I here cross a reading of Andreas Glaeser’s analysis of “what we can learn” from the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 with a response to the suggestion offered by Ioana Sendroiu and Mitchell Stevens in their introduction to this special issue. The aim of this exercise is to underline the ways in which the Cold War operates as an inherently normative object of thought so that it is impossible to make descriptive claims about the events of that period without recourse to some presuppositions (often unstated) about how secrecy and transparency, as integral to power politics in a nuclear age, were normed by practices of democratic citizenship. Hannah Arendt’s (Reference Arendt1993: 3–15) articulation of “the gap between past and future” will be the fulcrum on which my attempt to fuse a reading of Glaeser’s discussion of nuclear politics with a critical response to Sendroiu and Stevens’ intention to theorize a “medium durée” of the Cold War. Overall, I offer three points. First, a reading of Arendt on the vanishing present as the gap between past and future can serve in understanding how Glaeser demonstrates that “the Cold War,” as an object of thought (and hence embraced in scare quotes), is inherently normative. Second, this matters for understanding the Cold War as a more or less circumscribed set of historical events (and hence without such typographical distancing) that has never truly reached an end. In this way, my remarks underline how learning from the past is possible. Third, I vindicate a central consequence of what Sendroiu and Stevens say about the medium durée of the Cold War: that something like the Cold War exists even today, in the sense that structures of thought and action that arose in the institutional politics of the 1940s–1990s remains intact today, in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and in our language about and policy responses to climate change.
Before making these points, it is important to contrast my understanding of Arendt’s thinking from the time just before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis from a prevalent one in which Arendt thinks about her main objects of concern in the 1950s and 1960s – freedom and plurality and their conditions (The Human Condition [Reference Arendt1958]); Nazism and Bolshevism as totalitarian movements (Origins of Totalitarianism [Reference Arendt1966 (Reference Arendt1951)]); and evil, revenge and justice (Eichmann in Jerusalem [Reference Arendt2006 (Reference Arendt1963)]) – through the lens of the Cold War. In each of these works (Arendt Reference Arendt1963, and Arendt Reference Arendt1966 [Reference Arendt1951]), for this common view, Arendt’s (citation) concern was to vindicate the Pax Americana, which placed her on the what would ultimately prove to be the wrong side of the global liberation movements. Correcting this distorted picture of Arendt and her argumentative aims is important for the kind of learning from history that Glaeser has in mind when he answers the question “Could we learn from the past Cold War to avoid another?” with “a form of institutional analysis which I call consequently processual hermeneutic institutionalism (CPHI).”Footnote
1
Where Glaeser offers a real advance on the commonly held view of Arendt, I would argue, is in his emphasis on institutional arrangements.
Glaeser points to two main “preconditions for learning from history.” First come “the institutional arrangements making politics possible,” including cultural and intellectual habits, social movements, party politics, and elite bureaucracies, that must be sufficiently similar in order for historical learning to be possible, which he notes is a rare occurrence. The second precondition for “learning from history for a particular purpose in the present from a particular set of institutional dynamics in the past is sufficient self-similarity of the compared institutional dynamics.” The test for this second condition, Glaeser writes, is that “actors can assume that a particular past action which was then followed by a particular reaction would unfold in the present as well.” Here, like many recent commentators, chiefly perhaps Samuel Moyn (Reference Moyn2023a, Reference Moyn2023b), Glaeser is interested in the intellectual and political premises of Cold War liberalism. Glaeser’s account is significantly richer because the form of historical analysis he offers is “consequently processual,” precisely because it is grounded in institutional dynamics. This is the form of historical learning Moyn wants to mobilize in order to sit in judgment of the errors of these postwar public intellectuals but does not achieve precisely because of the missing analysis of the institutional dynamics at work both in that period and in our own time. What emerges as the basic sameness of institutional dynamics that makes it possible – and necessary – to try and learn from Cold War politics, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular, in this issue Glaeser argues, are “two profoundly paradoxical institutional assemblages which I propose are constitutive of Cold War dynamics,” namely, the paradox of nuclear politics and the paradox of just governance.
