INTRODUCTION
A distinction frequently used to be drawn between Hannah Arendt's work as a political philosopher and as a historically minded critic of political culture.Footnote 1 Recently, however, scholars have stressed continuities between the historical focus of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the philosophical tenor of her later writings.Footnote 2 Arendt has come to be seen as a thoroughly historical thinker, if not a historian. Yet her writings from the early 1950s, in which she constructed a historical sensibility grounded in readings of Marx and Hegel, have mostly been ignored. In these writings—part of an ambitious, unfinished book project entitled “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism”—she sought to identify aspects of Marxism that had hastened the emergence of totalitarianism, without condemning Marx's thought in its entirety.Footnote 3 The result was a series of investigations into the philosophy of history that formed the basis for many subsequent articles and monographs.Footnote 4 While some aspects of these writings—her critique of Marx, notion of ideology, and developing political theory—have been examined, little has been said about the notion of history with which she tied them together.Footnote 5 This essay will show that Arendt's notion of historical understanding centred on an uneasy relationship between the need for reconciliation with the past and a thorough rejection of twentieth-century violence. Her later attempts to theorize forms of judgement and action that avoided voluntarism and fatalism can be better understood in this light.
“Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” was a continuation of Arendt's endeavour to comprehend the emergence of the “idea of humanity”. In Origins she had described the contribution of “race-imperialism” to the collapse of the nation state and the international order. Race-imperialism, along with anti-Semitism, had enabled the totalitarian assault on human diversity and the unforeseen recognition of a common humanity.Footnote 6 In her Marx project she extended this global and historical focus, treating the rise of labour, “the social” and the eclipse of the public sphere as preconditions for totalitarianism.Footnote 7 The categories of labour and work, she argued, grounded modern historical consciousness. Marx's interpretation of the Hegelian philosophy of history emerged from this background, mandating the violent transformation of humanity in accordance with a teleology grounded in the emancipation of labour.Footnote 8 In refining her theory of totalitarianism, she specified how particular political constructions of temporality could justify violence.
In grappling with the significance of totalitarianism, Arendt articulated a concept of reconciliation as a way of dealing with the worst of human experience.Footnote 9 Moralistic forms of understanding that elicited straightforward condemnations, or comprehended concentration camps through precedents such as slavery—something she attributed to contemporary social-scientific analyses—prevented a confrontation of the “elements” of totalitarianism in Western society. Something akin to a Hegelian mode of reconciliation to the world, discerning hermeneutic value in even the most appalling of events, might lead to a productive understanding of the past. But it might also create a fatalistic resignation in the face of historical events, or, worse, support the Marxist view that past violence was the necessary “midwife of history”.Footnote 10 Two commitments were required to supplant Hegelian and Marxist responses to the past: first, to abandon a view of history as possessing rationality. To prevent this leading to a nihilistic politics of will or abandonment of oneself to the flow of history required the second commitment, to judging the past. This tied a concept of reconciliation to that of non-reconciliation.
Constructed at a time when she still felt totalitarianism to be an immediate threat, Arendt's notion of non-reconciliation was a blunt precursor to her theory of judgment. Non-reconciliation entailed a refusal of political arrangements founded on violence and a starting point for political action. It also conflicted with the need for reconciliation. Because Arendt viewed modern history and politics as overwhelmingly characterized by violence, the notion of non-reconciliation encouraged her to lay out extremely demanding sets of conditions for political legitimacy. This would feed into her ultimately implausible account of the quasi-contractual conditions for legitimate polities in On Revolution (1963). Many of the paradoxes of Arendt's later political thought stemmed from this relationship between violence and history.
This essay reinterprets several major aspects of Arendt's trajectory in the years following the publication of Origins in 1951. Though there have been numerous scholarly treatments of her historical thought as a form of “storytelling”, they have neglected the philosophical and anthropological justifications that she provided for her historical approach.Footnote 11 This essay examines these justifications in three ways. First, it examines the historical dimensions of her writings on imperialism and totalitarianism, showing that her critique of instrumental conceptions of politics emerged from a critique of historically grounded justifications of violence.
Second, it shows that although Marx was an important figure in Arendt's intellectual development in the early 1950s, he was a starting point for a number of concerns, rather than her sole interest. Uninterested in producing a straightforward anti-totalitarian take on Marx, she used parts of his political economy to ground her depiction of the rise of “mass” societies. Such societies, she argued, fostered alienated and instrumental attitudes towards the world, and a search for meaning through the direction of historical change. This led to politics based on practices of violent domination and legitimized with reference to the course of history. Her reading was shaped by French thinkers such as Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.Footnote 12 Connecting these concerns to her critique of the nihilism of French existentialism and the relationship between violence and history in Marxism shows how sustained these reflections were, casting light on the transition from her earlier work to later criticisms of Sartre and Frantz Fanon in On Violence (1970), and her condemnation of the Vietnam War.Footnote 13
Third, this essay shows that by 1954 Arendt had developed a positive notion of historical understanding, defined against Hegelian reconciliation to the past. A central foil for this, as with her examination of violence, was French existentialist thought—specifically that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—which she felt failed to grasp the unprecedented historical situation. Against their purported combination of voluntarism and fatalism, she sought a means of interpreting the past that was reconciled to the impossibility of political action reliably realizing its original intentions, but that avoided nihilistic resignation to violent conflict.
Examining these three themes sheds light on the post-war intersection between German and French thought on history and violence, and revises interpretations of Arendt as a historical thinker. It also points to the origins of her later theory of judgement. This essay begins by considering Arendt's writings on imperialism and totalitarianism and her critique of French existentialism. It then turns to her articulation of reconciliation and non-reconciliation as ways with which to comprehend the past with an eye to responsible political action, before showing how this approach inflected her investigations of labour, history and—crucially—violence.
