Hannah Arendt - Politics and Anarchy

8/2/2019 Hannah Arendt - Politics and Anarchy

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Political Itineraries and AnarchicCosmopolitanism in the Thought of

Hannah Arendt

Annabel Herzog

University of Haifa

In this paper, I argue that Arendts understanding of freedom should be examinedindependently of the search for good political institutions because it is related tofreedom ofmovementand has a transnational meaning. Although she does not say itexplicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation between political identities and territorialmoves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands and borders, thatis, specific geographic movements. I call this correlation a political itinerary. My aimis to show genealogically that her elaboration on the regimes of ancient, modern, and

dark times is supported by such a correlation. I read Arendt in light of the currentclash between an amorphous global political identity (and new international order)and the renewal of nationalisms. I show that, for Arendt, the world is divided bynecessary frontiers territorial borders and identity frames and that the politicalconsists precisely of the effort to transgress them. Arendt never proposed a restorationof authority but, on the contrary, a worldwideanarchic (that is, based on nopredetermined rule) politics of de-localization and re-localization; in her terms, apolitics offree movement of founded identities, a cosmopolitanism, which,nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global sovereignty.

Arendt did not conceptualize a best regime nor did she systematically

indicate the characteristics of good political institutions. She theorized

freedom as the raison detre of politics,1 but, as widely noted in the

literature, she left us with more questions than answers because her

argumentation on the need for authority contradicts her concept of freedom.

In my mind, Arendts understanding of freedom should be examined

independently of the search for good local political institutions because it is

related to freedom ofmovementand has a transnational meaning. I argue that

Arendts conception of the political in general is linked to the notion of

displacement and, hence, transcends the limits of localized structures.

Although she does not say it explicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation

between political projects meaning constitutions and identities and

territorial moves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands

and borders, that is, specific geographic movements. I shall call this

correlation between political projects and territorial displacements a politicalitinerary. My aim in this paper is not to reveal a misunderstood political

Inquiry, 47, 2041

DOI 10.1080/00201740310004396 # 2004 Taylor & Francis


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philosophy, but to show genealogically that Arendts elaboration on the

regimes of ancient, modern, and dark times is supported by such a

correlation. I read Arendt in light of the current clash between an amorphous

global political identity (and new international order) and the renewal of

nationalisms. I show that the world conceived by Arendt is divided bynecessary frontiers territorial borders and identity frames and that,

according to her, the political consists precisely of the effort to transgress

them.

In order to expose the notion of political itinerary in the work of Arendt, I

disregard the dichotomy totalitarianism-free republic (or democracy)

traditionally established by Arendts scholars, and I read her according to

the conceptual triad, authority-imperialism-cosmopolitanism. I first focus on

her conceptualization of authoritarian regimes as repeated policies of return

to one land and one founding rule. The authoritarian itinerary has been proven

to limit freedom because of its centralization on a sanctified land and a once-

in-history foundation whose values were considered as essential principles of

behavior. However, modernity has taught us that the destruction of allfoundations, that is, ideology, has more severe consequences than the absence

of freedom. Therefore, in the second part of the paper, I discuss Arendts

contention that imperialism, seen as the first ideological policy, replaced the

authoritarian itinerary in annihilating both the idea of foundation and that of a

territorially delimited homeland. In the third part, I turn to Arendts proposed

alternative to the imperialist itinerary. I argue that Arendt does not propose a

restoration of authority but, paradoxically, a worldwide anarchic (that is,

based on no predetermined rule)2 politics of de-localization and re-locali-

zation; in her terms, a politics of free movement of founded identities,3 a

cosmopolitanism, which, nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global

sovereignty.

I. Authoritarian Itineraries: Ontological Foundation

In We Refugees, in which Arendt describes the life condition of German

Jews fleeing Nazism, she writes: The desperate confusion of these Ulysses-

wanderers who, unlike their great prototype, dont know who they are is

easily explained by their perfect mania for refusing to keep their identity.4

The difference between the refugees and Ulysses is that the former had no

place to come back to because they forgot who they were. For Arendt, identity

does not consist in a determined background that follows one everywhere like

a shadow, but rather in a process of return, which is at the same time a

territorial return and a return in memory. Ulysses remembers who he really is

and, accordingly, agrees to reveal himself to others only when he hears thestory of his own life out of himself, an object for all to see and to hear, told

Politics and Anarchy in the Thought of Hannah Arendt 21


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by a bard at the court of the king of the Phaeacians. 5 His memory of his

journey or, as Arendt interprets it, his reconciliation with his own reality, is

parallel to his concrete return to his island: one day after he hears and tells the

story of his life Ulysses eventually reaches and re-conquers Ithaca, his home. 6

Arendts reference to the journey of Ulysses in such a refugee contextreveals the twofold meaning of the myth (twofold for our purpose, manifold

in general), namely, its ontological and political levels; ontological first

because it is the story of the elaboration of identity as a dialectical process of

alienation and re-appropriation, which ends up in a reinforced sameness.

Unlike the refugees who whatever [they] do, whatever [they] pretend to be

reveal nothing but [their] insane desire to be changed, not to be Jews, 7

Ulysses estranges himself from his family and his small land whose borders

are clearly established, and crosses the seas to discover and confront

otherness, with the constant aim to come back and reintegrate his own

landscape and his own traditions. Enriched by his adventures, one might say

that he becomes more himself than himself at the end of his journey. The

meaning of his trip, its essence, is the return. Ulysses travels in order to comeback; he leaves the known for the unknown for the sake of the known. This

ontological myth is, in parallel, a political myth. King Ulysses chooses to

leave his kingdom and participate in the Trojan War. He visits remote lands

where he fights and defeats various powers and comes back to re-conquer his

Ithaca, coveted, like Penelope, by the suitors. The return of Ulysses is that of a

victorious king and of his specific political order. By contrast, argues Arendt,

the German-Jews fleeing Germany never cared for political involvement.8

They had nothing to come back to because they had lost a political identity

that never existed: remember that being a Jew does not give any legal status

in this world.9 Identity is political. Its loss is a loss of belonging to, and acting

in a specific community and a specific place.