Glaeser makes a compelling case that when it comes to nuclear politics, his CPHI analysis suggests that bearing in mind “systems-competition between China and the West, with military tensions in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, nuclear strategy matters much more again,” it is “hard to imagine that the paradox of nuclear weapons has been resolved in any way.” And with respect to “just governance,” Glaeser sees a tension between the anti-imperialism at the heart of liberal arguments on behalf “a rule-governed international order” and its own practice of imperialist policies, often involving a blatant disregard for these very rules. Anti-imperialism “is a credible stance only in stringent self-application.” This normative lesson is the main result of the CPHI analysis of the institutional practices and individual judgments in the context of the Cold War, making clear for Glaeser “how deterrence by nuclear weapons fails in the fog of war, how claims over foreign territory tied to national consciousness tempts politicians into recklessness, and how decision-makers caught in their own instrumentally motivated mythmaking are driven to act against their own better insight.”
In this presentation of the paradoxes and how they plague both the institutional and individual judgments of actors both during the events of the Cold War and in the analysis of “the Cold War” in processual hermeneutic analysis, Glaeser argues for a representation of the actors in the time around the Kennedy Administration that shares many of the central critiques of liberals who embraced the Pax Americana in the 1950s and 1960s that critics such as Moyn (Reference Moyn2023a, Reference Moyn2023b) advance. Yet Glaeser also helps make clear why the common misunderstanding of Arendt as something of an American (and Cold War) apologist, in my view, not just wrong but wrongheaded in ways that help us see the stakes of the kind of historical learning he discusses in his contribution and which pervades this special issue.
Like Glaeser, Arendt was persistently concerned with the paradoxical or aporetic structure of political thinking. Unlike metaphysical thinking, political thinking is not concerned with timeless truths but rather with the realm of changeable opinion, and hence judgment. Metaphysical (or philosophical) thinking, as invisible and timeless, does not evoke any perceptible change. It takes place as if in another world, in a moment outside history of which metaphysicians have always dreamed (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 11). It focuses on universals, unlike action, which always focuses on specific events. The object of metaphysical thinking is situated outside of the space of appearance. In the everyday practice of thinking as we know it, the invisible can be memories from the past, but also ideas about the future. Metaphysical thinking engages with the invisible in the form of general concepts, which has been its essence throughout the entire history of philosophy. Crucially for Arendt, thinking remained concerned with the general as opposed to the particular, that is, with the absent or conceptions of the absent. Acting, on the contrary, always engages in the specific, the present, the tangible, and the plural. Its essence is appearing of acting subjects in the public space (Arendt Reference Arendt1958: 199), where they are visible and audible to each other. Their action is always present: always here and now.
Arendt’s point of departure was the situation that often enough arises in politics, understood along the processual and hermeneutic lines Glaeser articulates; namely, a moment when we cannot simply rely on the authority of the past or appeal to general rules that seem to have governed politics in the past. What, then, should human beings do, on those occasions when neither rules nor tradition offer guidance? In this situation, Arendt (Reference Arendt1993: 13–14) suggested reflective judgment needs to stand in for any firm orientation in political practices. Judgment remains an activity of the mind, political thinking, situated between the past that cannot give us firm guidance and the future that we cannot foresee. It is meant to fill the gap between past and future, between the consistent set of institutional bodies and actors that populate the past and future but whose very continuity is conditioned by the individual actions of those who must judge and act in the here and now. Judgment’s role is literally pivotal, as “each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 13). This is why our capacity to exercise the ability to judge without a stable authoritative referent is precisely what is needed to address what Glaeser calls the paradoxes of nuclear politics.
Arendt’s essayistic style, was in tune with her exercises, which do not follow any predefined scheme or strict rules of a philosophical treatise. They are structured by two moments only: the critical and the experimental. Though these two elements of an exercise are not strictly divided, Arendt assigns a temporal dimension to both of them, critique being associated with the past and experiment with the future. The practice of reflective judgment is thus temporally located, as the judging subject critically directs her gaze to the past, which offers her a reference to make an experimental, future-oriented judgment. This does not mean that through such an exercise, I cannot simply re-appropriate tradition by critical interpretation of its terms. The traditional concepts lost their original sense, “leaving behind empty shells with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 14). This is why Arendtian exercises do not aim at inventing “some newfangled surrogates” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 14) of tradition: it is only from my actual position as situated here and now that I can relate to these concepts, and I do this through the experimental element of an exercise with its future orientation. Because political thinking, as actualized in the exercises “arises out of the actuality of political incidents […] and my [Arendt’s] assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 14), relating to the past is only possible in the form of experimental practice.