IMPERIALISM, NIHILISM AND HISTORY
A history of modernity and critique of violence as much as an investigation of Marxism, “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” possessed significant continuities with Arendt's earlier work. In particular, the account of race-imperialism that came to form a central part of Origins shows that from an early stage she saw violence as a central “subterranean” element of Western history.Footnote 14 Imperial expansion tied to racial domination, Arendt argued, had undermined the European nation state by radicalizing tensions between the state as impartial guarantor of rights, and the nation as ethnic community.Footnote 15 Competition for scarce colonial outlets for capital generated conflict, leading to the collapse of the international state system in war.Footnote 16 As nation states collapsed, totalitarian movements exploited the political vacuum, drawing on violent practices of racial domination developed in the colonies.Footnote 17 This was her “boomerang thesis”—based on a reading of liberal J. H. Hobson—of the effects of colonialism on the legal and political structures of European states.Footnote 18 Theories of ethnic supremacy justifying colonialism abroad undermined the concept of an impartial state at home. Despite debts to Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin in describing the connections between capital accumulation, overseas expansion and war, Arendt's analysis lay well outside the paradigm of early twentieth-century Marxism, providing little detailed economic explanation of the influence of colonialism on European genocide.Footnote 19 She was engaging in cultural criticism as much as in history. For example, in her 1946 article “Imperialism and Suicide”, she argued that the force behind European power politics and imperialism lay in a scientific materialism that found man's origin in “Nothingness . . . in spiritually void matter”, and therefore “looked toward the annihilation of man”. Although driving the lust for power and possession, nihilism also catalysed the fulfilment of these desires in destruction, “the most radical form of domination as well as possession”.Footnote 20
Arendt's account of imperialism, while avowedly anti-colonial, was strongly Eurocentric, with implications for the inclusiveness of her understanding of history.Footnote 21 She clearly possessed many of the prejudices of her contemporaries.Footnote 22 In Origins she described sub-Saharan Africans as “without a culture or history of their own” for failing to erect a “human artifice” atop the natural world.Footnote 23 The silence of indigenous peoples in her narrative of imperialism is compounded by empathetic descriptions of the experiences of European settlers and adventurers, who, when they killed, were “not aware they had committed murder”.Footnote 24 Her Eurocentric cultural anthropology points to an uneasy early relationship with Hegel. Despite her claim in Origins that he was “never interested in the rise and fall of cultures as such or in any law which would explain the death of nations”, Hegel did in fact pronounce judgment on peoples such as the North American Indians, and advocated colonization to bring oriental peoples into the stream of real history.Footnote 25 Though plausibly ignorant of these views, Arendt's analysis similarly implied the exclusion of peoples from history on the grounds of their purported inability to humanize the world; in her case through establishing laws, polities or written records of deeds.Footnote 26 This was a spatially and temporally understood differentiation between humanist and quasi-natural relationships with the world that would shape her later distinction between work and labour.
Despite condemning imperialism more for its effects on Europe than on the non-European world, Arendt rejected the idea that the barbarism of totalitarian rule was only an import from colonial encounters. The bureaucratized violence of colonial practices was a product of a nihilism that unfolded from the heart of Western thought.Footnote 27 By the end of 1946, she had dropped the idea of violence as an immediate relation between consciousness and the world, as described in “Imperialism and Suicide”. Instead she explained the violence of colonialism and then totalitarianism through historical and social conditions, ideology and philosophy.Footnote 28 She still saw mass violence at the heart of modern history, but with the shift from colonial domination to European genocide its attachment to a wide set of bureaucratic practices became contingent on a wide range of factors. The “suicidal” dimensions of nihilism were subsumed in a description of the passive masses swept up in totalitarian movements.Footnote 29 Arendt retained the general category of nihilism to characterize the destructive tendencies at the core of European thought, tied to modern ways of seeing history in terms of a blend of fatalism and voluntaristic freedom.Footnote 30 Its surfacing into the mainstream of Western history marked a radical break with history. The philosophical basis for this treatment can be discerned in her early criticisms of French existential thought.
NIHILISM AND EXISTENTIALISM
French existentialism, Arendt opined, was a “rebellion of the intellectuals” hostile to bourgeois society and committed to a notion of freedom not bound to historical forces.Footnote 31 In a 1946 piece she commended Sartre's lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”, delivered in 1945, for rejecting both the “sterility of the old revolutionary elite” and the “spiritual bankruptcy of the left”. Alluding to attempts to clear a political and intellectual space between the Socialist Party (SFIO) and the French Communist Party (PCF), she was also praising Sartre's humanistic rejection of materialism and emphasis on the contingency of existence.Footnote 32 Nevertheless, she suggested that his “new humanism” was a reinvigorated nihilism.Footnote 33 Her usage of “nihilism” in this instance followed Heidegger's emphasis on the obscuring of Being by the stress placed on individual beings in Western metaphysics. Heidegger saw Descartes's dualism as exemplary of this forgetting, in its strict division of subjectivity from world and consequent treatment of man and his surroundings through the prism of self-consciousness.Footnote 34 In his play The Flies (1944), she noted, Sartre proposed that “if man becomes aware of his own consciousness . . . he realizes that he depends upon nothing and nobody outside himself”.Footnote 35 The suggestion was that by conflating existence with subjective consciousness, Sartrean existentialism entailed a nihilistic relationship with others and a hubristic account of human capacities.Footnote 36
