• They pose as interpreters of scientific historical forces that are beyond human control.
• They demand ‘total loyalty’ and manage ‘total domination’ of the individual and the collective: ‘Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual.
• Totalitarians regimes only gradually denying a person his legal right to have rights

Arendt was apparently not happy with how her ideas were sometimes received. “Anti-Communists on the right used the association she made between Stalinism and Nazism to justify increasingly ruthless measure during the cold war. And many on the left resented her failure to leave open the possibility of a human and just Marxist revolution.”

If anything, it is extremism and absolutism in ideology which comes across as her target, as Power quotes from the preface of Arendt’s book, “This book has been written against a background both of reckless optimism and recklass despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”