The similarity of ontology and politics as a search for reconciled identity

or, put differently, the understanding of politics as a quest for unity and

sameness, is as old as Western culture and is reflected in traditional

philosophy. Arendt dedicates The Life of the Mindto analyzing and criticizing

this similarity and, like many of Heideggers students,10 she there claims to

attempt to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories.11

When referring to traditional philosophy, or metaphysics, she turns to another

Greek journey, Platos Allegory of the Cave. Political philosophy, she writes,

began with the philosophers turning away from politics and then returning

in order to impose his standards on human affairs.12 As Patrick J. Deneen

recently argued, the Allegory of the Cave shares a great deal with the story of

Ulysses: Odysseus offers for Plato the example of a protophilosopher, one

who is cognizant of the attractions of life both inside and outside the cave and

who, like Odysseus, chooses finally to return to mortal life inside the cave, ifinformed throughout by his journey above and by prudence once below.13

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The Allegory of the Cave, like the story of Ulysses, unifies ontological and

political processes. On the one hand, the philosopher comes back enriched by

the contemplation of the essence of Being, that is, of true and perfect unity; on

the other hand, he comes back as a philosopher-king.14 Arendt argues that it is

Platos originality to have thought of sameness and truth in terms ofstandards applicable to the behavior of other people and that he tried to

modify the theory of ideas so that it would become useful for a theory of

politics, and so that it would become the basis for ruling the public sphere.15

This wish to rule, she adds, comes from Platos fear of the mob that killed

Socrates. Recall that the mob in the cave claims to know the truth and does

not recognize the philosopher as the truth-teller, as the suitors aspired to

Ithaca and Penelope and did not recognize their king.

The ontological political identity exemplified in these myths consists,

therefore, in a double process of return: return to preexisting rules whose

value is discovered and strengthened during the estrangement abroad, and

return to a specific and limited territory: Ulysses comes back to Ithaca and the

philosopher comes back to the cave. Arendt insists on this normative andgeographic return, which appears to inform the authoritarian order, and

which I call the authoritarian itinerary, as distinct from authoritarian

institutions. Arendt argues that authority as theorized by Plato was, in

practice, a Roman creation, the particularity of the Romans being that they

were bound to the specific locality of this one city [Rome] [They] were

really rooted in the soil, and the word patria derives its full meaning from

Roman history. Moreover, Roman-conquered lands were subsumed

ontologically, as it were, under the laws of the homeland and they were

nothing but Roman hinterland.16 In this context, authority meant a constant

return both to the land of Rome and to the values of ancestors considered

sacred and immutable.17

As emphasized by Honig,18 Arendts analysis of authority is ambivalent,

not to say, contradictory. On the one hand, she contends that authority helps to

prevent deterioration of the political realm.19 On the other hand, she

criticizes authority in that it may lead to an attraction to the tyrannical, both

in philosophy and in practice,20 because authority always implies obedience

and a hierarchy.21 The compelling nature of the rules, even if they represent

the standards of reason, risks degeneration into coercion.22 At the same time,

therefore, authority is a necessary condition for political life and authority

hinders freedom and the human capacity to begin something new. Pirro asks:

Why does Arendt affirm the necessity of limiting the very thing [freedom]

that she values the most? And he rightly answers: Political authority, as it is

manifested in customs, manners, traditions, and positive laws, serves to

stabilize human affairs by providing a framework within which initiative-

taking in politics can take place.23

In other words, authority is useful forpolitical life to the extent that it provides a framework but it endangers or



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limits freedom to the extent that this framework subsumes newness under

given standards. Accordingly, it is my thesis that, for Arendt, what is needed

for good political life is not authority per se, which may degenerate into

tyranny, but a framework or, more precisely, a framework that will allow or

even provoke newness. Such a framework, independent of authority butincluded in some forms of authority, is called by Arendt a politicalfoundation.

A foundation is the actual event that realizes the link between sameness

and newness and on which a community constitutes its specific identity, be it

that of a nation-state or of any other form of public community of acting men

and women. It is an event in which the world had become flesh, that is

an absolute that had appeared in historical time as a mundane reality, and it is

the necessary starting point of all actions.24 The founded political identity

may be more or less related to previous structures: A modern revolutionary

foundation tries to cut all bonds with former regimes, whereas some antique

foundations, like that of Rome, voluntarily maintain a link with ancient

customs or traditions.25

In any case, for Arendt, following Aristotle, apolitical foundation never consists in a passage from a state of nature to a

political state: It institutes a particular political tradition, or constitution,

replacing another particular political tradition. Indeed, it consists partly in a

return to sameness: It establishes the political but it is, at the same time,

already based on a political situation. Then the foundation of a political

community constitutes its identity because, or when, its actual occurrence is

remembered. Ancient foundations, for instance, were kept in memory in the

form of legends through which people assumed responsibility for the past and

on which they built their political will.26

In her analysis of foundations, Arendt recalls a third Greek journey, that of

Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens.27 She recalls it briefly, but her

laconism should not prevent us from remembering the whole myth. Like

Ulysses, or the philosopher of the Cave, Theseus comes back home but he

comes back to a home where he has never been before: His homeland is not

his land of birth and youth. His trip, from Troezen to Athens, is a quest for

identity, for he is willing to meet Aegeus, his father. In Athens, however, he

does not perpetuate his familys regime but establishes a new regime,

democracy. He accomplishes his glorious deeds and defeats his cousins, the

fifty sons of Pallas, not to re-conquer a lost kingdom, but to found a new

political order. In the three Greek myths recalled, that of Ulysses, that of the

Cave (developed in the whole theory of The Republic), and that of Theseus,

the hero comes back reconciled with himself, represses some kind of

rebellion, and strengthens his political power. However, only in the case of

Theseus is this power radically new, that is, free;28 indeed, it is a regime of

freedom. (For Arendt the authoritarian regime of the philosopher-kingdescribed in The Republic has nothing new because it is based on the

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ancestral ruling mode of the private space, and it does not allow much more

freedom than life in the cave.) Theseus journey paradoxically links a return

and the beginning of absolute newness: Theseus comes back to act; he comes

back for the future. Consisting of both a return and the beginning of

something contingent, his foundation becomes, in itself, a framework thatwill allow further freedom to develop. Put differently, Theseus foundation

establishes the possibility of other foundations.

