THE CHARACTEROLOGICAL DISCOURSE: A “HIDDEN TRADITION” OF THEORIZING

In analyzing the relations between structural patterns and individual dispositions, Arendt applies a method of theorizing which plays an important role in the 20th-century discourse on social and political theory. Particularly obvious are the characterological accents in Max Weber's social theory (see also Hennis Reference Hennis1987, 59 ff.). Arendt was certainly critical of some underpinnings of Weber's ideal-typical method of conceptual construction. Besides a number of substantial differences regarding the concrete conceptual understanding of politics and action (Baehr Reference Baehr and Aschheim1999, 317–23), Arendt's methodological exercises also clearly oppose Weber's outspokenly neo-Kantian epistemological orientation. Contrary to this orientation, Arendt aims at hermeneutically “distilling” her theoretical concepts directly from the empirical material itself–an interpretive method which Weber ([1922] Reference Weber1988b, 181) explicitly denied in favor of the neo-Kantian notion of abstract hypothesis construction. Notwithstanding these significant differences, however, Arendt does share with Weber the marked interest in the conceptual connection of society and action. Weber seeks to elicit the cultural significance (“Kulturbedeutung”) of structural elements by constructing practical ideal-types from the correlating dispositions of individual actors. In his political sociology Weber often follows the methodological principle that the “spirit” of an institutional constellation can be most clearly grasped by constructing an ideal model of an individual actor most appropriately corresponding to the institution's functional logic ([1921] Reference Weber1988a, 334–40, 388–92; on character types of politicians in Weber's Politics as a Vocation, see Satkunandan Reference Satkunandan2014). Furthermore, Weber tries at times to empirically substantiate these ideal-typical constructions by identifying exemplary representatives of specific character types. The most familiar example in this respect is Weber's exposition of the “spirit of capitalism” as the individual disposition corresponding to the economic structure of modern societies, with reference to the exemplary case of Benjamin Franklin ([1920] Reference Weber1947, 31–8).

The same idea of characterological interconnections between structures and individuals reoccurs in Karl Jaspers’ Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919). Jaspers’ study, which Arendt (Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 9) considered to be among the decisive readings of her early intellectual biography, directly takes up Weber's line of thought, not only in terms of content but also regarding its “characterological” methodological foundation (Jaspers Reference Jaspers1919, 9, 13). A similar conceptual framework is applied in Erich Fromm's and Theodor W. Adorno's social psychologies of authoritarianism (Adorno et al. Reference Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford1950; Fromm Reference Fromm1941) as well as in the account of the “changing American character” in Riesman et al. (Reference Riesman, Glazer and Denney1950) or in the analysis of the political self-perception of American society in Bellah et al. (Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton1996). Pierre Bourdieu's (Reference Benhabib1990, 52 ff.) conception of habitus, finally, is one of the most recent elaborate accounts of a characterological connection between social structures and individual dispositions.

Regarding its methodological orientation, Arendt's study can conceivably be classified as a genuine contribution to this subtle characterological discourse. Due to her distinctly political theoretical interest, however, Arendt's contribution also differs, for instance, from Riesman's sociological perspective (Baehr Reference Baehr2010, 35–58) or from Fromm's analysis of the “authoritarian character,” in spite of some common subject matter. Whereas the major theoretical focus of Fromm's concept of “social character” lies on psychoanalytical and sociological questions, Arendt in Origins is primarily interested in political character types. Rather than dealing with psychological and social problems, Arendt's characterological investigations reflect the public personae of individual actors and their political relation towards their social environment (see also Baehr Reference Baehr2013).