The appeal of this form of nihilism in France, Arendt believed, was a reaction to the spread of devoluntarizing philosophies of history. In “What Is Existential Philosophy?” (1946), in the same year as her review of French existentialism, she argued that radical and nihilistic accounts of human freedom were best understood as responses to the determinism of modern historical consciousness.Footnote 37 Her argument rested on a compressed history of alienation and historicism in post-Kantian German thought. The problem of historicism, she claimed, emerged in the nineteenth century alongside the increasing influence of the natural sciences on the humanities, leading to the underplaying of human agency through its definition in terms of the “historical or natural or biological or psychological flow in which he [man] was caught up”.Footnote 38 During the same period, she argued, the notion of alienation emerged as a philosophical problem, rooted in the Kantian split between the noumenal realm of rational freedom and the phenomenal world of causal determinism. In nineteenth-century philosophy this led to attempts to overcome alienation and determinism in the name of human freedom. Increasingly radical anthropocentric idealisms and materialisms—such as that of Marx—masked the persistence of “an open or hidden concept of fate” combined with an “element of defiance”.Footnote 39
Early phenomenology, Arendt claimed, sought to circumvent this choice between freedom and necessity by reconstituting the world through human consciousness.Footnote 40 This entailed treating man as a “world-creating being”, capable of constructing a totalizing philosophical system that would end alienation. By conferring divine status on humanity, this endeavour both failed to recognize its historical conditions—secularization—and remained trapped in a Cartesianism it had intended to surpass.Footnote 41 Though Heidegger drew attention to the impossibility of this project, in the process he produced a radical nihilism by placing nothingness at the heart of Being to create a “world-destroying being”.Footnote 42 Arendt maintained that despite his claims to have effected a destruction of Western metaphysics, Heidegger was still beholden to Cartesian ontology that posited a rigid divide between consciousness and supposedly external phenomena. Her narrative of philosophical change had a sharp political point. While avoiding denigrating existentialism entirely, Arendt sought to criticize the irresponsibility of Heidegger's thought, and its adaptation by Sartre. Spurred on by additional information about Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, Arendt sought to criticize the irresponsibility of his thought.Footnote 43 Cartesian ontology, reflecting a wider metaphysics of modernity, tended to separate being from a wholly externalized, fallen and alienated world, leading to an unworldly and instrumental attitude to politics. Given his conviction that public speech was idle chatter and political life irredeemable, it was unsurprising, she argued, that Heidegger's radicalization of this tendency led him to the destructive panacea of National Socialism.Footnote 44 This nihilistic combination of Cartesianism, phenomenology and existentialism, she suggested, was being radicalized by Sartre and other French thinkers.Footnote 45
The existentialist model of freedom opposed to historically imposed necessity generated conceptions of politics and the past that placed violence at the heart of historical change, as the only means of breaking with the dead weight of the past or the mediocrity of mass society. This violent relationship between freedom and necessity, Arendt suggested, was characteristic of philosophical modernity.Footnote 46 In Origins she tied this historical understanding to totalitarian ideologies: comprehensive Spenglerian or dialectical materialist notions of history had fuelled the fatalistic and relentless activism of the “front generation”.Footnote 47 Against these approaches, she argued that responsible political action would require combining sensitivity to history with discrimination. After completing the manuscript for Origins in 1949, she began to grapple with ways of approaching the past that were attuned to the need for understanding as well as responsible political engagement. Arising from an attempt to come to terms with Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, her notion of reconciliation brought personal, political and philosophical concerns to bear on historical understanding.
RECONCILIATION AND UNDERSTANDING
The occasion for Arendt's development of ideas of reconciliation and non-reconciliation as a means of judging the past was a discussion of forgiveness with Heidegger, following their rapprochement after a visit she paid to him in February 1950, while working for the Committee for Jewish Reconstruction in Europe. Their ensuing correspondence prompted her to reflect on the themes of forgiveness, revenge and reconciliation. Writing to her in May, Heidegger had referred to Nietzsche's thoughts from Also sprach Zarathustra on the desire for revenge and the difficulty of reconciliation.Footnote 48 In a long note written in June 1950—the first entry of her Denktagebuch, a notebook she would maintain until 1973—Arendt opposed reconciliation to both forgiveness and revenge, articulating a notion of judgement oriented towards the past.Footnote 49 Forgiveness, she claimed, placed the judge so far above the object or person being forgiven that it meant “no further relationship” was possible. It was only possible for God. She could not, therefore, ease Heidegger's burden of guilt by forgiving him. Revenge, however, was also inappropriate, as it equated judge and wrongdoer. Reconciliation, however, generated a form of solidarity resting on an acceptance of wrongs as a feature of the world, without erasing their historical occurrence through forgiveness or justifying degrading acts of revenge.
Arendt saw this notion of reconciliation—originally conceived to encapsulate her feelings about Heidegger—as suitable for affirming plurality, or human difference and unity, in the wake of catastrophe. Simultaneously past and future-oriented, reconciliation could re-establish solidarity in the wake of an abhorrent act or event. It was therefore essential to the discriminating continuation, abandonment or reformation of joint political projects. Non-reconciliation, on the other hand, provided a response to acts that could be neither forgiven nor punished, or “about which one ought . . . to neither be silent about nor pass by”, rejecting the conditions that gave rise to them, and demanding new circumstances.Footnote 50 More so than forgiveness or revenge, the principles of reconciliation and non-reconciliation provided a reliable guide to judging the past.