The recourse to the myth of the founder of Athens allows us to better

understand the relationship between authority and foundations. By contra-

distinction with the multi-founding journey of Theseus, who, after pacifying

Athens, went on sailing up to Crete to challenge the tyranny of Minos over

Athens inhabitants, and then traveled to the land of the Amazons etc., in

other words, introduced newness at each stage of his leadership, the return

home that characterizes the authoritarian itinerary exemplified by Rome is

based on the centrality of Rome and the memory of a once-in-history

founding of the city and of the values of its first and only founders. Arendt

stresses that this eternal foundation of Rome prevents the possibility ofrenewing itself and by this, differs from the Greek understanding of

foundations, paradigmatically represented by Theseus. She assumes that

[t]he polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its location; its the organizationof the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space liesbetween people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.Wherever you go, you will be a polis: these famous words became not merely thewatchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action andspeech create a space between the participants which can find its proper locationalmost anytime and anywhere.29

For the Greeks, the political meant an endless founding process in lands

considered both as homelands and as new lands. The lands were necessary for

foundations and, hence, for political commitment. However, Arendt says that

in their refusal to sanctify these lands, the Greeks expressed a critical

attitude, perceptible also in their approach to political functions manifested in

democratic practices and in the way they treated cultural sources. She writes,

[T]he great Greek authors became authorities in the hands of the Romans,

not of the Greeks. The way Plato and others before and after him treated

Homer, the educator of all Hellas, was inconceivable in Rome30 She

emphasizes that [t]he Roman feeling of continuity was unknown in

Greece because [i]n contradistinction to the Romans, the Greeks were

convinced that the changeability, occurring in the realm of mortals in so far as

they were mortals, could not be altered because it was ultimately based on the

fact that, the young, who at the same time were new ones, were constantly

invading the stability of the status quo.31 We have to conclude, therefore,

that it is because they lacked criticism, that is, free renewals of foundations onnon-sanctified lands, that authoritarian regimes degenerated into coercion and



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violence.32 Indeed, Arendt claims that the difficulty to maintain an

authoritarian regime comes with the difficulty to keep a territory sacred

and eternal, as shown in Machiavelli,33 and that this difficulty leads to

terror. We can now see that the problem of authority for Arendt comes from

the closure of its unique return, its unique foundation, or its limitation intime and space. More often than not these regimes eventually maintain their

unique tradition through dictatorship.

II. Imperialist Itineraries: Regressive Progression

As shown, for Arendt, Theseus founding gesture and, in general, the early

Greek invading the stability of the status quo oppose the authoritarian

itinerary understood as a return to a sanctified once-in-history foundation.

However, these two ancient models have to be considered retrospectively, in

light of the new dangers of dark times. In modernity, an unknown category

of regimes arose, which destroyed the bases of authority without establishingnewness and freedom because these regimes were, strictly speaking, non-

founded policies. In Arendts terms, they were ideological expansions.

Arendt calls the modern form of power that imposes an identity without the

foundation of a body politic, that is, without the possible creation of

something new,34 imperialism. As I will show in the last part of this paper,

she proposes an original alternative to ideological expansions based on free

and renewed foundations (hence, on Theseus model). In order to understand

her alternative, I shall now highlight the features of the imperialist itinerary.

As broadly emphasized in the literature, Arendts focus on imperialism was

genealogical and the object analyzed genealogically was modern world

alienation.35 By alienation Arendt meant depolitization. Politics disap-

peared in dark times because private practices and devices were gradually

transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs.36

Referring to these words, many of Arendts readers understand her notion of

depolitization as based on the opposition between public and private spaces

established in The Human Condition. As a result, depolitization is interpreted

as an undue outgrowing of the social, that never private nor public hybrid

realm,37 followed by destruction of the public sphere. This understanding is

legitimate in any attempt to associate Arendt with participatory democracy

theory.38 However, I focus here on another theme of Arendts theory, namely,

the continuity of time. In her thought, the erosion of a clear separation

between public and private spaces comes with the emergence of a gap

between past and future. In dark times there seems to be no willed continuity

in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past or future, only sempiternal

change of the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it.39

Asrecalled above, for Arendt, the political means not only free plural and public

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actions, but also such actions based on the remembrance of a common past.

What is destroyed in dark times is not merely the ability to act in the public

space, but the ability to link newness and a preexisting political identity

consisting of common historical memories,40 that is, between acting and

belonging to a founded community. In my opinion, Arendts entire theorydepends on this link, a link that establishes the elements it links: When the

link disappears, both political initiative and political identity are

neutralized.

Arendt contends that imperialism was involved in the destruction of this

link and, therefore, of the two components of all bodies politic, acting and

belonging, because it consists in expansion instead of action, and in ideology

instead of foundation. In focusing on expansion and ideology, Arendt tries to

distinguish imperialism from otherforms of territorial conquest, for instance,

Roman conquest, which she never criticizes, or the colonization of America,

about which she is remarkably silent, as if colonization were legitimated by

the eventual constitution of a body politic. In other words, contrary to our

current views on conquest, the problem of imperialism, for Arendt, is not thatit negates the independence and cultures of entire populations but that it

destroys all possible political life in conquered territories. In the same vein, in

1947, she wrote to Jaspers: What has been done in Palestine itself is

extraordinary: not merely colonization but a serious attempt at a new social

order.41 A new order consists in action, which develops stabilizing forces

which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion.42 The

stabilizing forces are the foundations of a common life, that is, a common law

(a tradition), whereas expansion does not care for the implementation of law

or justice because it is an economic process based on unlimited production

and accumulation of capital. Contrary to the ancient conquerors, European

imperialists never attempted to govern conquered lands but dominated them

for economic purposes through bureaucratic reports and decrees.43 Con-

quered lands became economic properties of European countries, never new

homelands. The principle and tool of such bureaucratic rule was power left

to itself, that is, power whose end is not to serve and control political action

but to increase indefinitely.

