Hisrory ofEuropeen Ideas, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 385-398. 1991

Rmted in Great Britain

0191-6599/91 $3.00+0.00 0 1991 Pergamon Press plc

HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICAL THEORY: ETHICS AND ENEMIES*

SHIRAZ DossAt

Arendt’s political theorising was not in any critical sense global in outlook or interest, but from the outset her writing contained an international component. Totalitarianism’s central place in her analysis of the human predicament in the twentieth century ensured her international relevance; Western Europe and its fate, however, including its impact on certain parts of the world (Middle East) remained her primary interest.

As a thinker Arendt was distinctively European in her style and concerns, and though she paid effusive homage to America’s origins in On Revolution, she never much liked or felt settled in her new home. In her political theory, she set about rediscovering the nature and the meaning of the ancient and authentic European notion of the political itself, and the kind of ethics appropriate to genuine political life. To Arendt this politics, in the form it had assumed in the speculations of Homer and in the practice of the Athenianpolis, was the product of European genius.’

But this singular, peculiar strand had powerful enemies within and without the West. Today it barely survives, in a truncated, tenuous form in the public realms of European politics, but it is under attack by competing paradigms and models of politics drawn from the disciplines of economics, philosophy and sociology, all united in denying any intrinsic value and significance to this pre-Socratic understanding of politics and ethics.

For Arendt, this was a tragic state of affairs that showed how far Europe and

Europeans had slipped away from their ancient political roots, and lost a critical part of their contribution to the very idea and practice of politics. Arendt saw contemporary models of politics as versions of anti-politics, as adversaries of the political as she understood it. In this paper my purpose is to provide a sketch of Arendt’s political theory and her understanding of political ethics and its enemies. In her analysis the challenge to Western Europe is only partially an external one; it is basically an internal threat by liberal-bourgeois modernism and its celebration of the ethics of consumption and mastery of man and nature. To the extent that this post-Enlightenment modernism has spread well beyond the boundaries of Europe, the threat to Europe’s political genius is international.

ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Arendt harboured prejudices about blacks that had a contemptuous edge to

*This is a revised version of the invited paper presented to the 1988 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., l-4 September 1988.

TDepartment of Political Science, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2G 1CO.

38.5

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them, and were reminiscent of the views of other notable European thinkers. Kant and Hegel were negative about blacks in a similar way, though their sentiments, unlike Arendt’s, were pretty much racist. Kant asserted that blackness was ‘clear pro& of stupidity.2 The Kantian Enlightenment apparently did not include the inhabitants of black Africa. Hegel was equally dismissive: the Negroes were unhistorical and undeveloped, they had no ‘moral sentiments’ and they lay quite outside the plan of World Reason.3

That Arendt did not wholly reject Hegel’s and Kant’s judgement is clear in her repeated use of the word ‘savages’4 to describe blacks, in the midst of a book in which she damned racism as ‘the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization’.s Arendt settled doubts about the strength of her anti-black prejudice by pointedly exempting Chinese and Indians from her harsh judgement6 Nothing that can and should be said about Arendt’s general commitment to human rights, her courage in defending Arab victims of Zionism7, can or should disguise the fact that Arendtfelt an intractable antipathy towards blacks.

No other group was so trenchantly disparaged by her; not even the labouring poor in whom Arendt discovered redeeming attributes despite her decisive lack of sympathy for them. In the case of the blacks, her famous caveat that her readers should take ‘for granted’ her ‘sympathy for the cause of the Negroes’ because she was a Jew, is just not convincing.~ Arendt’s defense is as implausible as the contemporary Jewish argument that Israel’s sympathy for the oppressed should be beyond dispute because of the long history of Jewish suffering and persecution-a point Arendt would readily concede.

Arendt’s attitude towards blacks is unconscionable, but it is not just the result of prejudice. Her unJewish hardness on the black and other questions of oppression and misery is deliberate, and deliberately cultivated. Marx was for social justice and thus, in a sense, profoundly Jewish, indeed ‘fanaticaI’.9 Arendt on the other hand, scants social justice; her first concern is the world and worldliness-in a word, politics. The needs of Africans and American blacks are not political, but economic, social and humanitarian. To Arendt the demands of all such ‘persecuted peoples and enslaved groups’,r* including certain European Jews, preclude the practice of politics in her ancient Greek sense.