A recent example of a study that shares some traits with the method implicitly applied in Origins may clarify this political focus of Arendt's account. In the first part of Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah et al. introduce the “representative character” as a fundamental methodological category of their study. The concept is inspired by Tocqueville's political theory which rests on the assumption that the structure of a society “can be viewed as an interlocking network of specific social roles” that altogether constitute “the distinctive quality of that society” (Bellah et al. Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton1996, 39). The different roles are integrated into the more or less consistent whole of a concrete society by political “representative characters” which provide “a focal point at which a society encounters its problems as interpreted through a specific set of cultural understandings” (Bellah et al. Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton1996, 40). According to Bellah et al., Tocqueville's idea of representative characters thereby describes a decisive feature of the cultural self-perception of societies and, hence, also a crucial methodological principle of interpreting social reality:

In the “living” ideal type of a representative character and in its more or less successful realization in the lives of actual persons, the abstract cultural ideals of a society are represented in terms of the concrete practice of individual actors. They function as public “myths” that orient the logic and practice of politics within a society because they reflect the society's elemental structure on the concrete level of individual action. As such public myths, furthermore, they serve as the “central hidden force” and the “vital” practical “principle” of functioning political institutions, as Tocqueville himself expresses it ([1856] Reference Tocqueville and Hampson1988, 62). Consequently, characterological analyses indeed play a major part in Tocqueville's political theory of modern society, for instance in his extensive reflections on democratic citizenship as a public role and character in the second volume of Democracy in America ([1835/1840] Reference Tocqueville, Mansfield and Winthrop2000, 399–676) or his account of the significant influence of “literary men” as representing the predominant type of leading politicians in 18th century France in his study of the Ancien Regime ([1856] Reference Tocqueville and Hampson1988, 110–18).

This Tocquevillian understanding of character types as public myths and principles of political conduct quite accurately accounts for the same distinctly political emphasis by which Arendt's characterological reflections in Origins is also determined. It is obvious that Tocqueville is a significant source of inspiration for Arendt in this respect. Arendt explicitly refers to Tocqueville's “great discovery,” for instance, of the general trend that “power-losing groups” are particularly in danger of being persecuted, as one of the “few helpful rules” in historical analyses to determine the peculiar “spirit of the time” (OT, 4–5). Furthermore, Arendt's reflections on the significance of the emerging “equality of condition” for the development of Jewish character types clearly echoes Tocqueville's historical account of modern democracy (OT, 54–5).

More explicitly articulated than these Tocquevillian themes is the influence of Arendt's interpretation of Montesquieu on her characterological method, especially Montesquieu's discovery of the fundamental problem of “principles” of action corresponding to the “nature” or “essence” of the different forms of government (Montesquieu [Reference Montesquieu, Cohler, Miller and Stone1748] Reference Montesquieu, Cohler, Miller and Stone1989, 21–30; see also Cane Reference Cane2015). That her genuine interpretation of Montesquieu exerted a substantial influence on Arendt's own account is most obvious in the concluding chapter on “Ideology and Terror” which Arendt added to the second edition of Origins. In this chapter Arendt explicitly applies Montesquieu's idea of “principles” in order to depict the “elemental structure” of the totalitarian constellation in a more systematic account than the first edition had provided (OT, 460–79). In terms of method, however, this more systematic account of the study's second edition does not suggest an altogether new perspective but only improves on the characterological principles that were already implicitly applied in the first edition. The influence of her reading of Montesquieu is also discernible (although not explicitly addressed by Arendt) in the first part of Origins which Arendt did not substantially revise for the later editions (on the different “phases” of Arendt's theory of totalitarianism also see Tsao Reference Tsao2002). Her depiction of the parvenu disposition, for instance, shows conspicuous parallels to Montesquieu's understanding of the principle of “honor” (see below). That Arendt's interest in Montesquieu's “principles” indeed closely relates to her characterological conceptualizations is most obvious, however, in some essays written after the first edition of Origins in which Arendt reacted to her critics and attempted particularly to more explicitly bring out some of the methodological implications of her study.