Unlimited investment and trade combined with unlimited power meant

unlimited territorial conquest. Such a journey was a realization of what

Arendt calls the progressive view of the 19th century, that is, a perversion of

the 18th century belief in emancipation, and which not only did not want the

liberty and autonomy of man, but was ready to sacrifice everything and

everybody to supposedly superhuman laws of history.44 For Arendt,

therefore, imperialist progression had nothing to do with Kants conception

of universal history as a regular progression among freely willed actions.45

Like Benjamin, and quoting his ninth Thesis on the philosophy of historyand the denunciation of the pile of ruins created by progress, that is, the linear



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march of imperialist conquerors,46 Arendt establishes a correspondence

between the territorial and deterministic senses of progression.

However, imperialism does not consist only in progression but in a

regressive way of defining political identity. At the beginning of the

imperialist adventure, identity was still nationalist because what then seemedrelevant in expansion were the economic and security interests of the

homeland.47 Soon, the seduction of power left to itself became so strong that

the administrators of conquered territories resented the restraining power of

the nation-state. These functionaries of violence proved to be indifferent to

political considerations on the submitted lands andalienated from their native

body politic. The consequence of such alienation, argues Arendt, was a

regressive nihilism that eventually destroyed the structures of the nation-state

itself, the last known form of the authoritarian itinerary: The concept of

unlimited expansion makes the foundation of new political bodies well-

nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all living

communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at

home.48

The imperialist disintegration of patriotic beliefs did not mean theend of the search for a shared identity, but rather that the establishment of a

common ideology had replaced the reference to a common foundation. Here,

according to Arendt, appears the originality of the imperialist itinerary and, in

my opinion, the originality of her analysis. Arendts conceptualization of

ideology is to be found only in the last part of The Origins,49 but, as I

understand it, the whole book reads like a genealogy of ideology seen as the

main characteristic of depolitization. As Bernstein emphasizes, Anti-

Semitism was already a form of political ideology,50 and imperialism

crystallizes ideology as concrete policy. For Arendt, ideology is the logic of

an idea not related to something that is but to the development of the idea

itself. Accordingly, ideological thinking becomes independent of all

experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a question

of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological thinking becomes

emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists

on a truer reality concealed behind all perceptible things. Emancipating

itself from experience through certain methods of demonstration that

replace the remembrance of real events, ideology pretends to explain the

entirety of history through the logical development of its single idea.

Racism, for example, explains the whole of history as a natural fight of

races.51 As a result, imperialist administrations became ideological from the

moment they stopped looking back to the nation and concentrated on race

theories, that is, when they tried to give themselves a pure identity based on

pre-political natural origins:52 The organic doctrine of a history for which

every race is a separate, complete whole was invented by men who needed

ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for politicalnationhood.53

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Echoing her claim that extermination camps were laboratories of

totalitarianism, Arendt argues that the case of the Boers should be observed

as a laboratory of all European imperialist policies. Believing in (but not

founding) an identity made of faith in the divine chosenness of the Whites,

hence trying to escape all laws, that is, all limitations upon their landpossessions, the Boers voluntarily abandoned these lands and entered the

interior wilderness of the country they had transformed themselves into a

tribe and had lost the Europeans feeling for a territory, a patria of his own54

(note that the use of the word patria clearly refers to the authoritarian

itinerary). Like all race organizations they had lost all roots. According to

Arendt, the focus on the purity of the race leads to regression to a horde

existence without territorial boundaries, and, hence, no more based on

conquest but on the horrible reality of wandering like beasts. Arendt notes

the similarity of the horde-like life of the Boers and the tribalism of

continental (German, Russian, etc.) imperialism. Tribalism, she explains,

rejects the framing effect of territorial borders and, as such, it destroys all

political commitment. It articulates metaphysical rootlessness with theterritorial uprootedness of the nationalities it first seized.55

The imperialist itinerary described by Arendt articulates symbolic and

territorial progression and regression. In erasing borders, imperialists did not

enlarge the territories of their sovereignty but rather destroyed the idea of

territorial sovereignty. Moreover, the invention of a so-called superiority of

the white race overrides all theories of human origins that have a political,

hence territorial, outcome. In boundless lands ruled by violence, there isnowhere to fall back upon,56 only an abstract ideology based on no common

experience no founding event, no memories, no shared actions, and no

specific place to frame these actions. The outcome of imperialist policy is a

regressive world, where armed hordes fight for supremacy and survival.

Arendt insists on a direct consequence of the imperialist itinerary, which,

as such, should be distinguished from totalitarianism (which, radicalizing the

regressive features of imperialism, is an unprecedented form of absolute

depolitization).57 In annihilating territorial boundaries, imperialism necessa-

rily engenders the existence of stateless people and refugees. Certainly due to

her own status during and after the war, Arendt focuses solely, I have to

admit, on European refugees. It is somewhat disturbing that the consistent

parallel that she establishes between the different forms of imperialism

suddenly ends when she turns to the victims of imperialism, and refers only to

European stateless peoples.58 Her silence on non-European refugees is partly

explained by her claim that the unique reaction aimed at protecting stateless

people against racist ideology was also a European ideology, namely, the

abstract slogans of human rights. The notion of human rights was as

unfounded, she says, as the idea of race struggle: Since the Rights of Manwere proclaimed to be inalienable, irreducible to and undeducible from



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other rights or laws, no authority was invoked for their establishment. [I]t

turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and

had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect

them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.59 Arendt argues that

the condition of stateless people did not consist in a lack of the rightsformulated in the declarations of the 18th century, but was manifested first

and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions

significant and actions effective. Here again, against liberal views Arendt

emphasizes not the lack of rights of stateless people, but their total exclusion;

the fact that they had nowhere to be even as repressed people. They belonged

to nowhere whereas, in ancient times, even slaves still belonged to some sort

of human community.60 As such, stateless people appear as the first signs of

a possible regression from civilization,61 parallel to the horde-like regression

of imperialists. The regression of the conquerors and that of their victims

characterizes a depoliticized world.

III. Cosmopolitan Itineraries: Displaced Foundations

By imperialism Arendt meant the strictly European colonial imperialism

whose end came with the liquidation of British rule in India.62 However,

imperialism consists in the crystallization of two general processes of

modernity, the loss of tradition and the loss of action, which still shape our

attempts to overcome the boundaries of the world, claims Arendt, even when

the outcomes of such attempts are not successfully imperialist:63 the word

expansion has disappeared from our political vocabulary, which now uses

the words extension or, critically, overextension to cover a very similar

meaning.64 The recent revival of nationalism in Europe may seem, at first

glance, to refute Arendts analysis, although it appears quickly that these

struggles for independence are not exempt from imperialist ideologies. In

the following lines, I sketch Arendts attempt to respond to imperialism

leading to depolitization without coming back to authority leading to

despotism.