For Marx, his secular pride notwithstanding, Jerusalem never ceased to be a source of inspiration. His unbending hatred of injustice was rooted in his Jewish background. Arendt chose Athens, the world of power, prestige, politics; she never despised Judaism or Jewishness I’ but she preferred the freedom of Athens and Athenian politics which Jerusalem could neither accept nor tolerate. In this Greek territory, social justice was not high on the scale of values, and slavery was the natural fate of all who did not measure up. Marx and Jerusalem could not but come into conflict with Arendt’s Athens and its pure notion of politics.

Despite her differences with Marx and Jerusalem, Arendt’s moral sensibility was shaped by both; it is evident in her defense of the radicalism of Bernard Lazare, her contempt for the program of the revisionist Zionists and her critique of the American view of revolutions in the third world.r2 The lure of Athens did not permanently silence Arendt’s Jewish conscience, though blacks were not its beneficiaries. Their exclusion from her concern clearly points to Arendt’s Athenian moral reasoning and to the political theory to which it is tied. By our

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standards, her morality is inadequate, but Arendt is by no means immoral or amoral (even if she is stubborn in her prejudice).

POLITICS AND POLITICAL THEORY

Political theorising, in the grand sense, has usually been a response to a huge crises of one kind or another in the political world. In the Leviathan, Hobbes was reacting to the English civil war with as much originality and self-righteousness as Plato had reacted to the collapse of the Athenian city-state and the death of Socrates in his Republic and other dialogues. Arendt’s political theorising, similarly, was a grand attempt to master the origins of the contemporary disorder and offer a new foundation for post-holocaust politics.

By crossing the established boundaries of moral good and evil, by transcending the old categories of political right and wrong, the Holocaust had broken the thread and the meaning of the Western tradition. The break was irreparable, but the ancient past, the primal political beginning, was still intact. Falling back on Heideigger’s discoveries, Arendt resurrected this past, the polis experience, as she thought it had been in the days of Pericles, long before Plato recast it as the worthless shadow-play of demotic cave-dwellers. Arendt’s starting point was thus the same as Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Marx’s,‘) but her conclusions were radically different. To miss (or misread) the novelty of Arendt’s reading of this polis experience is to miss the foundation of her political theory and to misconstrue her political ethics.

No political theorist consciously sets out to make the lives of citizens more difficult or less fulfilling-at least not the type of theorists I tend to read.r4 He seeks to advance a theory that he thinks will better our common condition, make it more just than it was under the regime of other political theories. From Plato to Marx, theorists, in various, conflicting ways, have understood themselves as proponents of the just polity or the just set of rules or the just society in the age of progress.

Arendt’s political theorising does not share this self-understanding; not only is justice not at the heart of her theory, it plays a secondary role in her scheme. Arendt’s agenda is the politics and the ethics of the polis as the new basis for contemporary politics, not the politics of Plato or of the tradition. What Plato began and passed on was a powerful anti-politics of absolute stability, truth, justice. To Arendt, the foundation of politics has to be politics itself: its standards must be internal to political life; its rules appropriate for the many; its spaces suitable for words and deeds; and its limits must be those that flow ‘from the articulations of political phenomena themselves’.r5

For Arendt, all this is available in the thought that lies behind, and in the practice of, the Athenianpolis. Her political theory is a contemporary retelling of the polis experience, though not only for its intrinsic political importance. Two further purposes are clear in her theoretical strategy: first Arendt wanted to loosen Plato’s hold on students of political theory; to settle his hash, so to speak, by undercutting his damning interpretation of the polis, and rescuing as much of the authentic lustre of the polis as possible.

Her second purpose was to teach acceptance of the Holocaust and of the world

Shiraz Dossa

in which such monstrosities were possible. For many this was a morally shocking and dubious aim, but Arendt had her reasons. To lament and mourn the terrible sufferings of its victims, to condemn its evil, was perfectly natural and necessary -as Arendt had herself done in her first political book in which she detailed the horror of the Holocaust. But even then, Arendt was resisting the temptation to lapse into self-righteousness, togophilanthropic. As a Jew, perhaps, this would have been entirely appropriate. But as a theorist, Arendt felt she could not possibly give up on men, on the world, on politics. This was the Greek in her: her ability to be reconciled with a world in which such things happened.i6

Marx’s pained moralism in the face of human suffering is missing in Arendt. So is Plato’s morally charged contempt for the polis that dispatched Socrates to his death. Neither makes political sense to her, though she understands and sympathises with both. Playing down their moralism is Arendt’s way of resisting their distinct doctrines of absolute justice because both make politics impossible (since neither can tolerate moral compromises). For this political reason, Arendt fought against the natural tendency to confuse philanthropy and political theory in the aftermath of the holocaust. If philanthropy and absolute justice had no place in her politics, human rights, solidarity and decency were by no means

excluded.” To establish his claim, a theorist has to ‘contest ground already held’; he has to