What results from Arendt’s practice of “exercises in political thinking” is a model of partial, situated political cognition, the outcomes of which can only be temporary and contingent. From the perspective of such an experiment, political thinking correlates with political action, with the difference that the judging subject as a spectator maintains at a distance from the common world, while the political actor is in its midst. What Arendt called a “common world” is precisely that set of conditions, institutional and political, that make the kind of continuity and processual consequentiality required for historical learning – in the notion of it that Arendt and Glaeser share – possible.
What makes Arendt relevant for Glaeser’s open-ended answer to his own question about learning from the Cold War, in particular in better resolving the paradoxes of nuclear politics and just governance, is Arendt’s perception that conservative thinkers are not simply wrong about the ways in which liberalism failed to understand its debt to what she called the tradition and projected a false vision of itself as novel and modern. Yet, while accepting a good deal of these conservative critiques, Arendt, especially in her public interventions in the time of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, thoroughly rejected antiquarianism or anything like a nostalgia for premodern conditions. This is what made her a liberal after all, but a heterodox one: her unique take on the way liberalism actually relies on traditional resources that liberalism itself is eager to disavow.
This view of Arendt as a heterodox liberal is grounded in the normativity of “the Cold War” as an object of thought, and how it exemplifies the kind of thinking without banisters that Arendt believed was necessary to inhabit fully and accurately, the vanishing present as the gap between past and future. It is also what marks the institutionalist strain in her thinking that aligns her – at least to some extent – with conservative thinkers and also makes her an interesting dialog partner for Glaeser’s CPHI, a form of institutional analysis with which intellectual historians and political theorists would do well to engage more deeply.
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I here cross a reading of Andreas Glaeser’s analysis of “what we can learn” from the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 with a response to the suggestion offered by Ioana Sendroiu and Mitchell Stevens in their introduction to this special issue. The aim of this exercise is to underline the ways in which the Cold War operates as an inherently normative object of thought so that it is impossible to make descriptive claims about the events of that period without recourse to some presuppositions (often unstated) about how secrecy and transparency, as integral to power politics in a nuclear age, were normed by practices of democratic citizenship. Hannah Arendt’s (Reference Arendt1993: 3–15) articulation of “the gap between past and future” will be the fulcrum on which my attempt to fuse a reading of Glaeser’s discussion of nuclear politics with a critical response to Sendroiu and Stevens’ intention to theorize a “medium durée” of the Cold War. Overall, I offer three points. First, a reading of Arendt on the vanishing present as the gap between past and future can serve in understanding how Glaeser demonstrates that “the Cold War,” as an object of thought (and hence embraced in scare quotes), is inherently normative. Second, this matters for understanding the Cold War as a more or less circumscribed set of historical events (and hence without such typographical distancing) that has never truly reached an end. In this way, my remarks underline how learning from the past is possible. Third, I vindicate a central consequence of what Sendroiu and Stevens say about the medium durée of the Cold War: that something like the Cold War exists even today, in the sense that structures of thought and action that arose in the institutional politics of the 1940s–1990s remains intact today, in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and in our language about and policy responses to climate change.
Before making these points, it is important to contrast my understanding of Arendt’s thinking from the time just before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis from a prevalent one in which Arendt thinks about her main objects of concern in the 1950s and 1960s – freedom and plurality and their conditions (The Human Condition [Reference Arendt1958]); Nazism and Bolshevism as totalitarian movements (Origins of Totalitarianism [Reference Arendt1966 (Reference Arendt1951)]); and evil, revenge and justice (Eichmann in Jerusalem [Reference Arendt2006 (Reference Arendt1963)]) – through the lens of the Cold War. In each of these works (Arendt Reference Arendt1963, and Arendt Reference Arendt1966 [Reference Arendt1951]), for this common view, Arendt’s (citation) concern was to vindicate the Pax Americana, which placed her on the what would ultimately prove to be the wrong side of the global liberation movements. Correcting this distorted picture of Arendt and her argumentative aims is important for the kind of learning from history that Glaeser has in mind when he answers the question “Could we learn from the past Cold War to avoid another?” with “a form of institutional analysis which I call consequently processual hermeneutic institutionalism (CPHI).”Footnote 1 Where Glaeser offers a real advance on the commonly held view of Arendt, I would argue, is in his emphasis on institutional arrangements.