In a subsequent and rare methodological discussion, Arendt outlined a mode of historical cognition that could ground this idea of reconciliation. Her January 1953 “Reply” to criticisms of her historical method made by philosopher Eric Voegelin was a significant step in her development of a notion of historical judgement. Her retrospective justification for the structure and approach she took in Origins elucidated her demand for non-reconciliation to a world harbouring totalitarianism, suggesting how reconciliation and non-reconciliation might be applied to historical and political phenomena.Footnote 51 Abhorrence of totalitarianism, she claimed, had led her to depart from scholarly conventions of neutrality in Origins, allowing the historical object to shape the relation between historian and object and cultivate a judgement.Footnote 52 In describing “a methodological necessity closely connected with my particular subject matter”, she claimed, she was not merely emphasizing the difficulty of neutrality towards totalitarianism, but making a claim about the relationship between political judgement and historical analysis.Footnote 53 Unreconciled to totalitarianism, she sought to disaggregate it into “elements” in order to destroy its conceptual unity.Footnote 54
While presenting her approach as without precedent, driven by the rupture with the past caused by totalitarianism, Arendt's presentation of the role of the historical observer was clearly influenced by Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, the manuscript of which he had entrusted to her care before his suicide in 1940.Footnote 55 She argued for an erosion of the separation between historian and historical object, a distinction that she claimed suppressed the stakes of historical investigation. The aim was not for “a history of totalitarianism” but rather “an analysis in terms of history”, employing the “imagination consciously as tool of cognition”.Footnote 56 This was an echo of Benjamin's demand that the historical materialist “blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history”.Footnote 57
Arendt's claims about imagination and cognition pointed to her respect for the mode of imaginative identification with historical objects found in German historiography.Footnote 58 But by noting that “mere observation of chronological order” was “necessarily salvation and frequently justification”, she was repeating Benjamin's criticisms of the quasi-theological grounds of German historicism, which he argued depicted “the sequence of events like the beads on a rosary”.Footnote 59 Historicism did not interpret the distinctiveness of particular events and their significance for the present; this was a claim she had previously made about Hegel's attitude towards the past.Footnote 60
Contemporary historicism, she suggested, viewed the emergence of totalitarianism in terms of “intellectual affinities and influences”.Footnote 61 This hinted at the approaches of contemporaries Jacob Talmon and Karl Popper, but also at Voegelin's own reading of totalitarianism.Footnote 62 In contrast, the role of the historian, Arendt implied, was to observe disparate strands and historical objects and assemble them into something resembling what Benjamin referred to as “the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one”.Footnote 63 In Origins she had assembled the elements that were to “crystallize into totalitarianism”.Footnote 64 Such an approach required judgement grounded by either reconciliation or non-reconciliation.
The tentative claims that Arendt presented in her reply to Voegelin did not, however, constitute a methodology. She hinted at a more systematic frame for historical investigations in “Understanding and Politics” (1954). There she defined understanding as the means by which “we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world”. Distinct from “correct information and scientific knowledge”, it grounded political judgement, rooted in the reconciliation or non-reconciliation of historical objects.Footnote 65 While “understanding” defined the relation of the historian to the historical object, “events” delimited the character of phenomena to be studied. Congealed clusters of speech and action, events were manifestations of intersubjective human freedom. Without their disruptions, history was merely “the dead monotony of sameness, unfolded in time”. Events could not be explained by causal historical analysis or subsumed into wider historical processes, as they transcended “the sum total of all willed intentions and the significance of all origins”.Footnote 66 The influence of Benjamin was again evident here; in her description of the “dead monotony” of history understood as a chain of causal sequences, Arendt echoed his criticisms of conceptions of history as the site of “homogeneous, empty time” rather than time filled by “the presence of the now”.Footnote 67 She was articulating an avowedly present-oriented relation to the past. Her conceptualization of “events” also resembled Benjamin's claim about the historical materialist approaching “a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad”.Footnote 68
While the description provided of the historical gaze drew on Benjamin, Arendt's argument rested on a more clearly non-Marxist basis, attuned to a notion of reconciliation as a form of judgement.Footnote 69 Seeing the past in terms of “events” was a prophylactic against the alienation fostered by the meaningless temporality prevalent in mass societies, but it was also a goad to political judgement and action, bounded by reconciliation to certain objects, and non-reconciliation to others. The chief example of an event she used was that of totalitarian domination.Footnote 70 Such an event could not be assimilated into the flow of historical processes that integrated it into some higher meaning; it made prevalent forms of historical-political understanding seem obsolete. It also signified a moment of non-reconciliation. This notion of the “event” was a rebuke to Hegel's form of universal reconciliation and to Marx's conception of history as the development of the labouring process. Both denuded history of meaning and undermined its value as a ground for action, and for an understanding that would allow one to become “at home in the world”, rather than condemned to the “rootlessness” that totalitarianism had preyed upon. Arendt worked out the substance of these criticisms in “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism”, an important stage in her treatment of the relationship between history, violence and action.
CRITIQUING MARX
Arendt began work in earnest on “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” around the same time as she began to think about the notion of reconciliation. Marx, whom she read above all as providing a philosophy of history that legitimated violent transformation, was a vital foil to her views on the proper relationship between political thought and history. Yet although planned as an exploration of the Marxist road to Stalinist totalitarianism, “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” was originally also intended to be a reconciliation of sorts, in order to benefit from Marx's insights into modern history. This entailed reappropriating his thought from anti-Stalinist intellectuals.Footnote 71 Looking for transatlantic and European intellectual solidarity in the late 1940s, she had become disenchanted with the bellicosity of American anti-Stalinism.Footnote 72 It was in this context that she announced to her friend and erstwhile mentor Karl Jaspers that she intended to study Marx, at a time when “every little idiot thinks he has a right and a duty to look down” on him.Footnote 73 Even as late as 1952, Arendt remained more sympathetic than many of her émigré contemporaries, writing that Marxism had “done as much to hide and obliterate the actual teachings of Marx as it has to propagate them”.Footnote 74
Marx, Arendt argued, was vital to understanding modern history, not only as the progenitor of a radical intellectual tradition that had been used to legitimize Soviet totalitarianism, but also as an acute observer of the rise of labour as a political force.Footnote 75 Lecturing on totalitarianism in universities across Europe after the publication of Origins in March 1951, she had the opportunity to delve into Parisian archives on the history of the labour and socialist movements. Following another trip to Paris in 1952, she prepared a series of lectures on “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought” delivered at Princeton in 1953.Footnote 76 These lectures indicate that she had begun to use Marx's political economy to clarify her views of the global developments that had led to totalitarianism. In Origins she had described the masses uprooted from class interests, breaking with class analyses while retaining a Marxist emphasis on imperialism.Footnote 77 Now she extended her narrative chronologically and thematically with the aid of his account of primitive accumulation from the first volume of Capital, combining his accounts of Reformation-era expropriations of communal land and the Industrial Revolution to explain the emergence of “mass societies” dependent on economic growth at the expense of the public spheres required to support political life.Footnote 78