‘delegitimate’ the prevailing theories. Political theorising has its own politics; it aims to displace or destroy the credibility of ‘rival’ theories.18 A theorist is obliged to be a pugilist of sorts, to disarm or knock down his competitors. Hobbes and Marx practiced this art with legendary overkill. As an intellectual warrior, Arendt is less strident but not at all shy in naming her opponents. In a sense, her political theorising is tougher, more combative because she was intent on jettisoning the entire tradition as fundamentally unpolitical.‘9

Not surprisingly Arendt’s politics has little in common with that of her predecessors. None of them took politics seriously in its own right, though Aristotle and Marx (in his younger days) came closest to a full appreciation. Arendt understands herself to be doing political theory as it should be done. For politics she was claiming the kind of moral autonomy and identity that had never been claimed for it in the annals of Western political theory. And it followed that if politics is autonomous, then it must have its own boundaries, substance and

ethics. That is the crux of Arendt’s implicit claim for politics, and that is why she has

been frequently patronised by her academic peers.20 For her thesis is radically subversive of contemporary political theory and of the political acumen of its practitioners. The net result of this state of affairs has been a drastic devaluation in the prestige of politics and political theory. Arendt’s central point is that political theorists critically influence the way we judge politics. In the long run, bad political theory produces bad politics, and both diminish us as men and citizens.

What is wrong with political theory today is obvious: its practitioners have no idea that their political theorising betrays no knowledge of the political or that there is such a thing as the political. By contrast, Arendt insists that the notion of the political is crucial because it serves as the yardstick of the permissible or impermissible, rational or irrational, right or wrong, in politics. In other words,

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there are standards of reason, ethics and humanity peculiar to the political, and they are not identical with social or historical standards.21 If the notion of the political is not metaphysical, neither is it unstable and malleable in Arendt’s construction: it is distinguished by sustained concern for the public and the common, as opposed to the personal and the private, by its passion for honour and glory, contrary to interest and benefit, and by a disposition that is worldly, not inward and constrained. Without public selves committed to the public and

the common, there cannot be politics at all. This is the indispensible foundation for politics and political theory.

ANCIENT ETHICS

For Arendt there is an ethics in and for politics in her sense; there is a kind of moral reasoning peculiar to political theory and politics which is not reducible to personal values or transcendental morality. Political ethics is a measure of right and wrong, though not, as a rule, in any absolute way. Political ethics demands of public actors (citizens) honourable conduct- no more, no less: it is neither the ethics of the Christian commandments nor the anti-ethics of Nazism-if soulcraft is ruled out, so is mass murder.

Like Aristotle, Arendt assumes an intrinsic connection between politics and ethics. Twice in the Human Condition, Arendt cites the Nichomachean Ethics when referring to Aristotle’s ‘political philosophy’ and ‘political writings’.22 That political theory is ethical is something she never doubts, but in Arendt’s political ethics, unlike Aristotle’s, politics is primary, not ethics. No matter how sensitively Aristotle appreciates the polis experience, he insists as forcefully as Plato that politics is for the sake of the good life, ethics is the legitimating rationale for politics. With Arendt, politics comes first and shapes her political ethics. What is right and wrong politically, she ties to the notion of thepolitical which provides its own legitimacy. The political is self-validating. But it is also self-limiting and self-policing, even if the range of permissible conduct is fairly

wide. Arendt’s political theory is a sustained attack on bourgeois liberalism, on the

liberal mind and its habits: her ideals of the public realm and, the public self (citizen) explicitly challenge the liberal celebration of private interests and private lives. 23 As Arendt’s Human Condition makes clear, the senseless consumer societies that saturate the Western landscape are products of the bourgeois mentality. The decline of the political and politics is the consequence of the liberal ascendancy in the West.

As Arendt sees it transgressions of her public actors are minimal, compared with the destruction wrought by ‘normal’, self-interested men motivated by

nothing more sinister than private interest and ambition. In the long run, and in our time, bourgeois greed poses a far greater threat to men and civilisations than the immoralism of citizens in search of glory. For Arendt to say, as she clearly does, that slaveholding is unjust but ‘certainly human’, as long as it is the desire for freedom that drives the citizen to enslave others,24 is obviously wrong. To think of human beings as legitimate targets of domination and slavery is in principle immoral. Yet for all the bravado of her political theory, it was the plight

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of the persecuted, the stateless, the oppressed, the duped (Jews, Palestinians, East Europeans, Americans), that incited her to protest, to complain, to blast off. Nothing of the moral fire of the pages she wrote in defense of the victims of the pathologies of this century is visible in her writing on theory and philosophy.