In these texts Arendt argues that Montesquieu's concept of “principles” brings to the fore the connectedness of the structural elements of a society, such as its legal and institutional structure or its patterns of power, with the practical dispositions of individuals acting within these structures (Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 331–6). While “nature” or “essence” in Montesquieu denotes the “particular structure of government,” its principle of action “is what inspirits it,” because the “structure taken in itself would be altogether incapable of action or movement” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn2005, 63). Arendt's interpretation stresses that Montesquieu's category of principle is neither a “psychological” nor a “metaphysical,” but a distinctly political theoretical concept which sets a “binding link between the structure of a government represented in the spirit of its laws and the actions of its body politic” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn2005, 66). Principles depict “the very criteria according to which all public life is led and judged” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 332). They describe the substantially public form of the relation between individuals’ dispositions as political actors and their comprehensive social contexts. Accordingly, “the animating force of principles” for Arendt has to be understood “as an externalized, worldly force” (Cane Reference Cane2015, 63).

These Montesquieuian themes also resonate in Arendt's concrete analyses in Origins. Integrated in the genuine conceptual framework of her analysis of totalitarianism, the “externalized, worldly force” of representative dispositions turns out to be a significant factor in the process of crystallization of various structural elements and hence a major force of structural and character transformation. The following section gives a more detailed account of Arendt's technique of applying the characterological method as a means to understand the totalitarian constellation.

ARENDT'S CHARACTEROLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

In Origins Arendt shapes the characterological method into a distinctly critical method of political analysis. When read with an eye on this interwoven characterological motive, Arendt's study not only provides an account of the “elemental structure” of the totalitarian constellation; it also renders a critique of totalitarianism in terms of a political theory of action which offers a number of insights into its immediately practical implications. In following this characterological accent, her account of anti-Semitism brings to the fore the significance of a further aspect of her reading of Montesquieu and Tocqueville. For Arendt, the conceptual focus on principles of action also helps to conceptualize the complex political dynamics of a society's historical development. These political dynamics, however, are for Arendt conceptually much more important than Montesquieu's theory suggests, and even more complex than Tocqueville's analyses indicate. Montesquieu's concept of principle, for instance, does introduce, as Arendt stresses, “history and historical process into structures of government,” (Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 331). But her analysis of the processes of crystallization that led to the totalitarian constellation brings much more clearly to the fore the political dynamics inherent in the relation between structure and person.

A particularly illuminating example in this respect is Arendt's examination of the character type of the parvenu. Although transformed into a different analytical context, this type shows conspicuous parallels to Montesquieu's understanding of “honor,” according to which the striving for distinction and the competition for reputation and privileges as external signs of distinction are the dominant motives for action in monarchical societies (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 335–6). According to Arendt, Montesquieu's concept of honor is “closely connected to historical experience” insofar as “medieval monarchy, based on nobility” is obviously the historical context in which it is originally located (Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 331). Arendt's character type of the parvenu also has a history, but a much more unsettled one. This type does not so much reflect any sort of genuine “identity” based on the Jewish tradition. Instead, it represents the peculiar political position of Jews within the elemental structure of European societies (Judaken Reference Judaken, Rensmann and Gandesha2012, 174) which is determined by their exclusion from being fully integrated as equal members of society. As a consequence, the parvenu’s relation towards society instead follows the peculiar social logic of distinction. Compelled to abstain from claiming recognition as an equal in an open public realm, the parvenu must strive to achieve “reputation” and “privileges” as means of protection for their marginal position against a potentially hostile society.

As a consequence of this forced orientation towards distinction, the parvenu shares his general features with the public disposition of “subjects” in a monarchical society as described by Montesquieu. In Arendt's analysis, however, these features turn out to be highly ambivalent. Regarding its political implications, the position of the parvenu within his social context in a sense resembles the French nobility's position as sketched by Tocqueville. In Tocqueville's analysis of the Ancien Regime, the “gentilhommes” in 18th century France, and especially the recently ennobled “parvenu” types among them (Reference Tocqueville and Hampson1988, 71), are interpreted as representing an effectively anti-democratic character type. Within the context of the prerevolutionary French society, and contrary to the positive development and successive democratization of the character type of the “gentleman” in English and American history (ibid., 66), the motives of distinction and privilege as represented by the “gentilhomme” exerted politically highly destructive effects because they primarily brought to the fore the political dysfunctionality of the still privileged “caste” of the French nobility (ibid., 66–77).