Arendt's interest was less in Marx's political economy, however, than in his philosophy of history, against which she began to define her own mode of historical understanding. While respecting his acumen as a critic of capitalism, she argued that he possessed a deterministic conception of history modelled on the activity of labour itself. The future emancipation of labour would allow the mastery of nature to produce “the truly human world on earth”.Footnote 79 But labour, Arendt argued, was the most repetitive and ultimately meaningless of human activities. By cheering the “gigantic multiplication of needs, the fulfilment of which is felt to belong to the necessities of life”, Marx inadvertently urged on the development of the stultifying mass societies described in Origins, now redefined in terms of nihilistic and “worldless” devotion to labouring and consuming.Footnote 80 Arendt's view of Marx's notion of labour as biologized was not a free-standing phenomenological analysis, but reflected the influence of post-war French readings that imputed Hegelian and phenomenological categories to Marx's thought.Footnote 81
In the late 1940s, a focus on alienation and the revolutionary humanizing of the world in Marx's thought had become central to a humanist form of Marxism directed against crude forms of dialectical materialism associated with Stalinism.Footnote 82 Merleau-Ponty, for example, wrote in Humanism and Terror (1947) that “it has been remarked without paradox that Capital is a concrete Phenomenology of Mind; that is to say, that it is inseparably concerned with the working of the economy and the realization of man”.Footnote 83 The “whole import of Marxist politics”, he argued, could not be understood without “going back to Hegel's description of the fundamental relations between men”.Footnote 84 Arendt's approach at the beginning of “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” was similar. In February 1951, before her studies of labour in Paris, she still viewed Marx in a primarily humanist vein; justifying her plans to a sceptical Jaspers, she pointed to his early article “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”, and its rebellion against the “abstraction of society” and the “de-humanizing of man and the de-naturizing of nature” by the “economy of commodities”.Footnote 85 By the end of the year, however, she had moderated this emphasis on Marx's humanism. Invoking a phenomenological contrast bolstered by readings in Parisian archives on labour and socialism, she claimed in her Guggenheim application that he conflated humanizing work—associated with craft and artistry—with labour, a repetitive, dehumanizing interaction with nature geared towards the reproduction of life.Footnote 86
Arendt's critique of Marx's philosophy of history relied on a strong distinction between labour and work. Yet as critics have pointed out, Marx did not draw such a strong distinction between the two activities. Instead, following Hegel, he emphasized their dialectical relation, ascribing humanizing potential to labour in ways that Arendt seemed to wilfully ignore.Footnote 87 Making her case for the separation of labour and work, she drew on Engels, Darwin and her own phenomenological interpretation, stressing the similarity between Marx's view of labour and natural-scientific history.Footnote 88 Her combination of the Hegelian and humanist Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts with the purportedly economistic one of Capital brought together early and late writings at a time when other commentators were beginning to stress their difference.Footnote 89 Arendt suggested that neither a simply humanist nor a simply determinist interpretation of Marx was possible, because he persistently combined the necessity of labour with the radical freedom to remake the world through humanizing work. It is notable that she would acknowledge in The Human Condition (1958) that there was little textual basis in his writings for her distinction.Footnote 90 She held on to her questionable distinction between labour and work in order to present Marx as the culmination of a modern tendency to see human existence in terms of a radical opposition between necessity and freedom. This was the metaphysical relationship she had criticized in “What Is Existential Philosophy?”.
In his conception of the past, Arendt argued, Marx granted history meaning only through a “single gigantic development process” that reduced it to data read off the historical ledger. This flattened interpretative complexity and prevented the past from becoming a source of understanding that would allow reconciliation to the world.Footnote 91 Worse, in treating violence as “the midwife of history”, he furnished the basis for doctrines of dialectical materialism that legitimated violence as a tool for escaping from historical necessity to the realm of freedom, reaching a nadir with the Stalinist belief that terror would speed historical progress.Footnote 92 Marx's form of historical understanding, Arendt claimed, encouraged an indiscriminate reconciliation not only to the past, but also specifically to its violence, thus inhibiting the exercise of political judgement essential to a proper form of reconciliation that could make individuals at home in the world. This interpretation is best understood alongside her view of contemporary French thought.
WORK, VIOLENCE AND HISTORY
Post-war French thought suggested to Arendt that even existentialist approaches to Marxism advocated reconciliation to the purported necessity of violence. Her stays in Paris in 1951 and 1952 solidified her view of the renewed influence of Hegel and Marx amongst French intellectuals.Footnote 93 Her criticisms were tempered, however, by respect for the political and philosophical attitude of French existentialism. She also remained unwilling to imply crude causal connections between Marxian ideas and Soviet totalitarianism. Nevertheless, disillusioned with her intellectual acquaintances, by 1954 she was willing to criticize them openly. Opposition towards reconciliation to violence and the “progressive or doomed course of history” became one of the foci of her tentative concept of historical understanding.Footnote 94
Like many European thinkers after the Second World War, Arendt found notions of the progressive direction of history deeply unpalatable.Footnote 95 Writing with a sense that traditional concepts of state and international relations were breaking down, she hoped for progress towards Kant's vision of perpetual peace through a post-war European federation, but had no faith in history leading to a cosmopolitan endpoint.Footnote 96 She also entertained the possibility that an “end of history” might succeed in bringing about mass societies devoid of a public realm, especially in light of Nazi and Soviet success in organizing great masses of individuals along race or class lines.Footnote 97 She was deeply critical of non-pluralistic conceptions of groups, nations or, worse, humanity acting as collective subjects in history.Footnote 98
Arendt explored the intellectual and political origins of conceptions of historically developing humanity from the earliest stages of “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism”. Both Hegel and Marx, she claimed in September 1951, had thought that humanity rationally revealed itself by shaping the world through work. Unlike Hegel, however, Marx suggested that work could be applied to shape the course of human history, humanizing the world by bringing about the emancipation of labour.Footnote 99 While Hegel had restricted his view of historical understanding to “what was comprehensible in purely contemplative terms”, Marx allowed conscious action to produce truth; humanity could realize the Absolute—laws of history validated by dialectical materialism—rather than relying on the cunning of History to do it behind their backs.Footnote 100 Revolutionary change became the means by which the social organism of humanity could make history coincide with the development of productive forces.Footnote 101 Such a reading was hardly unprecedented. In his Paris seminars during the 1930s, Kojève had presented a teleological and anthropocentric Hegel, filtered through German phenomenology and Marxian political economy. Human existence in his scheme was rooted in time rather than space; in intentional becoming and conscious direction. Progress was driven by man's mastery of nature, but also by a dialectic of struggles between masters and slaves, leading to a view of history as a series of violent conflicts directed towards a hopeful end.Footnote 102 Kojève's interpretation of historical change was taken up and radicalized by others.