Arendt defines the political as an interrelation of actions and foundations.

Foundations are specific actions on which identities are built. New actions

emerge from these identities but also transform and transcend them. Arendt

calls identities, which connect people in a particular way, in-betweens:

Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with

each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly

objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking

agent.65 In-betweens are objective realities because they are founded on

actions that are real events, and they are thereafter transformed by other realevents. Based on such an in-between, a regime is not ideological, but it would

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be not authoritarian only if it were repeatedly transcended by actions, that is,

if the values of the foundation were not to eventually become a standard for

behavior and a justification for violence. Accordingly, a founded non-

authoritarian regime would consist of pure freedom and would produce pure

freedom. Put differently, freedom needs foundations that will not restrain it.In Honigs words, the problem is to establish foundations without appealing

to gods, a foundationalist ground, or an absolute or, as Keenan puts it, to

establish a lasting support for freedom.66

This may seem quite abstract, or maybe even trivial. This could mean that a

free political community should constantly renew its foundation through

democratic activities. However, it is striking that Arendt never defines such

democratic practices or the institutions that would assure them. Canovan

recalls that Arendt had planned to write a systematic book on political

institutions but it never materialized.67

She stresses elsewhere that Arendt

was much less interested than most of her predecessors in the details of

institutions, and much more interested in free discussion.68 Unlike most

political philosophers or political writers such as Montesquieu orTocqueville, whom she often recalls, Arendt does not provide us with any

normative analysis of political structures. My conclusion is that, for her, to

find lasting support for freedom does not mean to establish lasting

institutions. Arendt cares only for the lasting of the possibility to call

something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not

even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly

speaking, could not be known.69 She argues even more radically that Where

men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must

submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I

force myself, or the general will of an organized group. If men wish to be

free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.70 In other words, lasting

support for freedom cannot be identical to lasting institutions of sovereignty

because sovereignty is identical to rule and, hence, constrains freedom.

Arendt recalls that, for the Greeks of Theseus times and subsequently,

Freedom as a social phenomenon was understood as a form of political

organization in which the citizens lived together under the condition of no-

rule. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy. Thepolis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy.71 As I see it, when

Arendt speaks of lasting freedom, she always refers to such a freedom as no-

rule or as participation in public affairs72 not determined by an a''rwen or akratein. As a result, I cannot agree with Honig who argues that Arendtsearched for a practice of authority for modernity, although Honig

interestingly concludes that such practice turns out to be, paradoxically

enough, a practice of deauthorization.73 The augmentation and amend-

ment of authoritarian constitutions74

would necessarily be centered on anabsolute legal and territorial ground, that is, on an a''rwen. Sure enough,



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Arendt makes it consistently clear that founded authoritarianism is better than

unfounded modern imperialism, and she emphasizes the advantages of

authority in light of the catastrophes of dark times. However, it seems to me

that she would prefer to avoid all practices based on immutable a''rwen.

Freedom is pure anarchy, which is emphasized in a too-often forgottenexpression of Arendt (in her essay on Broch): the political realm -- that is, the

inherently anarchic conglomeration of human beings75 This sentence

suggests that freedom, experienced in spontaneity,76 constitutes its own

foundation and that we are looking for a way to assure the continuation of

such auto-foundation. The act of foundation is a real event, albeit a real event

exclusively made of freedom.

A non-authoritarian and non-imperialist political life should, therefore,

consist of renewed foundations and of freedom as no-rule. Arendt did not

describe the structures of such life because, per definitio, a no-rules life has no

predetermined structures. We would not be surprised to discover that political

freedom has no territorial predetermination either, but a global meaning.

Action is part of the human condition, which is to say that in defining action,Arendt not only depicts the political functioning of societies but also

processes that express and influence our being in the world.77 Our actions in

the public realm transcend this realm and we are thrown into the world by our

actions. Paradoxically, when the specific and limited public sphere appears, it

is immediately dissolved into the world: [T]he term public signifies the

world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our

privately owned place in it78 In the context of this elastic notion of the

public sphere, as Curtis puts it,79 freedom as no-rule is freedom in the

world as freedom of movement: Freedom of movement is [] the

indispensable condition for action, and it is in action that men primarily

experience freedom in the world.80

The emphasis on global freedom is developed in Arendts analysis of

Jaspers attitude in Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?81 Arendt writes:

One could easily prove that Jaspers whole philosophical work was

conceived with intent toward world citizenship , and she stresses the

resemblance between the cosmopolitanism of Kant and that of Jaspers, the

only successor Kant has ever had.82 The similarity between Kants right to

visit as opposed to conquest,83 and Jaspers world citizenship reacting to

imperialism and totalitarianism seems glaringly obvious. However, Arendt

immediately adds that to be a citizen of the world does not consist in

belonging to a world government.84 In her last book, Democracy and the

Foreigner, Honig notes that political theorists, principally nationalist ones,

too often identify cosmopolitanism with world government. She advocates a

democratic cosmopolitanism seeking not to govern but rather to widen the

resources, energies, and accountability of an emerging civil society thatcontests or supports state actions in matter of transnational and local

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interests85 In my mind, Arendts work enriches this discussion and

contributes to the elaboration of a new kind of cosmopolitanism independent

of the idea of rule, although, as I suggested above, Arendts thinking is

fundamentally more anarchic than institutionally democratic. Arendt points

out that No matter what form a world government with centralized powerover the whole globe might assume, the very notion of one sovereign force

ruling the whole earth, holding the monopoly of all means of violenceis not

only a forbidding nightmare of tyranny, it would be the end of all political life

as we know it.86 In a lecture on Kant she similarly claims that Kant knew

quite well that a world government would be the worst tyranny imaginable.87

As unique sovereignty single rule over the earth world government can be

nothing else but the outcome of an extended ontological conquest eventually

maintained through violence, thereby to constitute a strengthened authoritar-

ian power whose enlarged sovereignty makes freedom impossible.88

As a

result, Jaspers idea of world citizenship necessarily entails a rejection of all

possible forms of sovereignty, national and transnational, and would lead not

to a global power but to a federated world based on mutual understanding:

[J]ust as the prerequisite for world government in Jasperss opinion is the renunciationof sovereignty for the sake of a world-wide federated political structure, so theprerequisite for this mutual understanding would be the renunciation, not of onesown tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validitywhich tradition and past have always claimed. The shell of traditional authority isforced open and the great contents of the past are freely and playfully placed incommunication with each other89

It appears to me here that Arendt uses her reading of Jaspers to reformulate

her own conception of the difference between a framework and the attempts

of this framework to rule. According to her, Jaspers rejection of sovereignty

is not the rejection of distinct traditions and past, but of their binding authority

as a claim of universal validity. We need traditions against ideology, buttraditions that appear freely in our times, thereby to be renewed and

replayed in the here and now. World citizenship means a communication

between diverse traditions, that is, free passages between memories of distinct

national pasts. Cosmopolitan communication should be materialized through

a world federation. Such a federation would reproduce Arendts description

of a federation of councils on a larger scale and thus realize the relation

between foundations, identities, and freedom. Arendt indeed wrote:

[C]ouncils or soviets had sprung everywhere, completely independent of one another.The formation of a council in each of these disparate groups turned a more or lessaccidental proximity into a political institution. The most striking aspect of thesespontaneous developments is that it took these independent and highly disparateorgans no more than a few weeks, in the case of Russia, or a few days, in the case of

Hungary, to begin a process of co-ordination and integration through the formation ofhigher councils from which finally the delegates to an assembly representing the



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whole country could be chosen. As in the case of the early covenants, cosociations,and confederations in the colonial history of North America, we see how the federalprinciple arises out of the elementary conditions of action itself. The commonobject was the foundation of a new body politic

90

Richard J. Bernstein refers to Arendts understanding of the councils systemas a viable political alternative to the failures of the nineteenth-century

nation-state (and national sovereignty) and to the all too real successes of

twentieth-century totalitarianism.91 Although I would replace the term

totalitarianism with imperialism (because Arendt saw totalitarianism as a

specific crystallization of general imperialist processes that destroyed

freedom and tradition), Arendt definitely considered federalism to be a good

solution to the risks of both authority and imperialist disappearance of

authority. That is why, in her mind, a Jewish homeland, distinct from a

sovereign Jewish state and imperialist Jewish expansion, could be realized

only as a confederation of Arabs and Jews. Moreover, as Crick notes, her

fervor for councils recalls Proudhons utopia, hence classical anarchism and

the rejection of a centralized states rules.92

However, no matter how appealing Arendts enthusiasm and hopes, they

only partly match her general argument. Of course, a federation of councils is

built on spontaneous actions and connections between identities but Arendt

herself emphasizes that at the end of this process (and quite quickly in fact), a

unified representation of the global body politic is established and freedom

becomes institutionalized. In other words, general rules are determined.

This would not be a problem if we were only considering the spontaneous

freedom of the founding act. However, because freedom and newness are

identical, freedom should be able to renew itself. Arendt contends quite

emphatically that in federalism the central power [does] not deprive the

constituent bodies of their original power to constitute.93 But this view is true

only up to a certain point. If we focus on her own examples of the Soviet

Union, Hungary, and the United States, we reach the unequivocal conclusion

that all post-foundation changes in constitutions were made under the

authority of these same constitutions, regardless of the clear differences

between them. Once the body politic is founded, and even if freely founded,

there can be no more free actions. As Bernstein notes, public freedom existed

only for the revolutionary founders.94 Arendt is aware of this fact and she

pursues her description of federalism by the surprising statement: Freedom,

whenever it existed as a tangible reality, has always been spatially limited.95

It seems, therefore, that the outcome of freedom as no-rule consists ultimately

in a kind of authoritarian return. If we follow Arendts own analysis of

federalism, we have to conclude, against her, that a federation and, a fortiori,

a world federation, will necessarily, in one way or another, become

sovereignty.Let us bear in mind that Arendts purpose was not to define institutions that,

34 Annabel Herzog


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de facto, eventually constitute a sovereignty limited by territorial borders

(even if, as she claims, many sovereignties are less tyrannical than one world

sovereignty), but to conceptualize action as freedom. We should, therefore,

set aside for a moment the risk of sovereignty and focus on the meaning of

such a freedom. As Villa shows, for Arendt, actions are expressions of thefree uniqueness of the agent, independent not only of rules but also of

personal motives.96 Actions are inspired by principles such as glory or honor,

which appear during performed acts, neither before nor after,97 and are

accomplished even if there is nothing to be attained.98 However, a further

distinction should be made. Subjective actions are depersonalized because

they do not realize personal motives, and undetermined because they are not

subsumed under specific rules. Still, they are founded. They are free if and

only ifthey are connected to a common past. Actions are depersonalized and

undetermined but, precisely through the principles that they express, they

continue a tradition, and thereby constitute individual developments of an in-

between. Put differently, actions express individually a plurality of agents

related by the in-between. But how can individual action manifest and renewa plurality? Actions, says Arendt, consist of expressed opinions,99 and an

opinion itself consists in taking into account other opinions, or other

standpoints:

I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by makingpresent to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.This process does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhereelse, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a questionneither of empathy nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being andthinking in my own identity where I actually am not

100

As we know, Arendt explains that the capacity to form opinions by taking into

account the diverse opinions of a plurality is similar to the enlarged

mentality based on imagination conceptualized by Kant in his Critique ofJudgment. In her lectures on Kant she writes:

Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open toinspection it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentiallypublic, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kants world citizen.To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains ones imagination to govisiting. (Compare the right to visit in Perpetual Peace).101

Critical is to be understood here in its etymological sense of judgment.