Arendt's reflections on the parvenu as a Jewish character type focus on similar aspects, but she much more clearly treats them as symptoms of the successive development of a general alienating and socially destructive character-context constellation, namely of the development of modern anti-Semitism. Locating the type's historical origin in the absolute monarchies in early modernity, Arendt's examinations reflect the dynamics emerging from the changing constellation of this disposition's relation towards society throughout the course of modern European history (OT, 14–28; see also Sigwart Reference Sigwart2012, 325–7). According to Arendt, at the time of the “court Jews” the parvenu disposition still had a positive social function. The “court Jews” remained aware of their marginal position within society and therefore maintained the original meaning of the motives of reputation and privilege. They did not yet try to use the logic of distinction as a means to find a way into society, as it was the case in later constellations. This disposition, furthermore, corresponded to the elemental structure of the old European nation states. Their “nature” was based on a fundamental antagonism between the social classes and on a strict separation of the state as an administrative entity from society (OT, 17). Following therewith the same rationale of distinction, yet only on the structural level, these old European class societies, organized as nation states, could make a positive use of the parvenu disposition; they even functionally depended on it.

In the course of the successive disintegration of these class societies of the old European style, however, the parvenu’s political function also dissolved, turning the figure into a socially dysfunctional character type (OT, 14–5). In the 19th century the parvenu—as one of the few public roles Jews had been at all allowed to play—had become a structural anachronism, as it were. Accordingly, the type's “behavior patterns,” still centered around the “concentrated effort to distinguish” oneself, had also fundamentally changed their political significance. In light of the changing situation, determined by the dissolution of classes and at the same time by a growing pressure of social conformity, the motive of distinction turned into a hopeless strategy of assimilation, into the “tragic endeavor to conform through differentiation and distinction” (OT, 55–6, 66). In this transformed historical variant of the “exception Jew,” most clearly represented by Benjamin Disraeli (OT, 71–2), the parvenu not only directly reflected the structural conditions of a politically “decaying society,” but also provided a perfect point of projection for the various contradictions that emerged from this process of disintegration (OT, 68, 15, 55).

In Arendt's analysis, the effects generated by such incongruities between structure and action as they are discernible in the history of the parvenu disposition play a significant role within the disintegrating dynamics which dominate the development in Europe during the 19th century. The relation between structure and person within a society is obviously not necessarily stable, but may over the time of its development undergo processes of extension, stretching, disconnection, and transformation. Accordingly, a specific political disposition can at one point of its development be in tune with the society's structural physiognomy, while at another point it might strongly contradict it. As a consequence, depending on its concrete arrangement, the relation between structure and action can engender stabilizing as well as destabilizing political energies. In other words, temporal interferences can occur in the relation between structure and action in a society, and these are decisive factors within the society's political dynamics and social development.Footnote ² For Arendt, these incongruities are indeed a major source of the increasingly destructive social forces that drive European societies in totalitarian directions. The parvenu’s fate of falling out of time, as it were, by becoming the representative character of “the inherent weakness of an obviously outmoded political structure” (OT, 50) marks the beginning of a process at the end of which any positive relation between individual dispositions and society has become virtually impossible.

In analyzing this process, Arendt's critical characterology unfolds an extraordinarily fruitful conceptual creativity and originality. Compared to Montesquieu, for instance, the characterological scenery becomes much more complicated in Arendt's examinations. The structure of European societies during the 19th century is involved in an accelerating process of transformation in which social and institutional patterns as well as their corresponding individual dispositions are permanently in motion, dissolved and transformed. Accordingly, rather than just one single fundamental principle, there seem to be several varieties of dominant character types, each representing major tensions, contradictions, and fractures within a specific phase in the development of these disintegrating and transforming social constellations.