In a recent essay in Political Theory, an American writer actually claims that Arendt philosophically separated ‘morality and politics’. Sam qualification, this is plainly absurd since it means that Arendtian politics is amoral, if not immoral, by conceptual fiat-the claim is that Arendt understood politics as a non-moral vocation in a Weberian sense. If true, this would make nonsense of her thesis that politics is the basis of moral community, and of her laborious taxonomy of Nazism and other political evils.25

As Arendt understands it, ethics is a tale of absolutes, of right and wrong irrespective of consequences. In ethics there are no compromises, no extenuating circumstances, no excuses. To her this is true ethics-the ethics of Jesus and Kant, but also of Plato and Aristotle. But this ethics, because it is absolute, is relevant only to ‘man in the singular’, to man as man. To men in the plural, that is to men as political beings, this ethics is irrelevant and dangerous, except in unusual and extraordinary circumstances. Arendt’s point is that moral absolutes cannot tolerate the ‘fundamental relativity’26 of politics; they can only end up destroying the public space of politics. The underlying logic of ethics is the dream of discipline and mastery. Kant understood this better than anyone else.

Politics is neither unethical or without rules of its own but it is bound only by its own ethical standards. Arendt’s rationale is Aristotelian: politics can be as ethical as its nature allows, it cannot become a surrogate or substitute for ethics. In the final analysis, Aristotle subsumed his politics under ethics, though he was the first to protest against Plato’s transformation of politics into a branch of absolute ethics. Neither was sympathetic to politics in Arendt’s sense of the political, but it was Aristotle who had ‘warned against’ allowing philosophers to rule in politics. As Arendt notes, Aristotle knew that the philosopher’s ethics is the ethics of ‘man in the singular’ (absolute ethics). Like her, he also knew ‘the disastrous consequences for any community that began in earnest to follow [these] ethical precepts.. . be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian’.27

What mattered to Plato was the ethics of salvation, of the soul (conscience) at peace with oneself and nature: the well-being of the self, not of the world or of fellow human beings. Pure ethics, in particular the Greek variety, is far more selfish than political ethics. As Bruno Snell has remarked: ‘On the whole the Greeks were comparatively chary of proposing that people should shoulder inconvenience for the purpose of helping others’.28

In any of its versions, the good of the self is central to Greek ethics. No notion of ancient Greek virtue strays too far from its primary interest in the condition of the self. We moderns have not fully understood this: there is no conflict in the Greek view between ethics and desire, morality and happiness, goodness and the care of the self.29 In this sense Arendt is half-Greek, the self matters to her ethics but it is the public self-the self as citizen, not the self of private interest or the self of one’s conscience. Total selflessness is as anti-political as pure selfishness: a minimal amount of interest in the self is natural and necessary. Taking this bit of self-interest as given, Arendt shuns both the virtuous narcissism of Greek philosophers and the liberal-bourgeois passion for the material self. The aim of

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her political ethics is the achievement, not of goodness, but of nobility, honour, reputation-the emblems of the public excellence of the public self (citizen). In the words of Snell, these sentiments have ‘an unmistakable tendency towards the moral because, unlike “happiness” or “profit”, they designate qualities for which a man may win the respect of his whole community’.30

KANT AND EICHMANN

To postulate an ideal of politics that is neither pure power play nor a morality play, is to invite the wrath of the absolutists. Mainstream Jewish reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem was an exemplary lesson in the wisdom of sticking to the Jerusalemic account of good and evil when dealing with events like the Holocaust. Ancient Athenian moral reasoning which, in fairness, led one to notice blemishes on the moral armour of the victims as well, complicated matters far too much. Arendt was damned because she challenged the moral absolutes that Western man has come to swear, though not to live, by. Her book’was an

exercise in political ethics, which she called ‘political morals’ and which she never fully spelled out. But she left many hints about it in her writings.”