Arendt planned to argue in the third part ofThe Life of the Mindthat political

judgment is a judgment without a rule; hence, she considered Kants

judgment of taste a model for political judgment. Put differently, critical

thinking or a judgment without a rule is, strictly speaking, anarchic. To form

an opinion is anarchic because it is determined by no standard at all.However, it is elaborated during a visiting process, which is founded on



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specific identities: in visiting I both stay in myself andI try the standpoint

of other people. Visiting, therefore, does not consist in an enormously

enlarged empathy,102 nor in abandoning my own identity. My opinion is

related to all kinds of people and groups that I consider although they have

nothing in common with me. Lisa Disch sums up this conception mostaccurately when she concludes, Visiting is contrary to parochialism, which

means simply to stay at home, contrary to accidental tourism, which means

to ensure that you will have all the comforts of home even as you travel, and

contrary to assimilationism, which means forcibly to make yourself at home

in a place that is not your home by appropriating its customs. Both the

tourist and assimilationist erase plurality.103

What we should notice in this attitude is, first, that it is both individualist

and plural. Although visiting is political par excellence, it does not reflect a

general policy but an individual behavior. However, this behavior takes into

account the whole community, and more: it is open to all sides. Second, it is

not accidental that in depicting critical political thinking manifested in

actions, Arendt uses the metaphor of spatial displacement and recalls Kantsright of travelers. The visiting behavior establishes a link between political

activity, namely, forming opinions expressed in actions, and traveling in the

world, even if only in imagination. Nevertheless, Arendt contends

immediately that Kants position was that of a world-spectator and not that

of an actor because To be a citizen means among other things to have

responsibilities, obligations, and rights, all of which make sense only if they

are territorially limited.104 As I see it therefore, to be political and not purely

philosophical in the manner of Kant, the visiting process or cosmopolitan

itinerary of the actor has to be dialectical. On the one hand, the foundation of

identities inevitably provokes the need to maintain these identities; hence, the

emergence of institutions and borders. Arendt recalls that all foundations

need a limited place to develop and produce an in-between. On the other

hand, these limits should be constantly criticized; hence, crossed and de-

localized by taking into account other standpoints. At the same time,

identities should be strengthened andtransgressed by worldwide movements.

Identities should be transformed by these transgressions, incorporating what

they learned during their visit, thereby changing the world and not

immobilizing it nostalgically; still, they refer to a delimited common past. A

citizen would be that person who, without rejecting his/her defined identity,

would be able to contest and de-localize its frame. He/she would not share a

common identity with all human beings but, in forming his/her own opinions,

in acting, he/she would take into account as many other specific identities as

possible.

Arendts dialectical but anarchic cosmopolitanism reveals the difference

between sharing an identity and taking into account identities. Sharing islimited symbolically and territorially and reduces plurality to sameness,

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whereas taking into account crosses all borders and, hence, is inherently

plural. Un-ruled butfounded (I hesitate to say rooted, as roots cannot move

whereas Arendts foundations have the ability to be displaced), this process is

both anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist. It sketches an anarchic political

itinerary consisting in undetermined worldwide movements founded onspecific identities and territories. Based neither on subsumption nor on

destruction of borders but on transgression of necessary limits, this original

cosmopolitanism does not include conquest of any kind. Visiting consists in

a continual confrontation between opinions and between identities; hence,

between territorial commitments, which may lead to disagreement but not to

war because war aims precisely at avoiding such confrontation in subsuming

or destroying. Contrary to Curtis, who suggests that Arendts actors excel at

being together with others by being neither for nor against them,105 and,

hence, describes quite a static and indifferent togetherness, I think that Arendt

depicts moving actors crossing one anothers path and rethinking their own

itinerary according to that of neighbors and foreigners.

Arendt shows us that the delimitation and determination of lands andidentities are not the goal of political existence but only a part of it; a part of a

process that should de-localize no less than localize. Borders are necessary

andhave no intrinsic value. As such, they should be criticized and reevaluated

but, at the same time, they should never be forgotten or rejected. Arendt does

not propose a new model of political regime but a new kind of political

itinerary resisting constraint and consolidating belongings. This moving

position is neither the most convenient nor the most stable. Like Theseus who

unified Attica but then offered civil rights to foreigners, and who welcomed

Oedipus although he was an outcast (see Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus), a

free citizen should both reinforce and transform his/her identity by examining

other standpoints. The risk of a hardening of identities and borders always

exists: Theseus was finally accused of being himself a foreigner, had to

renounce his leadership, and was replaced by a king. However, in times that

experience the ideological absence of foundations and, accordingly, the

desperate wanderings of refugees, anarchic cosmopolitanism could be the

political itinerary that articulates freedom as no-rule and concrete,

remembered, identities.

N O T E S

1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 146.2 I will use the word anarchic in its etymological sense; never in its common connotation.3 See Kimberley Curtis, Our Sense of the Real. Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 70.4 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited

by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 64.5 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 45.



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6 Odyssey, Book XIII.7 Arendt, Jew as Pariah, p. 63.8 Arendt, Jew as Pariah, pp. 55, 62, 113; Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego,

New York, London: Harcourt Brace and Company: 1993), p. 17.9 Arendt, Jew as Pariah, p. 65.

10 For instance Emmanuel Levinas writes, The ideal of Socratic truth thus rests on theessential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism Ontology asfirst philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State. Totality and Infinity. An

Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: DuquesneUniversity Press, 1969), pp. 44, 46.

11 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, one-volume edition (San Diego, New York, London:Harcourt Brace and Company, 19771978), p. 212 (Thinking). See also Arendt, BetweenPast and Future, pp. 1245. See Michael Denneny, The Privilege of Ourselves: HannahArendt on Judgment, in Melvyn A. Hill (ed.),Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the PublicWorld (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), p. 248.

12 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 1718.13 Patrick J. Deneen, The Odyssey of Political Philosophy. The Politics of Departure and

Return (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p.17.

14 Otherwise he would be killed15 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 112, 113; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 226.16 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 1201.17 However, authoritarian values are not necessarily transcendent: Platos recourse to

transcendental truth differs from the Roman use of laws. See Hannah Arendt, OnRevolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 187, 199.

18 Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press: 1993), p. 96.

19 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 119.20 Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger at Eighty, in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and

Modern Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 303. Seealso Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 139. See Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy,Terror. Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1999), pp. 16065.