Another specific feature of Arendt's character types is their genuinely negative political orientation. On the practical level of individual dispositions, the process of alienation in 19th century Europe is above all determined by the fact that the character type of the citizen is increasingly absent within the characterological scenery of the European public. Under the conditions of the anti-Semitic, racist, and imperialist transformation of the European societies’ elemental structure, the political character type of the citizen itself becomes a structural anachronism. Arendt's casuistry of character types in Origins consequently depicts the practical manifestations of an accelerating process of political alienation unfolding in 19th-century Europe in which the growing political vacuum is filled by distorted surrogates of citizenship, by apolitical or even antipolitical individual dispositions that increasingly dominate the understanding of public action (OT, 207–21).

This process appears to be determined by two major destructive tendencies: by the decontextualization of character types and by the direct perversion of their original meaning (see also Sigwart Reference Sigwart2012, 328, 331). The decontextualizing effects of political disintegration are particularly obvious in the imperialist phase of the development. “Expansion” as the defining principle of action which determines the thrust of imperialist politics stretches the structural context of political action to a point where any concrete limitations and comprehensible “borders” of political action are dissolved. The “imperialist character” operates within a structural frame of reference which is permanently expanding, to a point where it loses its social function as a meaningful horizon for practical orientation.

Arendt argues that this decontextualization had already taken place in the course of the political “emancipation” of the bourgeois’ peculiar “set of behavior patterns” which began to replace the political logic of the citizen's public disposition. During the 18th century, the originally merely private “bourgeois convictions” of competition and expansion and the “primary concern with money-making” were “gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs” (OT, 138). When turned into a representative disposition of political action, however, the inherently expansive logic of modern capitalist economy necessarily engendered destructive effects. “In contrast to the economic structure, the political structure” of a society “cannot be expanded indefinitely” without dissolving its social function as a meaningful frame of orientation: “The victory of bourgeois values over the citizen's sense of responsibility meant the decomposition of political issues into their dazzling, fascinating reflections in society” (OT, 126, 80).

In their fully developed form, the practical implications of such an unlimited frame of reference crystallize in the “imperialist character,” who actively follows the logic of expansion as the principle of public action. For Arendt, this peculiar disposition is most purely represented by Lord Cromer and Cecil Rhodes. Both men were driven by their discovery of expansion, “conceived as an endless process,” as a new political principle of individual action (OT, 215). For Arendt both are exemplary cases that demonstrate the absurd nature of this principle according to which human actions ought to be understood in terms of “functions” of the “anonymous forces” and “dynamic trends” of the historical processes of expansion (ibid.).

In terms of individual morality, the effects of this indefinitely expanding, self-consuming character are utterly destructive, and sometimes tragic. Arendt explicates this tragic trait with the case of Lawrence of Arabia, the “best man” (OT, 218) whom the ideal of the imperialist character had the opportunity to destroy. Lawrence's biography is an exemplary case of the development of a “quixotic” disposition, a type which, again, highlights the significance of temporal interferences in the interplay between society and action. Lawrence's tragic greatness lies in the fact that he most consequently realized the absurd principle of the imperialist character while at the same time struggled to remain a morally decent individual. This struggle, however, since it was pursued under the conditions of an imperialist society, could only remain an isolated endeavor, without the potential of creating the possibility of a new meaningful political relation between individual and society. The traditional forms of individual morality had already become dysfunctional structural anachronisms, without any positive relation towards the new social context of expanding society: “Lawrence. . .clung fast to a morality which. . .had already lost all objective bases and consisted only of a kind of private and necessarily quixotic attitude of chivalry,” standing for “such virtues as chivalry, nobility, bravery” that had become “utterly out of place in a political reality ruled by Cecil Rhodes or Lord Curzon” (OT, 218, 209).

The totalitarian movements consequently radicalize this destructive tendency of decontextualization by making it the explicit goal of their ideological programs for a complete reorganization of society. These programs can on the one hand be understood as attempts to violently resynchronize the relation between action and society. On the other hand, however, these violent resynchronizations only radicalize the perversions of this relation that preceded them and hence serve to complete “the breakdown of the whole structure of morality, the whole body of commands and prohibitions which had traditionally translated and embodied the fundamental ideas of freedom and justice into the terms of social relationships and political institutions” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 328). Under these conditions, the decontextualizing principle of expansion is radicalized by the totalitarian idea of a movement that is “international in organization, all-comprehensive in its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration” (OT, xxvii).