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, the clues are fairly explicit. The point about politics is that it is morally complex, it is frequently morally ambiguous, but it is not morally neutral or amoral. For men as members of the human community, as citizens, ‘political morals’ is their only suit of ethics. As the ancient Greek philosophers had it, moral theory is political theory. Arendt does not go that far but for her as well, political theory contains within itself a theory of ethics. For public actors, there is no question of separating ‘morality and politics’ because there is no domain of morality apart from politics. The ethics of politics is the ethics of the many, not of the philosophers or ‘man in the singular’.

As citizens, men are responsible to the public realm and its needs, to the world and its demands. They prize the public world they have in common, because that is the forum in which they ‘share words and deeds’, the arena in which they function as equals, in which they have the chance to excel, to achieve honour and reputation, to display courage-they prize it because this public world is the foundation of politics, citizenship, action. To preserve and protect this fragile public space, to keep intact the dispositions that make the polis possible, is the primary end of political ethics. In Arendt’s reading, the polis is as much a matter of mind as of space: ‘political morals’ are the morals of citizens who prefer the world to their private interests.

That is precisely why Arendt is so dismissive of Kant in her political theory. Kantian ethics in politics, in the realm of vita activa, can only result in the destruction of the world since it cares too deeply for moral absolutes and the integrity of moral principles, irrespective of consequences.32 In her essay, Politics and Truth, Arendt sharply criticises Kant’s approval of the Latin saying ‘Let

justice be done though the world may perish’. For Kant, an unjust world is clearly not worth living in, while Arendt is adamant that the world must be (has to be) our first priority.

But isn’t [Kant’s] answer absurd? Doesn’t the care for existence clearly precede

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everything else-every virtue and every principle? Is it not obvious that they become mere chimeras if the world, where alone they can be manifested, is in jeopardy?33

Kant’s absolutism is the reason that his ethics is so unsuitable for politics. In fact, in her piece on Lessing, Arendt felt compelled to stress the basic ‘inhumanity of Kant’s moral philosophy’34- that is, its commitment to abstract truths and principles as being applicable to the human world. In Eichmann, Arendt discovered a perverse understanding of the Kantian categorical imperative. Though he misconstrued its spirit, and twisted it to do things Kant would never have condoned, the fact remains ‘that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precept: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions’.35 As an officer of the Third Reich, Eichmann did his ‘duty’ in the matter of the Jews with an ‘uncompromising attitude’, so much so that he refused to obey Himmler’s order (until he was forced to) towards the end of the war, to stop the killing of Jews on the grounds that it was inconsistent with his duty to the Fiihrer’s law.36

Kant’s irrelevance to and in politics in Arendt’s sense, has not been noticed, one suspects, because Kant figures prominently in Arendt’s metapolitical and metaethical reflections in the Life of the Mind. Kant is obviously important in Arendt’s analysis ofthe vitacontemplativa, but not to herpoliticaZtheory.37 In the case of Eichmann, Kant was not of course responsible for his conduct, and yet it was his version of Kantian absolutism that encouraged Eichmann to keep obeying a criminal law to the bitter end. Arendt’s point is that in politics moral absolutes tend to spell disaster. With a little help from ‘his’ Kant, Eichmann shut out the world and killed his doubts about the final solution.3*

Kant, in this context, is criticised in consequentialist terms. To Arendt, consequences do matter, despite her notorious contrary view that the public actor in the ideal public realm need not concern himself with the consequences of his action.39 In a later essay, Arendt dismisses the relevance of conscience to politics in similar terms: conscience is ‘unpolitical’ because it is ‘not primarily interested in the world’, and because it doesn’t care about the ‘consequences’ actions have on ‘the future course of the world’.40 In On Violence, Arendt goes so far as to sanction violence if that is the ‘only way left’ to secure just consequences, ‘to set the scales of justice right again’.41

But this kind of concern is untypical: justice as a social and moral ideal is marginal to Arendt’s political theory. to her, justice in the modern sense means ‘equality of condition’,42 and that cuts at the heart of politics and the world. For the sake of politics and humanity in her sense-public excellence, honour, glory-Arendt is fully prepared to tolerate injustice in the contemporary sense. If one is for the world and politics, one cannot choose social justice. In saying this, she is fully aware of the ‘violent injustice’ of slavery, and of domination of man by man,43 and she insists that in the face of injustice, ‘rage and violence’ are not only necessary, ‘their absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization’.44 Furthermore, there is nothing ‘irrational’ about this kind of violence against oppression justified in the language of reason. To react rationally to this ‘hypocrisy’ is absurd: ‘To use reason when reason is used as a trap is not “rational”; just as to use a gun in self-defense is not “irrational”‘.45