Glaeser points to two main “preconditions for learning from history.” First come “the institutional arrangements making politics possible,” including cultural and intellectual habits, social movements, party politics, and elite bureaucracies, that must be sufficiently similar in order for historical learning to be possible, which he notes is a rare occurrence. The second precondition for “learning from history for a particular purpose in the present from a particular set of institutional dynamics in the past is sufficient self-similarity of the compared institutional dynamics.” The test for this second condition, Glaeser writes, is that “actors can assume that a particular past action which was then followed by a particular reaction would unfold in the present as well.” Here, like many recent commentators, chiefly perhaps Samuel Moyn (Reference Moyn2023a, Reference Moyn2023b), Glaeser is interested in the intellectual and political premises of Cold War liberalism. Glaeser’s account is significantly richer because the form of historical analysis he offers is “consequently processual,” precisely because it is grounded in institutional dynamics. This is the form of historical learning Moyn wants to mobilize in order to sit in judgment of the errors of these postwar public intellectuals but does not achieve precisely because of the missing analysis of the institutional dynamics at work both in that period and in our own time. What emerges as the basic sameness of institutional dynamics that makes it possible – and necessary – to try and learn from Cold War politics, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular, in this issue Glaeser argues, are “two profoundly paradoxical institutional assemblages which I propose are constitutive of Cold War dynamics,” namely, the paradox of nuclear politics and the paradox of just governance.
Glaeser makes a compelling case that when it comes to nuclear politics, his CPHI analysis suggests that bearing in mind “systems-competition between China and the West, with military tensions in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, nuclear strategy matters much more again,” it is “hard to imagine that the paradox of nuclear weapons has been resolved in any way.” And with respect to “just governance,” Glaeser sees a tension between the anti-imperialism at the heart of liberal arguments on behalf “a rule-governed international order” and its own practice of imperialist policies, often involving a blatant disregard for these very rules. Anti-imperialism “is a credible stance only in stringent self-application.” This normative lesson is the main result of the CPHI analysis of the institutional practices and individual judgments in the context of the Cold War, making clear for Glaeser “how deterrence by nuclear weapons fails in the fog of war, how claims over foreign territory tied to national consciousness tempts politicians into recklessness, and how decision-makers caught in their own instrumentally motivated mythmaking are driven to act against their own better insight.”
In this presentation of the paradoxes and how they plague both the institutional and individual judgments of actors both during the events of the Cold War and in the analysis of “the Cold War” in processual hermeneutic analysis, Glaeser argues for a representation of the actors in the time around the Kennedy Administration that shares many of the central critiques of liberals who embraced the Pax Americana in the 1950s and 1960s that critics such as Moyn (Reference Moyn2023a, Reference Moyn2023b) advance. Yet Glaeser also helps make clear why the common misunderstanding of Arendt as something of an American (and Cold War) apologist, in my view, not just wrong but wrongheaded in ways that help us see the stakes of the kind of historical learning he discusses in his contribution and which pervades this special issue.
Like Glaeser, Arendt was persistently concerned with the paradoxical or aporetic structure of political thinking. Unlike metaphysical thinking, political thinking is not concerned with timeless truths but rather with the realm of changeable opinion, and hence judgment. Metaphysical (or philosophical) thinking, as invisible and timeless, does not evoke any perceptible change. It takes place as if in another world, in a moment outside history of which metaphysicians have always dreamed (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 11). It focuses on universals, unlike action, which always focuses on specific events. The object of metaphysical thinking is situated outside of the space of appearance. In the everyday practice of thinking as we know it, the invisible can be memories from the past, but also ideas about the future. Metaphysical thinking engages with the invisible in the form of general concepts, which has been its essence throughout the entire history of philosophy. Crucially for Arendt, thinking remained concerned with the general as opposed to the particular, that is, with the absent or conceptions of the absent. Acting, on the contrary, always engages in the specific, the present, the tangible, and the plural. Its essence is appearing of acting subjects in the public space (Arendt Reference Arendt1958: 199), where they are visible and audible to each other. Their action is always present: always here and now.