In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty had emphatically endorsed the Kojèvian association between violence and historical change.Footnote 103 A former member of the Resistance and co-founder of influential journal Les temps modernes with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty discussed, through a discussion of the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, whether the use of violence and terror by the Soviet Union could be justified. The argument was complicated by the fact that it was now possible “to construct a picture of Soviet life which is the opposite of proletarian humanism”.Footnote 104 He concluded that violence and terror was justifiable if it brought history to an end and created “humanity”—a totality of non-exploitative relations between human beings. Denial of the need for violence was to be complicit with its institutionalization in capitalist exploitation and imperialism, the practical manifestations of liberal humanism. Violence was already basic to politics, “the common origin of all regimes”.Footnote 105 The question was not “to know whether one accepts or rejects violence”, but whether the form one allied with was progressive, tending “toward its own suspension or toward self-perpetuation”.Footnote 106 The basis of human life in relations of domination and struggles for recognition meant that history had to be understood in terms of violence, justified on the basis of its eventual cessation. History was, Merleau-Ponty argued in Kojèvian–Hegelian terms, “essentially a struggle—the struggle of the master and the slave, the struggle between classes”. This was, he claimed, “a necessity of the human condition”.Footnote 107
Arendt sought to undermine such understandings of history as a violent process amenable to conscious control. Perhaps the earliest expression of this endeavour was “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government”, later turned into the final chapter of the second edition of Origins (1958).Footnote 108 Delivered in its earliest form as a lecture entitled “Ideology and Propaganda” at Notre Dame in 1950, the version published in the Review of Politics in 1953 downplayed the role of totalitarian propaganda, which she had stressed in the first edition of Origins, instead emphasizing the power of ideologies: deductive, spuriously logical systems disconnected from reality, genuinely believed by their adherents.Footnote 109 This was not the definition of ideology used by Marx or the Frankfurt school. The content of an ideology, she argued, was less important than the consistency of its argumentative structure.Footnote 110 The political and theoretical gulf between her concept and that of Marxists was highlighted by her use of dialectical materialism as an exemplar of ideology, assimilating historical data according to a “stringent logicality” and justifying the use of terror to force the course of human history to fit it.Footnote 111
The model of totalitarian ideology that Arendt presented in her 1953 article contained a potted version of her interpretation of Marxian labour and work. The contentless core of ideologies was balanced by the work-like understanding of history they fostered. In driving attempts to mould the plural and unpredictable human world to fit teleological design, ideologies encouraged the escalation of violence. The Bolsheviks had thought it possible to make history and achieve a classless society through conscious planning. But the experience of work—such as the making of a table necessarily involving the killing of a tree—could not be applied to unpredictable “political activity, action, or historical events, or any other interaction between man and man” without becoming destructive.Footnote 112 She extended this claim to argue that categories of instrumentality applied to politics were inherently self-defeating, leading to means becoming ends. This was the form of self-negating nihilism she had critiqued in imperial expansion for the sake of expansion. Terror used to hasten the creation of humanity simply resulted in more terror to whip recalcitrant individuals and groups into line, leading to the creation of new enemies to satisfy the ideal of continual transformation itself. The most brutal examples of the Sisyphean impossibility of applying instrumental standards of work to politics, she argued, were the anti-utilitarian frenzies of the Nazi genocide and the Soviet purges.Footnote 113 Stalinist dialectical materialism was a parody of Marx's historical teleology, combining the violence of work with the self-perpetuating character of labour.Footnote 114
This form of self-justifying violence was also present, Arendt argued, in legitimations of American foreign policy in terms of its historical destiny as leader of the free world. Attempts to turn democracy into a “cause” frequently entailed supporting “tyrannies and dictatorships, or misery and shameless exploitation of man by man, or the imperialist type of oppression of foreign peoples”.Footnote 115 That such policies were often encouraged by ex-communists suggested to her that modern approaches to history shared a particular ideological form.Footnote 116 Though they had recanted their previous beliefs, they had not “lost their faith in History and its bloody and grandiose demands upon mankind”.Footnote 117 In later criticisms of the Vietnam War, she would combine these criticisms with a reiteration of her “boomerang thesis” from Origins.Footnote 118 Her arguments also lay in stark contrast to those presented by Merleau-Ponty, who had accepted violence in the hope that it would be self-limiting, guaranteed by reason in history, presupposing “in the present and in the flow of events a totality moving toward a privileged state which gives the whole its meaning”.Footnote 119
Arendt employed her critique of Marxian labour and work, forged in Paris but applied to American politics, to criticize the increasingly Hegelian and Marxist politics of the French existentialists. In the process, she returned to the treatment of nihilism, necessity and freedom from “What Is Existential Philosophy?”. In Paris during the spring of 1952, she described to her husband how Sartre, the existential philosopher Eric Weil and others were “wrapped up in their theories”, living “in a world Hegelianly organized”.Footnote 120 She had the opportunity to articulate these criticisms in a paper entitled “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought”, which she presented at the September 1954 meeting of the American Political Science Association. She discussed European responses to totalitarianism, pointing especially to two strains of postwar French existentialism.
