This book is a study in the cultural history of ideas, in particular, Hannah Arendt’s notion of solidarity, understood as a social form of political action. In a nutshell, Kim establishes that Arendt’s thinking about political commitment traversed a wide spectrum of choices in Europe, but ultimately settled on choosing and then, in her written work, idealizing citizenship in the American Republic. Kim explores why and with what consequences Arendt came to the conclusion that the United States was a Republic different from the failed nation-states of Europe, which privileged one majority group at the expense of minorities, usually defined in religious and racial terms.
His ultimate criticism of her position is that it arises out of a radical underestimate of the exclusion of both Native Americans and Americans of color from the Republic of rational equals she believed the Founding Fathers constructed. The critique is justified, though it takes the form of a too-narrow argument that 1776 happened to enable American slaveowners to resist British efforts to end slavery. This claim is the same kind of partial reading of the American Revolution that Kim accuses Arendt of advancing; it would not stand scrutiny against the latest scholarship of Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, among others. But Kim’s argument does show how partial was Arendt’s understanding of race in the American political context.
There is another dimension of Arendt’s pro-American revolution and pro-American Republic argument that escapes Kim’s critical treatment. In On Revolution, published at virtually the same time as her celebrated account of Eichmann in Jerusalem, she claims that the American Revolution avoided the bloodbath of the French Revolution because the Founding Fathers radically separated political equality from social equality. There are two parts of Arendt’s argument here that are striking. The first is that the French revolutionaries were overwhelmed by limitless empathy for the poor, thereby reducing the necessary distance between Republican citizens necessary for rational decision-making. Why empathy, or in Arendt’s terms, compassion, should paralyze political thinking is never made clear.
Secondly, the distinction between the realm of the social and the realm of the political is (in important ways) arbitrary, and so is Arendt’s distinction between the private and the public. In a famous exchange , Gershom Scholem accused her of having a lack of love of the Jewish people, in particular in her blaming the heads of Jewish councils in Europe as having been the worst moral actors in the Holocaust. Arendt’s reply was that she does not love a people; she loves individuals. Given her treatment in Germany, it is understandable that patriotism was a compromised choice for her, but the notion that emotional solidarity, a kind of loving affect for a group, cannot be extended to a population strikes this reviewer as either odd or perverse. Here, Arendt took Kant’s idea of “enlarged mentality” to develop the argument that judgment required you not to feel like someone else but to think in the place of someone else, and used it to rule out empathy (or compassion) as part of judgment. In On Revolution, she used Billy Budd and The Brothers Karamazov to show that compassion was not of this world, and therefore no sure guide to politics. The idea that there can be bounded empathy, or tempered compassion, apparently offended Arendt’s strict understanding of both Kant and Aristotle. She loved making radical distinctions and then following the consequences of such bifurcation. There is an entire literature available today on the history of empathy which goes well beyond Arendt’s separation of feeling and thought.
Had Kim explored this facet of Arendt’s thought he might have found an explanation for her mis-reading of the founding of the American Republic. Kim shows well how wrong was her critique of school integration in Little Rock, and how she failed to see the power of James Baldwin’s empathic preacher’s voice. But Kim is too committed to uncovering Arendt’s racial biases to provide a full account of her approach to thought and feeling in politics.
What she lacked was what Raymond Williams understood: that we study ideas in part to place them in what he called the “structure of feeling” of their time. Williams made room for “thought as feeling; feeling as thought,” in a way that Arendt refused to do. Racism is only part of that story of Arendt's thinking, but it is an important element in evaluating Arendt’s political outlook. To follow Raymond Williams’s suggestions in an analysis of Arendt’s ideas would produce a different book, one that has a better chance of doing justice to both her European outlook and her American destination.
The strengths of Kim’s book lie in his presentation of the unfolding of Arendt’s thinking sequentially through her work on Augustine, on totalitarianism and its origins in imperialism and anti-Semitism, on the Eichmann trial and on violence. The second half of the book is on Arendt, the American thinker, the advocate of the Republic, perplexed by the problem of race and ethnicity, which she never mastered in the American context.
The term “solidarity” in Kim’s book does not refer to the Polish trade union of 1980, or to the American trade-union song “Solidarity Forever,” written in 1915 and sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Hannah Arendt joined her mother in honoring Rosa Luxemburg, the German socialist martyr. Later on, Arendt moved away from socialist commitments, though her second husband was an early member of the German Communist Party founded by Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, both murdered in 1919. By the time she left Europe in 1941, she had long since discarded socialist views. Zionist views also did not survive the war and the post-war creation of an ethnic nation-state in Israel.
There she parted company with many of those who were her friends and comrades in the 1930s and 1940s. Other ties unraveled after the publication of the ironic masterpiece Eichmann in Jerusalem. What remained of her liberal and universalist convictions wound up being incorporated in her commitment to the American Republic. That choice, as Kim shows, was flawed by a selective reading of American history from the beginning.
Following other critiques of Arendt’s views on race in America, Kim places Arendt in the context of America’s current ideological warfare over race, affirmative action, “wokism,” and diversity. His account is fair and well-supported in both the German and American archives. He uses unpublished material to illuminate the distance between her thinking and that of Thomas Mann, to show through her marginal comments her puzzlement about black radicalism, and to probe her ambivalence about her sense of belonging to a national community. All these insights contribute to our sense of Arendt as a profound and painfully honest witness to the moral dilemmas of her times. The Arendt that emerges from this book is a flawed guide to political thinking, but that description is a mark of honor, not of accusation.
Nothing could be more indicative of where her heart lay than in Arendt’s decision to leave her archives to the Library of Congress and other papers and books to Bard College. The United States gave her the safe haven neither Germany nor France, nor any other European country provided her. Perhaps she was fortunate that her second husband’s early participation in the German Communist Party remained a secret, one her husband withheld from American immigration authorities when they arrived in New York in May 1941. Her achievement as a political thinker was formidable, but we should welcome Kim’s critical account as affirming the independence of thought, indeed, the liberal conscience in which she believed and (to a degree) embodied. As are we all, she was a woman of her time, and taking account of her contribution is the best way to acknowledge her achievement, and to move beyond it.