Arendt's further characterization of the “mood” (OT, 334) and “climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place” (OT, 326) particularly highlights the reciprocal character of the interplay between structure and person and of the transformative effects generated by the temporal interferences involved in it. The character type of the “authentic mass man,” for instance, most paradigmatically represented by the biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, not only “individually. . .embodie[s] the mass destiny of the time” under the structural conditions of “the pre-totalitarian atmosphere” (OT, 327, 332); at the same time this type, particularly prevailing in the “front-generation” after the First World War, also depicts the phenomenon of a transformative avant-garde of mass-society at a time when “masses” on a large scale were about to emerge. This avant-garde's representatives, for whom the experiences of “destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values,” (OT, 328), not only react to, but actively help to accelerate the process of alienation. In this transformative variant of a representative disposition, the very idea of a “self-willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of destruction” becomes the model of public “role and character” (OT, 331). The negative effects of structural disintegration and decontextualization are turned into principles of action and hence transformed into activating motives for further transformation. The members of this actively destructive avant-garde elite “stand ready” and are able to organize the emerging masses because their disposition most clearly expresses and at the same time anticipates and enforces the “character transformation” and the new spirit of action which is about to become “the spirit of the time” (OT, 326, 437, 335).

Under the structural conditions brought about by this activist totalitarian project of complete decontextualization, the very idea of a meaningful context as the common horizon toward which authentically political types of individual action could be oriented becomes altogether impossible. Such meaningful modes of relating to society are replaced by “suspicion,” “provocation,” and “conspiracy” as the new principles of action (OT, 430, 436). For Arendt, the character type which most clearly translates the systematically destabilized and permanently changing structural patterns into this new conspiracy principle of action is the “double agent.” Within a structural situation where “neither a community of values nor the predictabilities of self-interest exist as social (as distinguished from merely psychological) realities,” the practical logic and peculiar qualities of the secret police become “the general qualities of totalitarian society” as a whole (OT, 430). Within this society, “permeated by standards and living by methods which once had been the monopoly of the secret police,” “[e]veryone, in a way, is the agent provocateur of everyone else” (OT, 430–2). The disposition of the double agent, which assumes the status of a living embodiment of the society's practical spirit, is directly derived from the experiences of completely alienated “social outcasts” (OT, 432). These outcasts lack the ability to relate to their social environment in any other way than through the destructive terms of conspiracy, which perfectly articulates in terms of action the structural conditions within an ever accelerating process of decontextualization.

Closely connected with the decontextualization of individual dispositions is a second destructive tendency emphasized in Arendt's analysis. Over the course of the process of political disintegration, earlier character types are replaced by new dispositions that not only distort, but directly invert and thereby pervert their original meaning (see also Crick Reference Crick1977, 125 and Kohn Reference Kohn and Grunenberg2003, 96). The new representative types resemble the earlier ones, but at the same time they completely invert their practical significance. They almost seem to be political caricatures, absurd imitations of meaningful dispositions (OT, 227–43). This perversion of originally meaningful character types especially determines the imperialist phase of the development. The politically emancipated bourgeois, for instance, “transformed under the pressure of the chaotic economic conditions of our time into an involuntary adventurer” who is “worried about nothing so much as his security” for which he is “ready to sacrifice his beliefs, his honor, and his human dignity” is nothing but “the exact opposite of the ‘citoyen’” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 128, 130). Likewise, the socially marginal position represented by the character type of the pariah is transformed under the practical conditions of imperialism into openly destructive types of social outsiders. In the course of this transformation the peculiar features of dignity and independence which defined the pariah’s disposition are directly perverted into the redundancy and ruthlessness of the socially superfluous mass men who came to serve as the workforce in the “Great Game” of imperialist expansion (OT, 77–8, 147–57). These “superfluous men,” “spat out” by society and hence “without use or function,” mere “shadows of events with which they had nothing to do,” at the same time became the socially dominant “living symbols” of the new constellation, the “living abstractions and witnesses of the absurdity of human institutions” (OT, 189). Accordingly, the phenomenon of the imperialist “mob,” composed of these new “masses,” is to be understood as nothing but the “distortion and caricature” of political communities, an absurd “caricature of the people” (OT, 155, 107).