Social justice and Kantian moralism are absolutes: their uncompromising

Ethics and Enemies 393

interest is the welfare of humans and the integrity of their consciences, not the temper and the fate of the public world. For both ethics is primary; neither grasps the moral complexity of politics. Machiavelli and Lincoln had a clearer view of the dilemma: both understood that the end of politics is the interest of the world, not the interests of men. Lincoln loved the United States with as much passion as Machiavelli loved his Italy, and each sacrificed his soul for the good of hispolis. Lincoln and Machiavelli are exemplary political actors according to Arendt, because they learned ‘how not to be good’; they practised political ethics in the interests of the public realm.46

Machiavelli is the only figure in the Western tradition who grasped the meaning of the political. In Arendt’s eyes he is the heroic theorist who recaptured the ancient understanding of ethics and political ethics: being good is one thing, making the world a better place another. Machiavelli did not mean morally better, but better for men to pursue honour, reputation, rewards. Like Machiavelli, Brecht fully understood, what these readers don’t, that men who love the world, not themselves or their souls, that men who want to change the world ‘cannot afford to be good’.47 To Arendt, the issue is not the false one of separating morality from politics, but understanding that being good and goodness are moral options for man in the singular’, not for public actors. In fact, Arendt warns us to resist ‘the temptation to be good’ in politics.48 Trying to be good is a form of self-love; it is one of the ways to be unworldly and destructive of the public realm in which we share the best of human ‘words and deeds’. For Machiavelli and Arendt, and Brecht, notwithstanding their differences, it is ‘of greater consequences to leave behind you a better world than to have been good’.49

Machiavelli’s worldliness led him to praise the barbaric Cesare Borgia; Arendt’s love of the world does not include praise for such tyrants despite her advocacy of pathbreaking action in politics. The passion for politics carries with it special responsibilities to the city and community: it is not at all a license to be ruthless and unjust as a matter of course. As Arendt says, to do and suffer are the same, but the aim of doing is not to make others suffer. Life involves suffering by its very nature but to cause suffering and destruction is not the purpose of public life. Though the public self does not strive to be good, he has in him an Orwellian decency. By no means a saint or a good man, Arendt’s political actor is disposed to decency and honourable conduct. Indeed, Arendt’s criticism of the failings of political figures particularly in ‘dark times’ is so telling and incisive precisely because it is cast in the idiom of decency and indecency.

In On Revolution, while condemning the use of a patronising emotion like pity in politics, Arendt supported the principle of solidarity with the oppressed and the insulted. In On Violence, she stressed the ‘moral motives’ of the leftist student rebels of the 1960s in America. In her 1964 article on ‘personal responsibility’, Arendt praised the ‘independent human faculty’ of the men who rejected compromises with Nazism. so The moral resource at play in all these instances was plain decency. In part, Arendt’s infamous critique of the conduct of the Jewish leaders during the terrible days of the holocaust was an attack on the indecency of their cooperation, in any manner, with the Nazi authorities, especially in exempting ‘privileged categories’ from the final solution:

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The categories had been accepted without protest by German Jewry from the very beginning. And the acceptance of privileged categories-German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc.-had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society.51

To Arendt, this crisis of decency symptomised the much more serious failure of

political ethics. A number of Jewish leaders failed as public selves, failed to

protect members of the community. The issue is not that they were personally immoral, but that they acted badly, unpolitically. That is the higher, more culpable failure for political men in positions of power and influence. To say it another way, these leaders displayed an elementary lack of solidarity and communal spirit by dividing up Jews into those who were to be saved and those destined for ‘resettlement’.52 Still their deficiency in ‘political morals’, was nowhere near the grotesque indecency of Eichmann and his fellow-Nazis who were unperturbed by, and unaware of, limits of any kind. Their crimes fall beyond politics, well past the boundaries of Western ethics and political ethics.

BOURGEOIS MORALS

As Arendt depicts it, indecency has many faces. Nazism is one of them, and the worst, lack of solidarity is another and a further face, physically less dangerous, but insidious and deadly for politics and the world, is self-interest in its various possessive guises. Arendt has in mind not the minimum interest any sane person has in his self, but the exclusive self-concern, the maddened narcissism, that has come to characterise late bourgeois civilisation. That consumers have replaced citizens, that politics has become a roadshow for salesmen of one sort or another, that academics are regularly bought and sold by corporations and political parties-these are not fortuitous accomplishments of societies that live on and around the bottom-line.