Arendt’s point of departure was the situation that often enough arises in politics, understood along the processual and hermeneutic lines Glaeser articulates; namely, a moment when we cannot simply rely on the authority of the past or appeal to general rules that seem to have governed politics in the past. What, then, should human beings do, on those occasions when neither rules nor tradition offer guidance? In this situation, Arendt (Reference Arendt1993: 13–14) suggested reflective judgment needs to stand in for any firm orientation in political practices. Judgment remains an activity of the mind, political thinking, situated between the past that cannot give us firm guidance and the future that we cannot foresee. It is meant to fill the gap between past and future, between the consistent set of institutional bodies and actors that populate the past and future but whose very continuity is conditioned by the individual actions of those who must judge and act in the here and now. Judgment’s role is literally pivotal, as “each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 13). This is why our capacity to exercise the ability to judge without a stable authoritative referent is precisely what is needed to address what Glaeser calls the paradoxes of nuclear politics.
Arendt’s essayistic style, was in tune with her exercises, which do not follow any predefined scheme or strict rules of a philosophical treatise. They are structured by two moments only: the critical and the experimental. Though these two elements of an exercise are not strictly divided, Arendt assigns a temporal dimension to both of them, critique being associated with the past and experiment with the future. The practice of reflective judgment is thus temporally located, as the judging subject critically directs her gaze to the past, which offers her a reference to make an experimental, future-oriented judgment. This does not mean that through such an exercise, I cannot simply re-appropriate tradition by critical interpretation of its terms. The traditional concepts lost their original sense, “leaving behind empty shells with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 14). This is why Arendtian exercises do not aim at inventing “some newfangled surrogates” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 14) of tradition: it is only from my actual position as situated here and now that I can relate to these concepts, and I do this through the experimental element of an exercise with its future orientation. Because political thinking, as actualized in the exercises “arises out of the actuality of political incidents […] and my [Arendt’s] assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them” (Arendt Reference Arendt1993: 14), relating to the past is only possible in the form of experimental practice.
What results from Arendt’s practice of “exercises in political thinking” is a model of partial, situated political cognition, the outcomes of which can only be temporary and contingent. From the perspective of such an experiment, political thinking correlates with political action, with the difference that the judging subject as a spectator maintains at a distance from the common world, while the political actor is in its midst. What Arendt called a “common world” is precisely that set of conditions, institutional and political, that make the kind of continuity and processual consequentiality required for historical learning – in the notion of it that Arendt and Glaeser share – possible.
What makes Arendt relevant for Glaeser’s open-ended answer to his own question about learning from the Cold War, in particular in better resolving the paradoxes of nuclear politics and just governance, is Arendt’s perception that conservative thinkers are not simply wrong about the ways in which liberalism failed to understand its debt to what she called the tradition and projected a false vision of itself as novel and modern. Yet, while accepting a good deal of these conservative critiques, Arendt, especially in her public interventions in the time of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, thoroughly rejected antiquarianism or anything like a nostalgia for premodern conditions. This is what made her a liberal after all, but a heterodox one: her unique take on the way liberalism actually relies on traditional resources that liberalism itself is eager to disavow.
This view of Arendt as a heterodox liberal is grounded in the normativity of “the Cold War” as an object of thought, and how it exemplifies the kind of thinking without banisters that Arendt believed was necessary to inhabit fully and accurately, the vanishing present as the gap between past and future. It is also what marks the institutionalist strain in her thinking that aligns her – at least to some extent – with conservative thinkers and also makes her an interesting dialog partner for Glaeser’s CPHI, a form of institutional analysis with which intellectual historians and political theorists would do well to engage more deeply.