The first, represented by Camus and André Malraux, was committed to a limited revolt against social conditions, marked by an absence of “historical system or an elabourate definition of ends and means”.Footnote 121 The second, exemplified by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, superimposed Marx as a “frame of reference” on a revolutionary commitment to action, even though “their original impulses owed hardly anything” to Marx.Footnote 122 The stakes of this claim were rooted in the public dispute that unfolded in 1952 between Sartre and Camus over The Rebel (1951), but reached back to the positions Merleau-Ponty had taken in Humanism and Terror. The apparently Manichean choice between global capitalism and communism that appeared to French intellectuals had led Sartre to support communism as the lesser of two evils, and Camus to reject such a choice.Footnote 123 Arendt's claim that there were two distinct strains of French existentialism in “Concern with Politics” must be read in light of her support for Camus's position.Footnote 124
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's turn to Marxism, she argued, was driven by a refusal to be reconciled to alienation, finding it not primarily in economic relations but in the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, and in human existence, “uncertain, incoherent” and embedded in an “incomprehensible universe”.Footnote 125 Revolutionary action was more about endowing the world with “humanly comprehensible meaning” than about changing social and economic conditions.Footnote 126 The utopian character of “this attempt to save one's soul through political action” prevented it from formulating political principles and directing political choices.Footnote 127 Arendt claimed that such revolutionary action was intended to allow men to dwell in an “entirely humanized, man-made reality, so that the absurdity of human life will cease to exist”. But for the French existentialists, she argued, absurdity would not cease for individuals, but instead “for mankind in the midst of the human artifice”.Footnote 128 She argued that this slippage from the individual to an illusory collective humanity concealed the “extreme subjectivism of Cartesian philosophy” that found here “its last and most radical expression”.Footnote 129 This subjectivist worldlessness led to a desperation to find meaning in history, exacerbated by the brutal and seemingly meaningless events of the twentieth century. It provided ideal conditions for a renewed interest in Hegel's thought.Footnote 130 She was employing a reading of Hegel developed in parallel with her critique of Marx since 1951.
Taking political phenomena seriously without abandoning a concept of transcendent truth or succumbing to overly optimistic hopes of progress, the Hegelian approach, Arendt argued, did not claim, as Marx did, that conscious human action could drive world-historical change. In Hegel's philosophy of history humans could not control the outcomes of their actions on such a scale, because, she noted, they could “never have reliable control over the actions they have begun and can never fully realize their original intentions”.Footnote 131 This view of the tragic fallibility of action, derived especially from his chapter on “Spirit” in Phenomenology of Spirit, had a significant influence on Arendt.Footnote 132
She also recognized the influence of Hegel's tragic view of action on Merleau-Ponty. In notes taken on Humanism and Terror for her 1954 APSA paper, she copied out his remark that “the nightmare of involuntary responsibility and guilt over one's position . . . underlay the Oedipal myth”, and his approving reference to Hegel's view of Greek tragedy, which “has beneath it this idea of a fundamental chance which renders us guilty and totally innocent, because we know not what we do”.Footnote 133
However, while finding, as Merleau-Ponty did, Hegel's emphasis on the tragedy of subjective unpredictability appealing, she argued that he ultimately stripped events and deeds of their human meaning by subsuming them into a grander historical process. Twentieth-century Hegelianism had been used to support quixotic attempts to find a home for humanity amidst radical upheavals, fostering a tragic mode of reconciliation to a historical process that seemed inescapably dominated by violence. While superficially enabling action, this determination to find meaning in violence embedded in a temporal flow was easily transformed, she suggested, into self-defeating, instrumental and ideological treatments of history.Footnote 134
The roots of the notion of history as a devoluntarizing flow, Arendt argued, fundamentally lay in Hegel. He was the first, she claimed, to interpret the past as “history”, rather than a series of disconnected events, recuperating meaning from history without relying on divine guarantee.Footnote 135 In one of her earliest readings of Hegel, from 1951, she noted that in his thought politics only “became reconciled in history” on the assumption that history was a process, given meaning and a rationale as the means by which the World Spirit “reveals itself through the human consciousness” as a truth that transcended politics, sublimating the contingency of events into a universal dialectic driven by Providence.Footnote 136 This was not reconciliation to specific “events”, but rather general, tragic reconciliation to world-historical processes, leaving no space for discriminating judgement. Arendt's objection to French interpretations of Hegel's and Marx's thought was not that they were too historical, but that they were not aware of the central features of their historical situation, or “historicity”.Footnote 137 She remarked that even when they adopted Heidegger's notion of historicity—the radical temporal structure of existence—they granted it a “much stronger Hegelian flavour” that involved regressing to older forms of comprehensive philosophies of history exemplified by both Hegel and Marx. In the wake of totalitarianism, reconciliation to the rupture represented by Nazism and Stalinism seemed absurd. In a barb implicitly directed at Humanism and Terror, she asked how could anyone “dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps or play the game of thesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labour?”Footnote 138
For Arendt, the subsumption of cataclysmic events into a purported stream of history was characteristic of modern philosophies of history. This was not solely due to the appeal of teleological historical schemes. The search for stable frameworks of historical meaning among French thinkers had encouraged recourse to the Hegelian presentation of historical time as a constant flow. Events only acquired meaning through their place in causal relationships or grand processes.Footnote 139 Rather than allowing this to generate fatalism, French thinkers had applied the Cartesian tendencies that she identified in French existentialism to argue for the possibility of radical freedom through a break with historical necessity. The result was an instrumental model of historical change, rooted in Marx's radicalization of Hegel, placing the violence that resulted from this instrumentality at the heart of historical consciousness. The historical legitimation of violence, she suggested, lay at the heart not only of Marxism, but also of modern historical consciousness in general. Reconciliation to the fact of violence had ultimately led to ideological justifications of terror.Footnote 140 For Arendt, understanding and coming to terms with twentieth-century violence became the central task of any political mode of approaching the past.