This is the reason Arendt’s political theory is so scathing in its description of this ‘society of jobholders’. In it there are: ‘serious dangerous signs that man be willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come’.53 As long as his possessive self- interest is satisfied, modern man seems to care for little else, least of all the bios politikos in the old sense. In her few brilliant pages on Hobbes, Arendt unravels the essential nature, the relentless logic and the amazing prescience of the thought of this ‘only great philosopher’ of the bourgeoisie. Accumulation of wealth, power, riches, things is the core of bourgeois ethics: it is by nature imperialistic, contemptuous of national and moral borders. For the liberal- bourgeois, the whole of his life is within his hands: ‘Good fortune is identified with honour, and bad luck with shame’. If one fails one deserves to, more or less. Success is the achievement of superior desire and the will to realise it.54

Politically the distinguishing cachet of the bourgeois mind is an ‘innate hostility to public affairs’. Hobbes argued that there is no such thing as public good; if there is, it can only be the sum of private interests because the underlying rationale of life and human society is private interest. The best society is market

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society; the best method of satisfaction of these interests, supply and demand. As Arendt remarks, ‘there is hardly a single bourgeois moral standard which has not been anticipated by the unequaled magnificence of Hobbes’s logic’. Nothing, in principle, has any intrinsic worth except sheer life-one’s own more than one’s neighbours.55 Arendt fully understands the rage and the contempt for middle class values that was typically felt by European intellectuals prior to World War I. In sensitive souls the liberal-bourgeois ethic ignited sentiments of nihilism, and Arendt understood ‘how justified disgust can be in a society, wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie’.56

Contemporary liberal European society is, if anything, more bourgeois, more obsessed with the self, more hostile to politics and the public realm, than its predecessors. It is far more sophisticated, cynical and manipulative but its basic principle has not changed. In one sympathetic critic’s words, in its ‘standard of ordinary morality no self-sacrifice is required; no conduct is ruled out, provided that it is necessary for the preservation of life, rights and gravely important interests’.57 Needless to say this coda of market morals has nothing in common with Arendt’s ‘political morals’, with her heroic, risk-taking public self, who is as courageous as the liberal is prudent and calculating.

Political theory, in Arendt’s sense, has to be anti-Hobbesian, anti-bourgeois, if it is to count at all as political theory. By definition, politics presupposes a passing interest in the self and in business: cutting it in the public realm demands substantial sacrifice of these interests. For Arendt it is not an accidental fact that the men who ran the Nazi death machine were ordinary bourgeois men, ‘first, and foremost job-holders, and good familymen’. Himmler and Eichmann were simply more assiduous in advancing their private interests and careers, but no different essentially from the thousands of others who managed the mass murder of millions with the routine efficiency of bourgeois team-players.58

Arendt sees an intimate link between possessive self-interest and human indecency; its forms vary from the merely annoying to the truly barbaric, but common to them all is an insidious, unpolitical obsession with one’s interest, wealth and comfort. The liberal-bourgeois ethic is no exception. In this sense, as Arendt points out

the bourgeoisie’s political philosophy was always “totalitarian”; it always assumed an identity of politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only as the facade for private interests.59

By legitimating this philosophy in the vocabulary of freedom and democracy, the bourgeois liberal tends to obscure his intrinsic indifference to politics.

Arendt’s political theory is not populist nor is it necessarily humane in all its implications. But it is radically subversive of what she justifiably considers to be the real enemies of European politics and culture in particular: the domains of private individual and social interest, and its driving passions.60 To Arendt these trends in late modern and postmodern European society, spreading rapidly across the globe, testify to our losing sight of what it means to be human, to be men-women with discernable human identities, to live together politically as citizens who feel a sense of responsibility to their common world and to each other.

396 Shiraz Dossa

To scant the ancient ideal of the political and politics, as she understands and depicts it, is to abandon a crucial part of European and indeed human culture, and tacitly to authorise the triumph of bourgeois anti-ethics. Arendt could not imagine a more oppressive European reality.

Shiraz Dossa

St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia

NOTES

1. See my The Public Realm & The Public Self The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989).

2. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feelings of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Berkeley, 1960), p. 111.

3. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), pp. 91-99, especially pp. 95-96.

4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totaliterianism (New York, 1958), pp. 55 (fn. l), 185, 190-191, 194,206; Kateb, Hannah Arendr (p. 52) is mistaken in thinking that Arendt includes Africans in her defense of the victimised. In her The Political Thoughr o/ Hannah Arendt (London, 1974), Margaret Canovan freely uses the word savages to describe Africans (p. 33).