The final stage of this process of distortion and perversion of individual dispositions is reached in the totalitarian movements and forms of domination in the 20th century, during which the most fundamental traditional forms of European politics are altogether replaced by perverted surrogates. “Terror,” the “essence” (in the sense of Montesquieu) of totalitarian government, is nothing but the perversion of the idea of a government of laws (OT, 464–8; Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 340–3). The institutions of totalitarian governments are nothing but “fake imitations” and “exact counterparts” of traditional institutions that directly pervert their original logic by replacing any political practice of self-organization with the shear logic of functionality and the techniques of “Gleichschaltung” (OT, 372). Totalitarian mass organizations are nothing but the distorted imitations of commonly shared public spaces, in which the only remaining possibility of individually relating to the social world is the experience of utter “loneliness” (OT, 474–8). “Ideology,” finally, is not only the distortion of the traditional idea of natural law and of political knowledge based on practical judgment, but also the direct perversion of the idea of a meaningful political disposition of individuals towards society as such (OT, 461–5, 346–51). From Arendt's point of view, the “abstract logicality” of ideology, being the surrogate which totalitarianism requires “in place of Montesquieu's principle” (OT, 472) as “the driving motor of political action,” turns the idea of human action itself into a shear absurdity (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn1994, 348–9).

The totalitarian constellation, hence, is the final stage of perversion of the meaningful relation between action and structure, between individual and society. What remains of this relation in the ideological disposition is the experience of mere functionality. In the distorted terms of the ideologue as a character type, being an individual person is reduced to the role of a mere “phantom of a force,” and the meaning of “action” is reduced to the mere execution of “the necessary forces which rule the world” (OT, 219–20). Consequently, the disposition of a type like Eichmann “who had decided to be and remain a law-abiding citizen of the Third Reich” necessarily implies neglecting the very possibility of “personal responsibility” by claiming to be a mere “cog” within a “system” and the representative of necessary “historical trends and dialectical movements,” the “innocent instrument of an inhuman impersonal course of events” (Arendt Reference Arendt and Kohn2003, 40, 29–31, 20–1; OT, 8). Ideology, as the complete implosion, as it were, of the reciprocal relation between action and structure, ultimately transforms the individual from a participant in the process of commonly constituting and altering the shape of the social world and of the structural conditions of individual action into a mere technical function of abstract and anonymous social structures and processes. The ultimate result of this absurd constellation is to render the question of individual character types itself practically irrelevant. Arendt's understanding of ideology is the consequent conceptual conclusion of the negative characterological casuistry woven into her study on totalitarianism.

In conclusion, the most important conceptual cornerstones of the characterological approach that can be extrapolated from this casuistry are, first, the idea of a reciprocal, mutually constitutive and dynamic relation between structure and action; second, the idea of a methodological mediation of elementary structures and concrete incidents and stories by way of an interpretive construction of representative character types; third, the transformative potential of temporal interferences and structural anachronisms within this relation; and fourth, the significance of constellations of political vacuum and of decontextualization and inversion in the dynamic development of character-context configurations.

Due to their implicit and rather inarticulate form, Arendt's exercises in applying these methodological ideas leave a number of important conceptual questions rather unanswered, such as her criteria in choosing exemplary cases or in accentuating the significance of peculiar structural patterns. Notwithstanding these open questions, however, the reconstruction of her implicit methodological framework can serve not only to enhance our understanding of her political theory; when taken as an inspiration for further methodological reflections along the lines indicated by it, Arendt's characterological account can also make fertile contributions to current methodological debates in political theory. The following concluding section briefly outlines some of these potential contributions.