CONCLUSION
Against the justification of violence that she discerned in modern historical consciousness, in the early 1950s Arendt developed concepts of reconciliation and non-reconciliation to propose that historical method in political theory focus on fidelity to the singularity and difference of past events, rather than the purported flow of macro-historical processes. This mode of historical understanding would form the basis of her later theory of judgement. This was not a systematic historical theory, and, as she acknowledged to Voegelin in 1953, she thought it difficult to translate into historical writing. Nevertheless, the extent to which she did not possess a coherent concept of history in the early 1950s should not be overstated.
There were three aspects to her historical sense: first, reconciliation and non-reconciliation as ways of conceiving of the judgement of phenomena; second, “events” as the most significant historical phenomena; and third, a hermeneutic relation to events. This form of relationship with the past would help individuals be reconciled to the world, and would ground future political action in a manner that militated against nihilistic voluntarism and revolutionary violence. Historical understanding—in addition to the aesthetic judgement she stressed in her much later Kant lectures—was an important stage in the formation of her theory of judgement.Footnote 141
A key, neglected element in the development of Arendt's political theory was her critique of violence and treatment of Marxism. As the transition from Origins to “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” shows, she shifted from a metaphysical and phenomenological argument about violence generated by nihilism to a philosophical–historical one emphasizing its mediation through historical consciousness. What was new in her writing was the tension between a need for historical reconciliation, and the historical reality of violence. Modern politics, she argued, was dominated by imperialism, nihilism, racism and violence. Neither these phenomena, nor the continuing existence of the elements of totalitarianism—deracination, exploitation, the superfluity of individuals—ought to be reconciled to by political actors. Yet non-reconciliation to existing circumstances seemed to preclude understanding of the past in a way that grounded responsibility rather than nihilistic voluntarism and revolutionary violence.
The tension between reconciliation and non-reconciliation to circumstances became more apparent as Arendt went beyond her theory of totalitarianism to theorize the forms of necessity that obstructed political freedom. Here she drew on Marx's thought more than has been recognized.Footnote 142 Her questionable interpretation of his concept of labour as quasi-biological treated it not as an illusory category, but as a reality that conditioned individuals in mass society to pursue private interests rather than participate in politics. The intellectual context for “Totalitarian Elements of Marxism” clarifies the reasons for this. Marx's appeal across the world, she noted, was that his analysis of capitalism and concept of labour possessed a great degree of historical and anthropological truth. She engaged with him as an acute historical thinker, reading him through a lens that allowed the possibility that an “end of history” might come about, resulting in universal mass societies devoid of a public realm. This would render humans superfluous, as the “free, labourless man who is supposed to emerge after the end of history would simply have lost his most essentially human capacity”.Footnote 143
Arendt's reading of Marx cemented a pessimistic narrative of modernity, focused on the emergence of mass societies and pervasiveness of violence that was in some respects as determinist as his. Yet while her critique of mass society had elitist implications for her attitude towards democracy, her critique of Hegelian Marxism highlights the extent to which these commitments did not emerge from a conventional anti-totalitarian analysis of the kind presented by Karl Popper and Jacob Talmon.Footnote 144 It was in fact shaped more by a more radical French intellectual milieu.
Finally, the historical dimensions of Arendt's reading of Hegel and Marx reveal her sustained interest in the relationship between modern history and violence, and its importance to her later political theory.Footnote 145 In On Violence she would critique the use of violence by revolutionaries and anti-colonial movements, and its justification by Sartre and Fanon.Footnote 146 But she also dealt with similar themes in On Revolution, Between Past and Future and, to a lesser extent, The Human Condition.Footnote 147 She noted that the debates over violence in the protest movements of 1968 only showed “to what an extent Hegel's concept of history dominates the thought of Marxists and non-Marxists alike”.Footnote 148 The origins of this critique of violence, especially in relation to Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, lay in her interpretations of Hegel and Marx.
In her analyses of political authority and violence Arendt noted that modern regimes legitimized their authority with reference to the course of history, whether towards classless or merely more economically prosperous societies.Footnote 149 She also noted that both communist and democratic regimes encouraged Weberian definitions of political power and authority in terms of a monopoly of legitimately exercised violence. As this essay has shown, she understood this nexus of violence and authority to be historically legitimated. Mass societies conceived of themselves moving through time according to loosely Marxian notions of quasi-naturalized historical change. She defined “events”, representing the possibility of political freedom, against this flow. But as Martin Jay has noted, there were unavoidable affinities between the practice of violence and the “new beginnings” she hoped would found new forms of political authority and replace rule by historically legitimated force.Footnote 150
The temporal aspects of the idealized polis that Arendt would describe in The Human Condition could mitigate the problem of legitimacy; authority could be sustained through practices of remembrance and storytelling directed at founding events and political institutions, rather than repeated violent or disruptive political action. Yet remembrance and storytelling provide limited purchase on the basic tension between violence and the founding of a decent polity. Her concept of reconciliation, however, as a spur to both historical interpretation and active political judgement, suggested the possibility of an outright refusal of violent founding acts. More than remembrance or storytelling, it presented a historically sensitive refusal, directed at political phenomena and arrangements founded on violence. Though a problematic and “monumental” historian, as Judith Shklar described her, Arendt had a concrete sense of history not only as a means of spurring action through remembrance of past noble deeds, but also as a way of cultivating, modelling and even practising political judgement.Footnote 151