5. Arendt, Origins, p. 157; cf. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic(New York, 1972), pp. 210,225. For a critical discussion of this issue, see my essay, ‘Human Status and Politics’ in the Canadian Journal of Political Science (June 1980), pp. 318-323.

6. Arendt, Origins, p. 206. 7. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven,

1982) pp. xiv-xv, 391,passim; Arendt, The Jews as Pariah, pp. 164-222; cf. my essay ‘Hannah Arendt on Political Zionism’ in Arab Studies Quarterly (Summer 1986) pp. 219-230.

8. Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ in Dissent (Jan.-Feb. 1959) p. 46; see also David Spitz’s excellent reply to Arendt in the same issue, pp. 56-65.

9. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, p. 110; cf. Arendt, Origins, p. 34. 10. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times(New York, 1968),p. 13;cf. Arendt, Origins,p. 8.

11. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, pp. 245-251; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt,

pp. 91-94, passim. 12. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, pp. 76-79, pp. 125-222; Hannah Arendt, ‘The Cold War

and the West’ in Partisan Review (Winter 1962), pp. 14-20; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1965), pp. 218-219.

13. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 57; cf. Horst Mewes, ‘On the Concepts of Politics in the Early Work of Karl Marx’ in Social Research (Summer 1976) pp. 277-294.

14. One notable exception is Robert Nozick; see Brian Barry’s superb critique of Nozick’s essentially vulgar Anarchy, State and Utopia in Political Theory (August 1975), pp. 331-336.

15. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 9. 16. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 45; see my Public Realm, ch. II, section (ii). 17. For instance, see Arendt, Origins, ch. 9, passim; Hannah Arendt, On Violence

(New York, 1970), pp. 24, 64-65, passim; Arendt, On Revolution, p. 84. 18. See Sheldon Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method and the Politics of Theory’ in

Political Theory (August 1981), pp. 402-403. 19. See my Public Realm, ch. II.

Ethics and Enemies 397

20. For instance, see Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 5; Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Hannah Arendt as Thinker’ in Commonweal (10 September 1982), pp. 471-472; Maurice Cranston, ‘Hannah Arendt, Personally’ in Encounter (December 1981), pp. 54-60.

21. See my Public Realm, chs. II-IV. 22. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 206 and 56. 23. See my Public Realm, chs. I and IV. 24. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 176. 25. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Judgement and the Moral foundations of Politics in Arendt’s

Thought’, in Political Theory (Feb. 1988) pp. 31,46,48; Benhabib seems to be quite unfamiliar with the substance and the direction of Arendt’s political theory and her political ethics.

26. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 27. 27. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 245. 28. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (New York, 1982) p. 168. 29. For a good discussion of this point, see Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History ofEthics

(New York, 1966), pp. 84-85. 30. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, p. 158. The whole of ch. 5 is an excellent

analysis of Greek Ethics. 31. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl makes a similar point in her Hannah Arendt, p. 374. 32. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 228. 33. Ibid., p. 228; see also Arendt, On Violence, p. 64; Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 14;

Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 176. 34. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 27. 35. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 136-137. 36. Ibid. 37. See my Public Realm, ch. I and the Appendix. 38. For a fuller discussion, see my Public Realm, ch. V. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 205. 40. Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 60. 41. Arendt, On Violence, p. 64. 42. Arendt, Origins, p. 54. 43. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 119. 44. Arendt, On Violence, p. 63. 45. Ibid., p. 66. 46. Arendt, Crises of the RepubIic, pp. 60-61. 47. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 236. 48. EIisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 376-377. 49. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 236. 50. Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 84-85; Arendt, On Violence, p. 19 (cf. Arendt, Crises of the

Republic, p. 203); Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship’ in The Listener (6 August 1964), p. 187.

51. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 131-132; see also my Public Realm, ch. V, section (iii).

52. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 374. 53. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 321-322. 54. Arendt, Origins, pp. 139-146. 55. Ibid. 56. Zbid.,p. 328. 57. Keteb, Hannah Arendt, p. 34. 58. Arendt, ‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’ in Roger W. Smith (ed.),

Guilt, Man and Society (New York, 1971), pp. 263-265.

398 Shiraz Dossa

59. Arendt, Origins, p. 336. 60. See Arendt, On Revolution, ch. VI, especially pp. 280-281; Arendt, ‘Public Rights and

Private Interests’ in SmaN Comforts for Hard Times, ed. Michael Mooney and Florian Stuber (New York, 1977), pp. 103-108.