21 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 923.22 Hence Arendt tried to define the task of the thinker independently of the wish to rule, if only

by the standard of truth, the political realm that she sees as the domain of free andcontingent actions. See Lisa J. Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca

and London: Cornell University Press, 1994); Dana R. Villa, Socratic Citizenship(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 24698.

23 Robert C. Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (Dekalb: Northern IllinoisUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 53, 66.

24 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 160. See Honig, Political Theory, pp. 96109.25 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 210.26 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt

Brace & Company, 1979), p. 208.27 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 281.28 On Arendts triple identification of action, newness and freedom, which stands at the basis

of her whole thought, see for instance What is Authority? and What is Freedom? inArendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 91171 and Arendt,The Human Condition, p. 235. Iconsider this point basically known by all readers.

29 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198.30 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 124.31 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 28.32 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 13241.33 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 1389; Arendt, On Revolution, p. 39.34 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 135, 138.

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35 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 6. See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism ofHannah Arendt(A Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 76; BernardCrick, Crossing Borders. Political Essays (London, New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 155;and Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, UK: PolityPress: 1996), p. 124.

36 Arendt, The Origins, p. 138.37 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 28, 35.38 See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), see chapter 6, pp. 20152. For a criticismof Arendt based on this interpretation of her work, see Hannah Fenichel Pitkin,The Attackof the Blob. Hannah Arendts Concept of the Social (Chicago and London: The Universityof Chicago Press, 1998).

39 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 5.40 Arendt, The Origins, p. 166. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 94.41 Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence 19261969 (San Diego, New York, London:

Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992), p. 98. If we follow Arendt, what has been done in theterritories conquered by Israel in 1967 is closer to imperialism than to such seriousattempt.

42 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 1378.43 Arendt, The Origins, p. 186.

44 Arendt, The Origins, p. 143.45 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 41.As Pagden writes, Kant was not in an obvious sense an imperialist. Indeed, in almost allobvious respects he was an anti-imperialist. His belief in the possibility of a universalcosmopolitan existence is explicitly not based on the conception of an expanding militaryculture, however supposedly benign its intent. Anthony Pagden, Stoicism, Cosmopolitan-ism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism, Constellations 7 (2000), pp. 322, at p. 18.

46 Arendt, The Origins, p. 143.47 Arendt, The Origins, p. 132.48 Arendt, The Origins, p. 137.49 Arendt, The Origins, p. 46971.50 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Ch. 2.51 Arendt, The Origins, p. 159; see also p. 469.52 See Joan Cocks, On Nationalism: Frantz Fanon, 19251961; Rosa Luxemburg, 1871

1919; and Hannah Arendt, 19061975,Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, editedby Bonnie Honig (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press,

1995), p. 236.53 Arendt, The Origins, p. 166.54 Arendt, The Origins, p. 196.55 Arendt, The Origins, p. 236.56 Arendt, The Origins, p. 189.57 Let us recall that the first chapter ofTotalitarianism, which follows Arendts analysis of the

situation of stateless peoples at the end ofImperialism, is called A classless society. In itArendt shows that totalitarian control dealt with amorphous mobs made homogeneous.Needless to say, Arendt does not miss the division of society into classes but the existenceof some kind of boundaries within the society related to the difference betweenopinions (Icome back to this point in the last part of this paper.) She makes this clear when she claimsthat totalitarian movements organized masses and not classes or political parties. Arendt,The Origins, p. 308. In contrast to despotism, which is a degeneration of founded authorityinto violence, totalitarianism proved to be the total control of homeless hordesindoctrinated by ideology. This does not mean that totalitarianism is a consequence ofimperialism, but that it may develop at the end of the imperialist journey when expansion

and ideology have completely destroyed all political boundaries. Therefore, totalitarianismis absolutely a-political.



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58 On Arendts disregard for, or prejudices against, the fate of other continents, see AnneNorton, Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of HannahArendt, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 24761. See also Benhabibsdiscussion on Nortons view: Benhabib,The Reluctant Modernism, p. 85.

59 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 2912.

60 Arendt, The Origins, pp. 2967.61 Arendt, The Origins, p. 300, my emphasis.62 Arendt, The Origins, p. xxi.63 See for instance Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 347.64 Arendt, The Origins, p. xix. See also p. xx.65 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 182.66 Honig, Political Theory, p. 97; Alan Keenan, Promises, Promises. The Abyss of Freedom

and the Loss of the Political in the Work of Hannah Arendt,Political Theory, 22 (1994),pp. 297322, at p. 298.

67 Margaret Canovan, Introduction to Arendt,The Human Condition, p. ix.68 Canovan, Hannah Arendt, p. 203.69 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 151.70 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 165.71 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 30.72 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 32. See also Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 32.73 Honig, Political Theory, pp. 96, 115.74 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 202.75 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 149. My emphasis.76 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 166.77 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 177, 247, Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 156;

Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 5 etc.78 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 52.79 Curtis, Our Sense of the Real, p. 76.80 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 9.81 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, pp. 8194.82 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 74.83 Kant, Political Writings, p. 106.84 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 84.85 Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University

Press, 2001), p. 13. See also p. 104.86 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 81.87 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1992), p. 44.88 Such a regime would be despotic, but not necessarily totalitarian. Indeed, it would not

necessarily be established on ideology.89 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 84.90 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 267.91 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, p. 125.92 Crick, Crossing Borders, p. 159.93 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 267.94 Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, p. 130.95 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 275; see also Arendt, Lectures, p. 44.96 Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, pp. 139, 140.97 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 152, 153.98 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 147.99 See Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy. Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship

(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 81.100 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 1412. See also Hannah Arendt, Understanding and

Politics, Essays in Understanding 19301954 (New York, San Diego, London: HarcourtBrace & Company, 1993), p. 323.

101 Arendt, Lectures, p. 43.

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102 Arendt, Lectures, p. 43; see Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 241; Hannah Arendt, AReply (to Eric Voegelins review of The Origins of Totalitarianism), The Review ofPolitics, 15 (1953), pp. 7685, at p. 79.

103 Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 1589.104 Arendt, Lectures, p. 44.

105 Curtis, Our Sense of the Real , p. 147.

Received 27 April 2003

Annabel Herzog, Department of Political Science, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa31905, Israel. E-mail: [email protected]


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Hannah Arendt - Politics and Anarchy